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whoops
climber
paradise, ca
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Aug 10, 2012 - 08:06pm PT
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Solar panels also loose efficiency fairly quickly due to other reasons. We have output curves that reflect that expectation as we forecast the production from our arrays.
Seam.
Yes, I also have to factor that in to the design but I don't get the "fairly quickly" part. Panel lose is less than 1 percent per year which seems like a modest amount to me. If your talking about shading or dirt that's a different issue altogether.
Brad
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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Aug 10, 2012 - 08:24pm PT
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Hydro plants will shut off at night & buy power from coal plants.
I assume you are referring to pumped storage projects like Courtright / Wishon?
These systems can be economically viable due to the difference in power costs during peak and non- peak hours, but they cannot be thermodynamically efficient.
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BooYah
Social climber
Ely, Nv
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Aug 11, 2012 - 01:03am PT
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Ground based solar is just dumb.
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Sierra Ledge Rat
Mountain climber
Old and Broken Down in Appalachia
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Aug 11, 2012 - 08:48am PT
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does anyone remember snargs?
STFU, this is not a climbing forum
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justthemaid
climber
Jim Henson's Basement
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Aug 11, 2012 - 10:44am PT
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Interesting discussion.
I'm kinda in camp:
"I don't care if it's not perfect. CO2 is the issue...Anything that is burned for power produces greenhouse gases...Most solar panels are warrantied to produce 80% output for 25 years and who knows how much longer they'll actually produce power. Solar works."
My family owns a 100% solar home in Mexico so I can assure you it "works". There are 70 houses lined up + a hotel and cantina that have been running exclusively off solar for over 20 years now, and there ar many other solar communities doing the same. It always seemed to me that solar installed on a house-by house basis is a really viable goal to shoot for in areas that receive enough sunlight. I read some-wheres that there are countries that are requiring solar-systems on all new construction under a certain height which seems like a sensible compromise to these huge-scale, centralized government solar installations which seem to be problematic in terms of cost and efficiency. I'm kinda with the OP in questioning the environmental impact of such large-scale installations.
The fossil fuels will run out at some point and there's not enough hydro to go around...so alternatives will need to be found regardless.
My crazy fantasy invention: Roofing tiles that are actually solar cells. The entire roof becomes a solar panel. I know- sounds expensive ;)
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Aug 11, 2012 - 10:49am PT
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My crazy fantasy invention: Roofing tiles that are actually solar cells. The entire roof becomes a solar panel. I know- sounds expensive ;)
I was at a solar forum in which this exact concept was mentioned as under development. You're ahead of your time.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Aug 11, 2012 - 10:50am PT
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johntp, third request:
John you mention that you are working at a solar facility startup. How many acres are involved?
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justthemaid
climber
Jim Henson's Basement
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Aug 11, 2012 - 10:58am PT
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When I was a young lass I stood at the crossroad of Engineer & Artist.
I chose artist, but lo- had I taken the engineers path.. would we all be living under glossy energy-producing roofs by now.
I'd also have to invent the giant squeegee for cleaning them though. ;)
(Evidently I was ahead of my time... the concept of a solar-tile roof occurred to me when I was like.. 12 years old.)
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surfstar
climber
Santa Barbara, CA
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Aug 11, 2012 - 11:24am PT
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Too many people + too little resources.
Save the Earth - stop f*#king.
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justthemaid
climber
Jim Henson's Basement
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Aug 11, 2012 - 11:54am PT
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That was my idea at a mere 5 years old as I directed the awesome power of the sun onto unsuspecting insects.....
LOL I concede that 5-year-olds are superior beings. Poor little critters didn't stand a chance against your god-like kid-intellect focusing the power of the sun down upon them. Give a 5-year old a large enough magnifying glass and it could change the world. ;)
Damn-you.. heli+bugs...where's my solar-powered ornithopter?
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Aug 11, 2012 - 12:00pm PT
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Solar works great in certain areas. I rigged a small setup in an off grid cabin and if you don't go the road of a lot of unneeded appliances, is super cheap.
