China has a very large desert region in the northwest that receive a LOT of sun year round, so I'd expect the panels to be producing a decent amount of power throughout most of the day.
The biggest problem is actually distance - even a few years back, I was reading that there was a massive amount of solar power, but a very significant percentage was lost in transmission to the most densely populated areas of China which are predominantly in the southeast and east of the country.
These areas are also where a lot of rare earth metals are mined, so feasibly it would be relatively cheap to produce giga-batteries there too smooth demand, but I also suspect that they could see significant advantage to doing things that are traditionally energy-costly like electrolysis of water to create hydrogen that could be transferred across the country by pipe with pretty minimal losses and then burned to drive turbines at the other end. Such systems might end up with overall fewer losses than just having thousands of miles of power grid.
Another thing I read recently that was interesting is that it's getting approximately close to free for China to produce solar panels now, significantly cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Largely this is also due to the excess power produced in the northwest that can be cheaply used in the processing needed to produce more solar panels.
There's a project here in Australia that reckons its profitable to build a solar farm in Australia and ship the electricity over 5,000km to Singapore.
https://www.suncable.energy/our-projects
Maybe that's all just marketing hype and greenwashing corporate bullshit, but it at least _seems_ feasible to transport solar (and battery stored for 24x7) power long distances.
I’d expect HVDC to deal with power loss well enough. The longest one in China is 3200 km at 1100kv and 12 Gw capacity.
My guess is that the HVDC lines they have isn’t really enough to move all that renewable energy yet, or the strategy might be to build more industry out west closer to solar and wind, although water is then the limited resource.
The only issue is that, like the Sahara, but unlike the Arabian peninsula and the American Southwest, Australia is not closely located to any other major consumers of power, so will need to build that kind of infrastructure.
To be honest I'm quite excited. I think the transition to solar is happening faster and at an accelerating rate, ahead of anything we dreamed of even a decade ago.
Not that I'm an expert of anything but Australia has a lot of mining of resources that I would think could use a lot of electricity? Like instead of sending iron ore to mainland China, why not make steel in Australia if electricity is cheap?
Hmmm now I'm curious - google google google.
Refining bauxite into aluminium increases the price about 12 times from $40/ton for bauxite to about $2,700 per tone for aluminium which requires 5 tons of bauxite as an input.
Australia exports about 40,000kt of bauxite a year. It requires about 15 kWh/kg to refine aluminium from bauxite.
So if we refined all that bauxite into aluminium before exporting it, we'd use about 600GWh of electricity to turn $1.6 billion worth of bauxite into $220 billion worth of aluminium. (And the economics is better than that, because there's only be 8 million tons or stuff to export instead of 40 million tons.)
Surely that extra 218 billion a year would be way better (for Australia) staying in our economy instead of having all that bauxite refined somewhere else?
On the other hand...
Sun Cable reckons it'll deliver 1.7GW to Singapore 24x7, or 15,000GWh. So refining _all_ the bauxite would only use 4% of that.
Australia generates about 280TWh of electricity over a year. So refining _all_ the bauxite would use only 0.2% of that.
So no. It sure as hell doesn't use "a lot of power", even if people do refer to aluminium as "solid electricity"...
That was a fun rabbit hole.
(Disclaimer: no effort made to verify numbers some of which were sourced directly from DuckDuckGo search response page snippets. Also, I'm notorious for dropping three orders of magnitude when doing mental math using kilo/mega/giga/tera prefixes.)
It's the thing where the use of electricity is a large part of the production of aluminum, but the production of aluminum is not a large part of the use of electricity.
Renewable and storage costs continue to decline, new nuclear is dead, existing nuclear will run as long as safe to do so until decommissioning. Fission lost to fusion at a distance. Very simply, we just keep building and deploying solar as quickly as possible. Wind and batteries too.
https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-global-renewabl...
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/14/overbuilding-solar-at...
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA
I’m sceptical of PV being *the* solution to the world energy issue but who knows, maybe.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-...
https://electrek.co/2024/05/17/china-first-large-scale-sodiu...
That’s prospective technology developed literally in order to overcome the limitation that is lithium availability… The battery you are talking about in China is both the first and very small capacity related to the grid.
I’m sorry but I think you clearly have an axe to grind and are not engaging with me with full intellectual honesty here.
[1] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-v...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292113 ("HN: North Carolina is getting a $1.4B sodium-ion battery gigafactory")
https://electrek.co/2024/08/16/north-carolina-sodium-ion-bat... ("electrek: North Carolina is getting a $1.4B sodium-ion battery gigafactory")
Rare earth elements (REEs) and rare metals are key ingredients for glass, lights, magnets, batteries, and catalytic converters, and used in everything from cell phones to cars. For example, to make the magnet for one wind turbine, you need about 300 kilograms of neodymium.
There's more to glass than borosilicates and bulk ingredients are the least interesting source of unique properties.
FWiW Soda-Lime glass is more common than borosilicate glass and bases in at ~ 70 percent silica (silicon dioxide), 15 percent soda (sodium oxide), and 9 percent lime (calcium oxide). No Boron (in general).
That dull fact alone suggests your knowledge of glass could use a significant leg up.
If you're looking to better educate yourself there's the Corning School of Glass for the Art Glass applications and various industrial glass journals about optical glass, strengthened glass, et al.
As for rare earths in glass you can either take the material science journal search approach (multiple hits) or refer to the uses page of the largest global supplier of rare earths:
Rare earths react with other metallic and non-metallic elements to form compounds each of which has specific chemical behaviours. This makes them indispensable and non-replaceable in many electrical, optical, magnetic, and catalytic applications.
