Even if a location doesn't show high potential, it shouldn't matter.
Solar panels are dirt cheap, just put up more of them. With plug-in solar, rooftop solar and vertical solar, there can be enough production.
If all buildings in a city start producing, we eliminate a third of the cost of grid. Transmission network is not needed (or doesn't need to grow) we produce energy where we consume, in every city. Transmission networks are costly and time consuming. Vertical solar will get us there. Vertical solar will be the cheapest form of energy, because it can use the structural elements already on a building (no need of , adds ~4 hours of production (same as adding batteries, could be cheaper?). Vertical solar can immediately be deployed as fence, we have some kind of wall/fence between buildings everywhere.
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.
Europe has very high per capita income and colonial wealth, from Roman Empire, Vikings, Portugese, Spanish Empire, English Empire, Dutch and French colonies. With that level of income and wealth, adding dirt cheap solar panels, a bit more to account for lower production should not be a big deal.
Farmers in Europe should ask for solar subsides: shade for their livestock, grow crops that grow better in shade, grow tropical crops using solar energy in greenhouses, harvest both solar and crops.
Give farmers subsidies to harvest solar instead of [ethanol|biodiesel|biofuels|biomass] (garbage ideas, some posted recently about UK subsidizing biomass, which ships wood from Canada). Millions of acres of land can be used for both solar and livestock or crops. Freeing up the land from bio-nonsense-ideas will lower the cost of food and meat.
Canada also looks okay, the only country that can't go solar is Russia. Low solar potential, but also the Govt may not be too keen on Solar.
In the long run, there will be only two fossil fuel countries: US and Russia. The two great superpowers.
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.
> (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.
>> 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.
Haven't visited Europe in a few years. Last time I was there, on a train routed through less populated areas of northern France, I saw nuclear plants emitting steam. For all their downsides they do feed a lot of power into the grid. It is a relatively clean option.
You make a strong case for alternative options. I guess the path taken pivots on evaluation of the tradeoffs, and significantly, who does the evaluating.
>>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.
Actually they weren't. The majority of the populations of Scotland and England did not want it in 1707. There was rioting in Edinburgh when it happened and the signatories had to go into a cellar to hide from it. Most English people didn't want to annex Scotland either, since they thought it threatened their trade.
Under 0.01% of the Scottish population had a vote for the parliament in the first place. The Scottish politicians were bribed and there is a document showing how much each was paid (which is ridiculously hard to get hold of online, for some reason.)
The English parliament continued with a few extra members, while the Scottish parliament was abolished. The speaker of the English parliament boasted, "We have catch'd Scotland and will bind her fast."
The Acts of Union were in 1707, over a century after the Union of the Crowns. They were nothing to do with King James VI. The Scottish Parliament continued throughout the 17th century, apart from during the Cromwellian invasion.
By the way, England has been in regnal union with a number of places including Hanover, the Netherlands, France, Denmark (+ Norway) and Normandy.
Also the title was "King of Scots" not "King of Scotland", another common mistake.
> 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 always wish maps like that would include some sort of seasonality score. Maybe a worst week / best week ratio.
As it is, the map is useful until solar goes to a double digit percentage of total yearly generation. Any higher, and seasonal places start needing backup generation capacity that is only running in winter (or during monsoon), which does violent things to electricity markets.
It's also includes historic weather patterns and has some simple modeling tools built into it that can help predict how well off grid, grid tied and hybrid solar systems will perform. So far I have found that it's predictions map very closely to what I've experienced on the ground with my solar array.
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.
I am just astonished, I haven't been following the cost evolution of solar panels, but, as I have quite some tree canopy for our house, I left the the installation of panels to "later", I ran the calculations today for a city in Germany.
- Took the cost of a complete system from a big provider + 30% for the installation.
- Ran the calculations using the JRC tool[0] recommended in the previous comment.
- Added 75% loss because of the tree canopy.
