The climate change debate continues.

[willedoo]

The solar farm near my place has the panels easily high enough for livestock to wander underneath. There's no livestock involved, but it's on a floodplain (ex cane land) so I'm guessing they wanted them well up out of the floodwater.

[Jerry_Atrick]

Yes.. Like on of these nuns, eh?

 

[facthunter]

That one goes way back.  Nev

[Bruce Tuncks]

In little old Adelaide, Don Dunstan tried to save the best farming land by moving the expansion out to Monarto which is in the rain-shadow of the ranges. Alas, he was ahead of his time and the concept was ridiculed and abandoned.

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

To the extent that water is the limiting factor, ( true for most of Australia )  solar panels will not reduce the carrying capacity of sheep too much. There is plenty of insolation to enable grass to grow. I liked the research which showed better wool from paddocks with solar panels. There was a bale of wool which sold for a million dollars, it came from shedded sheep. 

But roofs are surely a better option ? They have no other uses and they have a good angle built in.

[facthunter]

You'd easily double the efficiency by having the panels move with the sun's angle. Nev

[Bruce Tuncks]

Efficiency is irrelevant!   Counter-intuitive I know. What matters is watts per dollar. If a rotating frame is more expensive than another panel, then the second panel is the go.

[facthunter]

That's true enough but where space precludes it you use the more complex. Solar and wind are by far the cheapest sources bar none to storage completes the equation and green hydrogen etc  Nev

[spacesailor]

I have seen , yonks ago !.

A ram , gas filled that whem the sun hit it , it warmed up then extended the panel th a better angle.

It was the super expanding gas that made it into " popular science " or " popular mechanics " .

Yes that long ago , and it was a water heating panel. 

spacesailor

[old man emu]

After spending the afternoon desperately trying to divert sheet flows of water from damming up against my little abode, I'm looking forward to a longish dry spell. One won't kill the pasture because the soil is 100% full. That's why I'm getting sheet flows. Unfortunately, my abode is halfway down the slope towards the creek and we all know that sh..t flows downhill. I think the concern of farmers around here is whether or not the ground will be dry enough to get onto it with harvesters come November.

[facthunter]

Dig drains around it on the high side.   Nev

[onetrack]

I was getting ready to ask how you were getting on with floodwaters. Just to the NW of you was reporting some serious flooding.

If you're on sloping land, that's a bonus, at least you can get the water to drain somewhere lower. On flat terrain, you don't stand a chance, you just have to put up with wet feet. 

[Marty_d]

22 hours ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

Yes.. Like on of these nuns, eh?

 

That could almost turn me to religion.  Or at least, get a handyman job at the nunnery.

 

 

Edited October 8, 2022 by Marty_d

[Jerry_Atrick]

As I'm an athiest, I would rather see her with her clothes off.. lots of renewable energy would flow, too... Although, like solar panels, I am sure I have lost some efficiency..

 

Edited October 8, 2022 by Jerry_Atrick

[nomadpete]

Jerry, i rather like to see some decorations on my cake. Oh, BTW my solar panels are guaranteed to have at least 80% of their original performance after 25 years of hard work. Can you match that?

[Jerry_Atrick]

I think I was 100% at 25 years.. From about 35, things start heading southerly...

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

OK.. back to the boring climate change debate after a little exciting diversion.. This has sat in my playlist for a while. It makes very interesting watching. I agree, as a wan... er banker (of sorts), the pricing of the energy markets are distorted for the very reason stated.  Interstingly, economists can see the value of moving off fossil fuels.

 

Most interestingly, the oil lobby (or Exxon) introduced the climate debate to provide a smokescreen..

 

Happy watching..

 

[nomadpete]

Unfortunately, failures of wind turbines are always very visible, which makes easy viewing for those fearmongers who wish to stop the march of progress.

 

The periodic catastrophic failures of coal or gas fired steam engines (sounds ohsooo 1800's), are generally tucked away from sight, so joe public believe they never happen. Nor do they see the long periods of unavailability of coalfired power generators, that is due to periodic shutdowns for periodic overhaul of those behemoths.

[onetrack]

I've seen a steam turbine shaft from a power station being reconditioned. The size and complexity of the thing was absolutely staggering - about 15 metres long, about 2.5M in diameter, and row after row after row of exceptionally intricate turbine blades.

This was around 1990, and the reconditioning was costing around $500,000 back then (about 10 times the price of a new Landcruiser in those days). The reconditioners told me a new rotor was worth over $5M, and they had a steady income reconditioning them.

 

The steam turbines in power stations catch fire too, and they develop cracked turbines, and they explode. But you never see that, as nomadpete says. You can download an article in the link below that goes into detail, as regards the constant problems involved in keeping huge steam turbine rotors operating without blowing up or catching fire.

 

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Steam-Turbine-Rotor-train_fig1_245413012

 

In 1947, a turbine blew up in the East Perth powerhouse, it caused a lot of damage, but fortunately, no injuries or deaths - purely by good luck, more than good management.

 

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/95532032

[facthunter]

Parts are never going to be available for Plants  with any age to them as designs would be being refined constantly. New super critical ones only operate well at near full output and can't be turned  on at the flick of a switch. Cost/ Kw hour is many multiples of wind and solar and when they fail you are suddenly very deficient in Power. It's gone to zero in a big way.   Nev

[spacesailor]

Generating stations! .

Is ' Calder Hall ' still ' online ' .

Must be old by any power station age .

I looked it up  AND, il,s gone . (  47 years life ).

Was the first to supply ' domestic electricity ' . Now nuclear power supplies a quarter of the UK,s power.

spacesailor

[Chris Tarran]

Hi Guys,

 

Solar and storage farms are becoming all the rage.  The link below talks about a facility near Cleve in SA which is supposed to be the largest in the world.  Its a little different in that it uses mirrors to focus the sun on space quality (small) PV panels on the top of towers.  It used ground water to cool the towers pumping the hot water into a pond.  It also uses some of the energy to cool water in another pond.

 

It them uses the temperature difference to drive a turbine to generate power in the dark.  Some of the numbers for generation and storage capacity are staggering.  They suggest they can store enough dispatchable energy to power SA for 24 hours.

 

DA process underway and no contribution required from any government for a build cost estimated at $750M.

 

Cheers

 

https://www.photonenergy.com/en/photon-energy/yadnarie-solar-farm.html

 

[kgwilson]

What an excellent innovation. Now Angus Taylor and his LNP dinosaur mates will have to think up another bit of BS to replace their "We need coal for when the wind doesn't blow & the sun doesn't shine" even though that original statement is BS anyway.

[Chris Tarran]

It gets even better.  We have a company here (Cleve SA) that has just started a pilot project producing a cattle food supplement from a particular species of seaweed.  If we feed a golf ball size of the product to a cow every day it stops a particular process in the cow's rumen and reduces their methane output by up to 90 percent.  With a world population of 150B animals the potential of this is enormous.  Look up a company called CH4 Global or go to the link below.

 

Cheers

 

https://www.ch4global.com

 

Edited October 21, 2022 by Chris Tarran

[pmccarthy]

Feed them to politicians.