Sustainable Energy looks at France’s developing solar and renewable energy scene.
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I hope this is all land that cannot be used by agriculture.
Because at first I would put solar on rooftops, of which we have enough, continuing with land that cannot be used otherwise.
Solar on land is more cost efficient than solar on roofs.
sheep can graze underneath the panels…. granted it’s much less productive than a field without the panels but grasses do grow under the panels.
No it’s not. Solar on roofs incurs no cost to acquire land. Free is always cheapest and most cost efficient! Installing on a flat roof is almost like installing on flat ground.
Pretty sad tale. France with the lowest emissions in Europe, putting in solar and wind. How crazy is that. Solar and wind *will increase emissions in France* and increase the electricity price. As it is now doing in Ontario. That’s what you get when you have two Bankster/Oil Baron stooge’s leading the country. Hollande, the man who spends $120k per year on his hair, and his pupil the Rothschild Bankster/Oil Baron employee & puppy, Macron. They did the same in South Korea with President Moon, in Ontario with Premier McQuinty, in Vermont with Gov Shumlin and California with Gov Brown. Anywhere there is a successful nuclear power program, buy the lead politician, and get him to stupidly shutdown the zero-CO2 nuclear and replace it with Big Oil’s NG/LNG electricity supply, greenwashed with wind & solar to sucker in gullible fools. 90% NG/LNG, 10% wind/solar. Increased emissions, increased electricity price, increased supply vulnerability, decreased supply reliability, increased NG shortages in the winter and high gas & electricity price peaks and more petrodollar Oil & Gas Pipeline Wars.
This solar power plant, very inefficient flat plate east-west orientation is very cheap to build @ $450M for 300MWpeak or $1.50 per watt pk, but with a CF% of only 13.3% means a cost of $11.5k per kwavg, much more than their latest First-Of-A-Kind nuclear, for an energy source that peaks in Spring when demand is minimum and only lasts for a meager 20yrs vs NPPs last for 60-100yrs, and uses a vast land area, land that could grow food or house people. And literally a mountain of toxic waste when the huge mass of solar panels must be discarded. Anyone who believes France will replace its nuclear, generating a few ounces of nuclear waste per French citizen’s lifetime energy needs, with nutty wind and solar scams like they claim, is just too gullible and stupid. Of course this is all about switching from zero emissions nuclear to gas brought by dangerous LNG tankers and a pipeline from terrorists in the Middle East through Syria. Thus the Syrian pipeline war. Note Macron is eager to expand the Syrian war, wants to murder another 100k Syrian citizens.
Don’t talk to me about a mountain of toxic waste when you’re advocating nuclear. You’re a black pot pointing to a kettle and yelling “black!”
whykhr, France is only reducing its nuclear power as they are able to bring renewable technologies on board. They are not arbitrarily cutting nuclear and making up the difference with non-renewable energy sources.
dlwatib, nuclear is a fantastically clean source of power. Unlike France we have been unwilling to continue to innovate and develop further generations of plants which are able to re-use fuel, significantly reducing the amount of nuclear waste to be disposed of. Furthermore, it is hoped that someday even that waste can be reprocessed and reused. The petroleum industry did a wonderful job of convincing Americans of how dangerous nuclear was — while simultaneously polluting the air and fighting to keep lead in gasoline. If you go back and look at the ads warning about nuclear power you will see in small print that the ads were sponsored by the petroleum/natural gas industry. What we must have is a strong, powerful regulatory authority that is not beholden to corporations and does not allow private companies to run in a slipshod manner like they have in the past. That is the biggest challenge to making nuclear power a realistically safe energy source.
The US is falling behiiiiiiiind!
The US is not falling behind. Power generation in the United States is regulated at the state level, not the federal level. It is primarily state public utility commissions that decide which power plants get built to serve the power needs of their citizens. They can easily, as in the case of California, prefer natural gas and renewables over coal and nuclear. The dirtiest power generation states in the union are (surprise…) Colorado and parts of Wyoming. Neither of these states are known for their air quality problems. Taking an average of the entire US, we’re still one of the cleanest countries in the world. We remain a leader in research into new renewable technologies and clean-up technologies for fossil fuels.
