How do you plan an electricity system?Photovoltaics are very cheap. Photovoltaics can be dimensioned so large that you can get by with it even in December. This means you have a lot of surplus electricity in June.In the last newsletter: Hooray, we're building settlements with fast-charging stations and even cement factories in Africa that only run on solar power. But how do you even plan something like that? I first had to deal with this question in 1992. This resulted in the pages with different yields in the book "Aufstieg zum Solarzeitalter". Incidentally, these book pages led to the destruction of a patent troll in 2008. A patent attorney called me and asked me why the GEMINI house was turning to follow the sun. To generate more electricity with photovoltaics, which was very expensive at the time, of course. Could I prove that? Sure, there are pages for each month in my book "Aufstieg zum Solarzeitalter" (Rise of the Solar Age), where the calculated yield is shown turned from fixed to south. A patent troll had applied for a patent for houses that tracked the sun. This was then deleted after it was already state of the art when my book was published in 1993.
There are now enormous tools for this. In the standard setting for grid-connected photovoltaics, you enter data on the system and receive monthly yields. But there is much more. Under "Off-grid" you can simulate a photovoltaic system with a battery. You can enter a daily consumption.
PDF with this example
The data can also be used to simulate Power to X and reconversion in an initial approach. Days of full battery times could not be stored on average, Power to X is available. Days of empty battery times was missing on average must be produced.
Now you can combine photovoltaics and batteries. You can try to get by with batteries alone or add power to methanol. The first thing to realize is that there is no clear-cut solution. Completely different solutions can have the same costs. You can use a lot of photovoltaics, you can combine significantly less photovoltaics with power to methanol.
Only tiny photovoltaic and battery applications have a lower efficiency than large ones. This refers to applications under 10 W, where the efficiency of small DC-DC converters is not as good as that of large ones. But if you go to power to methanol, the smallest systems are 10 MW. I have asked several suppliers, smaller systems do not make sense because the costs per MW increase significantly. Such plants are designed to utilize surplus electricity and can be operated in the range of 1 to 10 MW. For reconversion to electricity, 8% applies from a tiny generator for a mobile home to 64% in the most modern planned combined cycle power plant. The 64% efficiency comes at a price: you have to connect 500 MW of consumers to a power grid.
Photovoltaics are very cheap. Photovoltaics can be dimensioned so large that it can also be used in December. However, this leaves you with plenty of unusable surplus electricity in June. These non-usable electricity surpluses are a waste, but you save on Power to X or a lot of batteries. In order to have 100 kWh of electricity per day in Salzburg, you can use 150 kW of photovoltaics, 150 kWh of sodium batteries and 750 kWh of iron-air batteries. All combinations with power to methanol investigated so far were more expensive. This was due to the price of these plants. 20 million for a 10 MW plant. Plus the plant for reconversion to electricity. Both are currently priced into the calculation at € 3,000 per kW. At € 2,000 per kW for power to methanol and reconversion, 65 kW of photovoltaics and 195 kWh of battery are already cheaper. "The last 5% is the most expensive". If you want to use every watt hour of solar power, it is the most expensive. Sizing photovoltaics to non-utilizable surpluses is a way to save money.
The EU photovoltaic calculator can do even more: daily and hourly data from 2005, which can be used to carry out extensive simulations. The off-grid calculator provided initial findings. But it only has one battery. For a simulation with a sodium battery, iron-air batteries and Power to X, you have to write your own simulation with this data. Not only a separate simulation, but also a strategy on how to divide the energy between the individual systems.
The detached house is dead - long live the new detached house! The old detached house wasted a lot of energy, the new one produces so much solar power that it has become the backbone of a functioning energy transition. Where to live?
It's not about whether the shares will be worth 10 times or 100 times more in 20 years' time or whether they will only be worth a few cents. It's about the future of us all. Will there be a big showdown between eco-fascism and yesterday's fossils, or will it be possible to overcome the deep divisions in society and inspire supporters of both sides to work towards a great new goal? Global prosperity and planetary restoration instead of saving, restricting, renouncing and climate catastrophe or peak oil and a little more climate catastrophe. Both sides must be convinced that there is no solution that is even remotely viable. On the one hand, it must be shown that net-zero emissions are a completely inadequate target and that the goal must instead be a planetary clean-up back to 350 ppm CO2. The other side must be shown that solar power enables a higher standard of living than fossil energy. It's about survival! The social situation in 2024 compared to 2004. Extrapolating that to 2044 makes for a horror world! If we are successful and your shares are worth 100 times more, this is just an addition to all the other achievements. One new shareholder said "I with my very modest investment", but €4,000 times €1,000 is also €4 million for all investments up to the opening of the settlement in Unken as a starting point for global expansion. There is a reward program for recommending the share to others. Two of the new shareholders have become shareholders through this reward program. Here are the details. |
