The Death Of Fossil Fuels

[lpm]

It's not a free market. It's monopoly with the government faking a cargo-cult market.

So all this theorising is pointless.

[bjn]

Interesting article on the electrification of heating.

https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-t ... n-of-heat/

[bjn]

Solar roll outs continue to accelerate. In the first four months of this year China rolled out over 48GWp of solar, YoY that’s 37% more than last year’s installation. China alone is now installing 3GWp per week, globally it is now meant to be close to 1GWp installed per day.

https://taiyangnews.info/markets/china- ... ippets-12/

[jimbob]

Solar roll outs continue to accelerate. In the first four months of this year China rolled out over 48GWp of solar, YoY that’s 37% more than last year’s installation. China alone is now installing 3GWp per week, globally it is now meant to be close to 1GWp installed per day.

https://taiyangnews.info/markets/china- ... ippets-12/

That's about the peak demand for the UK every two months.
According to Google

[IvanV]

Solar roll outs continue to accelerate. In the first four months of this year China rolled out over 48GWp of solar, YoY that’s 37% more than last year’s installation. China alone is now installing 3GWp per week, globally it is now meant to be close to 1GWp installed per day.

https://taiyangnews.info/markets/china- ... ippets-12/

That's about the peak demand for the UK every two months.
According to Google

GWp is the peak output of the solar cells, when they are perfectly illuminated, which almost never happens. It's the name-plate capacity on the physical equipment, but doesn't tell you how much electricity they are likely to produce in a given location.

So you get some very impressive looking numbers for the nameplate capacity of intermittent generators, but the actual electricity they can produce on average is a lot less.

55 GW is about the hourly peak electricity demand in the UK, consistent with your 2 months. But 55GWp of solar cells in the UK would average about 6GW output over the year. In China, being at a lower latitude, and probably rather less cloudy on average than the UK, I would imagine it might be about double that, but would depend upon precisely where they were located. I don't know to what extent aircon has become sufficiently common in China that they might have peak electricity demand on hot sunny days, like in parts of the US.

[bjn]

Capacity factors vary by climate and geography, I believe the UK has and average capacity factor for solar of around 11%, but that’s from the Shetland all the way to the Scillies. In the South it is something closer to 20%.

A capacity factor is the proportion of electricity you actually generate vs running it at its theoretical peak for 24 hours a day, 364 days a year. On dim days and in the morning solar is going to be generating less than at noon in mid summer, but it is still generating. If the cost of your intermittent generation is sufficiently cheap, overbuilding it so that you get more on the dim days is a strategy. This does mean you over generate on the sunny days, which you can just curtail or dump into some form of storage. That’s all predicated on being cheap enough.

Talking of which. Looks like perovskite solar cells are going to be a thing soon. The first gen will by hybrid cells, layers on silicon cells, the numbers I’ve seen show them generating about a third more than standard silicon alone. The extra cost is meant to be marginal.

[bjn]

Linky for perovskites...

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/05/22/ne ... -solar-go/

and

https://www.q-cells.eu/about-q-cells/pr ... 30517.html