As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly vs weekly or monthly have very different cost vs benefits. You can minimize the risks of panels failing to recharge batteries by adding 0.1-4x more panels, or import from somewhere unlikely to have a shortfall when you need power.
A HVDC grid between 8 locations looks rather different than one between 2.
Solar coexists synergetically with many other uses, most particularly reservoirs and canals, where it cuts evaporation and biofouling and runs cooler, thus more efficiently (up to 2x vs desert); and pasture, where it also cuts evaporation, and the livestock can duck under to get out of sun and rain, and keep weeds down; and cropland, where it cuts water and heat stress, often increasing yield. Siting on industrial and warehouse roofing makes roofs last longer.
Agriculturally, bifacial fence-rows running north-south are easiest and cheapest to deploy, and collecting most in morning and afternoon better matches demand curves.
Siting solar panels in deserts will soon be recognized as very stupid. They collect dust and run hot, cutting their output often in half. Siting them in single-use arrays not in desert is almost as bad.
Just now Utah is frantic about the Great Salt Lake drying up and then blanketing the region in toxic dust. Cover it over with solar panels, and it will fill back up.
There are so many parking lots, where cars just bake in the sun, that would benefit from solar parking roofing. Cars would have to cool less, and the landowners would have another steady stream of income (its the upfront costs that are the problem as always).
TBH I look forward to a time where you can pull into a supermarket, shaded by solar panel roof, and I can hook up my EV to charge while I'm pulling groceries from the shelves. (Not that I expect the solar to be able to provide all the power needed for EV charging).
They are great because they shade the cars, and often the installation cost is $0 because the installer will sign a X year agreement with the occupier to provide electricity at Y cost for a number of years.
https://www.revolution-energetique.com/pourquoi-ces-habitant...
It’s not just about people falling off roofs, the kW people can install per hour goes down. Similarly you rarely stick solar trackers on roofs and can’t on simple floating platforms while the majority of grid installs use at least single axis tracking which provides more power in the morning and evening.
So, you are concern trolling, and badly. That is unwelcome here.
Too, anybody not already handy with putting up fencing is no farmer.
Finally, sunshine really is as free as anything ever, and the buckets are cheap and getting cheaper.
I could theoretically go out and buy a pallet load of twenty, 360W rated, 72 cell panels at something like $160 per piece, costing something like $3,200 + $400 LTL freight. But it's going to cost way more than that to put those 20 on my roof or ground mounts and make them useful.
https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... has €0.43 per watt peak (STC watt) only for high-efficiency panels, the kind you buy when you're tight on space (or the cost of your installation is dominated by the cost of labor, as you say). "Mainstream" is €0.33/Wp and "low cost" is €0.22/Wp.
Also, these costs seem to be much higher as a result of the current supply-chain crisis. The low point so far was August 02020, with high-efficiency panels at €0.30/Wp and low-cost panels at €0.16/Wp. Probably at some point shipping will get back to normal and prices will go even lower than that.
This project (CO2 to CH4) would benefit from maximum raw production per panel, if you can ramp the plants up and down, so aim them south. I've been deploying, both for my solar and for some other residential projects I'm helping with, east-west facing panels, to get production up as early in the morning as possible and run it late. You get less kWh per panel than south facing, but you get a system that, on a good day, is producing from sunup to sundown, even when those set far north of east/west. Out here, peak days are almost 45 degrees north of E/W for sunrise/sunset.
Iron Ridge XR1000 and some locally welded frames work pretty darn well for this sort of thing, if you have the ground area for it.
And the article seems to miss that wind is still beating solar from the LCOE charts I've seen. They keep making the towers taller and taller for better economies of scale.
plentiful wattage would be an interesting DIY project.
In the US, land is widely available at around $1000/acre. The current cost to cover that with PV is around $100,000/acre (depending on the fill factor).
So, land costs are not a substantial obstacle to reduction in the cost of PV energy.
If hypothetically ~10% of costs are fixed the maximum theoretical cost reduction is 90%. Which the quoted 10% annual cost reductions in solar hit in 22 years. But more realistically the closer you approach theoretical maximum the more difficult it is to improve at the existing rate.
If you look in Zillow you'll see that's very wrong.
While it's true that land costs aren't dropping, rural land is still very cheap and due to the nature of solar power it could be almost free.
For example, here in Chile most solar plants are in the middle of the desert. Even if that land had to be paid for, my guess is it's VERY cheap.
The great thing about solar is that you can put a lot of it directly on rooftops in most places. Obviously not on top of skyscrapers in NYC, but there are plenty of homes and businesses with ample room for panels.
I’m vaguely attached to a utility scale deal trying to happen. The land owners are interested, the utility is interested, and there isn’t much around the site. Still the details might kill the deal- they can’t agree where the HV lines will run, the utility wants a bit more land than the owners want to lease, access details and liability concerns are coming up, etc…
Utility scale solar is the future but rooftop solar gets installed NOW because each deal is simpler.
Now why my utility isn’t building out solar fields in the massive amounts of land they own around their coal and oil fired plants…
Land in a desert can cost as little as a few hundred dollars per acre, so it's far from being a dominant factor. And in other places solar is often a secondary use of the land.
Mores law also failed several times. More revised his initial 1965 estimate for a doubling every year in 1975. He predicted various doubling rates with the weakest form being transistors on a single chip every 2 years starting in 1980.
So, it’s current form isn’t an exponential increase in density but in terms of transistors on a single chip. If density actually doubled every 2 years then starting from 1971 an Intel 4004 @ 188 t/mm then we should have hit 6 million t/mm in 2001 and 197 t/mm in 2011. Except chips only broke 6 million in 2012 (11 years late) and are nowhere near 197 million t/mm in 2022.
Arguing that Manhattan is expensive therefore PV doesn't work is like arguing Manhattan is expensive therefore agriculture doesn't work.
Empty land is not necessarily a requirement.
Parking lot per-row shade structures that integrate PV panels on top are also a thing now, and there are sure a shitload of parking lots in NJ and out on long island.
Either more efficient panels, cheaper panels, or simply a greater manufacturing capacity are all fine for securing the energy needs of the planet.
And we won’t have to worry about running out anytime in the next billion years or so.
