Please tell me this isn’t a real thing someone published. It really needs to be a joke. My opinion of humanity is so very low, and I don’t think I can handle lowering it any further.
I’m sorry, buddy. It’s real.
By sunset, despite still high temps, 99% of solar power also failed.
They think high temps is what generates the electricity.
For some of them it actually is, not all are photoelectric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower
They have trade offs, like every power solution. One perk is that they generally cleaner to produce, since shiny metal is simpler than modern complex solar panels.
That being said, I have little faith in any report issued under the current administration.
That still requires sunlight to work…
It requires sunlight to charge, not to produce electricity. Because liquid salt doesn’t cool the moment it goes dark the plant can continue to use it to boil water to spin a turbine for a fair bit of time without sunlight. I believe one implementation only produces power at night, and spends the day collecting heat.
But yes, solar power does require sunlight at some point.It’s kinda moot however, because having now read the original post I was correct to assume they (the doe) was being disingenuous. The heat they seemed to be referring to was “the weather”. As in “despite the high temperature, the sun still went down causing solar generation to ebb in a predictable fashion that grid operators were unsurprised by. This is why it’s good we forced them to keep 150 year old coal plants burning”.
This is probably what explains that 1% generated by solar during the night.
Oh jeez, that somehow feels even dumber than what I thought it meant which is “it got so hot that solar panels stopped working after dark”. Like they were blaming the “extreme heat”… So by their understanding, Solar should work all summer long day or night because it’s hot, but not work at all in winter because it’s cold?
Damn it. I think that was the last little bit of faith in humanity I had left.
I should buy a bulldozer
Seems like the official DoE account on LinkedIn posted it;
Remember when the DoE used to be all boring engineers and physicists, not adeptus mechanicus?
There is no humanity. Just ~20L bags of very dirty water. Fluid dynamics is the only thing that applies.
This does not appear to be real I cannot find any other references to this graphic nor can I find the graphic itself anywhere else
Well shit
Incidentally, this is why I’m heavily invested in battery technology.
Kinda looks like a sunrise 🌅
Wow California has a lot of renewable energy. Even if all of it’s imports are fossil fuels that’s still pretty good.
I was surprised to learn the US actually is 43% renewable+nuclear. Plus almost all new generation is renewable.
China gets a lot of attention because they’re still building out their grid, but the US hasn’t been doing bad at transitioning. Our biggest issue is slow adoption of electric cars, but I largely blame Trump for that.
Iirc the imports are mostly hydro from Washington State and BC hydro
Any companies in particular?
Generac is the big one. They’ve got a mix of retail units and industrial grade.
I’ve also got some money in Dragonfly, which has primarily focused on truck battery alternatives, but it’s moving into larger scale products.
Then there’s a big lithium mine being constructed in Thacker Pass, Nevada, which trades under LAC.
Right on. Ill take a look at these. Thanks!
They’re currently all in the god’s damned toilet. But… hope springs eternal.
Buy low, sell high
That’s what they keep telling me
Tbf, renewables and their peripherals, paper products, physical PMs, are the ones that will do well long-term. Health, domestic AI, banks are radioactive.
Solar
Sunset
If those kids could read meme
Sometimes I wonder if my whole worldview is incorrect. Perhaps I am in an insulated leftist echo chamber. Maybe these people who I have vilified have reasonable positions that I cannot comprehend.
Then I see the Department of Energy lamenting how solar panels failed because they don’t work at night.
This. Thiiiiiiisssssss. Afajswhakfhid.
The 1% of solar producing power at night scares me
Moonlight and starlight is indirect and distant solar power, respectively.
Could also be as simple as them using the wrong cutoff time for when the Sun goes down
That light has way less than 1% of the intensity of sunlight.
Edit: from here you get that the brightness of moonlight is 0.05 - 0.3 lux whilst that of direct sunlight is 32,000–100,000 lux
Our eyes deceive us (our pupils dilate or contract and we have different more sensitive cells in our retina for seeing in low light conditions) and make it seem brighter than it actually is whilst making sunshine during the day seem less bright than it actually is.
You can use any light of the right frequencies on a solar panel to produce electricity, but the amount of current you can get on a solar panel from moonlight and starlight is minuscule.
My bet is that the 1% comes from things like molten salt solar power plants which during the day use sunlight to heat up some kind of salt (which is used to produce steam that powers a steam turbine), some of which will only be used to actually generate power during the night.
If it’s not from the sun, it’s not sunlight. Moonlight doesnt have heat, so it cant produce electricity
Moonlight is from the sun, and “has heat” in as much of a sense as sunlight does. Do you think solar panels can tell whether light is coming from the sun, moon, a distant star, or a flashlight? They just turn the photons into electricity, it doesn’t care where they’re from.
Have you ever been warmed by moonlight? It doesn’t give energy.
Yes, I have. It’s less energy than comes straight from the sun, but it still carries energy, because it’s all just photons. The photons from the sun aren’t hotter than the ones reflected from the moon, there’s just more of them.
