Yeah, this isn’t a good thing at all. Germany has a similar problem with wind. Storage and efficient transmission of all the extra energy is not cost effective enough currently to solve these problems either, and not likely to be any time soon (battery storage in particular is a terrible idea, especially when scaled up to base-load levels), increases in renewable capacity and regulatory interference forcing grids to prioritise them over other sources is currently putting energy grids under considerable strain, things are likely to start breaking in the coming years. And all the while fossil fuel usage keeps increasing, especially dirty coal.
Price it out. Bear in mind that your solution has to be able to deploy in, say, one minute, on remote command from the grid operators, and last for the lifespan of the panels-- 20 years or so. And survive exposure to weather for that 20 years. And be light enough not to put excess load on residential roofs. And be no worse than carbon-neutral, lest we lose the benefits of using solar in the first place.
One of the annoying things about infrastructure is how expensive the conceptually simple things turn out to be. Rapidly shading and unshading large areas is tricky; it means a lot of moving parts, and moving parts are painfully pricy outdoors.
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yeah, one of the benefits of PV over wind turbines is the relatively low maintenance, putting motorized sunglasses on them doesn’t seem like a very good idea.
I mean, the sun isn’t even IN America!
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Excellent points all. And not only do you need to be able to shade all of the panels quickly in a tough environment, but you have to remember that the largest solar farms are now going on 10 square miles – that’s a big windowshade, or a hell of a lot of small ones. You do refer to “large areas,” I just thought I’d put a number on it…
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I was thinking considering the feeling for Trump in Mexico, the solar panels might soon find themselves covered in some rather nasty grafiti. Thus rendering them useless.
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Also, consider that the big solar farms out in the desert aren’t solar cells, but an array of mirrors that are busy heating up salt to its melting point. This allows us to “store” solar energy for a time, but there’s still ramp-up time and an associated power cost for keeping a substance stored at 1k degrees.
We’re getting closer! But it’s still expensive to “burst” compared to the aforementioned gas turbines.
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I just searched this thread and nobody said “hooray” yet.
#Hooray!
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In California, the lion’s share is photovoltaic, rather than concentrating. And none of the big four concentrators use molten salt. (You may be thinking of Solar Two, and the subsequent Solar Tres in Spain-- now Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant.) Tedious details at Wikipedia: Solar Power in California.
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I’ve driven past this plant a few times in Seville, cool place. Stuff like this has a lot more potential in the near term, there’s still a lot of room for improvement in terms of PV efficiency, and once that gets good hopefully the storage and transmission technologies will have improved as well.
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My mistake! I’m am mixing up the Ivanpah array with Solar 2. Ivanpah is just sun->steam, which has CONSIDERABLE spinup and spindown, as you’re just pointing a bunch of mirrors at a steam tank.
The molten salt is really cool, though!
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of COURSE we have to pay Arizona. we wouldnt want to lower rates, or GIVe the energy to the folks who paid for the infrastructure
spent spend spend
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I’d be very strongly inclined to suspect that throwing a resistive load at the problem would be easier than adding moving parts.
It would look spectacularly wasteful to have a bunch of power resistors heating merrily away; but resistors are cheap, durable and fairly robust(materials with negative thermal coefficients of resistance require fiddly control to avoid runaway; but that’s mostly an LED problem, not something you see with normal materials; which can be sized to conveniently regulate their current draw as their temperature changes); and the amount of heat per unit area isn’t all that heroic(it’s pretty much just a Rube Goldberg pathway to achieve the ‘solar energy heats the earth’s surface’ effect that happens normally).
One would obviously prefer to find an actually useful thing to do with the energy; but in absence of one; I suspect that dissipating what you generate would be a lot cheaper and more reliable than attempting to shroud the panels.
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If the panels are mobile, I’d expect that it would be easier to shed power by just defocussing rather than shrouding. Just misalign 'em a bit.
For using the power, pumped hydro storage or similar seems an obvious response.
BTW:
My first thought for shrouding was LCD, but I think even at maximum transparency, that would still put a polarizing filter in front of the solar panel, so, uh, I guess never mind.
Maybe they could set up a water desalination plant to soak up the extra energy
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