Solar panels will "Suck energy from the sun"

[Orionaut]

How can you not understand that having low energy bulbs means you are using heat and energy more efficiently?

For example lets say I need the heating on 6 months of the year. Then 6 months of the year I'm wasting the heat off lighbulbs.

So only of use 6 months of the year. The other 6 months you are wasting energy.

Then you have to factor in gas is much cheaper than electricity. So I'd rather my gas central heating was heating the home than my lightbulbs.

In fact it would be better to run a mining machine for heating which offsets heating costs for a profit or break even than paying for heating.

So no light bulbs are not the answer to heating your home.

I am not saying that there is no benefit, simply that the benefits, especially as regards CO2s is rather more limited than is made out, especially if you are living in a new build all-electric home.

 

[wolfie138]

LOL

Haven't watched Airplane for a while. Must have a Video night sometime (Do people still call them Video nights??)



Or, as I am suggesting, have the plants been unfavourably chilled??

can't comment, other than I've seen plant in the shade in my garden go brown, and a pansy that was buried in snow for about 6 weeks pop up right as rain when the snow cleared. maybe it had been cryogenically preserved

 

[Psycho Sonny]

I am not saying that there is no benefit, simply that the benefits, especially as regards CO2s is rather more limited than is made out, especially if you are living in a new build all-electric home.

not really as i said before you don't need heating on all year round.

 

[Orionaut]

not really as i said before you don't need heating on all year round.

See https://www.statista.com/statistics...-daily-temperatures-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/

Most people would want some sort of background heating should temperatures drop below 18C, many with temperatures even higher than that.

The reason why most people do not use active heating for significant parts of the year is that in the summer months sufficient low level background heat for homes is provided by body heat and appliances. (Body heat in a reasonably well insulated house can be quite significant)

Reduce appliance heat and you will extend the heating season.

By how much, at an individual level not by very much. Over the whole country. Possibly by a rather significant factor.

In an all electric house, a KWhr is a Kwhr is a Kwhr. It doesn't matter what is getting hot, and insofar as CO2's are being emitted by generating that KWhr, that doesn't matter either.

Agin, just to reiterate.

I am not saying that there is NO benefit from low energy light fittings, nor that there are not other benefits that can be derived from the technology (Though there do seem to be a number of downsides) just that they are not some sort of wonderful planet saving massive energy saving green quantum leap. At least not in northern latitudes anyway.

 

[ttaskmaster]

You are aware of shadows right?

I overheard G'Kar and Delenn talking about them... Tell us more?

I've never understood why solar power hasn't been fully harnessed. I remember using a solar powered calculator in school in the 1980s. It only had a small solar strip on it yet powered the calculator as long as it had light.

My watch is solar powered... well, solar maintained, anyway. It's meant to need only 15 minutes of direct sunlight to bump the battery up a level, but in British weather that took weeks.
We don't get enough strong sunlight here for solar to be something we can rely upon.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

You can't really store solar energy at the moment either. Well, you can, but not very efficiently.

 

[Rroff]

We don't get enough strong sunlight here for solar to be something we can rely upon

The storage is more the problem - over the entire year even in the UK there is a decent amount of energy from solar the problem is storing it from those months of abundant generation for those winter months when it drops significantly.

Shadows shade the ground yes. But the sunlight is still absorbed by whatever is casting the shadow and the energy will eventually go to heat.

A solar panel is NOT a sunshade. It takes the solar energy, converts (Some of) it into electricity and then sends that electricity to somewhere else.

This is a very different thing altogether!

I wouldn't be so quick to be dismissive - the combination of a big increase of solar arrays reducing heat absorbed by the ground and if there was a big increase in the use of ground source heat pumps is going to have some consequences though I don't really know enough to know exactly what.

 

[Orionaut]

The storage is more the problem - over the entire year even in the UK there is a decent amount of energy from solar the problem is storing it from those months of abundant generation for those winter months when it drops significantly.

This refers to the US, but the UK situation isnt that diferent. Taken from The “New Energy Economy”: An Exercise in Magical Thinking

So how many batteries would be needed to store, say,
not two months’ but two days’ worth of the nation’s
electricity? The $5 billion Tesla “Gigafactory” in
Nevada is currently the world’s biggest battery
manufacturing facility.52 Its total annual production
could store three minutes’ worth of annual U.S.
electricity demand. Thus, in order to fabricate a
quantity of batteries to store two days’ worth of
U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years
of Gigafactory production.

And of course...

