> Under its revised energy plan, the Ministry of Industry now prioritizes PSCs on Section 0 of its plan wherein Japan aims to develop PSC sections generating 20 gigawatts of electricity equivalent to 20 nuclear reactors by fiscal 2040.
Wtf is this headline. Why are journalists doing this shit.
Perovskites: non-silicon based semiconductors, in theory much cheaper for solar panels, in practice have lifetime issues.
"Japan unveils world’s first solar super-panel: More powerful than 20 nuclear reactors"
How can a "super-panel" be more powerful than twenty nuclear reactors? By letting salespeople write stuff, it seems.
https://www.ecoticias.com/en/japan-super-solar-panel/12474/
> Scientists in Japan have been discussing the possibility of using a material called perovskite for solar panels
> The perovskite tandem cell has a theoretical efficiency limit of 43 per cent, while the silicon-based cell has a theoretical efficiency limit of 29 percent. It is speculated that these solar panels will be able to produce 20 gigawatts of electricity by 2040
> Under Section 0 of Japan’s revised energy plan, the Ministry of Industry prioritises the use of perovskite solar cells over the less efficient silicon-based solar cells of yore.
> Japanese company, Sekisui Chemical Co., with the help of the Japanese government, is now working towards developing advanced perovskite solar cells for circulation in the global market in the 2030s.
Perovskites are a type of crystalline material, [most common are] methylammonium lead iodide perovskite (MAPbI3).. researchers have found that gaseous iodine produced by MAPbI3 make them inherently unstable.. and may not be a fixable issue.
[2017] https://www.asianscientist.com/2017/01/tech/stability-iodine...
Bullshit. Japan is full of homes with silicon-based panels on their roofs and they work quite well. See this neighborhood in Ota City/Gunma for example (use satellite view).
https://maps.app.goo.gl/7Xbi28BNuHSuV4wt7
This is a neighborhood full of people who work at the local Subaru factory who IIRC got a special deal on rooftop panels, but rooftop PV is still not unusual in Japan as a whole.
This is still great but not a 100% solution.
It makes absolutely zero sense for me, a homeowner in New Mexico, to have my own storage facilities capable of getting me through a winter heating season (using air-source heat pumps). It makes much more sense for the storage to be centralized, scaled and managed, while my own PV array contributes to it during the summer time.
Output from panels on a single home are highly correlated seeing large drop offs from an individual cloud, where solar farms across a wide geographic area experience different weather systems. It wouldn’t be cost effective but with absolutely zero storage the US could get 70+% of its electricity from solar. Add wind and hydro to the mix and you can get quite far without grid storage, but adding options lowers costs so there’s an optimal amount of grid storage for any given energy mix.
Utility companies gave away streetlights, security lights, etc., because they would raise the electricity usage generated at times of lower demand. This minimized the need to spin up and spin down generating plants and let them make money on what would have been otherwise wasted power.
Nighttime lighting doesn't consume all of the excess power generated at night. Utilities have cleverly shifted power consumption loads to later times through TOD pricing for residential and industrial customers.
It's no secret that I'm a big advocate for turning down lights at night. Increasing dependency on solar and batteries would make running electricity-intensive processes and industries cheaper during the daytime and reduce the need for baseload power at night.
I sometimes think about a sci-fi world in which there is a globally interconnected power grid, so solar panels in daylight India can provide power to Spain. And then when the sun shines in Spain, it can generate solar power for California
[0] because India would need to generate not just it's daytime requirements, but also Spain's overnight requirements, and so forth.
[1] because each nation/grid system would need to store significant excess generation to make it through the night/storm systems etc.
> Supported by the government, Sekisui Chemical Co. is now developing advanced PSC modules for their future application to a broad market in the 2030s.
Maybe not the best analogy for the most earthquake-prone country in the world?
In the period 1980-1990, I repeat in a 50% shorter period commencing forty years ago, France installed 34 GW of nuclear.
All I want is for someone advocating renewables over nuclear to give me a single example of a buildout of available-in-winter power exceeding that target with the forty years of investment available.
Or to agree that we have, fundamentally and quite deliberately, become worse at generating carbon-free energy.
And that's in Wh terms, you specify capacity but I guess you'd be annoyed if I replied that renewables beat that capacity easily, like China deploying 80GW of wind just last year.
Here's an article looking at per capita increases show that France and Sweden did really well but renewables are accelerating past their records:
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/solar-wind-nuclear...
The growth of renewables in France (!) over the last five years matches the best periods of nuclear rollout in Japan and the USA.
That disadvantage will manifest as cost and slow growth, among other objective measures.
The current buildout of solar/wind/batteries is definitely faster than anything we ever saw with nuclear.
Yes. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Nuclear has a negative learning curve: it gets more expensive over time. Solar gets (spectacularly) cheaper over time. You might not like it but that's what the built infrastructure and its invoices tell us.
How Record Breaking Perovskites Are Here NOW [2024-12-17]
Undecided with Matt Ferrell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEgkTnkNhRs
My noob takeaway, from Ferrell and others, is that solar cells will continue to improve (per cost-learning curve) for the foreseeable future. It's no longer the bottleneck.
We now need to focus on the current bottlenecks. Like policy, building codes, installation costs, inverters, coercing utilities and their regulators into accelerating grid improvements (to accommodate new generation, storage, and customers), etc.
Lastly, per Jenny Chase (Bloomberg NEF), we urgently need to double down on renewable competitors to solar, like wind and advanced geothermal. To keep those tech stacks in the running (cost of capital, ROI). So they remain commercially available for use cases not addressed by solar. Lest they be left behind and therefore more likely to stay on fossil carbon.
robin_reala•9mo ago