@WandererUber@sickburnbro most ppl can't afford a luxury car like tesla. china'a got some super cheap evs for city dwellers. how would i be able to do daly 200-300 mile round trips in a service truck, when im supposed to be home, not working, charging the batteries for days? theres lots of info about the toxic materials in solar panels. is 20yrs the life of the panel? that's still an expiration date. a 10kw system cost about 15k and require 650square feet (more roof than i have). maybe this would work for a person who lived close to their job and did go very far and had lots of disposable income. im surpised they havent come up with exchangable battery stations so that ev ppl don't have to sit at charging stations all day waiting to get mugged. that way they could alao charge their battery all day long at home and swap it out when they get home.
@db@sickburnbro >most evs use 100kw to travel 100mi They don't. You're confusing kW (kilo-watts, unit of power) with kWh (kilo-watt hours, unit of capacity). Teslas largest battery is 100 kWh >100kw solar panel kit Nobody has those. Home solar panels cost about 50 cts to 2 dollars per Watt. A 10 kW solar installation (lets say about 20,000 dollars to get it installed) can charge Teslas biggest battery from zero to full in 10 sunny hours. You don't empty your battery every day however. >panels loose their ability to work over time Not really. And if you were worried, you could buy from reputable brands that give 20 years warranty. >then you're stuck with poisonous garbage Solar panels are not poisonous.
@WandererUber@sickburnbro i don't have money for those things. i read that most evs use 100kw to travel 100mi and a 100kw solar panel kit is now a little less than 100k. i think panels loose their ability to work over time, and then you're stuck with poisonous garbage. those little systems in rvs are nice, but i don't think they have the balls to power an ev battery. i suspect that the prepper types are collecting things for the future scavenger gangs. its hard to predict for the future.
@sickburnbro ive had a few conversations with ev owners because i was genuinely interested in their efficiency. some of them were like free charging station hawks, that could tell you which ones were free at different times. they had different tricks to get a free charge. most of them felt their green goals justified this behaivor and didnt understand that this would be impossible once the masses were using chargers. one person described this as free energy - "if only everyone cared enough to use free energy, we could save the world"
@db@sickburnbro why not put solar on your roof and a big ass battery in your basement? You're gonna need those anyway once the grid starts failing. Never understood the gridcel mindset
@Lyle@doonxib@db@sickburnbro It's way more complex than just shrugging your shoulders, repeating the same argument and saying "can't be done". You should do some more research, there are actually firms that recycle the fibers right now. Reread the first link I posted. It states explicitly that there are plants in operation since 2016 that do it.
It's completely idiotic to assume that an electric motor on a stick is unfathomably complex and impossible to run, yet a 10 stage refining and transporting process for fuel that is then burned in a motor with 20,000 parts+ is reasonable.
Those articles only show proposals and plans, which means nothing until they go into practice. Look back to all the green proposals made and see how many of them flopped once they started building.
Maybe they will get their shit together and pull it off, but for the moment they are are bleeding money, hydrolic fluid and breaking down much faster than their 'projected' lifespan.
@Lyle@doonxib@db@sickburnbro These articles are basically all copying each other. Just like they all copied the concept of 'carbon-footprint' from a British Petroleum press release that they made to shift blame away from huge corps to individuals.
I've put together some links (bit of a hassle to find these because I don't speak the language. Some german-only sources so far, but I'm sure there is more in french and from the scandies):
(unknown date) energiewinde.orsted.de/energiewirtschaft/recycling-windraeder-rotorblaetter-gfk Something interesting here: 'The number of wind turbines mined is still too small, so that from the point of view of experts there is too little material for economically sensible recycling.' It can't be both a terrible burden on the environment and at the same time a miniscule amount.
My dad's system is not a DYI, but with the US, the largest problem is sub contracting and frankenstein parts. It works, but he has to make minor adjustments all the time and the guy that installed them isn't big on customer service. Most of Solar Panel companies in America operate solely as sellers of contracts and they sub contract the parts and labor through a 3rd party. More often than not you have no idea what kind of work or product you'll be getting until you get it, and I've seen enough BBB reviews and cases on the companies that reached out to me and those I've researched to stay clear of.
@Lyle@doonxib@db@sickburnbro yeah that's a double edged sword. on the one hand, the US has a bigger diy culture for stuff like that, compared to europeans which are total sticklers for regulation and 'certified installs.' Can go both ways. A lot of chinese cheap stuff flooding your markets too. But a major euro panel maker recently got bought out by a US firm and is moving production there. We'll see.
>It would be nice to see solar panels and wind turbines being recycled I'd have to look into panel recycling in detail, but in principle, you need to consider that silicon is grown into huge crystals with massive energy investment, that's basically 90% of the material processing cost. Then you can make whatever you want out of the wafers, basically. If you dump a bunch of heat into a 'broken' panel you could remelt it and make a new one. The question isn't can you do that, the question is why would you want to? There are >20yo panels still working just fine, and if they lose 15% of output you'd rather sell them to the third world and make a new one instead of incurring the cost of recycling.
Wind turbines ARE being recycled in Europe, that's simply not true.
@Lyle@doonxib@db@sickburnbro I'm watching his video 'Should You Really Use Solar Panels?' right now. Cool channel.
>the heat absorbed in doing so lowers the conversion as well as the lifespan of the panel. that's not dependent on UV specifically. Rather they heat up in the sun (obvious) but they can't cool down enough in the summer, so they reach higher temperatures.
