You can solar power you home with 40kWh of mono-crystaline PERN all N-Type 2023 state-of-the art or CIGS Bouge RV for ever more $ & there are even some government incentives to lower your solar roof upgrade so you can charge your EV or it & your whole home 30kWh energy storage UPS battery with grid inter-tie.
But that is a spit in the energy bucket for society on Earth as a whole.
Even if 20% of all peoples had a big home solar PV array & battery power automobile, that leaves the other 80% to use natural gas, gasoline, diesel & jet fuel. Thats a far cry from the world today in terms of PV or BEV market penetration in the signal digit percentages.
From cow fart harvesting with tubes up their butt's into large plastic bags, to biogas collected from compost, yard waste, or even landfill gas recovery, we are talking about drops in the energetic budget.
To energize all economies in the world today, we need trillions of watts continually. I am talking about thousands of GW scale nuclear reactors. I am talking about today in the USA using 370 million gallons of gasoline daily. If each gallon contains 34kWh of thermal chemical energy, thats 370,000,000 X 34,000 watts, or 12.5 Trillion Watt Hour of chemical energy.
Lets use the latest bifacial PERC N-Type solar PV module that makes 400W of DC at 51.8vdc (calc for camps) for 3hr per day average over the whole year as an example. That means 1,200 watt hours per day. We would need 10.5 billion of these 400W panels to make all of that energy as electricity. But the cost to store it in batteries for 24-to-96 hours makes the $400 panels look cheap. The LCOE of Solar PV + Battery Energy Storage means electricity that costs $0.34-68 per kWh when the current national average only $0.14/ kWh. That makes conventional giga-watt scale fission power reactors seem cheap. No free lunch in physics & making those solar PV modules not eco-friendly either.
You know there is an eco-friendly way to make use of solar & batteries, living in a tiny home & use the entire roof for as much PV as possible, a super energy efficient Sunfrost Fridge, air-source mini-split heat pump with COP of 7.1 premium efficiency (best fan blade, axial fan motor, all copper nickel alloys palladium plated corrosion resistant heat exchangers)(best working fluid, most insulated pipes) best case, all LED mostly automatic off motion sensing long life lighting, ultrasonic shower, super low energy everything. You can reduce your home energy footprint & driving a hybrid or plug in hybrid or BEV, live closer to work, work from home, use less water, use less electricity, use less heat, tolerate colder in the winter, warmer in the summer, be less wasteful & more efficient. You can compost poo outside & tinkle on it too. But what about the other 8 billion people? Can we make one of each of those for everyone? No, it’s important to understand that a 6kw 24/7/364 life for someone using only solar all year with no grid assuming 10% output needs to make 24kw for a 4 person house use, and that’s using solar that would need to be 2400kw of PV or a giant 600 array of 400w panels in a 20x30 array -^^ and some serious wiring & mounting & inverters & battery energy storage // the extra solar made in summer would have to be exported back into a large utility grid inter-tie ac IO with disconnect breaker & two way meter for in and out metering or net metering. Most home roofs can handle 10-30kw of PV panels by comparison / so you can only go all solar with extreme energy conservation & super energy efficient appliances like the SunFrost fridge made to order in California USA that uses 90% less energy than a similar typical fridge.
Obviously many homes with 15kw or less of solar & a 10kWh or smaller battery can energize wifi & an LED LCD or OLED TV & laptop & smartphones & microwave & stove & hot water, even AC & heat, showers, toilets, the trick not to waste energy & using natural gas or propane for water heating, cooking, and air heating helps to reduce the need for bigger batteries and more watts of solar PV
Now let’s consider the billions of existing fossil fueled vehicles of all kinds, from the Tesla Model Y, or XW60 Prius w/196HP & eAWD, to the latest Boeing 737 or Airbus A380 / they all have a carbon footprint. Don’t think for one second that electricity for charging that Model Y is not causing carbon emissions. Even fission power has a diesel mining supply chain to mine, refine, and distribute the radioactive enriched element fuels used to make the fission reaction achieve criticality with the nuclear sustained neutron flux fission reaction!
All human activities have a carbon footprint since fissile fuels like gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, coal, propane, butane, even biomass like wood, waste incineration, natural gas, biogas, biofuels, methanol, ethanol, MTBE, and many more. Add in plastics & polymers made from crude oil, there is oil in many plastics & carpet fibers & carbon fibers & Kevlar & NOMEX, poly this or acrylic that, there is crude oil or carbon energy or carbon chemistry everywhere. So there is no getting away from carbon footprints or the hard on damaging nature aspects of industrial activity to enable 8 billion people to live at the same time!
No comments:
Post a Comment