Some photons are hotter than others. Its the wavelengths and frequencies. No UV from moonlight
You are fascinating. I mean yes, individual photons carry different amounts of energy and that’s reflected in their wavelength, but how do you know that and not how reflection works? Moonlight contains a similar proportion of UV to sunlight, there’s just less total light.
Wavelengths and frequencies are the same thing, just inverted. E=hf/c. Ask ya boy, Albert
It’s a subset of the wavelengths of sunlight, specifically just those which add up to the color of the moon.
The problem is not the “quality” of the light, it’s the quantity: moonlight has way less brightness than sunlight, specifically from here you get that the brightness of moonlight is 0.05 - 0.3 lux whilst that of direct sunlight is 32,000–100,000 lux.
Less brightness pretty much directly translates to less power produced by a solar panel.
So you can actually generate power in a solar panel from moonlight (photons of the same color have the same wavelength hence the same amount of energy, so are equally capable of inducing electron release independently of how those photons got there), it’s just a ridiculously small amount compared to how much you can generate under its optimal operating conditions (under direct sunlight) because moonlight is made up of far fewer photons than direct sunlight.
Huh? Everything that moves has or can create heat. Heat from light is the energy it has being transformed when it hits an atom. So all light, even a single photon, creates heat when absorbed. Just a matter of how much.
Light that can’t produce heat doesn’t exist, and matter without heat would be at absolute zero, and that is impossible in our current physics model.
Even the heat death of the universe has a static temperature above 0.
Well, there are solar condensator setups which will focus sunlight on a central tower to melt some kind of salt which is then used to generate power in the more traditional way (heating water into steam that then goes through a steam turbine).
These will keep generating during the night as long as there’s enough heat left in the reservoir of molten salt which was filled during the day.
Honestly, it’s impressive that they still managed 138MW after sunset.
Some of them positioned under bright streetlights or something?
Maybe it was a full moon?
Full moon?
Sun Sets
Republicans: Huddle nervously in the darkness uncertain if the magic sky fire will ever return.
As a point of comparison, here’s a press release from PRC’s government on the same day: https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202607/23/content_WS6a617ed3c6d00ca5f9a0c5e8.html
China is building yet another 300 GW of renewables by 2030, meanwhile the US is struggling to understand the word “solar” in “solar panel”.
China is basically the only major economy that invested into making a transition off fossil fuels actually possible.
The point is to focus on the future. Fossil fuels don’t disappear, but new energy sources can replace them in pieces, small or large. Also, equally importantly, personal solar is a life changing tool for millions of people around the world already.
For sure, I expect once the process will accelerate now with Gulf energy exports collapsing making it a necessity for a lot of countries. And Pakistan is a great example where people took initiative themselves to start importing the panels, and now there’s large scale solar available. This kind of stuff does make me cautiously optimistic.
Growing up in the American education system I met a number of intelligent and decent people. None of them that stayed in this country are doing particularly well professionally. I also met a number of trust fund brats and amoral monsters. They are doing quite well for themselves. This is America.
The lack of morality is a feature.
US education
4th Grade School Textbook
That’s from a private religious education textbook. It is not representative of the U.S. education system.
Yes, but a big part of the population in the US are in school with this and similar. I remember an interview with a passerby in Alabama, I think, asking him about climate change caused by pollution. Answer: It Is a big lie that man can change anything in God’s Creation.
The US Bubble
Autoritarian govs only can work with ignorant citizens, religion is always usefull for it. Search: List of Banned Books in US Schools.
nah man I dont believe you
To be fair, as a physics grad, I don’t think I understand electricity either. It’s much more tangible than quantum, so you can feign expertise more easily, but to actually comprehend it…
I’m wondering how that 1% remained operating?
Moonlight
138 MW generated from moonlight is insane to me.
I’m investing in lunar power now
Best guess, sunset is being defined as a specific time. Sunset isn’t necessarily the point at which all sunlight is gone, and even then, the time the sun goes down varies depending on where you are within a given time zone. If they just used an arbitrary time or an almanac listing for twilight for each day, they could easily end up including slivers of daylight in their post sunset data.
Which is really pointless since this is just the same old “BuT sOlAr DoEsN’t WoRk At NiGhT” argument that idiots have been making for decades. But I suppose you gotta at least pretend to use real world data to make it look sciencey.
Could be residual energy generation from the few operating concentrated solar power stations (generating great by reflecting sunlight and that heat persists for a time)
Had to rely on Google AI for this (downvote all you want but good luck trying to find this without it), but it says dusk/dawn can produce 0.1% to 0.01% capacity. But inverters for DC to AC have a minimum threshold so it’s nothing. So not that.
Firstly: I’m not the downvoter.
Secondly: you didn’t have to - you chose to.
