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David Dunn's avatar

Why does this post seem like an advertisement for solar companies? Are there no downsides to soakr technology? I'd like to see a more balanced treatment of the subject .

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drotszor's avatar

Hate to be the ackchyually guy, but there are a few things worth to be pointed out about the area calculation:

Most of the high consumption regions coastal China, India, Europe, east coast US etc, has significantly lower irradiance. If distance doesn’t matter why not go with the best location, if it matters the irradiance is more like about 1300kwh/m2, which is around 35% more land.

Since we are covering country sized areas in PV most of it will be ground mounted. Which is tilted for optimal angle and thus less dense due to shadowing. The optimal angle depends on latitude and season, but going with 30 degree (see next point) would result in around 30-40% more land.

By far the biggest issue is storage. We can either store summer sun for winter with enormous storage, months worth of electricity or optimise the PV capacity for a winter day and only store the energy for the night. On a winter day on these locations around 20% of electricity of a summer day is produced which would result 400% more land.

So roughly around 8-9x more land would be needed in this slightly more accurate back of the envelope calculation. Which is the size of Greenland for current energy usage.

Anyway good points and great article!

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