Tag: solar power

Powerless

Posted on

A surprise, yet scheduled, power cut today. For infrastructure maintenance, we’re told. That’s good. Some places don’t get their electricity infrastructure maintained. Like the rest of South Africa, for example.
Ostensibly, we’re off for a whole 14 hours. Without warning, nogal.
Well, apparently, there was a warning, but we weren’t told about it. And that’s one of the fundamental things about warnings. If you don’t get them, then you are very much unwarned.
And so we are quite literally without electricity, without warning.

It’s like getting loadshedding back, which might be good training for next week when everyone thinks we’ll be getting loadshedding back…

An aside for foreign readers: next week is election week here, and it’s widely believed that loadshedding has been done away with for the last 7 weeks in the hope that the voting public will conveniently forget that the current (no pun intended) ruling party can’t even supply the most basic of services. Quite whether this is true or not is up for debate, but it’s an entirely reasonable suggestion. Quite how the electricity grid is being propped up is also a bit of a mystery, but it seems like it’s billions of Rands worth of diesel, some sticky tape, and prayers to several (or more) deities. It’s also completely unsustainable. And furthermore, it’s pointless after the polling stations close on Wednesday evening. Hence the widespread belief that we’ll be back to Stage n very shortly.
But I digress. Often.

The council have also chosen the darkest, most miserable day to do the work. Thick black clouds, a cold Westerly breeze, drizzle. If this was Sheffield, I’d look at those clouds and fully expect snow. That’s unlikely to happen though. Still, not only will this inclement weather slow the workers down, it’s also preventing our little home solar setup from helping out with the power situation. We’re only a month away from the winter solstice, and so even if we could see the sun – which is some 151½ million kilometers away anyway – it would only be up for 10 hours and would only drag itself to 35o above the horizon.
I’m not an expert on solar power, but we need is closer, higher sun, for longer.

If we’d had some warning (which we didn’t – see above), then I could have pumped up the batteries and lived a near normal life. Instead, we’ve been in deficit since we woke up, and despite my best power-saving efforts, I’m helplessly watching what’s left slowly, inexorably slip away.

I might be tempted to rig up some sort of system so that as the batteries give up completely, they give a comedic beep…beep…beeeeeeeeeeep noise like one might hear in rather less comedic circumstances in a hospital ICU.
But then again, I suppose that that would only use more power. Which we don’t have. Because of the power cut.

On the plus side, there has been a delicious lack of angle-grinding and jack-hammery from the nearby building site. This is not going to assist with my waning electricity issues, but it has made it a whole lot quieter while the power runs out.

And it’s clearly the little wins that I’m going to have to focus on today.

I’m powerless to do anything else.

Do Solar Panels work in hot weather?

Posted on

It pains me to have to post stuff like this.
It’s just simple common sense. Of course they do.

And yet…

This is quite clearly BS, and if you need to be told that it’s BS, you probably also need to seek professional help.

Yes, the UK switched on a coal-fired power station a few weeks ago.
No, it wasn’t because solar panels stopped working.

…liberal-minded news outlets like The Guardian blamed maintenance at nuclear plants in Scotland and inter-tie maintenance on an undersea cable from Norway.

And much as I’m no fan of the Guardian, oddly on this occasion, it turns out that they were far more likely to be correct than those making the assertion that it got too warm for PV panels to work properly.

They’re built to function from -40C to +85C. Performance does fall when temperatures go above 25C, but only by 0.34 per cent for every additional degree. That’s pretty marginal stuff, according to Solar Energy UK. Even at close to boiling point, power output would only be around 20 per cent lower it says, other factors being equal.

“It’s not actually a big deal. High temperatures only marginally affect the overall output of solar power – it’s a secondary effect” says the UK’s leading technical expert on the technology, Alastair Buckley, Professor of Organic Electronics at the University of Sheffield.

Yet another example of someone who read something on Facebook believing that they now hold the same expertise as someone who has been studying the subject for their whole academic career.

It got up to a whole 30C, which is hot for the UK in June, but isn’t really hot when you compare it to the rest of the world. If this temperature had really wiped out the UK’s solar energy production, then basically, no country within a band 50 degrees north to 50 degrees south would be able to utilise solar panels.

Add in the countries north and south of there that can’t use solar because there isn’t enough sun (a genuine concern in placed like Svalbard) and suddenly that’s basically the whole world.

So why would any columnist try to paint this clearly incorrect picture, seemingly in a bid to discredit renewable energy?

Well, I guess it depends on the columnist:

Shaun Polczer is the Business Reporter for the Western Standard, based in Calgary. Formerly, a business reporter for the Calgary Herald, he has also held senior positions at the Daily Oil Bulletin, and the London Petroleum Economist.

Oh.

Sadly, the comments beneath his piece (I’m not giving him any extra traffic by linking to it), tend to suggest that the ability to think rationally and critically might also have been knocked out by the heatwave.

Next week: Why do ice skates not work in the cold?

Seeing the light

Posted on

We’ve been waiting for this day for a long while. And now it’s come very suddenly. At 2pm today, I got a call telling me that the solar installers are coming around tomorrow.

