I don't mind things like huge cooling towers or massive dams. They're majestic in the same way ancient pyramids are majestic. On top of being useful infrastructure and not just oversized landscaping pieces.

I don't mind nuclear. Good for base load.

Let's also not forget about the haze of photochemical smog everywhere there are combustion vehicles.

Today I walked by someone dropping off people from his diesel VW Passat B6. You could smell that thing from afar and it bothers me that it's still considered roadworthy.

What if we designed nuclear cooling towers to be more aesthetic? Maybe it would become desirable to see.

What’s wrong with a nuke cooling tower?

Do you see any of those things now?

I’m not aware of any sizable cities with coal smoke stacks, nuke towers, or visible large dams.

Are you?

I personally don't know but I feel like, we also need to think of the environmental changes of something like solar batteries if we store the energy

There was a michael moore's documentary regarding climate change and I personally think that the best solution climate-wise speaking is probably nuclear but the whole world's sentiment is so regulated by lobby-ists which is why the cost of production of them and regulations shot up to an unreasonable amounts but the world was already transitioning to nuclear energies.

There are some new modular approaches to it which aren't as efficient but feel safer to the general public but nuclear is one of the most safest and compact sources of massive amounts of energy generation compared to solar and wind.

Nuclear Energy is cool.

Now am I right/wrong in saying this, let me know, I think I am right but I maybe wrong too, but its just that every expert I have seen on this topic really prefer's nuclear and my own "research" on this topic makes me feel the same really.

Somebody should write more clearly as to why nuclear is superior to solar and the others as a comment as I feel like I have written similar things atleast once more and maybe if there could be a nice website like why.nuclear or why-nuclear.net etc. which could give points of why nuclear is a superior form, it could be really great and I would love to hear more arguments both good and bad comparison with nuclear (primarily) and maybe comparing it with solar if somebody's an expert on this topic as I would love to hear an expert about it as well.

> No matter what, the canopy solar system will be more expensive than ground mounting.

> Better to replace some farmland

South Korea is very hilly, farmland is too precious to replace with PV and I don't think they have been growing biofuel crops there.

>Better to replace some farmland, which you can make a strong argument for if you're growing crops for biodiesel or fuel-ethanol were the sun-to-wheel efficiency is terrible.

Yeah, who needs to eat anyway? Lol it is perfectly fine to put this shit in parking lots. In hot climates, it's a benefit to customers to have covered parking. The wiring should be no more fragile than, say, power lines or lighting fixtures in the area. Parking lots are also better because it doesn't matter as much if water leaks between or around the solar panels. Putting them on rooftops tends to cause roof leaks and it presents problems for roof repairs.

>I've got bad news about nearly black PV panels... it might be cooler under them, but around them is a different story.

Higher temps around black PVs should be similar to black asphalt. Also, the thermal mass of the PVs is lower, so they will not stay as hot in the evening.

There are probably issues with PVs related to ice buildup and hail. They probably don't make sense in places with those issues.

Depends on the season!

In winter I'd park my car at a train station and be sure to have the windshield pointed west so the car would be a bit toasty when I got in.

I love the idea but execution will determine if this is better for pedestrians. Poorly executed parking solar could reduce sightlines and escape routes by crowding ground level.

Hopefully this will be the sort of thing where we try different strategies quickly and pick winners and losers.

India has done a lot of work with covering irrigation canals with solar, and in some ways that’s a simpler problem so it makes sense that this is happening now instead of earlier. Big successful systems start as small successful ones. Maybe there is some substantial knowledge transfer that can occur there.

Solar operators aren’t cranking the bass so high that the windmills are leaving rust shadows on the road at stop lights.

Well, at least not so far.

I think maybe it was supposed to say “no more”

Solar already has economies of scale. There are three types of projects called out in How Big Projects Get Done and what they all have in common is that what you do on day 25 is mostly refinement of what you were doing on day four. Those are roads, solar, and wind projects. The self similarity means you are more likely to hit your targets. Because you just go faster and faster as you figure out the choreography. And the known unknowns.

Subways and buses are vastly more efficient, both in terms of energy cost and rider throughput.

Here's a recent article on the sub-industries that insure PV against hail, and predict and protect from hail:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/as-giant-hailstones-hit-the-suns...

Apparently in Australia climate change is making the hail bigger and more frequent.

You can't move the car protecting ones generally so it just comes down to making them tough and knowing your local weather, plus insurance.

Maybe the car insurance companies will cut you a check if you take the hit for them?

Was wondering about it too but seems like it’s either not an issue or they’re using panels resistant to it.

I have noticed though that they never seem to put them in flat. Always in quite an angle that doesn’t seem sun direction motivated. Usually v shape with car under each side of the v. Maybe thats for hail or possible to help rain clean it.

