Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "The world’s largest solar and battery power plant has 1.9 million panels" video.

It doesn't change the albedo of the land all that much. 20% of the light absorbed in the panels flows out in form of electricity (or is stored in the batteries) and during the night the panels are radiating IR very efficiently, cooling the air around them stronger than the original surface would have. Overall it's probably mostly a wash. In agricultural applications the shade of the panels reduces evaporation, leading to longer growth periods in spring and summer and allowing species that are less adapted to arid conditions to thrive. Solar shading in agriculture will probably go a long way to offset the effects of global warming on farming.
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We have plenty of copper in the ground... our old telecommunications cables can all be replaced by fiber. Apart from that... aluminum makes for great conductors.
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So when are you going to invest all of YOUR money in a nuclear power plant? That I want to see. ;-)
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@billcichoke2534 How would I delete your post???? I am not YouTube. You are clearly way too emotional about this.
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Battery storage is for rapid high load demand. That's the current problem that needs to be solved to stabilize the grids because solar and wind can show intermittencies at the minute time scale. The next longer time scale is four to six hours in summer as AC demand continues even after sunset in states that have warm climates. There is also a mismatch between demand and supply in the early morning hours as businesses are opening before solar has sufficient production capacity. This intra-day storage can be easily met with batteries. The much harder part will be to cover weekly and seasonal supply-demand mismatches, especially for heating.
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Cost per cycle is what counts and that can be reduced greatly with battery technologies that have longer lifetime. Once batteries reach the 10,000 cycle mark, their cost impact becomes marginal. We are almost there.
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I heard you say that last week about 900 million acres of farmland in the US. Oh, wait... you never said that about farmland. :-)
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@polarbear7255 Yes, you are making a good fool of yourself right now. ;-)
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Was it ever alive? ;-)
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@FreeKekistann One could imagine panels that are actually cooling the land by reflecting most of the IR radiation and by having an emission peak for IR wavelength that correspond to the Planck peak at 300K. That would reduce heat load by 30% or so. It does come with some efficiency loss and the production is more expensive, of course. Other possible combinations involve solar and thermal desalination.
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In California it was almost 20% of all electricity generation in 2022 and growing rapidly. By the end of the decade it will probably be the largest fraction of the electricity mix.
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@billcichoke2534 Your freedom to make a fool of yourself on the internet is in no way endangered. You are practicing it now. ;-)
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Yes, that's why absolutely nobody can afford to build a new nuclear power plant without government guarantees. ;-)
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@nightdipper5178 They weren't laughing the last time a nuclear project went bankrupt and took Westinghouse down with it. ;-)
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You need to read the fine print. Round trip efficiency is 80% WITH waste heat. In other words, unless you can get tens or even hundreds of MW of waste heat from somewhere it's very inefficient. Since the storage and retrieval are intermittent, it's also not a good use of the waste heat source, unless you are using it to increase the thermodynamic efficiency of a peaker plant. That, of course, is not an actual storage solution. This is more of a technology looking for an application than an actual solution strategy.
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Why are you so afraid of China? Is that because you aren't competitive? :-)
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@polarbear7255 Cost competitive? Then why did Georgia go bankrupt? The abbreviation of the definition of insanity is spelled "nuclear". ;-)
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@ChuckHolland-i4b Nobody stops you from investing YOUR money in new nuclear plants. :-)
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That's the kind of powerplant that could supply the entire continent with energy. ;-)
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@billcichoke2534 Good try, but it's just not true.
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@billcichoke2534 YouTube's bots do. If you are getting irritated about that, then this ain't the place for you. They do that a lot lately.
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@billcichoke2534 You are getting all emotional, again. :-)
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@mike160543 Yep. I don't believe that a seasonal storage solution has emerged, yet. I am not sure about hydrogen. It has very poor physical properties for energy storage. Ammonia and some hydrocarbons are more likely in my opinion. I can imagine molten metal storage. Sodium and aluminum are literally dirt cheap. For thermal storage molten salt, concrete and different kinds of rocks like basalt and granite are feasible. We could literally use old construction debris as heat storage medium.
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What's up with the screaming? ;-)
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@truecolors6469 It's just mindless screaming.
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Probably not in a relevant way. We are artificially increasing absorption but are then removing more energy through the grid and through the radiation these panels give off during the night time. Overall it's probably mostly a wash unless we start to actively engineer the panels as efficient IR reflectors. The shade does seem to reduce evaporation, though, so plants will grow longer and better underneath panels. Eventually we will probably need this effect to offset the increasingly more arid conditions in the South of the US due to global warming. I have seen one science study that estimated the cooling in the Sahara due to increase in heating during the daytime, which I believe draws cold, moist air in from the ocean (we are creating an artificial circulation heat engine, I believe). The article was mostly negative about the impact, if I remember correctly. Even million square kilometer patches hardly seem to make enough of a climate impact to change rainfall substantially.
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