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Besides we can still use that same land for crops with agrivoltaics
Here's a whole article on agrovoltaics. IIRC, they require less water because of the shade. https://www.climatehubs.usda.gov/hubs/northwest/topic/agrivoltaics-pairing-solar-power-and-agriculture-northwest
Archive because who knows what they'll do next: https://archive.is/n4jF8
It would probably use less water too. Crops require a lot of water, and biofuel crops more than most. I've heard it's putting a massive drain on the available water in some places.
How about putting that farmland back to producing food, and covering all our rooftops and carparks with solar panels?
Farmland installs can be cheaper.
If combined with farming it can protect yields but is more costly, but that's another topic
Please. I used to live in RI and driving through ri and ma you will regularly see ACRE upon ACRE of woodland mowed down, flattened, and thousanda of gaudy panels put up in what was once public lands and wooded areas. They do this right outside of the Worcester city limits like they don't have acre upon ACRE of already developed paved over areas that could benefit from shade from solar panels(think car parks, strap mall and dept store building roofs, residential roofs etc). I'm all for solar but I hate when they destroy nature for no reason. I'm not stupid I know it's easier to build them on a level earth than on rooftops but we only have so much land available as it is why not be more efficient with the land we have already used?
Its even more efficient. In Poland we have that project, where food is grown under solar panels - they harvest even more than before, because panels protect plants from too much sun.
What about the required raw materials to fabricate the solar panels? What about aging and recyclability percentage?
I don't say, abandon solar power. I say: improve the recycling rate of the panels. Dual use agricultural land, maybe try to take advantage of the panel's properties for agricultural land use (shadows cast by the panels, wind erosion idk).
And maybe evaluate where cars for personal transportation are really needed and how the fuel efficiency could be raised.
Mass transportation complemented by bike and scooter rentals - it's mostly an infrastructural change, which leads to reduced fuel consumption.
Car sharing: One could aim to increase the frequency of use per vehicle - less cars to build, less space required for parking lots and streets.
Now do lithium mine externalities.
Again, our proposal isn’t that we should cover all of this land in solar panels, or that it could easily power the world on its own. We don’t account for the fact that we’d need energy storage and other options to make sure that power is available where and when it’s needed (not just when the sun is shining). We’re just trying to get a sense of perspective for how much electricity could be produced by using that land in more efficient ways.
Turns out turning sunlight into food and then burning it is very inefficient, who could have guessed /s
Oil refining uses an insane amount of energy.
An electric car could travel 60km (or more) on the electricity used to refine enough fuel to drive 100km.
Instructions unclear, re-invaded Poland.
O kurwa, znowu to samo.
The big enemy is transportation. You can put biofuel in a container and it will keep for a very long time. It's easy to ship anywhere you'd like in large quantities. It can be pumped around using pipelines, it can be put in ships, boats and fuel trucks and brought to just about anywhere. Even places that don't have permanent infrastructure can often easily be reached by truck and transport a huge amount of energy in one go. Those fuels are very energy dense, so transport is easy and cheap and it doesn't lose any energy from being transported.
With electric energy transport is much harder, you need large transformer stations to get it up to high voltages and then you need fixed infrastructure to transport it anywhere. And on the receiving side you'd also need large stations to be able to use the energy and distribute it further. And every step loses energy, the conversion up to high voltage, the transport over the powerlines and then the conversion back down. Reaching places that don't have fixed infrastructure is much harder, as we don't have very good storage options for electrical energy. Best we can do is chemical storage in the form of large and heavy batteries that aren't as energy dense as biofuel.
However solar has a trick up it's sleeve where it's super easy to generate the energy where you need it, reducing the need for transport. Different from other power generation options you don't need a whole lot to generate some energy. For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car. Putting solar in places we need energy is the trick to a sustainable future (although we need to fix some issues with solar, but it's pretty good as it is). Having a bit of biofuel as an alternative can be pretty handy though and is better than fossil fuels for sure.
I disagree , electricity transportation is superior to fossil fuel transportation. 40% of all oceanic shipping traffic is for fossil fuels, which consumes more energy. Plus all of the land based fossil fuel shipping. Investing in grid infrastructure makes the grid more resilient to disasters and distributes energy more directly and efficiently than by vehicle or pipeline. Plus the benefits of less congested shipping, rail, and road routes, less air pollution, and less noise pollution for sea life.
