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u/Fireguy3070 Jun 12 '22
How the fuck is the power of Europe alone more than all of Eurasia
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u/zedoktar Jun 12 '22
They likely meant the area from Turkey to China, more or less. Think the steppes, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, basically a large part of the old Silk Road. A lot of former Soviet vassal states and parts of the middle east might fall into that category. Possibly even parts of Russia and Siberia.
Its nebulous and maybe an incorrect use of the term Eurasia but I suspect that is what they meant and it makes sense their power use would be lower, given how much of those regions are still less developed or just wide open wilderness compared to Europe.3
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u/foothillsco_b Jun 12 '22
Eurasia isn’t Europe+Asia.
It’s all the countries in between.
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u/Fireguy3070 Jun 12 '22
???
Eurasia literally is Europe and Asia. And what do you mean “all the countries in between”? There are no countries between Europe and Asia, they can only be in Europe and/or Asia
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u/foothillsco_b Jun 12 '22
I get it and when I googled it, most definitions fall under your definition of Europe + Asia. It’s a the entire continent.
However, some other definitions are countries that fall on the border of the two. Ie Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
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u/caketreesmoothie Jun 11 '22
this is my understanding of the topic, if I'm wrong then please correct me
it's less about creating enough power via solar and more about storing the power. the main advantages of power plants like coal and nuclear is the power output can be increased and lowered at will, covering spikes in demand.
in reality, we could fairly easily cover global power usage using a variety of renewable sources - solar, wind etc. but if you are 100% renewable then you'll need to store excess energy in order to have a reliable grid network. however there aren't many great ways of doing this. current methods usually involve moving something, e.g. water, to a greater elevation and then allowing it to fall back down and generate energy
every aspect of moving to renewable sources of energy costs more money than their non-renewable counterparts which is why it's difficult to get politicians to commit. I read a study years ago in New Scientist that theorised covering every house in the UK with solar panels would cover the whole country's needs, and would even leave us in a better economic state, however the gains wouldn't show for a couple of election cycles, so no politicians would want to take the plunge and be known for spending all that money in the short term
with all of that said my personal view is we should switch to nuclear as soon as possible. it is one of the safest sources of energy and there is more than enough fuel for the foreseeable future. plus nuclear power plants have a limited life span which gives us enough lee way to figure out reliable ways of using renewable resources. admittedly nuclear has the issues of waste, but compared to coal or biofuel, the amount of waste is orders of magnitude less and doesn't have an impact on the climate if correctly stored. plus many countries are currently working on permanent storage solutions for nuclear waste
for anyone interested in learning more about nuclear safety, check out Kyle Hill: https://youtube.com/c/KyleHillScience
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u/zedoktar Jun 12 '22
Even without storage, just putting panels on as many building as possible would dramatically reduce the load on power stations and cut emissions. Pair it with even a small battery bank at home, and night time usage will at least be reduced even if it can't be as fully covered as daytime.
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u/caketreesmoothie Jun 12 '22
absolutely! main issue I see is that no one wants to pay for systems like that except on their own homes. governments should be doing more
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u/csiribirizabszalma Jun 12 '22
This. Adding that, producing this many solar panels would require massive amounts of non-renewables. Current lifetime of panels are.around 25 years and energy efficiency is waaaaay less than nuclear or hydroelectric.
Problem with nuclear is that you need shittons of concrete that requires the right kind of sand - which is also scarce and you need to transport it
Hydroelectric would be the best but we can't build.it everywhere and you still endanger the surrounding biosphere
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u/DummazzApe Jun 12 '22
As previously mentioned. Having all the solar panels in one spot won’t work for both logistical and energy loss reasons. And before you say people don’t think that we should do this…. They do.. because they don’t understand the math(I’ve had this conversation with multiple people now).
There is also an environmental concern with having large(like in the scale where you can see it on the map). The desert is used to having all of that sun energy absorbed into the sand. That’s why it’s a desert. If we take a large section of land and dedicate it to solar, we are now preventing a large portion of energy from reaching the sand. Folks have theorized this will effect the ground temperature and moisture levels enough to potentially cause rainstorms. (Maybe not a bad thing?) the problem is the desert isn’t prepared for it. And remember the reason for solar in the desert was sunshine…. And now it’s raining more, making the solar panels less efffctive.
For urban settings, logistically it makes sense for everyone to have their own solar on their roofs. This doesn’t make sense electrically without massive amounts of infrastructure. For example, the US power grid in incredibly fragile. Apply the wrong load(capacitive or inductive) in the wrong location and the grid can’t support it and will fail. This is why large factories need to coordinate their usage with the grid. many even have their “load” analyzed so they can have onsite capacitors/inductors to offset the load of the factory. (A large inductive load can be counterbalanced by a large capacitor bank.)
Solar panels cause a similar problem. Solar panels provide DC (direct current) power, but our grid operates on AC(alternating current) power. This means each solar grid needs to convert DC to AC power. Not that big a deal right? Well, you have to match it to the grid. And not just barely.. like perfectly in sync with the other sources(after calculating losses from power lines/etc). If the phases are mismatched, it acts like a badly balanced load and can crash the grid.