Radically increasing battery production will
dramatically affect mining, as well as the energy used
to access, process, and move minerals and the energy
needed for the battery fabrication process itself. About
60 pounds of batteries are needed to store the energy
equivalent to that in one pound of hydrocarbons.
Meanwhile, 50–100 pounds of various materials are
mined, moved, and processed for one pound of battery
produced.54 Such underlying realities translate into
enormous quantities of minerals—such as lithium,
copper, nickel, graphite, rare earths, and cobalt—that
would need to be extracted from the earth to fabricate
batteries for grids and cars.55 A battery-centric future
means a world mining gigatons more materials.56 And
this says nothing about the gigatons of materials needed
to fabricate wind turbines and solar arrays, too.57
Even without a new energy economy, the mining
required to make batteries will soon dominate
the production of many minerals. Lithium battery
production today already accounts for about 40% and
25%, respectively, of all lithium and cobalt mining.58
In an all-battery future, global mining would have to
expand by more than 200% for copper, by at least 500%
for minerals like lithium, graphite, and rare earths, and
far more than that for cobalt.59
Then there are the hydrocarbons and electricity needed
to undertake all the mining activities and to fabricate
the batteries themselves. In rough terms, it requires
the energy equivalent of about 100 barrels of oil to
fabricate a quantity of batteries that can store a single
barrel of oil-equivalent energy

 

[Rroff]

And of course...

Short of a dramatic break through batteries aren't the answer on that scale but maybe something else will be :s shame hydro isn't the answer as that would make it so simple but you need like a swimming pool worth of water with a good head height just to power a 1kw heater for an hour or something like that.

 

[Orionaut]

Short of a dramatic break through batteries aren't the answer on that scale but maybe something else will be :s shame hydro isn't the answer as that would make it so simple but you need like a swimming pool worth of water with a good head height just to power a 1kw heater for an hour or something like that.

Back in the day when it was initially thought that a significant, bulk even, amount of the UK electricity supply was going to be generated by Magnox/AGR (Which do not load follow well) there was an intention to construct a number of large pumped storage stations.

Dinorwig was essentially a prototype. Far larger schemes were planned but never built. I dare say these plans could be revived.

 

[Puzzled]

Short of a dramatic break through batteries aren't the answer on that scale but maybe something else will be :s shame hydro isn't the answer as that would make it so simple but you need like a swimming pool worth of water with a good head height just to power a 1kw heater for an hour or something like that.

Edit: Missed the post above, yeah that one. Interesting idea if you have spare energy production to use up.

 

[Dis86]

You can't really store solar energy at the moment either. Well, you can, but not very efficiently.

Actually you can. Part of my university dissertation proved just that.

 

[Rroff]

Dinorwig was essentially a prototype. Far larger schemes were planned but never built. I dare say these plans could be revived.

Problem is though if you were for instance going to try and store power generated through the summer from solar to provide energy during the winter you'd need something like (assuming 20m head height) around 24,000 swimming pools worth of water pumped somewhere just to power a small village.

 

[D.P.]

OTOH, what solar panels will do is suck (or at least intercept) energy from the ground.

An array of solar panels with (say) 20% efficiency will, pretty much by definition, absorb 20% of the incident solar energy and pump it down wires to somewhere else.

How large does a solar array have to be before this, not at all insignificant cooling effect, starts to have obvious consequences??

when it covers 10% of the planet. Good job leds than 1% of the surface would be required to power the planet.

apart from that, any cooling is an additional advantage in combating global warming.


but your whole point is just ridiculous. Look how much area a city covers

 

[Malevolence]

I don't normally post news items but this one just made me stare, unblinking at my screen for about a minute while my brain wresled with the utter stupidity of what I was reading.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...-up-all-the-energy-from-the-sun-a6771526.html

A town council in the US has rejected plans for a solar farm because..... The panels will "suck energy from the sun and stop plants from photosynthesising."

What is truly shocking is that the person making these claims is a retied science teacher.

The makes me hark back to when a woman was on Reading local news complaining that she was worried that the proposed wind turbine at Madjeski Stadium might give her cancer and / or fall on her house...... in Caversham...... 4 miles away.

That story is five years old and has been posted numerous times on here. Did it really require a dedicated thread?

 

[stockhausen]

No message.

 

[NVP]

Edit: wait, I forgot the OP haha. My bad

 

[JBod]

It is easy to forget that half the population is dumber than the average.

 

[Django x2]

I don't normally post news items but this one just made me stare, unblinking at my screen for about a minute while my brain wresled with the utter stupidity of what I was reading.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...-up-all-the-energy-from-the-sun-a6771526.html

A town council in the US has rejected plans for a solar farm because..... The panels will "suck energy from the sun and stop plants from photosynthesising."

What is truly shocking is that the person making these claims is a retied science teacher.

The makes me hark back to when a woman was on Reading local news complaining that she was worried that the proposed wind turbine at Madjeski Stadium might give her cancer and / or fall on her house...... in Caversham...... 4 miles away.

This is very old news. It was a US school teacher originally that declared solar panels will weaken the sun. Shocking these people are allowed to breathe air, let alone teach.

 

[builder22]

this thread's got me Hank Marvin