I am still 2 to 3 times cheaper per kWh than my current provider. I would have no trees etc., I would be about 10 times cheaper!
I thought this was very interesting - there's the map upfront, but you can also drill into individual countries and regions with some nice tables. Some "obvious" things here, though a few surprises:
* The solar potential of a gloomy, northern locale like the UK is "only" half of somewhere sunny like Australia. Though I can imagine the swings between seasons are greater.
* Northern Canada has a surprising amount of potential, compared to European regions at the same latitude
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.
Dry and high altitude increase the performance because those increase the amount of sunlight hitting the ground. The effect of temperature would be on top of those effects.
Nice wind energy map there. Surprised that some places are good for both wind and solar. There is also Geothermal.. valleys have higher potential for geothermal
Europe geothermal. There are probably better maps than this:
It's not really easy to build wind energy in Europe as current windmills are 300 meter tall and the windier parts of Europe are often the dense parts. People don't want a 300 meter structure near them.
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.
These kinds of maps are very misleading. They show averages, and the averages rarely drive the costs - somebody in this thread already noted that Australia is only 2x better than the UK.
The main killer of solar is variability. Northern countries have shorter solar days during winter and can have _weeks_ of overcast days, so these countries would need some kind of backup: either long-term storage, or nuclear.
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.
I used them while designing my system. Just checked the numbers again against last 365 days - 97.5% accurate. Previous check I did year ago - I think it was more like 99.9% accurate.
Even if a location doesn't show high potential, it shouldn't matter.
Solar panels are dirt cheap, just put up more of them. With plug-in solar, rooftop solar and vertical solar, there can be enough production.
If all buildings in a city start producing, we eliminate a third of the cost of grid. Transmission network is not needed (or doesn't need to grow) we produce energy where we consume, in every city. Transmission networks are costly and time consuming. Vertical solar will get us there. Vertical solar will be the cheapest form of energy, because it can use the structural elements already on a building (no need of , adds ~4 hours of production (same as adding batteries, could be cheaper?). Vertical solar can immediately be deployed as fence, we have some kind of wall/fence between buildings everywhere.
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.
Europe has very high per capita income and colonial wealth, from Roman Empire, Vikings, Portugese, Spanish Empire, English Empire, Dutch and French colonies. With that level of income and wealth, adding dirt cheap solar panels, a bit more to account for lower production should not be a big deal.
Farmers in Europe should ask for solar subsides: shade for their livestock, grow crops that grow better in shade, grow tropical crops using solar energy in greenhouses, harvest both solar and crops.
Give farmers subsidies to harvest solar instead of [ethanol|biodiesel|biofuels|biomass] (garbage ideas, some posted recently about UK subsidizing biomass, which ships wood from Canada). Millions of acres of land can be used for both solar and livestock or crops. Freeing up the land from bio-nonsense-ideas will lower the cost of food and meat.
Canada also looks okay, the only country that can't go solar is Russia. Low solar potential, but also the Govt may not be too keen on Solar.
In the long run, there will be only two fossil fuel countries: US and Russia. The two great superpowers.
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...
> (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.
>> 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.
Haven't visited Europe in a few years. Last time I was there, on a train routed through less populated areas of northern France, I saw nuclear plants emitting steam. For all their downsides they do feed a lot of power into the grid. It is a relatively clean option.
You make a strong case for alternative options. I guess the path taken pivots on evaluation of the tradeoffs, and significantly, who does the evaluating.
>>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.
> English Empire
You mean British Empire.
The Act of Union had at least two willing parties.
Actually they weren't. The majority of the populations of Scotland and England did not want it in 1707. There was rioting in Edinburgh when it happened and the signatories had to go into a cellar to hide from it. Most English people didn't want to annex Scotland either, since they thought it threatened their trade.
Under 0.01% of the Scottish population had a vote for the parliament in the first place. The Scottish politicians were bribed and there is a document showing how much each was paid (which is ridiculously hard to get hold of online, for some reason.)