And they’re going to install some solar.

As regular readers of this blog will know, loadshedding is arguably the most dominant force in South Africa right now. It affects everything, and while we have no control over the things outside our home, we can at least do something about what’s going on in our house.

Not that we should have to. We already pay the government money to supply us with electricity. But then we also pay them for stuff like security and healthcare, and we still have to privately top those up to get any decent, viable service.

This system won’t take us completely off the grid. That would be desirable, but also outlandishly expensive (not that this is in any way cheap). But it will cut our bill by at least 80%. And it will mean that we’re able to live our lives with some degree of normality, and a bit more on our terms. Work will be easier. Food won’t spoil as quickly. No more last minute dashes for the kettle or the microwave. Expensive devices won’t break due to constant power cuts and surges. There will be sport on the big screen. The beagle will have a nightlight.

We’re still very lucky to be able to do this. And it’s weird that access to such a basic human right is a luxury.

I’m not going to be a solar wanker, claiming that my altruism is lessening the load on the rest of the country, nor am I ever, ever going to utter the phrase:

Yeah, we don’t even know when loadshedding is happening anymore.

But I am looking forward to our first session of loadshedding once our batteries are charged up, and there simply being… life as normal.

Whatever that means.

No solar

Posted on

Much hilarity around the internet this morning as self-appointed God and champignon of free speech (except when it offends him) Stephen Fry shared this little gem about a North Carolina town rejecting solar power after Ms Mann, a retired science teacher nogal, told a public meeting that:

plants near solar farms do not thrive because there wasn’t enough sunshine left over for them to photosynthesise.

Worst Mannsplaining ever.
Her husband (qualifications unknown) added:

solar panels suck up all the energy from the sun.

And, in all honesty, you’d actually be hard pressed to disagree with that.

But these aren’t good reasons to reject solar power. No. Good reasons to reject solar power are its massive inefficiency, the fact that it only works during the day and actually takes power from the grid the rest of the time (many learned folks refer to this as “night”), and its “hidden” environmental costs: the land use and habitat loss on their installation, and the massive water use and the nasty chemicals that go into making the photovoltaic cells.

When Ms Mann also questioned the high number of cancer deaths in the area, saying “no one could tell her that solar panels didn’t cause cancer”, she was only half wrong. Chemicals like arsenic, cadmium telluride, hexafluoroethane, lead, and polyvinyl fluoride aren’t exactly the healthiest things to be using in any manufacturing process. Of course, the half wrong bit is that the solar panels don’t cause cancer where they are installed – that’s all left over in the third world country that’s producing them.

So that’s alright then, isn’t it?

Next week – the conveniently overlooked problems of wind power, including the killing of bats and birds, the 40-storey eyesores being erected all over our beautiful countryside and the fact that it is destroying the local yachting industry by using up all the breeze.

QsOTD

Posted on

Quotes Of The Day – yes – plural. Like London buses, these things.

First off, some succinctly put insight into the world of the fad diet and the public reaction to it:

Nutrition is a complex minefield of information with plenty of vested interests playing their part. There is also a lot of legacy popular thinking around (read: stuff people just accept without any critical thinking).

That’s Joe Botha, speaking sense at Memeburn. Sadly, immediately thereafter, he does rather ruin it all by detailing his “lose weight quick” plan based on the enforced dietary timetable of our distant ancestors. (Save your time and bandwidth.) But, in typical Tim style, I’m going to take those lines (and only those lines) that suit my agenda and quote them here.

And then this from Australia’s Galileo Movement on Stellenbosch University’s latest breakthrough in renewable energy:

The industrialisation of our landscape for inefficient power production.

And yes, this is exactly the issue with solar and wind power right now. I know we need to make the switch away from fossil fuels, I completely accept that. But right now, there are simply no viable renewable alternatives out there:

The issue is the inefficiency of these technologies. And exactly how much space and how much of our environment do we really want to give up to this “inefficient power production”? Yes, SA has a lot of spare space, but that’s a good thing. It doesn’t mean that we need to fill it with solar panels and wind turbines.

aeg-power-solutions

And we’d need to, if we were to come anywhere close to solving our well-documented long term power shortages. That Stellenbosch project needs a mirror surface area of 220m² (never mind the space in between and around them, nor the same for the tower in the middle) to provide electricity for “about” 30 houses. But not at night, obviously.

Simply not good enough.

I’m not blaming the science or the scientists here. They’re doing their best. They’re progressing, developing, and they’ll get there. But renewable energy remains expensive:

The researchers have calculated Germany’s rapid switch to renewable energy sources like wind and solar is adding another €28 billion a year to the electricity bills of consumers and businesses.

And inefficient:

What happens at night?
As there is no light at night, no energy will be produced. The PV plant will import electricity from the utility to keep operations on site going.

Ooops. The simple fact is that we’re just not there yet.
And that’s why we can’t (and shouldn’t) be making the switch right now.

If only there were some clean, efficient, proven method of producing electricity that we could use.