This strikes me as being not very democratic innit.
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Miscellaneous News
- Thread starter bd popeye
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Imagine you're not the US, and the US is coming up to you, pointing at this UN report and saying and saying "you should stop trading in anything to do with Xinjiang because muh crime against humanity"
And just as you are pondering upon the suggestion, you also see this news:
How would you feel?
Meanwhile Xinjiang exports to the US hit a two year high.
So the Americans are the culprit for the forced labor being enforce on the Uygur...lol11 hours ago — Xinjiang's top individual export to the US in July was Christmas decorations, according to the Chinese customs data, worth more than US$1.5 ...
The west is so incompetent, my "haha" emoji reaction is getting overused in this thread...Meanwhile Xinjiang exports to the US hit a two year high.
11 hours ago — Xinjiang's top individual export to the US in July was Christmas decorations, according to the Chinese customs data, worth more than US$1.5 ...
I'm sorry there's no way nuclear and hydro has a 3 month payback. With nukes you'd be lucky if you get the money back before the plant retires. It costs like £/$10-20 billion to build one, how the hell does it make £/$10 billion worth of electricity in 3 months?
its EROEI payback, not total cost payback. See source.
See table 1 for the energy accounting.
In relation to total cost, much of the cost of a nuclear/hydro plant is not in the energy input but in things like land acquisition, regulatory compliance, environmental testing, etc.
You're not answering the question. Since you accept that there has been large improvements in cost and solar panel efficiency, what do you think the real EROEI is now? It obviously isn't the old 7-10 figure from 2014.
What you're talking about is irrelevant to the original point I'm making, which is that Solar can provide enough energy to displace an increasingly scarce hydrocarbon like oil.
1. You're also mixing up financial payback versus the energy payback
2. You're using links and references which are irrelevant.
You referenced residential solar payback calculators designed for residential use electricity profiles. But it's clear from Lazard/Bloomberg that residential solar is far more expensive than commercial or utility scale solar. In addition, the US levies a high import duty and tariffs on Chinese solar imports, but the rest of the world doesn't. The US is not representative of the global solar industry.
2. I was very specific that the combination of [solar + electric vehicle] is far superior to [oil + petrol engine car]. That is both from a cost and aggregate energy efficiency perspective.
Solar generates very low-cost electricity during a short period during the middle of the day. In the current electricity grid structure, this results in "excess" electricity.
But when you have electric cars with batteries that need to be charged anyway, the electricity use profile changes dramatically. Solar electricity generated during the day can be productively sent to electric car batteries.
The fact remains that utility-scale solar electricity bids are down to 1-3cents per KWh in places like Saudi Arabia, Portugal, Nevada and Arizona. And that the motors in electric cars are over 80% efficient in converting electricity into movement.
And looking to the future, we can expect to see significant improvements to solar and electric vehicles.
But that's like saying apart from the upfront cost, maintenance cost, and fuel cost a Ferrari F430 is a better than a Wuling Hongguan van.
The problem with nuclear is it's too expensive, and ROI is too long. That's why all the nuke companies are bankrupt and only china can build new ones.
The world-nuclear analysis does list a 3 month energy payback which you've quoted.
But given that a modern nuclear plant has a minimum lifespan of 40 years, that is an EROEI of 120, which sounds absurdly high.
In comparison, the 2014 Sciencedirect paper which you previously referenced has an nuclear EROEI of 14.
As I've said before, you need good data to work with.
no, that is not it. you have it completely wrong.
I don't know for certain what the actual EROEI is on solar right now. But we can think about the fundamentals. The determinants of EROEI for photovoltaics is the efficiency of the panel, the panel lifetime, the derating curve over the lifetime and energy inputs.
The NREL breakdown shows wafer processing costs and raw silicon costs are flat even in the best case scenario of scaleup. So the energy input from the silicon is not changing much. It does show a decline in cost of non-silicon components from scaleup. That would be things like glass encapsulation and metal interconnects.
From a and source, the lifetime per panel is still 25-30 years without change
From sources previously referenced, the average efficiency today is 17-19%, the same as NREL 2019 efficiency of 19%. So there is no improvement in efficiency.
The question then is that of the derating curve - does the decline over lifetime happen the same way? This requires experimental data.
Thus the conclusion is, based on known factors, the EROEI has not changed much from 7-10.