<
https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar-power-is-going-to-be-huge>
"A photovoltaic cell is a very simple thing: a square piece of silicon
typically 182 millimetres on each side and about a fifth of a millimetre thick,
with thin wires on the front and an electrical contact on the back. Shine light
on it, and an electric potential—a voltage—will build up across the silicon:
hence “photovoltaic”, or PV. Run a circuit between the front and the back, and
in direct sunlight that potential can provide about seven watts of electric
power.
This year the world will make something like 70bn of these solar cells, the
vast majority of them in China, and sandwich them between sheets of glass to
make what the industry calls modules but most other people call panels: 60 to
72 cells at a time, typically, for most of the modules which end up on
residential roofs, more for those destined for commercial plant. Those panels
will provide power to family homes, to local electricity collectives, to
specific industrial installations and to large electric grids; they will sit
unnoticed on roofs, charmingly outside rural schools, controversially across
pristine deserts, prosaically on the balconies of blocks of flats and in almost
every other setting imaginable.
Once in place they will sit there for decades, making no noise, emitting no
fumes, using no resources, costing almost nothing and generating power. It is
the least obtrusive revolution imaginable. But it is a revolution nonetheless.
Over the course of 2023 the world’s solar cells, their panels currently
covering less than 10,000 square kilometres, produced about 1,600
terawatt-hours of energy (a terawatt, or 1tw, is a trillion watts). That
represented about 6% of the electricity generated world wide, and just over 1%
of the world’s primary-energy use. That last figure sounds fairly marginal,
though rather less so when you consider that the fossil fuels which provide
most of the world’s primary energy are much less efficient. More than half the
primary energy in coal and oil ends up as waste heat, rather than electricity
or forward motion.
What makes solar energy revolutionary is the rate of growth which brought it to
this just-beyond-the-marginal state. Michael Liebreich, a veteran analyst of
clean-energy technology and economics, puts it this way: in 2004, it took the
world a whole year to install a gigawatt of solar-power capacity (1gw is a
billion watts, or a thousandth of a terawatt); in 2010, it took a month; in
2016, a week. In 2023 there were single days which saw a gigawatt of
installation worldwide. Over the course of 2024 analysts at BloombergNEF, a
data outfit, expect to see 520-655gw of capacity installed: that’s up to two
2004s a day."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/dawn-solar-age-same-sex-thailand-nature-europe/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