Germany is ahead in terms of implementing renewable energy sources, but it has done so uneconomically and now suffers from some of the highest electricity rates anywhere. They were unwise. They have an unbalanced system that often generates too much energy, yet at other times does not generate enough. It is expensive to have to shut down sources because there is too much energy. It is also expensive to have to import peak energy from other countries during times of shortages. Germans have demonstrated a surprising lack of planning.
The other main rival for renewable energy is China. Yes, China has gotten very aggressive at subsidizing their solar panel industry and then dumping them onto global markets. But in terms of air quality, China is way behind and having to play catch-up. The Chinese burn coal, not just to operate their power plants and their factories, but also to heat their homes. And it’s not just any coal, it’s the dirtiest possible coal. Our coal is much cleaner than theirs. Despite all they have done, they have barely begun to attack the real problem, urban air quality, and their progress has been negligible. Furthermore, I predict that it will take years before any noticeable progress is made because China is not yet doing what they need to do to address coal burning for home heating. Instead, they are spending all their time (as usual) copycatting the West and trying to exploit our markets. They’re spending their efforts on building EVs (and racing them!) when the electricity will be coming from coal-fired power plants. They built solar panel factories like mad, not to install those panels themselves, but to sell them to others. They have installed a few demonstration solar projects, but relative to need they have done nothing to improve their air quality.
dlwatib, that is what is causing us to fall behind. Rather than a strong national policy to benefit the entire nation it is based on parochial determinants. Companies influence policy based only their purely profit-driven motives, not national interests, and we continue to elect legislators, governors and presidents who believe in weak, “small” government, i.e., government that will pretty much let industry do as it pleases regardless of the short or long-term costs to the nation as a whole. Rather than national democratic leadership we have crony capitalism so energy policy is literally set by the petroleum industry, and obviously, what is in Exxon Mobile’s interest is not what is in the interest of the average citizen.
dlwatib, the Midwestern states are not known for poor air quality because of the prevailing wins. Though the Northeastern states pollute far, far less than the Midwestern states, they have far worse air quality because the pollution from the Midwestern stares is carried to the Northeast on prevailing winds. It has been a significant issue of dispute between the regions for many years. Northeastern states have resented the heavier burden and cost because of local air quality rather than on the actual sources of the pollution. They want the same standard to apply to all states, but Midwestern states have been able to avoid this burden because their pollution is carried eastward.
Good job!!!!
0:55 I doubt that triple efficiency claim.
That’s efficiency per area of land, not efficiency per area of panel.
The traditional solar farm angles panels towards the average highest sun. This way you maximize the panel production, but you need to space your panels far apart to avoid shadows.
You get the most electricity per $ but you loose a significant amount of energy because there is no way to cover all of the land. There will always be huge gaps of non-covered ground where the sunlight is not producing electricity.
As cost of panels decreases, and land use becomes a much more sensitive subject, the cost of land becomes dominant over the cost of the panels. It starts to make more sense to change strategy and try to capture the most amount of sunlight per area of land at the expense of using more panels.
In this case, you want your panels flat on the ground to avoid shadows (only a slight amount of angle to help evacuate rain and make cleaning easier), and cover as much ground surface as possible.
mrgomelonsolaris I can’t speak French but from reading tranalatiom it’s not about the efficiency, but about the amount of energy they get over the course of the year.
And also it’s said that “it allows”, so I would assume it’s just a theoretical calculation and not real data.
Yes, I can agree with that explanation. If the cost of panels becomes lower than the land rent, it makes sense to rearrange the panels differently. (But then it also makes sense to move to a cheaper land area.)