And as most chatbots list sources, you can always check them out yourself and cut out the middleman. Most of academia - some 45% do that. Another 45% don’t even bother. A lone 10% still do things the old fashioned way. In any case, you’re not alone in relying on AI to find obscure information.
With search engines becoming increasingly infested with low-quality and obvious-slop sites, relying on the same methods as the slopmasters isn’t even a big stain on your morality. Because of it was, the slopmasters would be drowning in the ink required, and billionaires would already have caused another biblical flood of it.
Did you know that 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot?
60% of the time it works every time
49% of us think we’re not divided.
Half the population can’t read statistics and the other third choose not to.
Academia calls these heuristics, not statistics.
Thank God we had you here to tell us what the slop machine sharted out.
You’re welcome!
It was sarcasm. Next time keep that shit to yourself.
It was?!?!? Rudeness from ml?!? Well I never!
AI slop garbage defenders from .world!? Who’da thunk it?
Anything can be true when words have no meaning.
If you kill all the Nazis this will stop being a problem.
Is this real? Is this really as dumb as it seems?
yup it’s real and it’s exactly as dumb as it looks
It’s not. The tweet may be real but the image is fabulation.
Maybe that’s why they’re allowing that company to build space mirrors; so they can point the sun at the solar panels 24/7.
~/s in case it’s not obvious.~
I know you aren’t serious, but I am now curious how much night time solar relaying it would take to pay off launching one of those satellites. I need to find numbers…
Edit- Here it is- with updated math
Looking around I first needed to see how much energy generation nets. This is time and location dependant. I am in Texas. Out grid is run by ERCOT and they have their wholesale grid prices listed.
If I were to be buying reflected solar, it would obviously be at night, during the unfortunately lower priced off peak times. Looking at the grid avg we get about $40 per MWh.
But we now have the question of how big is the solar farm? And this size is now limited to the reflected beam size. According to reflect orbital their first satellite, Eärendil-1, has a beam diameter of approximately 5 square Km. But we have to factor in some beam dissipation near the edges, so let’s be safe and call it a circle with a diameter of 4 square Km of usable reflected solar. This number also easily convers to about 1000 acres of land.
Utility Scale solar farms output 1 MW per 5-10 acres. Of we took the middle (7.5 acres per MW) our hypothetical reflected beam sized solar farm would output 150 MW.
At $40 per MW and 150 MW we are generating $6000 per hour. And with our twilight window of 6 hours we can generate $36,000 per night.
But how much does the satellite cost? The rented cost is one thing, but only peasants rent the sun. We are talking about owning it. The satellite is Reported to cost $2 million. But the mass produced they are claiming will cost closer to $300k. Let’s pretend this becomes a viable buisness strategy to own these satellites and beam them to a reflected solar farm and use the $300k.
So our cheap satellite should take about 8.3 nights to pay off. The expensive one should take about 55.5 nights to pay off.
This also does not factor in lower luminosity, night time clouds, solar build cost, or launch cost. This is also factoring in today’s energy prices that continue to trend downward with the adoption of more renewables. This also ignores the giant issue of their orbital height only giving 4 minutes of sun per pass per satellite. I don’t even want to know how many centuries it would then take to pay off a $2 million satellite in 4 minute increments…
Wow, that’s awesome. I look forward to your math update (but I would understand if it doesn’t happen).
As an aside, I thought your comment deserved to be acknowledged on the !theydidthemath@mander.xyz community.
~If you don’t like it, you could always cover my house with extra midnight sunlight as punishment. 🤭~
Eärendil-1
Will these people ever stop taking their product names from The Lord of The Rings? J.R.R. Tolkien’s corpse could probably be set up to generate power from all the spinning he’s presumably doing in his grave at this point.
looking at it more plainly the satellite only has 18 m^2 reflective surface are so if it hypothetically could perfectly reflect it to earth it could at most add equalient of that in solar energy as harvested electricity that would mean at best added 3.6kW meaning at $40/MWH it would generate about $3.5/day so it would take 235 years to pay itself back, almost a millenia if it only helps 6h/day
The 4 minute window is also a fun one. With the LEO altitude listed as between 600 and 650 Km, and if we call it 625 km, that gives it a period of about 96 minutes. This gives it 3.75 passes during out twilight window. But we don’t know when those windows will start or or end. As in, the first window might happen .5 hours onto twilight or the last window might be 1.5 hours before twilight ends, both scenarios wasting the remaining time, but we have a guaranteed 3 passes, and at least half the nights a bonus 4th pass either at the start or the end.
If each pass is 4 minutes, we get a total ‘illumination’ time of 14 minutes per night.
At $40/MW/hr we can also call it $0.6666/MW/min. Or, with out 150 MW farm this comes out to a clean $100/minute. And at 14 minutes per night we are making $1400.
To pay off the OG solar sat it will take about 1428.5 nights, or just under 4 years. To pay off the cheap sat it will take about 214.25 nights
Ok grok. What is a battery and why do we need them?