The English parliament continued with a few extra members, while the Scottish parliament was abolished. The speaker of the English parliament boasted, "We have catch'd Scotland and will bind her fast."
When the king of Scotland takes over England and then his descendant wants to unify his governments that’s all you get. It’s not a democracy.
The Acts of Union were in 1707, over a century after the Union of the Crowns. They were nothing to do with King James VI. The Scottish Parliament continued throughout the 17th century, apart from during the Cromwellian invasion.
By the way, England has been in regnal union with a number of places including Hanover, the Netherlands, France, Denmark (+ Norway) and Normandy.
Also the title was "King of Scots" not "King of Scotland", another common mistake.
> 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 always wish maps like that would include some sort of seasonality score. Maybe a worst week / best week ratio.
As it is, the map is useful until solar goes to a double digit percentage of total yearly generation. Any higher, and seasonal places start needing backup generation capacity that is only running in winter (or during monsoon), which does violent things to electricity markets.
Here's the tool I use for estimating solar performance: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/#api_5.3
It's also includes historic weather patterns and has some simple modeling tools built into it that can help predict how well off grid, grid tied and hybrid solar systems will perform. So far I have found that it's predictions map very closely to what I've experienced on the ground with my solar array.
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.
I am just astonished, I haven't been following the cost evolution of solar panels, but, as I have quite some tree canopy for our house, I left the the installation of panels to "later", I ran the calculations today for a city in Germany.
- Took the cost of a complete system from a big provider + 30% for the installation.
- Ran the calculations using the JRC tool[0] recommended in the previous comment.
- Added 75% loss because of the tree canopy.
I am still 2 to 3 times cheaper per kWh than my current provider. I would have no trees etc., I would be about 10 times cheaper!
[0]: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/#api_5.3
Access to low-risk funding over the decade needed to recoup investment is probably the actual blocker on solar potential.
Notably that's something that can be changed by human intervention.
I thought this was very interesting - there's the map upfront, but you can also drill into individual countries and regions with some nice tables. Some "obvious" things here, though a few surprises:
* The solar potential of a gloomy, northern locale like the UK is "only" half of somewhere sunny like Australia. Though I can imagine the swings between seasons are greater.
* Northern Canada has a surprising amount of potential, compared to European regions at the same latitude
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.
Cold actually increases PV output.
I wonder if the map accounts for this,
Without accounting for it, the maps wouldn't look like that. Cold, dry and high altitude increase the performance of solar.
Dry and high altitude increase the performance because those increase the amount of sunlight hitting the ground. The effect of temperature would be on top of those effects.
Places with most potential:
Australia (all of it!)
Most of South America: Chile (darkest on the map!), Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil.
Mexico and Cuba (everywhere), all of Central America
Western US
Africa (everywhere) Middle East (everywhere) Mongolia, North and Western China, Tibet
Europe has one of highest wind energy potentials instead. They can harvest wind energy in the winter when they need it most.
https://globalwindatlas.info/en/
And Europe has historical expertise and European companies that they can subsidize.
Nice wind energy map there. Surprised that some places are good for both wind and solar. There is also Geothermal.. valleys have higher potential for geothermal
Europe geothermal. There are probably better maps than this:
https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/project-innerspace-completes-...
It's not really easy to build wind energy in Europe as current windmills are 300 meter tall and the windier parts of Europe are often the dense parts. People don't want a 300 meter structure near them.
I wonder what makes for that blue region over China? Air pollution?
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.
Why did it need to hijack my back button...
These kinds of maps are very misleading. They show averages, and the averages rarely drive the costs - somebody in this thread already noted that Australia is only 2x better than the UK.
The main killer of solar is variability. Northern countries have shorter solar days during winter and can have _weeks_ of overcast days, so these countries would need some kind of backup: either long-term storage, or nuclear.
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.
I used them while designing my system. Just checked the numbers again against last 365 days - 97.5% accurate. Previous check I did year ago - I think it was more like 99.9% accurate.