Americans waste so much energy. I have watched it all of my life.
John, coal is still the defacto electrical generation fuel. We have coal fired power plants sitting right on top of some of the nations largest natural gas fields. It is an economic thing. Natural gas prices aren't that stable, historically, but now with shale gas there is a glut of the stuff.
It really makes the most sense as a transportation fuel. At least around here, UPS, Fedex, and most fleet vehicles have been running on natural gas for ages. It costs half of the cost of oil, and is the lowest carbon footprint fossil fuel of them all.
GE has come out with a simple modular box outfit that instantly becomes a natural gas filling station if it is located in an area with pipeline access. The only problem with natural gas is that you will get half the distance out of a tank compared to gasoline or diesel.
The entire fracking issue is a joke. Even my beloved Rhodes Scholar Rachel Maddow (face it, she IS smarter than Hannity) spouts this crap.
Fracking is no big deal other than the actual operation, which involves trucking massive amounts of water and sand to the wellsite.
I have done a lot of work for Chesapeake, the biggest fracker of them all. I have worked in New Ventures, and been able to see microseismic of numerous fracks.
Microseismic is much like 3D seismic, where you have an energy source at the surface, such as dynamite miniholes or vibrator trucks (vibroseis is favored because of its frequency sweep and lower cost).
You lay out an array of geophones and "listen" to the shale being fractured. This is all easily processed by modern computers and gives you a 3 dimensional picture of the fractures actually propagating. I have seen very few fractures go out of zone, and then only by a couple of hundred feet. The entire point of them is to fracture the reservoir rock, which is often over 10,000 feet deep and only 200-400 feet thick.
The gas in the groundwater that you see in "gasland" is either natural or a result of the zillion shallow gas wells drilled in the olden days of shallow gas in the Appalachian Basin. Chesapeake has been doing pre-drilling and monitoring of the water table for many years now. That way they know where pre-existing gas exists. Gasland was almost all bullsh#t. There was one very real case of pollution in the movie, and that had to do with the use of fresh water. Historically, frac water is bought from a city. In the past few years it has been recycled. Potable water from a city water tower is not necessary.
Also, the frack companies are now using bio friendly biocides in the frack fluid. This is pretty new, but you put biocides into the frack.
The entire technology is changing very rapidly, but actually creating fractures that reach the surface has only a few known cases, and those were in really shallow gas reservoirs.
Hell, the DOE tried using atomic bombs to induce fractures in low permeability gas reseroirs back in the fifties. Just Google "Operation Plowshare. Even the nukes couldn't fracture to the surface. A couple of them were near Rifle, CO, and a couple were in the San Juan Basin of NW New Mexico.
What was bad about the early fracks is that they disposed of the flow back water into municipal water treatment plants. Those plants can't get rid of chlorides (saltw#ter) or some of the exotic elements such as barium. That is now a no-go.
Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas all have a terrific saltw#ter disposal zone: the cambro ordovician Arbuckle (AKA Ellenburger in Texas). The Marcellus has no good disposal zone, so the flow back was even shipped south to states with a good disposal zone.
You can look at a basin like the Arkoma Basin in SE Oklahoma, which has been super heavily drilled for shale gas, and there are no problems. These fracs are also used in low permeability oil zones now as well. All of the time.
Pollution doesn't come from the wellbore except in super rare cases. Pollution comes from surface spills.
There was one state that used the salty flowback water to salt roads in the winter. You would end up in prison for doing that in Oklahoma. Saltw#ter injection is a highly regulated part of the industry.
All groundwater in Oklahoma is mapped, and the state tightly regulates surface casing and production liner cement jobs. The injection wells are limited to a certain pressure, and normally the Arbuckle will accept water on "Vacuum," meaning you don't inject under pressure at all. The Arbuckle is a couple of thousand feet thick and incredibly porous and permeable. The fact that you don't inject under pressure means that the zone doesn't become overpressured and then find a way to leak into the groundwater or worse, shallower oil and gas zones.
