I'm wondering how that 1% remained operating?

Moonlight

Please tell me this isn't a real thing someone published. It really needs to be a joke. My opinion of humanity is so very low, and I don't think I can handle lowering it any further.

Had to rely on Google AI for this (downvote all you want but good luck trying to find this without it), but it says dusk/dawn can produce 0.1% to 0.01% capacity. But inverters for DC to AC have a minimum threshold so it's nothing. So not that.

I’m sorry, buddy. It’s real.

https://xcancel.com/ENERGY/status/2080310429159444583

Maybe that’s why they’re allowing that company to build space mirrors; so they can point the sun at the solar panels 24/7.

~/s in case it’s not obvious.~

Seems like the official DoE account on LinkedIn posted it;

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/energy_customers-of-the-largest-us-regional-power-activity-7486076083239333888-CfN9

This does not appear to be real I cannot find any other references to this graphic nor can I find the graphic itself anywhere else

Damn it. I think that was the last little bit of faith in humanity I had left.

Firstly: I'm not the downvoter.

Secondly: you didn't have to - you chose to.

And as most chatbots list sources, you can always check them out yourself and cut out the middleman. Most of academia - some 45% do that. Another 45% don't even bother. A lone 10% still do things the old fashioned way. In any case, you're not alone in relying on AI to find obscure information.

With search engines becoming increasingly infested with low-quality and obvious-slop sites, relying on the same methods as the slopmasters isn't even a big stain on your morality. Because of it was, the slopmasters would be drowning in the ink required, and billionaires would already have caused another biblical flood of it.

By sunset, despite still high temps, 99% of solar power also failed.

They think high temps is what generates the electricity.

Did you know that 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot?

Anything can be true when words have no meaning.

Incidentally, this is why I'm heavily invested in battery technology.

60% of the time it works every time

In case you missed the comment above yours

https://lemmy.world/comment/24921010

It is real.

49% of us think we're not divided.

I should buy a bulldozer

For some of them it actually is, not all are photoelectric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

They have trade offs, like every power solution. One perk is that they generally cleaner to produce, since shiny metal is simpler than modern complex solar panels.

That being said, I have little faith in any report issued under the current administration.

I know you aren't serious, but I am now curious how much night time solar relaying it would take to pay off launching one of those satellites. I need to find numbers...

Edit-
Here it is- with updated math

Looking around I first needed to see how much energy generation nets. This is time and location dependant. I am in Texas. Out grid is run by ERCOT and they have their wholesale grid prices listed.

If I were to be buying reflected solar, it would obviously be at night, during the unfortunately lower priced off peak times. Looking at the grid avg we get about $40 per MWh.

But we now have the question of how big is the solar farm? And this size is now limited to the reflected beam size. According to reflect orbital their first satellite, Eärendil-1, has a beam diameter of approximately 5 square Km. But we have to factor in some beam dissipation near the edges, so let's be safe and call it a circle with a diameter of 4 square Km of usable reflected solar. This number also easily convers to about 1000 acres of land.

Utility Scale solar farms output 1 MW per 5-10 acres. Of we took the middle (7.5 acres per MW) our hypothetical reflected beam sized solar farm would output 150 MW.

At $40 per MW and 150 MW we are generating $6000 per hour. And with our twilight window of 6 hours we can generate $36,000 per night.

But how much does the satellite cost? The rented cost is one thing, but only peasants rent the sun. We are talking about owning it. The satellite is Reported to cost $2 million. But the mass produced they are claiming will cost closer to $300k. Let's pretend this becomes a viable buisness strategy to own these satellites and beam them to a reflected solar farm and use the $300k.

So our cheap satellite should take about 8.3 nights to pay off. The expensive one should take about 55.5 nights to pay off.

This also does not factor in lower luminosity, night time clouds, solar build cost, or launch cost. This is also factoring in today's energy prices that continue to trend downward with the adoption of more renewables. This also ignores the giant issue of their orbital height only giving 4 minutes of sun per pass per satellite. I don't even want to know how many centuries it would then take to pay off a $2 million satellite in 4 minute increments...

