bloody spell check. We’re being invaded I tell you. I’m losing my freedom to spell things correctly.
All those spell checker jobs being lost…
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Discussed earlier about the issues of land usage for cattle farms etc. I think it also swings the other way where hill farms play a pretty important role in maintaining the ecology of those hillsides. I briefly caught the end of a report discussing the changes to UK farming (of which a large percentage is upland hill farming) that will come from Brexit and the proposed changes that are in line from the recent farming bill that’s just gone through parliament.
kicking myself for not giving it more attention now.
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Roof top PV is a growing sector, just not as fast as utility scale. But there are developments now with standardized PV arrays included in the as-built price, along with energy storage and grid interactive systems. Depending on where they are and the corresponding load, homes can often generate a surplus. That has actually produced a perverse crisis in some jurisdictions with good solar resource and large homes - in Arizona now, it is cheaper on a financed basis to generate PV than to buy from the utilities. That in turn has created a social equity issue, as more affluent consumers leave the grid, less affluent consumers are left paying higher generation costs and the infrastructure carrying charges are carried over a declining population.
Done properly, wind doesn’t need to crowd out all other uses. None of the projects I have worked on actually owned the land, just leased it, largely from farmers. Their loss of productive land is limited to access roads and the relatively small area required for the base.
PV production has some toxic steps, but the quantities involved and the ability to reuse process materials means that production should be benign…however, China is the world’s largest producer.
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I was thinking more along the lines of eventually taking 2000 TW out of the wind, there has to be a knock on effect, there always is. Sorry about the birds but I’m looking at the bigger picture.
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Yes we had a few aluminium production plants here in north wales. One was near Wylfa, the other near the hydro electric station at Dolgarrog.
Both now closed sadly. As I understand the Anglesey plant had to close due to the electricity costs despite basically taking the majority of the base load from Wylfa. Of course Wylfa is now also closed so it was pretty much doomed.
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If you drive between LA and Vegas, you travel through a coridor of hills that are exposed to pretty much perfect sunshine all day long. There are thousands upon thousands of wind turbines there, no solar in sight.
The boss of (what was) the biggest UK solar installer now works for a legal firm sueing the installers for promising that which was never true. Talk about milking both ends of an industry.
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China might wake up one day and ask ‘what the fuck have we done?’ (like us 
).
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What, in terms of drawing the energy out? At a global scale, we’d barely be tapping the total energy at 2000 TW. There is a local effect, the wind ‘column’ takes a certain distance to reassert a stable flow, so wind farms are designed to minimize shading. But that is localized to a few hundred meters. As well, there is a theoretical maximum to the amount of energy we can extract (the Betz limit, 16/27ths), and no turbine design gets very close to that - the classic 3-blade monopole design peaks at about 48% extraction, and is usually operating in the low 40s.
You have to think about the areas involved - a turbine has a diameter of say 80 meters, and a tower of about the same that is reaching up into the moving air. In the 800-2000 meters that it takes for wind speeds to reach their peak, we can stack at least 10 and usually rather more identical circles, as well as identical circles adjacent. A wind turbine is just one circle at the bottom of that stack. Envisioned horizontally and vertically, the frontage of a wind farm versus the surface area of the blade sweep circles is enormous. Even a fairly large wind farm has no measurable impact on downwind wind speeds just a few kilometers away.
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The reason for that is not what you would think. California has so much PV that the market price of electricity often goes to zero in the afternoon, the ‘duck curve’ is a chronic problem there. There is not much investment in remote PV in the California market, and hasn’t been for years now. Most of the flow is now into smaller rooftop systems that don’t have to carry the same transmission expense.
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This stood out.
Will the solar panels be placed above the clouds or will we just cut the forests down and have done with it.
Both would be pretty catastrophic i think.
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I’ve spent more than a little time in the USA. I see more EV installs between home and work in the UK (cloudy and wet most of the time) than I’ve ever seen across the USA.
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Be that as it may, California alone has over twice the installed capacity that the UK does - which of course means they generate far more electricity because of the lovely insolation conditions you note for the UK.
The other state I believe you visit frequently, Florida, has been remarkably slow to take up PV by comparison. That is true of much of the Southeast.
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Stand-alone/off-grid solar systems are rather inefficient.
Why in the world would I ever go to hurricane / swamp central? Florida wouldn’t be on my top 50 states to visit.
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Not for lack of consumer interest, but mostly due to political fuckwittery and protectionism of existing power companies.
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Track them to avoid common clouds. Not many in deserts it has to be said.
What have deserts got to do with the equator? 
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It’s been discussed before. I think it’s the best idea anyone has come up with, but obviously it’s near impossible to sell to the public.
There is also an issue with take off/land - the bit of the flight that really impacts the most. A flat mileage would probably encourage short haul.
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OK smart arse, cover the areas of the planet that get the most sunshine of a sufficient intensity to justify and that causes the least environmental damage.
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The sunniest spots in the world (continental) are Sacramento Calafornia and Uppington South Africa. I would start by putting solar panels on roofs that have been angled and orientated to get maximum effect. North east Africa would also be a good place to look at.
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