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Germany produced 50% of electricity for entire country via solar one day last month

PhDeac said:
Unfortunately, monetizing takes priority. No way does solar progress without someone figure out how to make a ton of money off what we all get for free.
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Unfortunately?
 
bullets said:
Unfortunately?
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Yes. Unfortunately. It's unfortunately that we have to wait for technology that could improve society so a few people can figure out how to make more money off it.
 
PhDeac said:
Yes. Unfortunately. It's unfortunately that we have to wait for technology that could improve society so a few people can figure out how to make more money off it.
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Maybe I am reading too much into your post so please correct me if I am wrong, but are you saying that a system other than the free market system would be a more efficient economic structure for society?
 
I'm saying that the free market isn't perfect. One weakness is that the gears of innovation slow down and wait for someone to get rich first and innovation spreads to the point someone makes a lot of money off it.

Compare internet speeds in the US to the rest of the world for one example.
 
Yep. How is Tesla coming on hydrogen cars or solar cars?
 
RacerDeac said:
Still gotta produce that electricity somehow. Right now, fossil fuels (natural gas, coal and petroleum) make up 67% of our electricity production.
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Just another step towards leaving it behind. The rest is coming...I just hope this country doesn't end up lagging behind Europe or Asia on it.
 
RacerDeac said:
Still gotta produce that electricity somehow. Right now, fossil fuels (natural gas, coal and petroleum) make up 67% of our electricity production.
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PhDeac said:
Yep. How is Tesla coming on hydrogen cars or solar cars?
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The article I posted gets into that. Major problem with solar is storage and off peak use. Electric cars = giant rolling battery that charges overnight (off peak). Plus, it can be used as a storage unit - take power from your solar panels, store it, and feed it back into your house when you need it. So, some people think of the car as a building block that will lead to greater solar adoption and increase efficiency of the grid overall.
 
Gotcha. Using the car as a storage unit that can be transferred to the house makes a lot of sense considering it sits outside much of the day.
 
Deacon923 said:
The article I posted gets into that. Major problem with solar is storage and off peak use. Electric cars = giant rolling battery that charges overnight (off peak). Plus, it can be used as a storage unit - take power from your solar panels, store it, and feed it back into your house when you need it. So, some people think of the car as a building block that will lead to greater solar adoption and increase efficiency of the grid overall.
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I need to read the story, but I'm not really following. The batteries are already very heavy (i.e., we can't really just add a lot more to a car), and still offer very limited range. I have a hard time seeing the car being good for storage, since most people need their cars first thing in the morning after it would have been drained down from providing power to your house during solar off-peak. If anything, because the car needs to charge overnight from the use during the day, it would seem to be a problem for solar adoption, since it's charging when your panels aren't generating power.
 
The car charges at night, your panels sell power to the grid during the day while you are at work. Smooths out demand and increases efficiency across the system. Car storage is there to help in the evenings (middle demand period) and charges back up from the grid at night.
 
Deacon923 said:
The car charges at night, your panels sell power to the grid during the day while you are at work. Smooths out demand and increases efficiency across the system. Car storage is there to help in the evenings (middle demand period) and charges back up from the grid at night.
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Got ya. I understood it to be more of a battery system to keep you off the grid at night.
 
here's another piece of it (more theoretical right now, but with great potential):
It won’t be long before homeowners with both can be mini-utilities, buying power from the grid when it’s cheap and selling power to the grid when it’s expensive. Willett Kempton, a University of Delaware professor, has created electric vehicles that communicate and interact with the grid in real time; they earn about $150 per car per month by storing excess power when the grid gets temporarily overloaded.
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So your car spends most of its time parked. It's got a computer in it that knows how much juice you need to get home or to work (you can adjust this from your smart phone if you need to take a long trip or if you want to have a big buffer). It's plugged into the grid at your office building or your home. When the power company has excess power, they feed it to your car, and when they need it back, they buy it back from you (but without sucking the battery dry or going below the pre-programmed charge level). Otherwise, that power would just be wasted, so it's worth something to the power company to do this. Pretty darn cool concept.
 
With the ability to charge simply by contact with a surface, is it possible to constantly charge on these solar roadways?
 
WFFaithful said:
With the ability to charge simply by contact with a surface, is it possible to constantly charge on these solar roadways?
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Possible? In theory, sure. We have electric trains, buses, etc that do just that with third rails, overhead lines, etc. You wouldn't really even need solar roadways. Of course, it would be potentially dangerous and there would be a lot of engineering problems to be worked out.
 
Rubber is a crappy conductor.

Tesla, is really focused on batteries. Until you can store it, there's no point in capturing it. They are developing more efficient, longer lasting, lighter batteries not just for cars and playing three or four states in the SW to land the $5bil facility they want to build. He's considering spinning the battery section of Tesla off into a different company so it isn't just associated with cars.
 
ONW said:
Rubber is a crappy conductor.

Tesla, is really focused on batteries. Until you can store it, there's no point in capturing it. They are developing more efficient, longer lasting, lighter batteries not just for cars and playing three or four states in the SW to land the $5bil facility they want to build. He's considering spinning the battery section of Tesla off into a different company so it isn't just associated with cars.
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He also made their battery tech free and open source to anyone who wants to use it or try to develop it further/better than what they're doing.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/brianso...elon-musk-releases-patents-to-good-faith-use/
 
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