Going Solar...the best solution for Mars.

SpaceNut · 2024-07-04 08:35:24

Is Making Your Own Solar Panels Worth It?

You can buy a stack of standalone solar cells on Amazon for around $15. which in turn generates an electrical current. 60 of these cells adds up to a 400 watt solar panel, which can provide enough electricity to power small devices and appliances in ideal conditions.

SUNYIMA 10pcs Mini Monocrystalline Solar Cells Solar System Kit 50mm X 50mm/1.96" X 1.96" 2V 160MA for DIY Charge Solar Panels 61udEGEJhlL._AC_SX679_.jpg

SpaceNut · 2024-07-04 13:30:09

New chemical synthesis technique could improve organic solar cell efficiency

BB1ooep7.img?w=768&h=664&m=6

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.orgel.2024.106995

How Batteries Can Unlock the Full Value of Your Solar Panels

Modern lithium batteries are temperamental to heat and cold, but if they are kept under stable conditions, they hold up much better over the long term than the flooded lead acid batteries of generations past.
Fishman said she's been using batteries with her 2.4-kilowatt home solar system for over a decade. She opted to install more batteries rather than double or triple the amount of panels.
"They're still going strong after 13 years. We don't have any degradation on the batteries," she said.
According to FindEnergy.com, as a rule of thumb you should expect to pay around $1,000 per kilowatt-hour of a battery's capacity.
You can find batteries from as little as a few hundred bucks on up to $15,000 per battery. The average amount spent on batteries is in the top half of that range. Fortunately some of this cost can be offset by a 30% federal tax credit and other incentives.

tahanson43206 · 2024-07-18 05:09:41

The article at the link below reports on the success of Chinese owned companies in the US market.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy … 024-07-17/

It seems to me that the Chinese (taken collectively) have figured out how to do capitalism better than the US.

All the hand wringing about subsidies is beside the point. The US is a corporation, and China is a corporation.

The US has embedded ideas about how to do capitalism, and the Chinese have effectively adopted the best of capitalism while exploiting their management systems to maximum effect.

I suspect that the size of the populations of the two countries is a factor. The Chinese have been pumping out highly trained engineers at a rate far greater than the US, and the quality of the training has been steadily increasing while some in the US have been skeptical of Chinese capability.

The rapid development of AI and robotics in the US may provide a solution to the problem of insufficient person-power, but the Chinese are hard at work in both those areas as well.

(th)

Void · 2024-07-18 07:58:23

Poking my nose into this, I have to note that whatever any entity may develop per solar power may eventually end up on Mars, humans and their machines get to Mars. So, just as the modification of technology such as cars seems to have been a long term positive, it seems likely that those Chin Engineers will produce desirable effects in the long term. In the short term, however they may scare the children.

I read once somewhere that an Arab had said something like: "Arab Said the Arab has the power of the tongue, the Chin the power of the hand, and the Frank the power of the Mind ". Curious that the main ethnic group of China is called the "Han".

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

But the peoples surrounding China have hands also, and perhaps I bit more tongue and mind than the Han, I am just throwing a guess for.

We will want to utilize all of these skills to work with Mars. Computers and robots are perhaps equalizers for each group.

The problem of America at this time is it's two souths. (My opinion only). Actually, I am quite impressed with the old south at this point. I am sure that some of the things I might like the taste of will remain, but they seem rather sensible as far as I can see just now.

The New South are people with recent 2-3 generations ago immigration to this country. Dublin, London, Paris, Rome, Athens>>>
It is not proper to call certain places as North anymore in dominance, because of that influx. For the moment this causes an imbalance in the USA, in my opinion, as these people and their heritage are from the European South. Taken away from their roots they seem to have become rather liberal in my opinion. At least that is my perception.

But we need minds and hands as well as tongues. I believe that a rebalance is probable. The hostility that is exhibited towards Russian and China are in part perhaps a reaction to the New South not respecting the North, and the Old South. The Maga.

The Club Med, (Which I consider includes Dublin and London), have repeatedly though history pushed against the North in Eurasia. Not saying that Russia and China are not to be considered a problem, but history is history.

While the Arab saying seems to leave the Arabs and the Chin without brains, I think perhaps something is lost in translation. The Tongue has a mind behind it and the Hand has a mind behind it.

In the USA, the Old South and the New South historically both have a contempt for those who work with the hand. But technology is more of the hand and the eye than of the Tongue and Ear. But our universities are much more about the tongue, and ear than hand and eye.

Hand and Eye people are usually seen as lowly servant people by the Elites of the Old and New South.

So, big surprise, not so many engineers.

A rebalance is probably in progress, and I mapped out some aspects of its progression a long time ago.

Done

While nincompoops may quickly see their chances for a stupid binary civil conflict, I will note my opinion about the differences between Rome and Greece. If you study Greece now it is a Club Med Country. Ancient Greece had Exposure to the Black Sea and what was beyond.
Rome only had periodic refreshments from the North and the East.

The whole notion of democracy is claimed from these, but Iceland has had a republic for 1000 years or so, with one break of 50 years while occupied. Greek Democracy was very tentative, and Roman was periodic. Both had slaves. And by the way often slaves came from the Slavs, which would have offset the excesses of the Club Med to some degree. I believe that when cut off from the North and East of Eurasia, both Greece and Rome degenerated.

The New South loves the word Democracy, as it is easy to corrupt. But we are a representative Republic/Republic(s).

