@Finally

Er, not really. At 60 deg north we'll be charitable and say the incident solar radiation gives you 400W/m2. Ill charitably say your car might have 6 m2 of your new paint, so youll get 2.4 KW of useable power in ideal conditions with 100% efficiency.

Even a 1.3 suzuki swift turfs out 68KW, and youre going to need a lot more than that if you want to store some in batteries for driving at night, or in a tunnel.

Im afraid you wont ever really see a useable solar powered vehicle anywhere out side of the large deserts, and the ones there wont be v ery good.

With the quoted efficiency, your 6m2 car will currently have about 400W available power on a very sunny day in July in scotland. This might power a half decent stereo.

Im not a naysayer petrolhead, Im just pointing out that the sun doesnt burn bright enough.

Futureshock is coming

Well, you can have a solar powered vehicle, you'll just have to settle for much lower speeds. Pedalling it will help too. My electric bike has a 250W motor in the wheel, so 2.4kW would be plenty. The notion that we all need to charge round in a ton of steel at 70mph really is quite absurd. The human race is about to get bitchslapped by reality very soon in the shape of peak oil.

Him or me?

Well, put it this way, whose post did she reply to?

Somehow I don't think Sarah is asking for a ride in your hummer anytime soon.

aye

but money has to come from somewhere. Im sure you dont want to research for 10 years gratis, then mine refine and manufacture for gratis.

Smelting

I see smelting as something that very well could take advantage of "green" power. Unlike just about everything else that is a power hog, smelting doesn't require that power to be stable. It merely requires that power to be cheap. (You don't have to smelt all day. If there is a tonne of cheap wind or solar available for 8 hours a day, you smelt then, and power down when the expensive base load is all that's available.)

You could run smelters on the "excess power" generated by wind/solar/tidal, leaving the base load power for the things that need it. It might be one of the only ways to ever use intermittent power sources like wind/solar/tidal. (Tidal might be ideal for smelting, because while it may be intermittent, at least it’s predictable.)

Re: Smelting

I think that you'll find 700MW Manapouri hydro power station in the south Island of New Zealand already supplies the bulk of power to the Bluff Aluminium Smelter. It takes advantage of cheap power from Meridian and if the smelter was shut down, you could close one of the thermal NZ power stations. Nice offshore Industry vs energy production vs jobs debate to be had by someone

@ AC 23:16

I see hydro as good base load power. In my happy world, I'd have smelters and the like run from massive wind/solar farms, and impinging on good base load as little as humanly possible.

As you say: there’s a big debate to be had as regards offshore industry vs energy production vs jobs to be had here. What use is renewable power if it is so thready that you absolutely rely on fossil (or massive amounts of territory-destroying hydro) to smooth out the grid? IMHO, not bloody much. If, however, you can tie specific industries (such as smelters) to the thready renewables plants as “smart grid clients,” (or whatever the modern buzzwords for that idea are,) then renewables are useful everywhere you have such industry.

Don’t have much industry to speak of? Massive wind/solar farms may be a pretty bad idea then. Power generation technologies should be tied as realistically as possible to the types of power consumers that exist on that grid. I constantly read about the UK’s absolute dearth of industry, yet apparently there are huge programs underway to build stupendous wind farms. I have to ask what possible use these wind farms could be, since without industries like smelters that can make use of thready power, you’re going to end up with a lot of very expensive fast-reaction fossil plants to smooth the power out. (The UK simply doesn’t have the necessary free territory to use hydro as the fast-reaction generation.)

There are other examples of what I consider some pretty loopy generation decisions, but it really boils down to “I don’t think someone sat down and thought this all out.” Everything I read in the media, or from government press releases rely on technologies that either don’t exist, (clean coal, high-efficiency photovoltaics, fusion, etc.) or aren’t even close to ubiquitous enough, (consumer smart-grid devices, batteries in electric cars to smooth the grid, etc.)

The debate that needs occur read more like “the kind of society we are aiming for via our economic and tax policies will have a direct impact on the kind of energy production we require, as well as the jobs available. This will inform our educational requirements as well as the kinds of heath care issues we will face, longevity, useful working age of the population, etc.” It’s not just industry, energy and jobs...it is accepting that what modern governments do is tantamount to complete economic and social engineering...and as such the “big picture” needs to be carefully considered. Everything affects everything else... no society can make informed decisions about even the “simple things” like power generation without considering how it fits into the “bigger scheme of things.”

@John Smith 19

Hey John, I stand corrected. I honestly don't have much idea (beyond the basic physics of the work) how modern smelters are run. I picked them because they eat ridiculous amounts of power. The other two examples on the edge of my brain are hydrogen cracking and desalinisation.

The vision I have in my head for smelters runs something like this:

When power is about to become available, (win picks up, daybreak, etc.) the various bits of "smart grid" tech talk to each other, and the plant warms up. Similarly, there is usually some warning before major disturbances in power availability with renewable, (dusk, approaching calm, etc.) allowing the smelter to finish it's melt and not start a new one. Renewables are not so erratic that there isn’t at least a few minutes warning ahead of power availability changes: our existing grids would implode were this the case.

The smelters could run on base load if absolutely necessary, (say to finish a melt, or to keep the various bits at minimum temperature when no "cheap power" is available.) The idea though is that all the real heavy lifting be provided by renewables.

Ideally your smelter could run multiple "plants" as part of the same operation, only spinning them all up if enough cheap/renewable power is available.

If smelters aren’t the best example of this kind of power utilization, then I apologise to you, and all commenttards. I admit to a lack of understanding about smelting specifically, but hope there are some of those major power-gobbling industries out there that can be shoe-horned into this utilization scenario. If there aren’t, then given the huge push by various governments for wind power, we’re pretty boned.