Back to the Real world: It's 5:45pm here now, the sun has set on the eastern seaboard and everyone is home from work and school. The lights are on, Widescreen TV sets are on in multiple rooms, the kids are gaming and mum's in the kitchen, the stove running hot. And outside millions of street lights are coming on too, but no solar power now the suns gone? This is Peak usage time and will continue for a couple of hours, the coal fired plants are running full pelt to satisfy the needs of a million homes and businesses, yes they leave their lights on, and many will be open until 8 or 9pm.
What idiot ever dreamed up the idea we could run these modern nations of solar and batteries? Even if you spent a Trillion dollars, two days of overcast would put you back in the stoneage. Look at the cost of a LiPO battery, even a little one is expensive. For a car they range up to $30,000. And that's about what you'd need to run a home overnight, allowing for glitches in the Matrix etc. The whole idea was preposterous from the get go but that didn't stop a generation of morons brought up on StarTrek from thinking it could be achieved.
What I see is little test plants and little test battery facilities that are just as doomed as the solar thermal plants that have gone the way of the dodo.
It doesn't scale up. It never had a chance even if the total World GDP was put behind it because there isn't enough Lithium or silver or the other needed metals to build it all. Silver is essential for Hi-efficiency solar panels and there is precious little held in reserves and precious little in the ground now too. I know a bit about Silver, I've been investing in it for decades and keep track of what's happening in the market. Most silver actually comes as a byproduct of copper lead and zinc mining and the mines are playing out while new ones are increasingly harder to find. "Limits to Growth"
An Australian company has claimed high efficency panels using copper over silver
https://globalenergyprize.org/en/2022/0 ... ar-energy/But this is just company blurb and could just as likely turn into nothing. For all we know they could be exaggerating their claims just to get investment capital, that happens all the time, just look at Tesla.
Silver is the world's best conductor of electricity, better than Gold even. And it has one other valuable trait, it takes a long long time to oxidize. Unlike bare copper that tarnishes in a few days and goes dark brown in a matter of years silver stays shiny for years, eventually forming a thin hard white coating of silver oxide which eventually turns dark after 60 or 80 years. Of course exposure to various elements can speed this process up but what it means is that it's very stable encapsulated in a solar panel. For the life of the solar panel.
As we can see, mines globally produce about a million troy ounces of silver a year, that's nothing btw, last year 22 million metric tons of copper was produced. There is about 32,000 troy ounces in a metric ton, you do the calculations. There simply isn't enough silver for the job, and forget recycling at end of life, it's a one shot affair with solar because they go into the dumpster, the substrate being too hard to recycle. Perhaps Captain Kirk will find a solution in the years to come but he better solve the 35 trillion US debt first or nothing will get off the ground.
I'll hand the conversation over to Adam_B now. I'm sure he has some cutting edge technological information to share with the forum.
The 'peak oil' story is not over by any means. Fracking was a desperate and ruinous sort of pause, which has been used to crank up demand.