In truth it makes no sense to dedicate land use exclusively to solar when it can easily coexist with other land uses. They could have put those solar panels on the flat roofs of superstores like Walmart, or over their parking lots, or both. Factories and warehouses often have even bigger flat roofs. They can even put solar panels on canopies over public roadways. To worry about solar power produced per acre when there are so many acres of land going to waste is ridiculous. And of course they stupidly chose flat land to build on rather than the south slope of a convenient mountain. If the land is sloped at close to the correct angle already, then very little, if any, land needs to be wasted on shadow.
Building solar farms on roofs or on top of parking lots makes a lot of sense, but it also costs significantly more to do so.
Rooftops and parking lots require extra equipment to lift the panels to their desired location, support to attach the panels to, and labour is more expensive due to the hazards of working at a height.
Then you also have to deal with the existing owner and user of the land : they won’t let you install your panels for free.
They’ll ask for a rent, or worse : they might ask for some free electricity !
(remember, these gyus are major power companies. Factories and large retail stores are their major customers during daytime, financing such an endeavour would be shooting themselves in the foot).
The “build it on sloped land” idea makes no sense in mainland France.
France it roughly located at latitude 45° North , so the ideal angle would be close to 45° : that’s a very steep mountain. That kind of terrain is rarely smooth, often rocky, and covered by shadows of other mountains nearby (day time is shorter), and less sunny over the year due to the winds pushing the air up due the mountain, cooling the air, creating clouds. Plus they’re usually quite far away from cities, and the existing power cables are often already used all year round due to hydro power, so you need to build a lot of new long distance power cables.
That type of mountain would be the worst place to build a large scale solar farm.
I love how they conveniently left out where the back up power for this installation comes from. It’s undoublty from natural gas which will be the primary source of the 300 megawatts since this solar installation will optimistically produce 60-80 of those megawatts (due to the low capacity factor of solar). No matter how much public support intermittent energy sources THEY ARE NOT CURRENTLY GREEN. They can only be green with an equally green backup. Cheap efficient and large scale energy storage has proven to be an incredibly hard problem to solve and we really don’t have any good solutions. The best green backup for renewables will be generation IV nuclear reactors, particularly molten salt reactors (Google search this term) because they can ramp up and down very quickly to stabilize wind and solar generation. If you truly are environmentalist and want a future of clean cheap and abundant energy for all, acknowledge your bias towards nuclear and rationally look into the modern nuclear reactors, you may be pleasantly surprised.
It takes arrogant Frenchmen to believe that 58 or more nuclear reactors can be operated perfectly without human error in perpetuity. And it definitely helps if they can ship all their nuclear waste off to Britain.
Chris Gerwin, I believe you meant to say “bias against nuclear,” not “bias toward nuclear,” which means preferring nuclear.
dlwatib, nothing is failsafe, but even if you take Chernobyl into consideration, nuclear has killed fewer people than coal has in one year. Coal is responsible for approximately 300,000 respiratory deaths a year. That does not include accidents or the mercury contamination of our waterways and lakes from coal pollution or the carbon being added to the atmosphere.
Based on your argument, only the U.S. is arrogant enough to run its Navy on nuclear reactors indefinitely without an accident. Nuclear can be used carefully and safely.
Well, way to go France. your leaders understand what US leaders don’t
Tulio Cano , U.S. leaders understand who finances their campaigns.
The reason why France invested so heavily in nuclear energy is that the nuclear waste facility for the entire EU was/is in… Britain! They would have thought differently about it if they had to store nuclear waste next to their own precious fields of grape vines.
dlwatib
You’re clueless mate, all French nuclear waste is reprocessed in La Hague and the remaining waste is also stored there.
It’s just one, France still beleive in nucleaire. With the solar energie too many competitor, cannot make black money for the politic.
Here are producing power process “boma fetching unique” (Google it) to help your home become more energy-efficient and cut utility bills for years to come. Its a great spot to begin saving cash by making some small changes in your house. You could be a person who wants to save the environment or a family man wishing to save on bills, this is definitely among the best methods you will have.
I hope those things don’t reflect light back magnified towards the ozone layer ?
Instead of building up volume and value we are still engaged in telling is my tail better than yours
where can we buy? from Philippines