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Firstly, sunshine at any spot is always intermittent and often unreliable. Solar panels can deliver significant energy only from 9am to 3pm – a maximum of 25% of each day. Solar can often help supply the hot afternoon demand for air conditioning, but demand for electricity generally peaks at about 6:30pm, when production from solar is usually zero."
Yep and Coal Mines and oil fields don't pump 24/7 but somehow this isn't a problem..oh right, the energy is stored in a liquid form. So if you are using batteries, you store the energy produced and you don't need continuous sunlight. I hate when Conservatives try to aruge this crap and then make arguments that are dumber than the ones liberal make.
Secondly, to be a standalone energy supplier, PV solar needs batteries to cover those times when solar is not producing – about 75% of the time under ideal cloudless skies. To charge the batteries for continuous power, while also supplying usable power, a solar plant can deliver a theoretical maximum of only 25% of its daytime capacity. The chance of cloudy days will greatly increase the battery storage needed and the generating capacity absorbed in charging the batteries. Currently, only pumped hydro storage could possibly supply the storage capacity needed, and then only at massive cost, in a few suitable locations.
Um, many power plants need to be run 24/7 at capacities HIGHER than what is used because they can't do ON-DEMAND supply as quickly as something like a battery could. And yes pumping water and using that as a Battery is perfectly viable, but most batteries will be more efficient than that. And who says you can turn on other sources when you are having a cloud day? A Hybrid Solar/fossil fuel plant would do just fine. Again, stupid argument.
Thirdly, solar energy is very dilute, so huge areas of land are needed to collect industrial quantities of energy....Graham Palmer has produced a credible calculation that it would take a square with 31-km sides, completely filled with PV panels, to collect energy equivalent to Australia’s annual electricity requirements. To also charge batteries to maintain steady supply from a standalone solar facility would require at least four times this area – imagine 3,844 square kilometers of collectors, even if suitable battery technology were available.
And? How many square KM of roofs are there in a decent sized city? Australia has 7.7 MILLION sq Km and 22.6 Million residents. -- 0.25% of Austrailian land area is urban -- so roughly 20,000 sq KM. - and if you can build hig density urban structures over that much land mass is 31 KM of panels really such a ridiculous undertaking ? Especially when they can be attached to roofs in those high density urban areas and supply much of the power EXACTLY where its needed? And I have NO IDEA where he is getting the battery area.. For one thing batteries, unlike panels, are three dimensional. My batteries take up a 4 X 4 X 2 foot box - and store enough electricity to fully run the house for a day and a half without charging. Edison batteries are better and larget. Maybe twice as big. PVs main downfall is battery tech - energy storage, but I have no idea why he thinks that much area would be required.
The fourth fatal flaw of solar energy is the pernicious effect of the dramatic fluctuations in supply on the reliable and essential parts of the grid. When solar electricity floods the network around mid-day, the backup stations have to throttle back, all the stations needed for stability and backup have their profits reduced, and some may be forced to close, making the network even more fragile and prone to blackouts. Then, if a cloud floats across the sky, the backups have to restart swiftly.
Yeah, so that is why you have batteries. They serve as a resovir of energy to meet the demand. You might have the inbound river to the reservoir flowing only 1/4 of the time, but you can let water out at any rate... again stupid argument.
Fifthly, large-scale solar power will create environmental damage over large areas of land. Solar collectors may manage to convert only about 10% of the sun’s energy into electricity, the rest being reflected or turned into heat. But the whole solar spectrum is blocked, thus robbing 100% of the life-giving sunshine from the ground underneath, creating a man-made solar desert. For solar thermal, where mirrors focus intense solar heat to generate steam, birds that fly through the heat beams get fried. Why would true environmentalists support industrial-scale solar energy collection?
Um if you build these facilities in urban areas - which are already man-made solar deserts as they are covered with asphalt and concrete, how does it matter?
True environmentalists would kill all of the humans. So what?
There are nano-tech advances that are anti-dust coatings and one guy was Printinng panels -- then a single wire running on each side of the road and this printed surface end up creating massive amounts of surface area..
If you want to complain about how solar is stupid here is the argument
1) Cost. I produce power at about 40 cent KW-HR over the life of the system. I can buy it from the grild right not for 8 cents/ KW-HR. THAT is stupid.
Otherwise Solar works great, breaks an individual's dependence upon the grid, provides massive implicit redundancy if done in small scale in many many locations. If advances reduced the cost of a PV system with Batteries such that you would expect to pay 6 cents KW hr over the life of the system you would be an IDIOT not to get one.
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