I think people forget that if we build enough solar, we'll have such an energy surplus that it'll be essentially free to electrify stuff and use that energy.
Losses from transformation and transmission go away as soon as the resource is unlimited.
A small nitpick about the 40% figure: different type of oceanic shipping are "counted" different ways. Crude/products (and bulks) are counted by deadweight (DWT) while container shipping is counted by twenty foot equivalent units (TEU). Passenger ships by people, RoRo/PCTCs by lane miles, etc. There are other more esoteric examples as well.
I think the important metric here is fuel burned: how much fuel do we burn just to ship fuel to where it can be refined, and then to where it's needed?
This is exactly right. Like it or not, an easily transportable, easily stored energy source is hugely important to modern society.
Can 75% or more of average road traffic be addressed through electric cars and induction roadways? Absolutely. And we should keep going with the conversion so that high energy density needs like construction mining, large-scale transportation, etc. have access to remaining petroleum fuels. On top of getting diesel-fueled plants out of the power grid.
This isn't even hard. Does the vehicle need a CDL to drive? No? Then make it electric. Do you need special tests, licenses, and insurance to drive the vehicle? Does it weigh over 3 tons? Great, use that diesel all you like. No, your Ford F-350 SuperDuty does not entitle you to roll coal just to drive to and from your job at Bass Pro Shop, Dale.
For a lot of homes simply putting solar panels on the roof is enough to generate a lot of power for the home itself and an electrical car.
Unfortunately panels don't generate a lot, if anything at all, when the electric car is at home, often in the evening/night. You could add a home battery as storage, but that is, at least in my country, quite expensive and doesn't have the capacity to bridge that gap in an economically feasible way.
Then there's the problem with having your own driveway: that's not the standard here, so depending on the distance to the nearest parking spot it's often also not very feasible to hook up your car to your own grid.
Of course there's also the late autumn and winter period where your panels will not produce enough for the average home, especially if you are heating with an heat pump. Which is rapidly becoming the standard here.
And as the cherry on top: our power grid has a hard time handling the strain of solar panels dumping their excess power during daytime. For this reason here you pay a fee for generated power returned to the net. Currently you still receive a compensation which is usually higher than the fee, but people are fearing that in the next few years solar panels might start costing money. This heavily impacts the return on investment, which unfortunately needs to be a consideration for a lot of people as their wallet has a limit.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for moving to renewables and I do not have anything against solar power. But it is definitely not a magical solution and comes with its own set of problems that need to be tackled.
We really should be looking more into reducing car dependency as well.
That is why you vote for people that invest in a usable power grid which can store overproduced electricity in batteries (chemical, water storage lakes with pumps, pulling weight up/down etc.),
Or just make electricity prices variable so that you can expect a ROI investing in your own battery (like charge your battery cheap or by solar and discharge it for bigger returns by night/bad weather)
All it takes is political willpower and courage to change stuff for the better, we (humanity) are smart enough to find solutions, we just don’t have the courage, right now and do stupid things out of fear (like voting for people who claim to give security but do only more fear mongering only to sell more security measures that don’t solve any problems long term)
Just like mayor fisk
No thanks, we prefer to vote for people who blame immigrants for all problems we are told we have.
That is why you vote for people that invest in a usable power grid which can store overproduced electricity in batteries (chemical, water storage lakes with pumps, pulling weight up/down etc.),
Yup, which I've been doing for the last two decades and keep on doing, even though financially right-wing would serve my interests better.
Or just make electricity prices variable so that you can expect a ROI investing in your own battery (like charge your battery cheap or by solar and discharge it for bigger returns by night/bad weather)
We have variable pricing available here, the problem there is that having ADHD I need structure in my day and week. Guess I lack the courage, but having to plan chores around when prices are expected to be low sounds like a complete disaster scenario for me.
If you're driving a car every day, you're the problem
Good strategy, blame individuals for systemic problems lol
"very long time" here is like, 6 months to a year. Fuel does break down, a sad reality that anyone who has tried to start a lawn mower in the spring after letting it sit full of fuel all winter can tell you.
