Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 19 2017, @07:11PM   Printer-friendly

Meanwhile, a report from Scottish Renewables suggests that onshore wind farms could compete subsidy-free in the UK, as long as they were allowed to take part in the country's competitive auction process. (Known as contracts for difference, or CfD, the competitive auction process does not currently include onshore wind.)

Finally, while the loss of incentives and tax credits might have less impact than it once did—thanks to ongoing cost reduction and technological improvement—we are right to be concerned that political obstructionists can still do a lot of damage to the future of renewables. (The exclusion of wind from the aforementioned CfD process in the UK is one example.) But here too, there are signs of progress—because oil giant Shell is lobbying for the Dutch government to quadruple its offshore wind target for 2030 to an installed capacity of a whopping 20 gigawatts (GW). As Shell joins the likes of Statoil—which recently quit tar sands in favor of offshore wind—the shift of political and lobbying power starts to shift.

More signs that the pivot point in the energy economy is upon us.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 19 2017, @08:26PM (4 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 19 2017, @08:26PM (#496528)

    Probably talking about cloudy days.

    A lot of people don't realize that cloudy days are still very bright, sure noon sunlight is who knows like 6 times the watts/sq-whatever but its hardly zero.

    Then consider the cost of a watt on the roof drops somewhere between 5 and 10 percent a year.

    now combine them and insert a lot of MBA hand waving and the "true cost" of a cloudy day is brand new 2017 panels on my roof would perform at the same output at an equal amount of dollars of panels installed in 2009 or something like that. So $10K of solar panels installed today on a cloudy day will make as many KWH despite the clouds as $10K of panels installed in '09 at noon on a sunny day. Crazy times.

    I find it fascinating that a "really large array" like an entire residential roof supposedly pumps out enough watts from the full moon to easily electrocute a dumb experimenter. You can't just wait till the sun sets and start Fing around with replacing inverters and rewiring stuff because moonlight is supposedly powerful enough using cheap modern panels to kill. I find that interesting not just in some macabre sense but in that I only need 5 watts to run a rasp-pi so the idea of running a pi off moonlight is kinda cool. I suppose during the new moon I'd be screwed and during full moon, in addition to fighting off werewolves, I'd have too much power to run just the pi, I guess I could charge batteries...

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday April 19 2017, @09:27PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @09:27PM (#496563)

    Since the sun is about 400,000 times brighter than the full moon, a large 1kW (in noon sun) solar panel will produce only around 2.5mW by the light of the full moon. So you'd need 2000 such panels to generate 5W of power from moonlight. And at 1kW we're probably talking about a single panel being roughly 3m^2 - so we'd be talking 6000m^2 of panels, or a square roughly 77m across.

    It might still be true that you can electrocute yourself working on a solar array at night, but that would have more to do with the fact that, with some bad luck, it takes only micro-amps to stop the heart. As well as the fact that (as I understand it) the control electronics for quality solar panels will automatically "correct" their output so that large numbers of panels can be combined without limiting their productivity to that of the least-productive panel. Or even more likely, once you start messing around with inverters, etc. you're likely dealing with battery-backed (or grid tied) electronics that will mostly be receiving full power regardless of what the solar panels are currently (not) generating.

  • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday April 19 2017, @09:33PM (2 children)

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @09:33PM (#496565)

    I call bull-shit on moonlight killing somebody. Though 20mA at 400V is only 8W.

    Electricity From Moonlight (Cody's Lab -- 5:01) [youtube.com]

    Can moon light produce electricity from solar panels at night? Can moon light generate the electron-hole pair in a solar cell? [quora.com]

    Moonlight can be used to power PV cells at cost of 345:1. That is, a panel that would normally produce 3450 W at high noon would produce only 10 W of power during the full moon. The quarter moon (50% illumination) would likewise produce only 5 W, and so forth.

    So like the story of the guy killing himself with a multimeter (measuring internal resistance), it is in the realm of physical possibility, but you would have to work at it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:09AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:09AM (#496715)

      > I call bull-shit on moonlight killing somebody.

      Look who you are replying too.
      The guy's entire world is bullshit.
      I'm VLM probably thinks he himself died from moonlight electrocution.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday April 23 2017, @01:13PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 23 2017, @01:13PM (#498310)

      Here's experimental results from your link of enough current to stop a heart (A LED is enough current to stop a heart, under perfectly non-ideal conditions)

      Phil Hirsch
      Written Apr 25, 2016

      I have tried it, and the answer is yes. Not much electricity to be sure, but a solar panel that's rated at 50 watts produced enough current to light up a red LED. I didn't measure the current and I don't know how many LED's I could have connected -- I only tried with a single LED, just to see if there was any current at all -- but the answer is definitely yes.

      That dude used a 50 watt panel, I'm talking about doing maintenance on arrays of, say, 4x5=20 100 watt panels, so 2 KW vs 50 watts.

      I suspect an interesting contaminant is urban skyglow, perhaps streetlamps.