Does anyone know whether it makes sense to setup solar arrays closer to users or to concentrate them in sunny places and send them throughout the country?
e.g. an analysis of whether we should setup all the solar farms in Nevada for the whole country... set them up in the general south and transmit north... or will each state have their own farms?
Distributed. New transmission lines have big nimby issues, and many existing corridors are already getting overloaded. There are recurring attempts to reform the permitting process (in the last Congress it was called EPRA/energy permitting reform act), but… we’ll see.
Bureaucracy is the main thing holding back clean energy right now, rather than economics. You can see this in how Texas, which has lax grid regulation but isn’t biased towards clean energy has far surpassed CA, which subsidizes and got a big head start, in wind/solar generation in a few years.
We don't put all our coal and gas plants out in the desert, they're next to and within our cities.
Physically transporting electricity across distance is very expensive and a not-insignificant amount of power is simply lost on the way. These problems only get worse as the amount of power goes up, and the danger grows very quickly as power goes up. Plus the strategic and logistical benefits of distributed generation.
Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country. There's no practical way to actually transport that much power. Not with the technology we have today. If we had high-temperature superconductors then it would make more sense. But with standard metal wires, it's not happening.
In the GB (UK mainland) grid only ~2% of energy is lost in transmission; distribution is more typically ~5%. And we did put most of our big thermal power generation in the middle of the country, which is now causing difficulties as we need to re-jig transmission to accept offshore wind and interconnectors.
Solar PV on rooftops is great, injecting power directly at the load, eliminating transmission and distribution losses until there is excess to spill back to grid. It would be helpful if we stopped running an entirely artificial timetable in winter that demands heavy activity well outside daylight hours, so that demand better matched availability.
> Simply put you can't centralize generation for the entire country.
Depends on the country.
In Washington state, our power sources are not next to our population centers; in fact many are in the center of our state! And our state would be the 87th-biggest-country out of 197 in the world.
USA averages 6% transmission loss. New long-distance transmission lines are HVDC and have far less loss over distance. But people oppose them for dumb and good reasons; why would I in Washington state want to have good connections to California so the local producers can reduce supply and drive up prices?
Casey Handmer is a huge solar bull and his estimate is that solar becomes cheaper than any other form of electricity even when generated from northern states by 2030 (likely sooner)
Iirc solar is meaningfully more efficient (30-50%) in southern states, so it will likely make sense to place energy intensive workloads in locations with more direct sun.
However, the cost of transmitting additional power is interesting and complex. Building out the grid (which runs close to capacity by some metric^) is expensive: transmission lines, transformers or substations, and acquiring land is obvious stuff. Plus the overhead of administration which is significant.
So there's a lot of new behind-the-meter generation (ie electricity that never touches the grid)^^
With all that in mind, I expect energy intensive things will move south (if they have no other constraints. Eg cooling for data centers might be cheaper in northern climes. Some processing will make sense close to where materials are available)
But a significant amount of new solar will still be used in northern states because it's going to be extremely cheap to build additional capacity. Especially capacity that is behind-the-meter.
IMHO "efficient" isn't really the right term in your second para. The PV generation per W incoming is actually a little lower at higher ambient temperatures, but is otherwise fairly constant.
I assume that you mean higher kWh/y/kWp, ie you get more generation out of a given solar panel in the south each year.
If you would have a high voltage DC transmission line already, linking the dessert and the clouded cities far away, then it makes sense. I think it is worth building them, but it is a big investment. Many lines are proposed, some already build, but with the current US administration I don't think it is a priority.
High voltage transmission lines are really quite efficient, and concentrating generation is usually the right choice.
That said, it doesn't make sense to have just a single place for the entire country, as there are multiple grids in the US (primarily East, West, and Texas), and with very long transmission you can get into phase issues.
Concentrating generation made sense when transmission was cheap in comparison.
But one effect of ever cheaper solar is that transmission costs start to dominate generation costs, because transmission is not getting cheaper.
Cheap solar and storage requires rethinking every aspect and all conventional wisdom about the grid. Storage in particular is a massive game changer on a scale that few in the industry understand.
People absolutely can control quality. A simple example is handwriting, I can write chicken scratch or something neater if I slow down. Working longer on many creative pursuits will improve the quality, by experimenting with ideas.
Only up to their quality limit though. This is a slightly different concept to a quantity limit (which also exists), but the general (imperfect) idea is that for your "quality level" (i.e. your ability ceiling), the only real knob you can dial is quantity. In practice, quantity seems to be a defining factor for pushing your ability ceiling higher.
If there's a one word takeaway of the article it's attitude, and I'm curious if someone with as foul a one as yours can compete as well. Let me know if you write something!
The reason you feel that way is because social anxiety correlates with anhedonia. The person doesn't engage in playfulness which is the basis of social connection across mammals. Because they aren't playful, you perceive this as "deepness."
This cognitive fallacy connecting deepness / seriousness to substance, and connecting playfulness to triviality and frivolity has unfortunately affected me (I remember arguing it in high school English class!)
Consciously adopting a "playful" attitude fixes my social anxiety, and adds charisma and humor to my character.
I have never seen a place more playful than a roulette or a craps table in Vegas, people high five each other, they form groups they trash the casino when the bank wins... but it is very shallow and not very deep, it lasts a couple of hours and then each of the participant go separate ways.
3d printing is not the approach that will yield organs. My money is on the work Michael Levin is doing on bioelectronics, where you essentially “command” (/convince) cells to turn into the organ you need by talking with them in cellular electronic language.
My mind-reading senses tell me parent might be thinking about the scaffolding approach where you show cells the vague outlines of a lung or heart in the form of an extracellular matrix and then they go "hmm, we are building a heart then".
Once CBDCs become a thing, citizens should have the ability to have direct credit relationships with the central bank.
We can then transition from a cash based monetary system to an accrual based one (similar to how businesses do their accounting.)
Public benefits, then, rather than being given out like it is currently (e.g. you get $200 for food stamps) will instead be based on allowing you to draw credit.
So, the eGovCreditCard would for example always allow any citizen to draw $200 per month for food expenses.
Potentially, if we want to do more generous policies a la "UBI," we could add e.g. $1000 always being allowed per month for rent.
Health care similarly, instead of if the archaic and very inefficient system we have now where those on the dole often go to emergency rooms, money is funneled through "insurance", etc... would allow you to draw money for regular doctor care. Maybe at a set maxiumim limit per citizen, e.g. $1M.
Your suggestion basically amounts to: digitize and centralize welfare. There are already electronic cards for food. If the money is drawn directly from the central bank as credit instead of from the state welfare fund, it won't make it any more efficient. In fact any experimentation among states will disappear. Also, if CBDCs become a thing, you could see a slow slide into behavior control. What people eat, and where they live becomes a concern for the central bank, because they get to decide who the approved vendors are for those things. "Central" anything is a design smell in most cases.
Getting rid of cash also requires proper paper work and identification so you can sign up for the CBDC wallet. In that case you're excluding the very people from the system who need it the most.
In this scheme, what prevents a central bank from abusing its position and denying you access to food due to ideological concern? Cash (for basic stuff) spends the same regardless of my political affiliation or criminal history. An employer can do the same, but I can get a new employer with some effort. I'm not sure I can switch to a different central bank easily.
So you're saying that instead of receiving $200/month worth of food, poor citizens should go into debt to the central bank by $200 every month? How would that be a better approach? Personal debt is already a huge burden, this seems predatory.
You can find 99% of the junk on amazon on aliexpress for a lower price, though without prime shipping.
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