

Solar Energy: Springtime For The Artificial Leaf - danmaz74
http://www.nature.com/news/solar-energy-springtime-for-the-artificial-leaf-1.15341
“The biggest energy source we have by far is the Sun,” he says. “The best way to store energy other than in the nucleus of an atom is in chemical fuels. It&#x27;s inevitable someone is going to take the biggest source and store it in the most dense way.”
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noir_lord
I'm somewhat in this industry (I'm developing compliance software for UK
domestic renewable installers...stay with me I'm going somewhere..).

Part of that was developing a software implementation of the UK government's
Standard Assessment Procedure for estimating solar yields.

It's really quite surprising just how much energy falls on a single square
meter on a south facing roof even in the North of England.

It's going to be interesting to see where this market goes in the next 10
years.

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danmaz74
The last sentence in the article makes a lot of sense: “The biggest energy
source we have by far is the Sun,” he says. “The best way to store energy
other than in the nucleus of an atom is in chemical fuels. It's inevitable
someone is going to take the biggest source and store it in the most dense
way.”

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ams6110
Solar energy is diffuse though. When you go outside on a sunny day you feel
comfortable warmth, you don't burst into flames.

So whatever solar energy collection you do has to be spread out over a
relatively large area. This quickly creates several problems, first of all
creating that volume of solar capturing devices, and then the environmental
impact of taking the solar energy from whatever else might be using it (e.g.
plant life that would otherwise be growing on "solar farm" land).

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lutorm
The fact that you need a large area is largely (!) irrelevant, what matters is
the cost per energy unit. Except possibly in Seattle, most American single-
family houses have enough roof area to generate their annual electricity
usage, _including_ that for a hypothetical EV, using current PV panels. Add
area used for parking, and you have more potential in densely populated areas.
Storage is still an issue, though.

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crdoconnor
>Storage is still an issue, though.

A bigger issue that storage is the utilities' desire to make it difficult and
uneconomic to hook up panels to the grid.

They make the greatest profits during the times when electricity usage peaks -
coincidentally which is when solar panels are at their most productive
(midday; especially during summertime).

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lutorm
I'm not sure that's a _bigger_ issue, though it's definitely _an_ issue.

However, my understanding is that utilities are happy with PV offsetting peak
load, because in those situations they either have to buy power from someone
else or fire up expensive peaker plants, and in the vast majority of markets
they can't charge their customers for it because most customers don't have a
time-of-use tariff.

