To go along with my post on 200,000 liters of water per day to clean solar panels is a drone video of solar panels being cleaned (not the same solar farm).
Those panels are pretty dirty.
Plus an anecdotal experiment video that claims a 17% improvement in output. (But be careful cleaning your own panels. I read that soap is a bad thing)
There is a good blog post on how laughable it was to suggest that Canada could rely solely on wind, water and sunlight to meet our future energy needs by 2050.
Read it.
I plan to just talk about the number of facilities necessary to do this. The blue # is the necessary count. The red at the end is the # needed to be built by 2050.
“Lets look at the offshore wind platforms. As one of the two southern coasts, British Columbia would be responsible for close to half of the 27, 242 offshore units needed to achieve our national 100% WWS goal. As of today, we have zero offshore wind facilities. “
This is laughable. Canada can’t even build a pipeline to carry oil from Alberta to tidewater in many years.
Imagine the regulatory approval … the lawsuits … the lack of skilled trades.
Its a joke.
But do read the blog post for more info.
When you come up with a dumb idea and call it green …
“Four years ago a viral campaign wooed the world with a promise of fighting climate change and jump-starting the economy by replacing tarmac on the world’s roads with solar panels. The bold idea has undergone some road testing since then.
The first results from preliminary studies have recently come out, and they’re a bit underwhelming.
A solar panel lying under a road is at a number of disadvantages.
As it’s not at the optimum tilt angle, it’s going to produce less power and it’s going to be more prone to shading, which is a problem as shade over just 5% of the surface of a panel can reduce power generation by 50%.”
“The panels are also likely to be covered by dirt and dust, and would need far thicker glass than conventional panels to withstand the weight of traffic, which will further limit the light they absorb.
Unable to benefit from air circulation, its inevitable these panels will heat up more than a rooftop solar panel too. For every 1°C over optimum temperature you lose 0.5% of energy efficiency.
As a result a significant drop in performance for a solar road, compared to rooftop solar panels, has to be expected. The question is by how much and what is the economic cost?”
A mess of panels.
TOKYO — Solar panels have sprung up across Japan in the past few years, after the government introduced a “feed-in tariff” in July 2012 that guarantees prices for electricity generated from renewable energy. When these panels reach the end of their working lives in 20-30 years, they will create a mountain of waste.
By 2020, Japan’s Environment Ministry forecasts the country’s solar-panel waste will exceed 10,000 tons.
After that, the pile really starts growing: reaching 100,000 tons in 2031 and topping 300,000 tons in 2033, the 20th anniversary of the feed-in tariff.
Between 2034 and 2040 the amount of waste produced is expected to hover around 700,000-800,000 tons annually.
The projected peak of 810,000 tons is equivalent to 40.5 million panels.
To dispose of that amount in a year would mean getting rid of 110,000 panels per day.
At NoTricksZone the insanity of Germany’s “plan” for saving the worlds from cheap electrcity is on display.
80GW of demand (the reddish line)
40 GW of installed solar producing almost nothing (the yellow)/
10 hours of sunshine in Germany for the whole month of December.
As Jo Nova says:
“Imagine what kind of havoc this kind of energy flux can do. Not one piece of baseload capital equipment can be retired, despite the fact that half of it is randomly unprofitable depending on cloud cover. Solar PV eats away the low cost competitive advantage. Capital sits there unused, spinning on standby, while wages, interest, and other costs keep accruing. So hapless baseload suppliers charge more for the hours that they do run, making electricity more expensive.
They just need batteries with three months supply.”
“The city of Las Vegas is now drawing 100 percent of its power from renewable energy sources“
“The effort moved closer to reality about a year ago when the city expanded its partnership with NVEnergy“
“NVEnergy’s GreenEnergy program allows large customers to contract for an added cost with the company to power their facilities. Customers that opt to receive all of their energy from renewable sources pay a slight premium for that.”
“Coal currently accounts for 8 percent of NVEnergy’s generating resources, compared with 74 percent natural gas and 18 percent renewable resources.”
Do you have a lot of solar cells in your neighborhood or city or state? Then welcome to the PVHI.
“Because there are still large uncertainties surrounding the potential for a PHVI effect, we examined the PVHI empirically with experiments that spanned three biomes. We found temperatures over a PV plant were regularly 3–4 °C warmer than wildlands at night, which is in direct contrast to other studies based on models that suggested that PV systems should decrease ambient temperatures.”
And then your region can buy more air conditioners to try and cool off the evening, which will then pump more warm moist air into the area, which will increase the night time temperatures even more and then ….
Poor Ontario. An energy policy created by green activists is a grotesquely expensive mess that consumers will be paying for …. for the rest of their lives.
Read and weep here. Unfortunately Canada now has a pretty Prime Minister who will drag us down the same road and commit economic suicide.
The wisps of smoke are birds/insects being immolated by the Ivanpah solar farm.
A macabre fireworks show unfolds each day along I-15 west of Las Vegas, as birds fly into concentrated beams of sunlight and are instantly incinerated, leaving wisps of white smoke against the blue desert sky.
Workers at the Ivanpah Solar Plant have a name for the spectacle: “Streamers.”
Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds die from collisions or immolation annually while chasing flying insects around the facility’s three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant’s power-producing turbines.
Coyotes are getting fat on Roadrunners.
In addition, coyotes eat dozens of road runners trapped along the outside of a perimeter fence that was designed to prevent federally threatened desert tortoises from wandering onto the property.
sunshine hours 