See the part "non-replaceable in many .. optical .. applications" ?
I stated as a fact that rare earths had an application in glass technology.
You're the one that seemed to think the only type of glass was borosilicate, in addition to utterly blanking on the importance of trace elements and doping in glass properties.
As mentioned, you might benefit from a better reading in materials science.
For example, not just microscopes, there's also: https://www.fiberoptics4sale.com/blogs/archive-posts/9504429...
I heard a rumour that these "optical fibres" get used a lot, but hey, you're the expert.
And the snark doesn't add to the discussion.
Soda–lime glass accounts for about 90% of manufactured glass.
The implication being that borosilicate glass accounts for at most 10% of global production.
It's the dominant type for thermal | bakeware where expansion factors matter, but overall not the most common glass type in production.
> And the snark doesn't add to the discussion.
Please advise the user that stated "Pretty sure your source is shit given .. {false statement}"
Re: snark - the point of HN is that we are better than that. If someone is snarky, then we shouldn't respond in kind. But I get it. It's easier to say than to do.
At no point did I claim that rare earth in glass was a bottleneck to solar panel manufacture, glass only arose as doping glass for specific properties is one of the many reasons why we process rare earth materials at all.
[1] https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/thorium-molten...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
Edit: I think that all of the top 5 largest are in deserts. Maybe more.
See the executive summary linked at the bottom of this page: https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/utility-scale-solar-2023-ed....
Solar is cheaper and easier, so when the sun is shining you get essentially free energy while the nuclear cant be ramped down so you are now producing excess energy during the day.
solar eats nuclear's lunch during the day... with the long term waste issue and military target danger of nuclear thrown in.
It's a bad idea because after renewables have satisfied their share of demand, the residual demand will be very unsteady. And unsteady demand is the opposite of what nuclear is good at satisfying.
fundamentally disagree, this is taking simple facts and changing the narrative around the facts to make renewables look bad.
Renewables are cheaper and faster to invest, build and use.
Nuclear is slower and more expensive to invest, build and use.
there is a use for nuclear, but common widespread rollout is not it.
Peak heating demand is in winter and at night, when solar production is at its lowest. Replacing fossil fuels with nuclear can be done by you building nuclear plants, using cogeneration (steam pipes) to distribute heat to the population with reasonable distance of the plant and electricity generated by the plant to operate heat pumps for people who live more distance away.
To do this reliably with solar you need enough solar generation capacity on the coldest day of the year with the least sunlight to generate an amount of power on the order of the size of the entire existing power grid, just for heating. Then you need to store the majority of it for use at night. Then you need an entirely separate backup system in case it's cloudy for too long, because if solar doesn't generate enough power then people freeze. I've heard suggestions of maintaining an entirely redundant set of traditional fossil fuel generating stations to bring online in the event of undersupply -- these things cost nearly as much by themselves as the nuclear plants.
How is that combination supposed to be cheaper? Also, how is it supposed to be built in parallel when battery production capacity is already being consumed to electrify transportation and do peak shaving to allow renewable sources to replace fossil fuels in the existing grid?
Ultimately The storage part is actually a huge improvement to existing design with modular design and decentralized layout giving societies DR capability that would be horrendously expensive in the more centralized designs we use now.
> these things cost nearly as much by themselves as the nuclear plants.
This is completely wrong. A simple cycle turbine power plant is maybe 1/20th the capex per W of a nuclear plant; a combined cycle plant maybe 1/10th. Combustion turbines are amazing.
We will also see migration of thermal energy intensive industries to lower latitude places with more sun and less seasonality. Diurnal storage of heat from PV is quite feasible. Sorry Europe, nuclear won't save you.
I will also note that 2/3rds of industrial heat demand is at < 300 C, which means heat pumps can be used (particularly if the process has a warm waste heat stream to feed into the heat pumps.)
https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/solar-industrial-process-heat....
But the premise was "solar is getting so cheap". Wind costs more than solar, and is still intermittent so you still need the backup.
> A simple cycle turbine power plant is maybe 1/20th the capex per W of a nuclear plant; a combined cycle plant maybe 1/10th. Combustion turbines are amazing.
That's just the capex for the plant itself. It doesn't include whatever you're using to produce and store the fuel. The capex to store a week's supply of hydrogen in particular would well exceed the capex for the plant itself. Plus the "operating costs" which largely still exist even if the plant is only operated 1% of the time. It still has to pay for full-time security and maintenance and have a full complement of staff on-call at all times in case the plant has to be brought into service.
And many of those costs go up rather than down as usage declines. Right now we have a network for the production and distribution of natural gas which gets funded by domestic use for heating and cooking and existing power plants can tie into those pipelines at minimal incremental cost. If we stop using fossil fuels for heating, now you have to justify the opex on all those pipelines just for the infrequently-used combustion power plants, or you have to build and maintain a different distribution system for the fuel.
The low cost thing to do would be to have have a production and distribution system that can replenish the week's worth of fuel over the course of three months, but now you can get a period of undersupply in November and the tanks won't be replenished until spring. Whereas if you want to be able to produce a week's supply of fuel the next week, add another billion+ dollars per GW of capacity for electrolyzers.
Even if this still costs less than a nuclear plant, this is the cost of the backup system by itself. You still have to add the cost of the renewable sources to be used the other 99% of the time. And the efficiency advantage if nuclear is used for heating via cogeneration.
> We will also see migration of thermal energy intensive industries to lower latitude places with more sun and less seasonality.
Industries are fine, the question is how to heat homes in Europe or the northern half of the US.
And while cost is a big deal, long-term waste isn't that much of an issue, and reactors are not good military targets.