I was yacking with and engineer up in Kansas yesterday, and he told me that the Arbuckle in western Kansas isn't taking water from horizontal wells in the Mississipian play, which I have thoroughly mapped for Chesapeake. Another company applied for permission to inject at 2400 psi surface pressure, which is a bad idea. So that area just isn't going to work without enourmous expense in saltw#ter disposal. No way will they, or should they, get permission to inject under that much pressure.
Most oil wells produce some saltw#ter. Many oil wells produce a lot of saltw#ter. This water is trucked off to a local and well regulated saltw#ter disposal well, and this has been going on since the forties. There is nothing new about it at all. There have been earthquakes associated with disposal wells, but it is super rare. If that happens, then you shut in that well for good. I know of disposal wells 200 feet away from old faults with no problem. Rarely, if you overpressure your disposal well, it can cause an ancient, dead, fault to slip. They are pretty small earthquakes, but it is taken seriously nonetheless.
The biggest example was a couple of disposal wells at the Rocky Flats Nuke Arsenal near Denver. This was many years ago, but they were causing small earthquakes and were shut in.
Fracks don't cause earthquakes. The flowback water is not radioactive, or what is called NORM. NORM does occur in the Permian Basin in west Texas, but it occurs as scale build up in production tubing over many years. It takes a hell of a lot of time to build up, much like scale inside your home water pipes. Marcellus flowback water has basically no radioactivity, but since it does occur as tubing scale in one part of the world, the whackos use it as an excuse. They invent anything as an excuse to stop drilling in the Marcellus, real or imagined.
You who know me know that I am about as green as they come. I just happen to know a hell of a lot about this issue. It isn't an environmental problem. It is a public image problem, and for the exploration companies that is just as real as a physical problem. Public perception can easily be perverted. Fracking those wells is just a big industrial process and all of that trucking tears up roads. After the frac is done, the wells produce under really low pressure. The hydrostatic head of water in the wellbore will kill a gas well from flowing, so you get a lot of the water back immediately after the frac. Then the well kicks off and flows the rest of the moveable water. Frack water that remains is bound in the pores of the reservoir rock by capillary pressure and doesn't make it into the wellbore in any significant amount.
The fact that these are low pressure wells is significant. After the frac, the wellbore doens't have enough flowing pressure to force any fluid to the surface, period. They have flowing pressures of less than 1000 PSI. If you want to see a hell of a big wellhead, you should look at the 22,000 foot vertical Springer gas wells just north of the Wichita Mountains in the Anadarko Basin. Those suckers are choked back and often have way over 10,000 psi at the wellhead. The wellbore design, using multiple casing strings, keeps the gas from channeling behind the cement jobs to reach the groundwater. If you do get gas in the groundwater, the landowner lawsuits are enourmous.
Nobody wants a leaky casing string, but in the shale gas wells, the only point where a leak is a big deal is during the frack. Those wells are designed to more than take it. If you do get a leak in one of the strings, you know it instantly. In the control truck on a frack job you will see a pressure spike on the annulus of one of the strings. Each casing string has a pressure gauge on it, and it is all plugged in to the control trailer, which looks like the space shuttle.
Since natural gas prices crashed from the glut, almost all drilling has stopped. The only drilling going on is just to hold the leases. All of the companies are scouring the U.S. and Canada for low permeability oil zones. Gas is a dirty word now. You will go broke drilling for natural gas at the moment.
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Sierra Ledge Rat
Mountain climber
Old and Broken Down in Appalachia
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Aug 11, 2012 - 12:23pm PT
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Anything new and creative and functional in terms of solar power and home owner energy independence is going to be bought up by the big oil companies - and buried forever, never to be seen again.
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Curt
Boulder climber
Gilbert, AZ
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Aug 12, 2012 - 03:40am PT
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Not exactly. Solyndra failed because they employed a colossally idiotic technology--one that had no hope of competing cost-wise with other domestic module manufacturers, let alone the Chinese.
So Curt, Where did you get this? Are you in the solar business? I'm curious.