> That means LiPo.

IIRC the most popular EV battery technology today is LFP.

Extra "wasted" capacity has many benefits for EV battery packs.

It allows distributing load across more cells. It allows using cells with a lower C-rating, which typically have better energy density, and longer lifespan.

Distributing load reduces energy loss during charging, makes cooling less demanding, while allowing higher total charging power, which means adding more range per minute.

The excess capacity makes it easier to avoid fully changing and discharging cells. This prolongs life of NMC cells.

(but I agree that cars are an inefficient mode of transport in general)

Yeah, most commutes are less than 100 km but would you buy a car with 100-200km range? How's your range anxiety?

I'm not so sure about less resources as the majority of the car is still required only smaller battery.

> V2G is a pipe dream.

Seems a bit early to come to this conclusion, but I would also suspect, that the value of a parking garage full of EVs is not in providing energy to the grid but as a large scale consumer for load shaping.

Seems like an easy solution would be for the car to provide energy for the house, rather than the entire grid, and reduce overall load.

Oh yes, the return on investment is very convincing for most of the big companies! Like Uber: https://uberlosses.com/

The utility. The utility operates a 24/7 electricity marketplace that perfectly matches supply and demand. Supply must follow demand. If demand decreases, pricing becomes negative until supply decreases. This is problematic because we aren't utilizing all the excess energy generated by solar and wind. Which is all free.

Wholesale prices went negative about 200 million times: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-30/trapped-r... (https://archive.is/nFsOk)

Regional clusters emerged, for example, in the Permian Basin in western Texas, and in Kansas and western Oklahoma in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), negative prices accounted for more than 25% of all hours. Negative electricity prices result either from local congestion of the transmission system leading supply to exceed demand locally or due to system-wide oversupply. :https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/plentiful-electricity-turns...

Edit: This is called curtailment. It is now ~20% and increasing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtailment_(electricity)

If you set the app to allow it to be drained overnight, then it may be drained overnight. Similar to forgetting to pump gas into the tank and getting stranded in the middle of nowhere. Most people are a bit smarter than that.

What about the top 10% or 20%? It would be just like using “reserve mode” but you’d get paid for it. And have the option to turn it off before a road trip.

I think it's perfectly sensible to charge it at work to full, then partially discharge in the evening after coming back home. Especially since that energy could mostly power your own home. If you have enough left in the morning to drive back to work it would be fine.

Basically you would haul (hopefully cheap) electricity form your work, to your home to use it in the evening.

Spot pricing in energy markets goes negative when there is too much energy in the grid. Someone gets paid to take it out.

The average emissions for a car is 4.6 tons of co2. The average carbon intensity of U.S. electricity generation is around 384 grams of co2 per kWh. 1230000 * 0.384 / 1000 = 472 tons. But 185000 cars emit 851000 tons so 500 tons is like a rounding error, unless I am mistaken.

Some of us wouldn’t minds so much. That puts a cap on how car focused commercial real estate can be.

Depends on country, some have fixed ratios based on occupancy or square footage of shopping area. Which they could shrink, but it would raise the final price per square foot (land price stays the same and most construction costs don’t get that much smaller if you shave off a few hundred sqft).

Why aren't new developments including rooftop solar as a standard selling feature? If it makes sense it should be a no brainer right? Your new $800,000 home comes with a solar installation so you never pay for heating, cooling, power supply.

You have a big peek in early summer/late spring and a nosedive during winter. Still need generation capacity for winter.

I will never stop to amaze me how far to the south the USA is compared to Europe on average. I live near Berlin and even most Canadians live further to the south than me.

Being further north does have some advantages. If the panels are angled more to get a better view of the sun they will also be better at shedding snow loads.

If you look at it as a way of disincentivizing wasting land on parking lots, it makes a lot of sense

Sometimes we do things that the market has failed to price properly because there is still value not captured in the economics. That is not performance, that is internalizing unpriced externalities. The free market, perfect information, and perfect prices do not exist.

France has similar legislation.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/11/18/france-publishes-new-...

Yes, because the fossil fuel and energy markets are famously free of political/economic manipulation, and military and ideological intervention .. by both state and private actors.

Urban planning, too.

The astonishing thing to me is that the production of solar panels is a huge source of mining and manufacturing jobs. Just like heat pumps. If we were serious about the objectives stated by the conservatives, Canada could easily be a world leader with Alberta and Saskatchewan profiting handsomely.

As an American, we deserve the derision. Please, continue shaming us, maybe some day people will get sick enough of it to try to prove them wrong.

That's probably asking too much, though.

> "Europoors"

A term I don't think I've ever heard. Insulting America, on the other hand, is by orders of magnitude the favorite sport of the Internet.

OP here. I am American. We are the Uneducated fucking States.