Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 33,188
That doesn't really explain much, AT ALL, big investment doesn't really mean anything, because lots of people with money to burn are investing in things for the future, lots of that investment came from Google guys, who are literally ploughing billions into various things in an attempt to rule the world in 50 years.
Also 4 billion contracts could mean anything, 4billion of panels made in the next 8 days, or the next 20 years, a contract can be anything and it doesn't explain how much they can produce, how quickly and lots of people like signing up for these things, we'll have 50 panels for 1million, with a view to IF THEY WORK, extending the contract to 10,000 panels for 100million, who knows.
As for the CPS, http://www.solutions-site.org/artman/publish/article_348.shtml
Its horribly inefficient, 634 mirrors at 120M^2 EACH, for 11MW, which can power 10k homes(another article says only 6k homes) is just horrible in terms of space available.
You lose power in transmission so you can't build stuff that far away, especially not cheaply and well.
But the main problem, it took them seemingly from 2001 to 2005 to build it. 4 years of production and building to get it to 11mw, its sped up somewhat but its taking another 8 years to go from a low power setup to a much more powerful one and it will still only power 200k homes.
its simply too slow and takes up too much space.
Hell, it wouldn't even keep up with population growth and power requirement growth. In another 20 years average power requirements for all the homes they are planning on providing power to will have an extra 3 computers, more AC units, more mobile devices to charge constantly.
Basically its a bit of a collosal waste right now, its no where near effective enough in terms of production speed and efficiency in area to ever catch up with our power usage and thats the main issue.
This covering Arizona metaphor for how it can't be done doesn't even mention that in a hundred years, with trillions no one can afford if it was done, in another 100 years the power requirements would have gone through the roof again so it still won't even be enough.
Theres little point spending billions on production facilities to make solar panels or solar tech, because its simply not good enough and is using up rare materials, if/when solar tech of any kind becomes slightly feasable, we don't want to have wasted so much money, time, resources and materials on solar tech thats essentially obsolete and needs replacing.
Half the idea's for solar tech of various natures are interesting idea's but are so economically/logistically not possible, like a updraft/downdraft tower, to get enough energy for it to be worthwhile they want to build a 1km high tower, which is simply not possible.
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/12/10/fsummit.climate.solarpower/index.html
A tower to produce 200MW, enough for 200k homes(probably a lot less by the time it was done) needs to be 1000m high, can only be done in certain countries and would need a circumference of 3KM, we're talking massive massive cost for a structure like that, for enough power for what, 1/40th of what we'd need for London, 1/100th when you take into account powering trains and everything else in london, its a joke basically when no one can afford one or has the space of most importantly, the materials/time/production.
That seems to state, added to the other numbers, that the plant in Seville took some 4-5 years to build, and another 2 years to get online, at a decent expense, to power 6k homes, and another much bigger plant is being built, to add 20MW, which will take I believe another several years to complete.
Its not even in the realm of a viable option, 6000 homes, at best what, 24k people, we're talking about if solar tech went into overdrive and plants were built the world over using trillions of pounds, providing 1-2% of our power, at best, with several billion people still reliant on coal/nuclear power.
Space wise, its actually not that bad, if its 6k homes, and 634 mirrors, thats almost 10 homes per mirror, at 120m^2 , I mean that could quite easily fit, with spare space, on the roofs of those homes, the problem is it took 5 years to build that in open space with no logistics problems in terms of people being home, different roofs, working in tight spaces and on roofs and between buildings and getting equipment to each house. If you built that on roofs it would have taken a ridiculously longer time to install.
Its not the space, its not the cost(completely) its the fact that everyone all working towards the same goal, massive production and it will simply never catch up anywhere near our power usage levels, it will take decades of production, installation and massive massive investment, to even provide at very best, maybe 10% and thats probably being immensely generous.
But in 10 years, the population and power usage will probably increase faster than we can produce solar tech equipment and faster than it can be installed.
We've also got what will be a massive massive explosion of power use in China, Africa, and every other 3rd world country that starts to use electricity more and more.
