> (garbage ideas, some posted recently about UK subsidizing biomass, which ships wood from Canada)

This is the greenwashing of the UK's largest thermal power station, Drax, which was built for coal.

> colonial wealth, from Roman Empire

I think one or two things may have happened to the distribution of wealth since this event.

The solar deployment is happening, but slowly. I got my panels a decade ago when the subsidy regime in the UK was better. Seasonality is an issue, I would never attempt to go off-grid, but I don't need to.

One of the traditional holdups is very European: the need for permitting, whether that's for the install itself or the grid connection. People still get funny around the appearance of panels. The NIMBY tendency to demand that the entire world looks like a particular bucolic vision of the countryside is really bad.

There was a proposed project to build a massive solar wind and battery installation in Morocco, and link it to the UK via undersea cable. I believe it collapsed due to the lack of companies able to supply that much cable and the current government also didn’t support it. Also geopolitics still matters, any government is going to be very wary about getting a significant portion of electricity from a region that might become hostile in the future. Your comment ignores that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...

>> Europe is the only place which shows a little less potential. They can build solar farms in Spain, Turkey, North Africa and add transmission lines.

Traveled a lot in Europe earlier this year (by rail). Saw quite a lot of solar installed, both on buildings and in open land.

Saw even more wind turbines. Europe may have less solar potential, but clearly they still have enough sun to make solar economically viable. And the addition of wind turbines makes sense; that co-exists very well with farm land, and nicely balances solar production.

> Transmission network is not needed (or doesn't need to grow) we produce energy where we consume, in every city

How do you figure that? That may be viable in 50 years when most buildings are insulated well enough to cover their own energy usage in the depths of winter with rooftop solar and the winters get milder due to climate change. But I don't see how this could work out in the near future.

> English Empire

You mean British Empire.

The Act of Union had at least two willing parties.

>>US and Russia. The two great superpowers. If you count by how many nuclear bombs they have and the unpredictability of their governments, then sure they are.

> Solar panels are dirt cheap

As long as we have china shitting them out and fossil allowing them to shit them out this cheap *

> Even if a location doesn't show high potential, it shouldn't matter.

It all depends. In some places where install costs are high and you can get good deals on TOU (i.e. free power hours) - batteries are vastly better deal.

I put 7.2kw on my roof in Canada. Tight valley, tons of snow.

You know what I learned about all the projections and estimates?

It’s a complete waste of time . Panels are so cheap now just slap up as many as will physically fit and get on with it. Everything else is a waste of time.

Over their 25+ year lifespan I’ll profit $25k-$30k.

It’s the no brainer of all time.

As soon as my garage build is done I’ll cover that roof in another 8kw of panels too.

Canada compared to Mongolia of similar latitude, has lower potential though. Apparently that is because Mongolia is a desert and has no forests, very dry and high in elevation. The cold is no issue. The panels there produce 1.8 times more. The reason that Northern Europe is worse than Canada of the same latitude is apparently because of maritime proximity that increases humidity that diffuses light. Australia doesn't have maritime climate.

Europe has one of highest wind energy potentials instead. They can harvest wind energy in the winter when they need it most.

€561 million is been loaned to build the EU's largest solar park, Dama Solar, Romania.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/energy-developer-rez...

Of course, banks are not risking, that the future electricity price will be low during peak solar production and they don't get their money back:

"Dama Solar was also awarded two Contracts for Difference (CfDs) by the Romanian government last year. The grants are part of a low-carbon energy-support scheme paid for with EU funds, based on CfD, which set the power price at an agreed level for 15 years."

For solar, seasonality would be best addressed by thermal storage, which I mention here frequently.

This is being pursued most interestingly by Standard Thermal's "hot dirt" approach. They've updated their web page to include a few more technical details, which look to make sense economically (for example, they're putting the resistive heater(s) outside the dirt piles where it/they can be easily maintained).

The round trip efficiency (RTE) might be 40%, which is actually not bad since the input power (crude DC direct from solar modules) is quite cheap, not needing inverters or a grid connection sized to that DC power. Thermal losses are < 1%/month.

The technology would work down to a scale of about 100 kW average power, which is quite small all considered. Good for village-scale microgrids or individual small industrial enterprises. Scaling up, the average power would be similar to that of a large earthen dam of the same size, only the dirt would be used for to hold heat, not hold back water in a river, and could be sited almost anywhere. Heat retention improves as the size scales up; a dirt pile of the size of the largest dams, if it had been built and heated in the Bronze Age, would still be hot inside.

No, that's the Sichuan Basin. The climate is subtropical with monsoonal rain all summer and dry and cloudy winters. It basically has persistent cloud cover all year and heavy fog. Less than 30 days of sun per year.

Many people in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, etc. And even some further north have done the math and it comes up positive.

You have to be realistic of course. There are a few months in the winter where they don't perform well and returns drop well below a single kwh of power. But then you might start getting some bright winter or early spring days and you go back to getting many kwh per day worth of free power as early as February or March.

It's better if you have a battery and if your local energy supplier has favorable contracts.

Long term storage seems to be a be a hobby horse that comes up in a lot of theads like this. The reality with batteries is that the overwhelmingly vast majority is for dealing with short term supply/demand fluctuation. The supply spikes are as important as the demand spikes here. Empty batteries can absorb those.

Anything beyond four hours drops off rapidly in terms of economics. And a few hours is all most energy companies need for planning to spin up or down gas (or coal in some cases) plants or decide to import/export power via cables.

As for nuclear, it's is a lot less flexible and very expensive. And in any case very little of it is coming online for the foreseeable future (next 1-2 decades). We'll get probably quite a few TW of battery, solar, and wind deployed over that time. Nuclear is going to be a rounding error on that even in the best case.

Nah, just overprovision like crazy and store what you can.

Germany has currently around 1.5kW of solar installed per person - even in October this yields double-digit GWs at 9am. They can't put all that power to use in summer, but it sure puts a damper on prices off season.

Sure, storage is still being built as there's a market for it, but for now it's still cheaper to just build more solar capacity.

My 3 month old system is running about 20% above their numbers, not clear on where the difference is. From some other modeling using pvlib, I suspect that the panels are over producing, as that’s the easiest way to make the numbers work. It’s also possible that the measurements are miscalibrated, or we’ve just had weather that’s not in line with historical averages.