>The solution would be to add heatsinks and fans behind the panels I think some firms are also exploring adding solar water heaters behind them, basically you watercool your panels and also gather heat for your home. Definitely less efficient.
If I lived in an area where my solar panels constantly overheat, I'd probably just put more of them on my roof so I can make more money instead of maximizing a single panel. But this is an edge case anyway.
>They cannot even be recycled and end up in landfills I don't like this argument at all, because practically anything could be recycled and also americans say the same thing about wind turbines, but other countries DO recycle those. And the US not doing it is largely caused by the anti-renewables attitude from fossil lobbyists (not saying wind and solar don't have those too, of course)
>My dad lives offgrid and bought solar, but tells me all the time about the problems he has with them. Then he probably DIYed his system right? I think that can cause a lot of issues if you don't know what you're doing, and also there are a lot of scalpers in the market that sell terrible chinese components for excessive prices. Those are nothing but trouble.
@doonxib@db@WandererUber@sickburnbro There is a very smart channel I watch on youtube, called Tech Ingredients. it's hosted by an engineer and his assistant who go into detail explaining how things work (or don't work).
He covered how inefficient solar panels come out of the box due to their contradictive nature. The solar cells need peak UV radiation to get the most power out, but the heat absorbed in doing so lowers the conversion as well as the lifespan of the panel. The solution would be to add heatsinks and fans behind the panels, but this adds a lot of weight to them as well as the cost and effort needed to make it as there are very few companies that are even looking into it.
My dad lives offgrid and bought solar, but tells me all the time about the problems he has with them.
Also note that the advertized lifespan of these panels are projected and not actual. Many of these panels have not been around as long as they claimed they live and are already failing. They cannot even be recycled and end up in landfills, while containing heavy metals that will leech into the soil.
@WandererUber@Lyle@doonxib@db@sickburnbro Wind turbines are probably the worst method of energy production. Solar on a private roof can make sense, if energy prices are high, but wind is simply shit. Expensive, the worst kind of energy to run a grid with - wind gusts let turbines oscillate between 0 and 100% within seconds and if the wind gets too strong, they need to shut off - solar can be predicted well in advance, wind absolutely can't. Infrasound and moving shadows reduce property prices in the vicinity, birds and bats are shredded by the fast moving blades.
@quercus@WandererUber@Lyle@db@doonxib wind doesn't have to be a terrible source of power, if you keep the wind as motion and use it to turn a weight you can balance out the fluxuations
@quercus@Lyle@WandererUber@db@doonxib what's interesting about a grid is that when you connect generators to it, the existing grid helps synchronize the generators.
@sickburnbro@WandererUber@Lyle@db@doonxib If you don't need to stabilize a grid within less than a tenth of a Hz, maybe - windmills did work after all. But with electricity, not so much.
@quercus@Lyle@WandererUber@db@doonxib right, you don't want to backdrive that, which is why you isolate it by having a transmission connecting the turbine to something like flywheel
@sickburnbro@Lyle@WandererUber@db@doonxib Yes. And when there is too much or too little energy, they start to spin up or down, which can wreak havoc on a turbine. Also electric motors without inverters change their speed, which can be a problem with pumps or fans, where a little more speed can quickly mean overloading.
@sickburnbro@Lyle@doonxib@db you've been pretending to talk about, be explicit, go into detail the whole thread. nothing but pointless generalizing.
>where does the power for the arc furnace come from Solar panels produce way more power than it takes to make them buy a gigantic margin. About as smart as saying you need horses to power the elevators that get the coal out of the mines. Not an indictment of coal in the slightest.
@Lyle@doonxib@db@WandererUber@sickburnbro I've noticed that LED light bulbs fail on almost the same timeframe as conventional lightbulbs, so all the advertising hype about them lasting 10x as long (and thus justifying 10x the price) is just hype. Maybe some do, but it seems like the companies never have to back up those claims, and there's no consequences for them posting false claims.
@PoalackJokes88@doonxib@db@WandererUber@sickburnbro I don't put any stock in their claims, but they do eat up less electricity and don't run near as hot. They cost a lot more than an incandesent so the upfront cost eats up the savings the first few years. You have to also consider that just like everything today it's made in China, and quality control there is abysmal. It really is hard to tell the potential of anything made today because of this.
I know some claim their lightbulbs can last up to 25 years, I replaced all my bulbs in the house with LED ones 4 years ago and I only had one die on me so far. 20 years later I'll repost here and let you know if they're still going :angrylaugh:
@Lyle@doonxib@db@WandererUber@sickburnbro I've had a bunch die on me. The "made in China" thing is a big factor, as is the competence crisis here in the US. If all manufacturing labor here is made up of Indians and Somalis it might not matter where it's made. I also personally worked in a place where "made in America" meant "repackaged in America".
As for the power savings, that's still the main draw for me. I just hate that they mandated LEDs so they don't have any competitors, so now prices have a new floor. If they ever mandate solar panels or EVs, prices will skyrocket overnight.
@db@sickburnbro Those same types are always the ones most opposed to nuclear energy. I hate it. If you're really going to go with low-carbon energy, you need to be building grid scale nuclear (fission) and reducing natural gas down to peak generators or none at all. Alternatively we could get serious about space and start building space based solar power, where tin foil mirrors that are miles big could act as concentrators instead of relying on dusty/cloudy/snowy ground-based systems. But as always the same ones who want to wallow in the mud with solar panels will be horrified at the prospect of humanity actually getting more energy rather than slowly going extinct.