A 605 MW PV plant in Germany is now Europe's largest solar farm
A 605-MW project in Germany has claimed the title of Europe's largest solar farm, bumping a PV plant in Spain out of the top spot.
Good. I'd much rather look at this than the gaping hole of some old abandoned coal mine.
Do I have some news for you: https://gravitricity.com/
They use surplus energy to pull up weights and lower them when energy is in demand, using the principle of a grandfather clock. They are using abandoned mine shafts because they are readily available for this purpose.
That method doesn't scale. 1 ton raised 1m gets you 12m in an electric car.
Yeah, that's awesome!
There are so many other Quarry's and coal mines this could be done to. It would actually save the mine companies money as they don't have to fully return the space to nature.
I always wonder how resilient are these solar parks when a big hailstorm comes. There were some really large storms in Germany in the last couple of years and they caused really serious damage in the cities.
Its a major design consideration and they do survive hailstorms. There are always going to be freak events with very big hail that they don't survive but if you have one of those its not just the solar panels its everyones cars and windows and anything else remotely breakable in the area as well.
I'm all for it, but with plants of this size - or rather such an mount of relatively dense photovoltaic surfaces - i am thinking about the heat that these panels are generating. i am guessing it would be similar to such an area out of asphalt. if these panels were cooled the heat could also be used to warm massive heat storage tanks.
And by piping water to the back of the panel to cool it you make the panel operate more efficiently.
All with Chinese panels I assume
Better decarbonise with Chinese panels than keep burning fossil fuels.
Still better than nuclear fuel refined in Russia. Or gas from Russia.
If you want to beat the Chinese at solar panels, you need to go back about ten years and find a couple million workers that will take $2/hr to make them.
I'll look forward to updates on your progress towards this goal.
Australia sounds like it's about to donate $2B to some grifters that are going to pretend they can do this domestically. They'll take the money, produce nothing and live happily ever after.
Solar module production isn't labour-intensive, much less intensive in low-skill labour.
A bit more than a decade ago, Germany was the #1 producer of solar panels, drastically pushing down prices with advances in technology, manufacturing, and automation. Then the government decided to slash all subsidies (mostly about capping feed-in tariffs for solar), without warning, and without phase-out. Noone was prepared for that kind of thing so all the companies went belly-up and the Chinese swooped in, buying the tech for cheap with money borrowed from the Chinese taxpayer and began to produce panels and sell them, again subsidised by state coffers. We later slapped them with anti-dumping tariffs but by then the domestic industry was already decomposing.
It'd stiff be cost-effective to build solar panels in Germany, the degree of automation is so high that higher wages balance out with higher transportation costs.
Australia though don't get me started on Australia you're structurally a 3rd world economy reliant on export of raw goods. You're not even smelting that ore, just shovelling it onto ships.