Sun Sets

Republicans: Huddle nervously in the darkness uncertain if the magic sky fire will ever return.

Half the population can't read statistics and the other third choose not to.

138 MW generated from moonlight is insane to me.

Solar

Sunset

If those kids could read meme

Sometimes I wonder if my whole worldview is incorrect. Perhaps I am in an insulated leftist echo chamber. Maybe these people who I have vilified have reasonable positions that I cannot comprehend.

Then I see the Department of Energy lamenting how solar panels failed because they don't work at night.

There is no humanity. Just ~20L bags of very dirty water. Fluid dynamics is the only thing that applies.

Remember when the DoE used to be all boring engineers and physicists, not adeptus mechanicus?

That still requires sunlight to work…

If you kill all the Nazis this will stop being a problem.

I’m investing in lunar power now

Best guess, sunset is being defined as a specific time. Sunset isn't necessarily the point at which all sunlight is gone, and even then, the time the sun goes down varies depending on where you are within a given time zone. If they just used an arbitrary time or an almanac listing for twilight for each day, they could easily end up including slivers of daylight in their post sunset data.

Which is really pointless since this is just the same old "BuT sOlAr DoEsN't WoRk At NiGhT" argument that idiots have been making for decades. But I suppose you gotta at least pretend to use real world data to make it look sciencey.

Kinda looks like a sunrise 🌅

Any companies in particular?

It requires sunlight to charge, not to produce electricity. Because liquid salt doesn't cool the moment it goes dark the plant can continue to use it to boil water to spin a turbine for a fair bit of time without sunlight. I believe one implementation only produces power at night, and spends the day collecting heat.
But yes, solar power does require sunlight at some point.

It's kinda moot however, because having now read the original post I was correct to assume they (the doe) was being disingenuous. The heat they seemed to be referring to was "the weather". As in "despite the high temperature, the sun still went down causing solar generation to ebb in a predictable fashion that grid operators were unsurprised by. This is why it's good we forced them to keep 150 year old coal plants burning".

Wow, that’s awesome. I look forward to your math update (but I would understand if it doesn’t happen).

As an aside, I thought your comment deserved to be acknowledged on the !theydidthemath@mander.xyz community.

~If you don’t like it, you could always cover my house with extra midnight sunlight as punishment. 🤭~

Academia calls these heuristics, not statistics.

Thank God we had you here to tell us what the slop machine sharted out.

US education

4th Grade School Textbook

looking at it more plainly the satellite only has 18 m^2 reflective surface are so if it hypothetically could perfectly reflect it to earth it could at most add equalient of that in solar energy as harvested electricity that would mean at best added 3.6kW meaning at $40/MWH it would generate about $3.5/day so it would take 235 years to pay itself back, almost a millenia if it only helps 6h/day

As a point of comparison, here's a press release from PRC's government on the same day: https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202607/23/content_WS6a617ed3c6d00ca5f9a0c5e8.html

China is building yet another 300 GW of renewables by 2030, meanwhile the US is struggling to understand the word "solar" in "solar panel".

The 1% of solar producing power at night scares me

Wow California has a lot of renewable energy. Even if all of it's imports are fossil fuels that's still pretty good.

Could be residual energy generation from the few operating concentrated solar power stations (generating great by reflecting sunlight and that heat persists for a time)

nah man I dont believe you

Generac is the big one. They've got a mix of retail units and industrial grade.

I've also got some money in Dragonfly, which has primarily focused on truck battery alternatives, but it's moving into larger scale products.

Then there's a big lithium mine being constructed in Thacker Pass, Nevada, which trades under LAC.

Well shit

That's from a private religious education textbook. It is not representative of the U.S. education system.

China is basically the only major economy that invested into making a transition off fossil fuels actually possible.

For sure, I expect once the process will accelerate now with Gulf energy exports collapsing making it a necessity for a lot of countries. And Pakistan is a great example where people took initiative themselves to start importing the panels, and now there's large scale solar available. This kind of stuff does make me cautiously optimistic.