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Climate change

Nice watching for a Sunday afternoon, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Doomsday Clock), quick start at 4:00



And here the infamous wordometer

As to this nice diagram… no comments required…

For anyone still indulging in reading, may I suggest the 1972 original book The Limits to Growth

Another sure way to entertain oneself is to use your favorite search machine and type either WWW III or WWW 3.

Have fun

Dan
ain't the Destination, but the Journey
LSZF, Switzerland

My PV installation is now about 15 years old. No equipment failures. Surprisingly, no decrease in output. Proper German stuff helps maybe It will take me a few years more to amortize it, but the main reason why it takes so long is that back in the days the equipment, particularly the panels, were much more expensive. And in my particular case, quite some infrastructural work for a 10kW peak power installation was needed.

In general nowadays PV should start making you money in a matter of just a few years, certainly less than 10. YMMV:

  1. Climate, obviously.
  2. Ease of mounting the equipment
  3. Usage profile/cost of energy saved
  4. Reimbursement tariff of feed-in electricity

And let’s not forget one thing. The cost of electricity will probably not go down in the years to come.

Last Edited by aart at 10 Mar 11:19
Private field, Mallorca, Spain

@Peter it doesn’t matter if the installer has gone, although I very much doubt if they will. The company has been around for over 100 years and is one of the largest in France. Secondly, the guarantee is backed by the state through a quality federation.
Personally, I don’t think those savings are minuscule for a 3 to 4 month period especially as this winter’s weather has been mainly overcast. Unusual here as records show this region as one of the sunniest in France.
I also paid much less for the turnkey package from getting planning permission to installation and to negotiations on connection to EDF than €100,000.
I chose the more expensive option of an inverter for each panel and with my welcome bonus from EDF and a loyalty bonus from the contracting company for the installation, it will have cost me less than €15000.
And that’s okay with me as I figure I will get an ROI over time especially if I eventually get an EV.

Finally, yesterday a bit of blue sky to get a look at the damage.

Last Edited by gallois at 10 Mar 09:25
France

The installer will almost certainly be gone long before 25 years.
There is no doubt that PV panels generate electricity. The Q is how much you paid for the installation. Those savings are miniscule.

There are of course other angles e.g. a PV roof is likely to be a requirement to get planning permission to build a house. This is happening everywhere, and if say you are building a 1M house (building cost say 300k+land) then spending 100k on PV is worth doing even if does nothing at all

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Airborne_Again wrote:

That is indeed true. Anyone who can come up with an ethically acceptable solution will be a hero.

We already have several methods to reduce population that work really well. The most effective seem to be combining easy access to contraception and economic security.

This discussion is very interesting – it’s probably the first time I’ve heard the argument that more CO2 might not be so bad for us, and that dramatic climate change on the planet could turn out just fine for our descendants. I guess if you use this logic we could argue that gigantic meteors hitting the planet could also turn out fine in the long run. Actually, none of this will matter at all in 1 million years, much less a few billion years. :)

Fly more.
LSGY, Switzerland

@Silvaire France and Japan have had a low birth rate for several years now and if things keep going the way they are there will not be enough indigenous people going into the future. No one to care for, pay for, or replace old people in the future.
South Korea has just announced similar concern. So how a Governments meant to depopulate?
@Peter my contract for PVs guarantees them for a period of 25 years and the inverters for 25years also.
I have an app so I can at any moment see how much they are producing and if one is faulty. If one is faulty someone comes along and replaces is with a new one.
The guarantee is backed by the State.
We have had some pretty awful overcast and rainy weather here for the last 4 months or so. But since they were installed I have produced 980kwh of my own electricity of which I have exported 162kwh to the grid. Therefore I have used 818kwh of my own electricity which is a saving of approx €163 on my energy bill and additionally I will be paid approx €22 for the electricity I have exported to the grid.
IMO electricity prices are set to rise year on year, which is pretty normal. So IMO as the years go on my savings will be greater.

France

When was the last time any national government, even in affluent or relatively affluent countries, made any statement about overpopulation as the root cause? That is the problem, governments are motivated to have as many taxpayers as they can, and educating people to the reality of how overpopulation is leading the human population down the rat hole does not even start to happen. There’s lots of ‘leadership’ in the direction that just happens to benefit the ’leaders’ financially, and essentially nothing else.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 09 Mar 21:20

But if I was to be honest, I did it for economic reasons, primarily. Thoughts of saving the planet were a secondary consideration.

I was in solar water heating business (the differential temperature controllers) for many years and the main concern when doing real payback calculations (i.e. ignoring the market-distorting grants and other subsidies like excessive feed-in tariffs) was whether the panels (and, with PV, the associated electronics) will last long enough to get the capital investment back.

With solar water, they categorically did not.

With PV, you may get lucky.

The main problem is that everything outdoors just rots away. Water ingress (it is awfully hard (read: expensive) to make a long term IP68 sealed enclosure, on the cheap; something I know well professionally) and then UV just finishes it off nicely. You can do it in 316 stainless steel, or similar, but you can’t make solar panels in stainless steel

The other problem is the average life of the power electronics… something I have also been doing professionally for decades. In brief, you can make electronics which is really very reliable, with MTBF of say 1000 years if it all runs at low power (negligible self heating) if stuff like corrosion is excluded, but you can’t do it with power electronics due to thermal cycling. I would expect not a single product in the kW range, built to commercial standards rather than space satellite standards, to make 25 years. I work above a car service bay and they chuck out the (non repairable) electronics boxes from EVs pretty regularly; probably as often as they chuck out (or repair) engines.

Then you ought to account for the pollutants from manufacture and disposal. People are awfully keen to account for the decommissioning cost of nuclear fission plants but they shy away from doing the same exercise for all the other power sources Buggered PV panels will prob90 get sent to China for scrapping Actually most of them are made in China now anyway…

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Silvaire wrote:

The solution is less people.

That is indeed true. Anyone who can come up with an ethically acceptable solution will be a hero.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

@Mooney_Driver I have just had 9Kwc of solar panels fitted to my roof. I will have to wait to see if I have done the right thing, but early signs are good.
But if I was to be honest, I did it for economic reasons, primarily. Thoughts of saving the planet were a secondary consideration.

France
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