Solar In My Neighborhood

I live in an extremely progressive, environmentally-concscious neighborhood, full of Teslas and Bolts and many other EV's, and yet, they still have us screwed pretty bad when it comes to energy. It does not look like this around here:

 

My next-door neighbor has a solar roof, but I can walk east for more than a half-mile before I see one more house with solar panels. I can walk almost as far to the west before I see more solar panels: the branch of Chase bank next to a strip mall there has solar panels covering its entire roof, north, south, east and west. 

I keep meaning to go in there and ask someone about the solar panels. Because we live in one of those areas where there are all sorts of restrictions about what sort of solar set-up you can have, and I had assumed that literally covering your roof with solar panels was illegal in this city.

Maybe this is just an example of businesses tending not to put up with some of the crap that utilities succeed in shoving down homeowners' throats. Or maybe the fact that most of the roofs around here are not yet covered with solar panels, south, north, east and west, is an illustration of people not knowing their rights. I myself don't actually know whether what Chase is doing there is different than what any of us could be doing. And I know more about solar power than most people do.

There's a local group which wants to take our fair city away from the utility and run our power ourselves. I keep meaning to go to one of their meetings. If all of the neighborhoods in this town had roofs like those in the picture above, we could export a lot of electricity, undercut the prices of that utility, get others to join us, and put that utility and their coal-fired plants out of business. 

I'm good at daydreaming. Top-notch.

I keep meaning to look into these Biden-administration solar incentives, to see whether I could actually go solar myself right now, despite my low income. 

I keep meaning to actually do something.

Well, I write one of these posts on green energy now and then. Maybe I've actually encouraged someone somewhere else to actually do something.

Innovation in EV and Renewable-Energy Technology

For you Republicans: "EV" means "electric vehicle." Those things which you believe are well-meant, but don't work, whose sales are booming worldwide, because they work really well and are rapidly improving. The way that you believe that solar and wind energy are well-meant, but that the time when they will provide electricity more cheaply than coal or natural gas or oil is some time off. And, in a way, you're right about that: that time is some time off and keep getting further away, because it is years ago. That's right: wind and solar have been cheaper than coal and gas for years, and they keep getting cheaper, and coal and gas and oil don't. That's the reason why more and more wind and solar power plants keep being made, and why more and more rooftops have solar panels on them: not because of widespread insanity, as you may have been told, but because it's a better deal. Financially. Even before you start to calculate the value of being able to continue to breathe.

To be fair, some of you Republicans are already with me, but to be real, an awful lot of you are still buying (or selling) a line of BS from big polluters.

Utilities are also not necessarily everybody's friends. They themselves are building big solar and wind plants, and in some cases are even eager to build solar generating systems on people's roofs which they, the utilities, own, not the owner of the building, all because they would rather make the profits of generating electricity by solar panels than see you make those profits by generating a lot of electricity on your roof and selling what you don't use to the grid. In the past four years they have done a very good job of taking those profits out of other people's hands.

On the other hand, off-grid solar and wind are growing fast: people who've decided they don't need the power utilities at all. The word "utility" means the quality of being of some use to someone. When electric power utilities take worse and worse advantage of their customers, they undermine their very reason for existing. A strategy which may seem unsustainable in the long term.

Those of you who are technologically-literate, regardless of political affiliation, know that the biggest current problem with EV's is batteries. And you know that also when it comes to EV batteries, there is an awful lot of disinformation out there. The importance of range, of how far an EV can go without recharging, is exaggerated. The abundance of charging options is hidden from public knowledge as much as possible. And the rate at which EV batteries degrade, lose their power, turns out to be not as great as even EV enthusiasts feared, let alone the stories that circulate in the right wing. 2004 Nissan Leafs are being sold second-hand, why, because they're a great deal, and their batteries, their original batteries, still work pretty well. 

Still, EV batteries are a problem because they're very heavy, and because they take a while to recharge. (Not as long as you might think if you get your news from right-wing sources, but...)

So it occurred to me a while ago that EV's could be recharged from satellites. That's right: besides radio and TV and Internet signals, you can also send electrical charges wirelessly over great distances. The wireless recharging technology is not very advanced right now, or it would be widely used right now, but eventually, unless some other technology I'm not thinking of beats it to the punch, the current aggravation with EV batteries will be overcome, not just by better batteries, but by satellite recharging. This means that EV's will have to carry much smaller battery packs, which in turn means that they will be much lighter, which means that they will be even peppier and more efficient than they currently are.

So that occurred to me a while ago, and I conferred with my brother, who is a mechanical engineer, and he confirmed that this has already occurred to other people and they're working on it. 

But then yesterday, while my mind was up there in space with those satellites, it also occurred to me that electricity can be generated in space -- space, where overcast skies are less of a problem than the problems which Republicans tirelessly exaggerate in their attempts to convince people that solar power will never work.

And of course, solar power has been used in outer space for a long, long time. How long? Since 1958. 

When googling this subject, I came across things which I don't yet understand at all. But people have been working on large-scale solar power generation in space since the 1970's. 

So, to summarize, renewable energy has already been a better deal than coal, gas and oil for some time, and it will continue to improve much more quickly than fossil-fuel technology. How great the benefits will be which the public reaps from the change to wind and solar, and how fast the change will happen, depends on education: education of scientists, technicians, engineers and mathematicians, but also the education of the public in general about the political and economic forces which are slowing the transition for the sake of the short-term financial interests of a few people, at the cost of everyone's health.

Global Electrical Production and Use

In this post I'm citing random figures given on the Internet. Reliability of these figures: completely unknown to me. If someone can tell me where to get reliable figures, that would be wonderful. If someone can tell me why RECENT figures are so hard to find, that would be awesome. Because these figures are changing rapidly.

Global energy consumption in 2016: 21.8 terawatt hrs. That's 21.8 trillion watt hours. 21,800,000,000,000 watt hours.

Global installed electrical capacity (the most which could be generated at one time, theoretically, if everything was working, but it's never all working at the same time) was 4.15 terawatts in 2017.

Of that, 1.01 terawatts was renewable.

Global installation of new solar capacity in 2019 was 105 gigawatts. That's 105 billion watts. 105,000,000,000 watts. The total capacity of solar at the end of 2019 was 509.3 gigawatts.

If I have my figures straight, that would mean that about half of the renewable generating capacity, and about 1/8 of all capacity, worldwide, is solar. I have no idea whether my figures are even halfway straight. I also don't know the ratio of capacity to actual electricity generated. I'm sure it varies greatly from one type of generation to another. As opponents of alternative energy love to point out to us, is if we hadn't figured it out on our own, the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow everywhere.

However, some things are completely clear: Solar power is growing at a very fast pace. It's cheaper than coal, oil or gas, and it keeps getting cheaper, while generating electricity with fossil fuels gets more expensive. Utilities, at least ones which are privately owned and operated, would rather generate that cheap solar energy themselves and sell it to the public than have Mr and Mrs Joe Blow Homeowner own solar panels on their roofs and compete with the utilities for the profits from selling solar electricity, if Mr and Mrs have any left over. The regulations about who can generate and sell how much of what type of energy very wildly from place to place across the US. Quite a few oil companies are among the companies who are building huge solar generating plants. Two very key factors which will determine whether or not humanity kills itself off with pollution and climate change, are information and politics.