That’s a pretty big gap to cover with spamming more panels. I would venture to guess: this approach would work up to latitude 45 or so.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/surface-solar-radiation-d_1213.html
Where I live, in midwinter, the day is 6 hours long. Over here, wind turns more heads than solar. But yes, solar is riduculously quick to install.
Since 2021, nearly 4 full years, the world has closed less than 1% of active coal power plants.
Closing will come later, when alternatives are widely available. What renewable energy does currently - at least here - is forcing those plants temporarily out of the market, especially during summer months and windy weather. The plants will exist and stay ready in case of need for well over a decade, maybe even two - but they will start up ever more rarely.
Technically, the deal is: we don’t have seasonal energy storage. Short term storage is being built - enough to stabilize the grid for a cold windless hour, then a day, then a week… that’s about as far as one can go with batteries and pumped hydro.
To really get the goods one has to add seasonal storage or on-demand nuclear generation. The bad news is that technologies for seasonal storage aren’t fully mature yet, while nuclear is expensive and slow to build. There’s electrolysis and methanation, there’s iron reduction, there are flow batteries of various sorts, there’s seasonal thermal storage already (a quarter step in the right direction)…
…but getting the mixture right takes time. Instead of looking at the number of closed plants, one should look at the sum of emissions. To remain hopeful, the sum should stop growing very soon.
I would add:
Thanks, that looks like something I might have to try. :) Myself, over the network, I still don’t do filesystem level incremental backups, sticking to either directories or virtual machine snapshots (both of which have their shortcomings).
I’ve been hearing about ZFS and its beneficial features for years now, but mainstream Linux installers don’t seem to support it, and I can’t be bothered to switch filesystems after installing.
Out of curiosity - can anyone tell, what might be blocking them?
Edit: answering my own question: legal issues. Licenses “potentially aren’t compatible”.
Due to potential legal incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL, despite both being OSI-approved free software licenses which comply with DFSG, ZFS development is not supported by the Linux kernel. ZoL is a project funded by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop a native Linux kernel module for its massive storage requirements and super computers.
Source: https://wiki.debian.org/ZFS
From a person who builds robots, three notes:
Raspberry Pi has two CSI (camera serial interface) connectors on board, which is a considerable advantage over having to deal with USB webcams. This matters if your industrial robot must see the work area faster, your competition robot must run circles around opposing robots, or more sadly - if your drone must fly to war. :( On Raspberry Pi, in laboratory conditions (extreme lighting intensity), you can use the camera (with big ifs and buts) at 500+ frames per second, not fast enough to photograph a bullet, but fast enough to see a mouse trap gradually closing. That’s impossible over USB and unheard of to most USB camera makers.
I know that Raspberry Pi has “WiringPi” (a fast C library for low level comms, helping abstract away difficult problems like hardware timing, DMA and interrupts) and Orange Pi recently got “WiringOP” (I haven’t tried it, don’t know if it works well). I don’t know of anything similar on a PC platform, so I believe that on NUC, you’d have to roll your own (a massive pain) or be limited to kilohertz GPIO frequencies instead of megahertz (because you’d be wading through some fairly deep Linux API calls).
Sadly, neither of them has a WiFi antenna socket. But the built-in WiFi cards are generally crappy too, so if you needed a considerable working area, you’d connect an external card with an external antenna anyway. Notably, some models of Orange Pi have an external antenna, and the Raspberry Pi Compute Module has one too.
Snow can definitely be useful in summer - but I would store it differently. I have observed that the local airport simply piles its snow up into a massive heap. This heap sometimes lasts until early June.
If I would need to store snow, I would likewise pile it, but would use two tricks: the ground under the heap would be thermally insulated, and once weather turns warm, the heap would be covered with a blanket of some kind. A hatch is just as good as a blanket, of course, but uses more material.
Actually, since storms have a tendency to blow away blankets, a depression / pond where to deposit the snow would probably be handy. Nothing too well engineered - just an insulated bottom and a location that keeps ground water elsewhere.
The wood-powered car is a nice idea.
As for whether electric cars need fancy electronics - that is a debatable topic. :) A brushed DC motor wears out fast, but definitely doesn’t need fancy stuff. An inverter to produce 3-phase alternating current for a brushless motor can be rigged up with relays and reed switches, but those have a shorter lifetime than power transistors. A fixed-speed motor controller can likely be radically simpler than a variable speed controller. As for how simple a transistor-based motor controller can get… well, at least one microchip is advisable. But it doesn’t do much - the calculation it performs is simple. I think that in a solarpunk society, someone would manufacture such a chip in their excessively well equipped barn. The chip would not be efficient, but would work.
Now, power transistors would better be efficient… so they cannot be too homebrew. I think a dedicated factory might be needed to make those. The other parts - resistors, capacitors, are a piece of cake.
Looks nice.
I do mow, but it’s more like making hay - when the plants have grown tall, and most varieties have managed to bloom. I also try to de-synchronize it from neigbours’s activities, so the landscape would never be the same in every direction.
Also, mowing peppermint and dandelions is taboo in my yard. Peppermint blooms very long and repels mosquitos, while attracting lots of other bugs to drink nectar. Dandelions are just nice to look at, so I don’t do anything until they are “ready to fly”.
If I didn’t cut hay at all, I would get Artemisia growing here and unfortunately their pollen can ruin a week for me.
Currently, solar still makes economic sense, but from April to October. Lots of it was built rather fast, now the adoption is slowing since the grid can’t accept it everywhere.
Consequently, summer is when oil shale miners rest and prepare for the next season.
Since the goal is to get rid of mining oil shale, big plans exist to install a lot of wind power. Sadly, this has gone embarrassingly slow, and it cannot cover winter consumption, and there is not enough storage.
As a result, some companies and building out storage, but only enough to last a few hours.
…and in the next country southwards, there is a huge gas reservoir that could accept methane, enough to last the whole winter, but nobody has a good enough handle on methanation to renewably produce a considerable quantity and store it there. :o
With regard to reactors, it seems likely that getting one would take 10 years and the local country here doesn’t even have legislation built out for nuclear power. They’re drafting it. Starting from zero is quite slow.