But! That is quite a bit longer than electricity, which needs to be used pretty much immediately or it'll start blowing up transformers.
Logistics is the primary issue. We can't generate power anywhere it needs to be pretty close to where it's being used. Unless we want to ship giant fucking batteries all over the place which in some circumstances might not be a bad idea. Not ideal though. Still, if we're putting biofuel on a truck, it's worth considering. I'm not sure the energy to weight ratio of 80,000 pounds of batteries to 80,000 pounds of fuel is.
That said, we can build these things to make energy transmission possible over long distances. Shit if we're making enough excess energy from solar alone we could beam it across the sky with microwaves if we really wanted to. The barrier here is not that it is hard. The barrier here is that liquid fuel is still so goddamn profitable there's no incentive to switch.
I'm not sure the energy to weight ratio of 80,000 pounds of batteries to 80,000 pounds of fuel is.
Fuel is about 25 times more energy dense compared to batteries. Of course depending on the fuel and depending on the batteries. 25 times is most diesel fuels compared to most modern li-ion batteries. Large LiFePO4 would probably be used for transport, which do worse than high performance LiCoO2 batteries, so then you are talking about somewhere around 30 times worse. Transporting batteries simply isn't worth doing, it's super inefficient.
Same with stuff like microwave transmission of power, you lose so much in the transfer, it's a total non starter.
Unfortunate that the person that made this article shot themself in the back of the head 3 times with a long range rifle.
??
Both authors seem to be alive:
Is this a pessimistic joke like movie's where someone creates cold fusion so the government is after them to cover it up?
If you write movie's, why don't you also write author's?
Yes
I only really asked because of the upvotes. It's a bit upsetting how pessimistic the audience is
It's been great traveling the world and seeing more and more solar installations. There is a long tail for things like aviation and plenty of chemistry but the world is changing. It would be nice if less governments were voted in that were anti the transition but progress is still being made
The size of Germany, Poland, Finland, or Italy
😄
First, pretty weird to go with 4 examples
Second, those 4 are of VASTLY different sizes by "my country isn't one of the 5 largest in the world" standards. The difference in size between Germany and Italy is the equivalent of almost 150% of Denmark.
Third, even IF those countries were roughly the same size, they're of such disparate shapes that the comparison would STILL be pretty much useless as a reference point to most people.
There are so many places we could install solar before we even have to touch agriculture.
Rooftop solar is expensive for a lot of people unfortunately because it's paid by the household installing them (government subsidies help, but even if gvt is paying 50% of your 20k solar install, 10k is still a lot of money). But there's ways for businesses and municipalities to install solar.
Without getting into reducing car dependency (which is also important), I maintain that every car park of any significant size should have solar. We're going electric anyway, this makes the EV chargers slightly cheaper to operate (and when nobody is charging, should make some money back) and there'd be shade in the summer, as well as slight protection from snow in the winter. Everyone wins. The owner of the solar, the people parking, etc.
Mandating rooftop solar on all non-historic government buildings at any level of government would also be helpful. I'm sure there could be countries already doing it - I'm advocating for more countries to start doing it.
Also for businesses and communities to install solar, there's crowdfinancing apps to get loans. Goparity has a bunch of solar projects. I've contributed negligible sums to a few, figuring that it might be a riskier investment than say index funds, but at the very least I'm contributing to something good happening to the planet I live on. There are other alternatives too, that's just the one I'm using.
We're not going battery electric. We're going bus grid electric and bicycle.
Or you could just do ground mount arrays somewhere because it's way cheaper to install and who cares about a 1% or whatever change in land usage.
What they're saying is this is only tangentially agriculture. We grow crops, process them, and make additives for fuel or just fuel. If we stopped doing all that, we could provide enough electricity to make all the cars electric.
This, of course, doesn't take into consideration things such as battery requirements, etc. but it does give perspective on just how much land is being used for some small fraction of car fuel, and how absurd biofuel is, given how little we actually use relative to our overall fuel use.
Edit: everything else you said is true, but even turning biofuel land into grazing land and having it covered by solar panels would be more useful. And we need more batteries.