Brad
I was. In July of 2010, I attended the REFF-Wall Street (Renewable Energy Finance Forum) conference in New York City and sat around a table with a number of analysts from various investment banks, after our first day of our conference. This was a conference I had attended for a number of years and my company was then an ACORE member.
Applied Materials had just pulled the plug on their turn-key SunFab production lines and I essentially asked "who is next" to fail, to those present. Everyone agreed that "Solyndra" was the next likely candidate to fold--and that was a full year before the DOE loan guarantee debacle. Basically, no professional in the solar industry thought Solyndra had any chance.
And they didn't. Even today, no solar module manufacturer employing CIGS (copper indium gallium diselenide) module technology is economically viable. And, Solyndra's tubular shaped CIGS module technology was even more expensive to manufacture than other flat CIGS modules were.
Curt
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 18, 2012 - 02:23am PT
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johntp, third request:
John you mention that you are working at a solar facility startup. How many acres are involved?
Hard drive died last weekend. One site is around 1400 acres, the other is around 1600.
edit: another is around 2100
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 18, 2012 - 10:43am PT
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_of_life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emissions
It would be a good thing to look at the estimates of CO2 emission for the life-cycle of the particular energy source you would use if you are concerned about CO2 emission.... for instance the above article has this plot from Vattenfall Electricity:
showing that solar cell generated electricity incurs large CO2 emissions largely in construction and decommissioning, much larger than hydro-, nuclear, wind or bio-fuel power sources combined. Interestingly, nuclear is the least.
On the nuclear waste issue it is important to know that what we call "waste" is actually potentially usable fuel, only about 2% of the nuclear fuel is used. Keeping the "waste" from our current reactors around until we figure out how to process it to make fuel is something we can do over the next century or so... we don't have to have a solution for sequestering the "waste" right away, just a place to keep it secure.
This opens up an interesting set of future litigation with the nuclear power industry taking the USG to court over compensation for the "energy" derived from the "waste," I believe the USG is already paying the industry to store the waste locally.
Mal Daly had a book recommendation at the Vedauwoo Sushifest "cocktail hour" which I have since forgotten, perhaps he can post the title here...
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Swami Jr.
Trad climber
Bath, NY
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Aug 18, 2012 - 10:51am PT
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Thanks Ed. It's good to see data in the midst of this thread.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 18, 2012 - 11:07am PT
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What I didn't write above is something that we can all do... conserve.
Last week the nth solar energy company called me about putting solar on my roof... I replied to the lady on the phone that we've been working hard to reduce our energy use, and that it didn't seem economical to go to solar... she challenged me:
"How much is your monthly electricity bill?"
I hemmed and hawed, didn't have the number, but she kept insisting to know... I asked Debbie and reported:
"$50 a month"
the lady was nonplussed, "$50, that's for a month?"
"yes" I replied, here response was:
"I guess you weren't lying"
There is room for everyone of us to take care of the amount of our energy use. Phantom sinks of energy occur in all parts of our modern lives, keeping your computer on overnight, televisions, other electronics...
...by the way, Smart Meters are a great way of keeping track of your household energy use...
...and the DOE had an energy conservation tax credit program until recently, too bad that incentive isn't there anymore, but your energy savings are real.
As we are not yet paying for the cost of energy use waste production, the costs of conservation may seem to save little, but that is an improper calculation of cost-benefit as it does not take into account the future costs of increasing electricity/gas production and rising prices.
But reducing our power use is something we can all do... and creatively, without having to "suffer."
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Jon Beck
Trad climber
Oceanside
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Aug 18, 2012 - 11:27am PT
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Great point Ed. When I investigated solar 4 years ago I realized I would need a huge system to replace my consumption at the time. I went on an aggressive energy conservation rampage. I had a house and a connected studio. I replaced both refrigerators and went all cfls. Cut my use in half close to 50bucks a month. A full price system would not have paid back in less than 25 years. I shopped around and got great prices on hardware and self installed. Payback at the time was around 15 years. Since I started charging an electric vehicle my payback has been reduced even more. Every time the price of electricity goes up payback is further reduced
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Aug 18, 2012 - 02:14pm PT
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