I’ve seen this floating around the internet for a couple of days:
One former Democratic Congressional Candidate thought he’s Tweet something similar like it was his original thought.
It's -454F degrees in space and the solar panels on the International Space station are working fine. Nasa has been using the Green New Deal for 23 years.
— Scott Huffman (@HuffmanForNC) February 21, 2021
Except…
The surface temperature of the ISS ranges from -250°F to 250°F depending on if it is facing the sun or not.
Moreover, the solar panels used by NASA are not the same as the ones you put on your house or on a solar farm. The panels use a high-efficiency material to capture as much energy as possible while still allowing the panels to be thin and lightweight.
The overall efficiency of the panels is lower because earth-based solar panels generally have multiple layers for photon capture. The ISS panels do not so to save weight.
As a result, the ISS solar panels are ridiculously expensive, about $150 million to cover the area of half a football field and generate 120 kW of power in direct sunlight.
One of the reasons the ISS panels are as effective as they are is that they are in orbit, with no atmosphere to reduce the intensity of the light hitting them.
The problem with the solar panels in Texas isn’t so much the cold as the ice and snow that reflects the light reducing the photovoltaic performance.
People who actually understand science and engineering know why this is a stupid argument.
People who don’t know science but are members of the “party of science” and just want to dunk on Texas think this is brilliant.
Solar panels also don’t work as well when it’s cloudy … as it usually is when it’s snowing or raining.
Vacuum isn’t “cold”. It’s… nothing. Unlike cold air, it doesn’t strip heat away from you. It doesn’t have water vapor to form frost, or water drops for sleet or ice. Removing heat from the living quarters is a bigger problem than heating them.
Further, NASA needs solar and RTGs because they’re as “off grid” as anybody can get. They can’t have a line run up to the ISS to draw power from a big, really efficient generating plant.
“Solar panels don’t work when they’re covered in snow.” Yep. There’s a barn I drive by often to get to one customer. Owner covered the whole south roof of his barn in solar panels. Which, this time of year, are 1/3 to 90% covered in snow.
I’m sure it’s great in summer time.
If memory serves, you have 700% increase in efficiency if you are out of the thick Earth atmosphere…
Not so much efficiency, as more photons getting to the panel. And the spectrum is different – unfiltered by atmosphere – so, as J.Kb pointed out in the article, you optimize the panels differently.
There are plenty of people confused about solar panels. A particularly hilarious example I saw the other day, in a newspaper articles that talked about upcoming “transparent solar panels”.
Hey, if you could tweak the junction to only pump the charge exchange using IR, that’d be neat for windows.
Again, though … we’d be talking about differential – small differential – increases in energy production vs. a real panel, with concurrent large hassles in wiring up said windows into the house’s power infrastructure.
reminds me of all the hype about “solar roads” a few years ago. Let’s use some of the most expensive materials on earth to make roads that are slippery when wet, that have some of the worse angles to the sun to collect electricity to power the roads.
What about frost heaves? Uh, we’ll figure that out?
What about plowing them? We’ll use all that excess power to melt the snow/ice from them.
What about the co-efficient of friction on silicon based materials when they get wet? Uh, BETTER TIRES!
They have a test installation of a few dozen square feet that hasn’t paid for itself yet.
I want to have off grid power sources. Not one, multiple. I started this search some 20 years ago. The closest I got was when I owned some property with running water on it. The next summer that stream dried up.
At the same time I found that the amount of power in that little stream wasn’t enough to power hardly anything. 10gpm, 200 ft of head generates 160Watts. I.e. enough for 50watt light bulbs. Not enough for my computer. I’m up to 50 gallons per minute before I’m close to 1Kwatt of power.
So I looked at steam. A 1HP engine is equal to a 746 Watt electrical source. I’m still going down this path.
Solar gives me an easy 160Watts for reasonable costs during good light times.
So my plan has become: Get some batteries, make a bank of batteries to hold power, charge the batteries. Use the batteries to do real work, then turn stuff off until I can recharge batteries again.
My favorite “I don’t understand the numbers” story is of a friend that was busying building a generator from scratch, 3D printed parts, knex and bunches of wire and super magnets. I did weight lifting so his idea was to lift a bunch of weights up and then let them slowly drop during the day to power his apartment.
The numbers didn’t work out. And it was to difficult, so I suggested moving water instead. He went down that path. Still not enough. So then he got the bright idea of putting a rain collector on the roof and using that.
I told him it was a great idea! And I thought I had seen that idea implemented before. Would he like a picture of it?
He was very excited and said yes. I posted him a picture of the Hoover Dam.
This stuff is easy, but it requires a lot more than people realize.
To me, this all really illustrates just how impressive an energy storage density fossil fuels have. 🙂
I’m reminded of a YouTube series by an engineer who tried to use the kinetic energy of his gutter downspout to run a small turbine when it rains.
The best prototype he came up with provided enough energy to power an LED. Not even enough to charge a USB device. And that only when it rains pretty hard (it doesn’t do ANYTHING when there’s no water coming down).
It also — by tapping into the spout near the top and not catching it efficiently at the bottom — directed significant amounts of rainwater into the ground under his house’s foundation, thus completely negating the purpose of downspouts to begin with, and if used long term would eventually generate tens of thousands of dollars of revenue for foundation repair and waterproofing companies. But hey, he lit an LED for a few minutes.
It’s not that large-scale “green” power generation is impossible. It’s that scaling generation to significantly — let alone completely — off-set demand requires much larger projects than can be achieved by a single person or household.
Hell, attaching an automobile alternator to a stationary bike and pedaling a charge to your phone scales better than the gutter-spout hydro!
Yet another example of “the Left can’t meme”.
It’s just a wall of text with a picture that doesn’t add anything to it.
“People who actually understand science and engineering know why this is a stupid argument.”
I dunno. It can be difficult to refute a meme. (See: Unarmed innocent blacks killed by police. It’s near impossible to counter that lie.)
And they’re overlooking the fact that it requires over half a football field worth of highly-optimized solar panels to power livable quarters for three-to-six people.
But a couple of cheap made-in-China panels on top of that 800-unit high-rise will make the whole building carbon-neutral. Sure.
*headdesk*