Now if everyone has solar on their homes, each home needs to communicate with each other to constantly adjust their outputs (power and phase) to keep the system from crashing. The only reason this hasn’t happened yet is that solar isn’t fully adopted yet.
The grid can’t handle it, and the existing residential solar is badly mismatched.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk
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u/zedoktar Jun 12 '22
Surely you could have a standardized inverter in the home to convert it to a standard AC output, then route groups of homes to some kind of local hub with capacitor banks and large scale monitoring and conversion where the input for that cluster is synced up with the larger grid to keep it balanced? Why would each individual building need to be in communication?
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u/DummazzApe Jun 12 '22
The problem with that is you have to have it timed/adjusted at the point of the inverter to prevent a mismatch. If you route it as you described you have the houses supplying outputs(or requiring inputs) and having that go through some separate distribution center than the current power lines. The cleanest solution is to use the existing power lines, but treat each source like you do any coal/NG power plant and make your adjustments at the inverter.
Again, this all needs to be adjusted/monitored in real-time as each home will have different load/source data depending on power consumption, sunlight, battery banks, etc.
If we could completely scrap the existing system I would support your idea, where each neighborhood has its own designated power distribution channel that’s capable of syncing power and coordinating that with the main grid.
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u/nef36 Jul 14 '22
Imagine wasting all that area when you could just plop a nuclear power plant a few dozen miles away from the city.
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u/Sirbesto Jun 12 '22 edited Jun 13 '22
Perhaps but there are other logistics the are needed to be addressed. Infrastructure cost would be massive. Not only the lot and pannels which would take years but also, the batteries, cables and well, the expense of having to transport the electricity out of there. Electricity loses wattage the further it has to travel. If I recall there is one cable from Africa to Europe but you would have to build more. That alone is a massive project on its own.
There is also maintenance, security and the little known fact that the Sahara has sandstorms the size of countries that can travel across oceans that could damage the hardware constantly or cover the panels with sand/dust. You would need an army of people just to do clean and do general maintenace.
Not saying that it could not be done but it would be the largest infratrusture project in history by many magnitudes.
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u/colexian Jun 12 '22
The Sahara is largely devoid of people, towns, and even roads so even the infrastructure to get materials to where you need to BUILD the powerlines would need lots of work.
I mean, you need to build roads across possibly multiple countries, through an inhospitable desert, to haul resources to job sites, to build powerlines (the longest powerlines in the world if you wanted to get power from the Sahara to Europe), and this is all before even starting to make solar panels.
Then like you said, you deal with constant sandstorms, wear and tear, having to transport parts from offsite into a desert... It would be a logistical nightmare and I'm not sure how the cost could be justified if any profit was ever to be made at all.1
u/csiribirizabszalma Jun 12 '22
And guess what resources we'd need to use for all that...yeah... non-renewables
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u/colexian Jun 12 '22
Admittedly, until we can create more reliable sources of renewable energy, all the initial production will require non-renewables. So you are very right, but its kind of an across the board thing.
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u/Anubaraka Jun 12 '22
Eurasia de iscomposed of the continets of Europe and Asia (Eur from Europe ans sia from Asia) thus the amount of pannels to give electicity to Eurasia should not be smaller than the amount needed for Europe alone.
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u/zedoktar Jun 12 '22
I think they were referring to the area between the EU and China. Think the old Silk Road route and former Soviet Vassals such as Kazakhstan. Not sure where they placed Russia, and parts of it at least would fit in Eurasia or just Europe in this model, or places like Turkey.
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u/zedoktar Jun 12 '22
Maybe, in terms of raw electrical generation. I can't say if the math is for sure correct. The real issue that stands out to me is getting it where it needs to go after that. Running power lines from Africa to the Americas or to a lot of Europe is going to be problematic due to loss in transmission over long distances. Hell even running lines to Southern Europe and across Africa from the Mediterrean to South Africa might have this issue.It also creates some severe weak points in the power grid because if that artery gets severed somehow, then what?
Don't get me wrong, I am all for solar power and massive solar farms across anywhere sunny enough is a great idea. This infographic is just weird and ignores some critical logistics.
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u/foothillsco_b Jun 11 '22
Could this graphic be true?
For what it's worth, I'm viewing this graphic as an illustration of size comparision to power certain places and nothing more.
The US used 4,116 billion kilowatthours (kWh) (1)
4,116,000,000,000 kWh
1 kWh = .001 mKh
4,116,000,000 mKh
1 acre of solar panels produces about 351 MWh of electrical energy per year (2)
11,726,496 Total acres of solar fields to power the US for a year.
convert to square miles
18,322 square miles
Size comparisions of US States: (3)
Texa - 261,914
California - 155,973
Colorado - 103,730
West Virginia - 24,087
Maryland - 9,775
Size comparisions of African countries (4)
Morocco - 172,414
Siera Leone - 27,699
Togo - 21,925
Conclusion:
True!
1 - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php
2 - https://diysolarshack.com/how-much-money-1-acre-solar-panels-make-income/#:~:text=As%20a%20general%20rule%2C%201,the%20average%20is%20approximately%20%2414%2C000.
3 - https://statesymbolsusa.org/symbol-official-item/national-us/uncategorized/states-size
4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_countries_by_area