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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.


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  • (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.

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