It is well worth repairing. It may do pretty good, if it can maintain itself in the "Kingdom of Balance". Having all three assets, Tongue, Mind, Hands, it may well be able to go to Mars with anything that the Tongues, Minds, and Hands have developed anywhere on this planet.

Done

Ancient Greece: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece
Image Quote:

It can be seen that the unlike the Romans the Greeks had a better balance of Club Med and the Black Sea (Eurasian Influences).

Under Alexander, they even went into India for a time.

The Romans even at their greatest expanse had less of a balance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire
Image Quote:

Someone may say well, the Italians do have impressive technology. Well, the north of Italy was settled by Franks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po_Valley

Greece having been a nexus of collection of things from the ancient world, at least of Eurasia, Club Med, and perhaps India, to a small degree, no wonder it was a center of development for a time.

India and the USA being somewhat balance, no surprise, that for the moment at least representative government of some degree is practiced.

Europe has tried balance but made the mistake of trying to rape the East again. It has not gone well.

South America has hopes.

Done

Last edited by Void (2024-07-18 08:59:06)

Oldfart1939 · 2024-10-16 22:52:28

I happened upon this short video of what I really don't want to see happen to Mars.
When Louis started this particular thread, I cautioned that the landscape would be overwhelmed by solar panels.
"Enjoy!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym1nmefir3w

Calliban · 2024-10-17 16:38:41

Whilst solar powerplants may be visually unappealing, a larger problem on Mars is the materials needed to build them. On Earth, photovoltaics are the most resource intensive energy source that we have by a significant margin. On Earth, solar PV has experienced almost miraculous price drops since the turn of the century. A large part of this is due to the use of very cheap coal-based energy, mass production and use of slave labour. None of those things exist on Mars and sunlight is only half as intense. That means to produce the same power at any lattitude, the plant must be twice as large. Using solar thermal power, most of the material inputs can be steel or cast iron, which are much less energy intensive than silicon-based PV.

Power density will still be low, requiring a lot of refined metal for each MWh of electricity or heat. This presents a significant problem on Mars because refined materials will be expensive. The high energy density of uranium makes it a more desirable optionmeven if nuclearfuel must be imported from Earth. A single gram of uranium will yield some 21,000kWh of heat in a fission reactor. This pretty much guarentees that fission will be the dominant energy source on Mars because the powerplant needs only a few percent of the materials needed to build a comparable solar plant.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-10-17 16:50:09)

kbd512 · 2024-10-18 15:06:07

The irony of our metal resource conundrum is that Earth's crust is 28.2% Silicon, and 8.23% Aluminum, and 5.63% Iron by mass, for a combined 88.16% (edit: should've been "42.06%", not "88.16%", which includes Oxygen) of total crustal mass. We have metal galore. You'd think it would be trivially easy to extract enough Silicon to make the base metal for semiconductor-based microelectronics (computers and photovoltaics), as well as Aluminum for high voltage conductor wiring. Unfortunately, all the contaminants and the incredibly stable bond Oxygen forms with Aluminum and Silicon, or Iron for that matter, ensures that producing just the base metals for semiconductors and conductor wiring, with the required level of purity, are two of the most energy intensive mass manufacturing activities that humans undertake.

This would be far less problematic if someone could figure out some cyclical process whereby Oxygen was "stolen" from Silicon and Aluminum, using a more energy favorable reversible process. I'm not a chemist so I don't know what that would entail, but we're after some sort of reversible reaction whereby we "steal" oxygen from the desired base metals, and then strip the Oxygen from whatever chemical or chemical cocktail we've whipped up for that purpose, while consuming less energy overall than what high temperature Silicon and Aluminum smelting requires. I would assume a lot of people far smarter than I'll ever be have already attempted to do that. Maybe it's possible but complex and costly. Maybe it's just not possible, and the methods devised are still used, such as Hall-Heroult method for electrolytic Aluminum refining.

This is what I call "lying with numbers":

We have lots of Copper, but not enough to make everything electric if batteries must provide fast storage, hence the requirement for Aluminum. What the infographic above does not explain is what would be required to extract every last kilo of that 2.1 billion tons. This is where the "lying with numbers" starts. We would literally have to turn the Earth's crust "inside out" to get at some of that Copper. Furthermore, energy input increases exponentially as you grind rock to finer grain size to use the chemical flotation bath method, which hasn't changed since the 1920s because no more efficient process exists that we can devise, in order to extract the Copper ore.

For example, we could level the entire Andes Mountains because it's one gigantic low grade Copper deposit. Are we really gonna chop down the entire Andes Mountain range to get at all the Copper it contains, or do we need a "come to Electric Jesus" moment?

Jimi Hendrix was high on LSD when he wrote, "I stand up next to a mountain, and I chop it down with the edge of my hand." Voodoo Children aside, voodoo doesn't work for energy economics. Leveling a mountain requires jaw dropping amounts of energy, even though it can technically be done.

Since the probability of us getting at even a minor fraction of that Copper is slim to none, all ore grades are steadily declining, all energy input is going up, and all the dollars being dumped into opening new mines have already been allocated, is that not an indicator that we're gonna need a better plan (even if we remain fixated on electrification)?

Solar thermal power and energy storage requires, roughly speaking, 2 orders of magnitude less energy input. You still need exponentially more metal and concrete than you do for nuclear power solution, but the metals required are mostly steel and Aluminum for reflector coatings only.

What the graph above indicates is that a bare minimum of 90% of all the solar energy input can be thermalized into "sensible heat" energy. Commercial photovoltaics of the variety we can actually mass manufacture convert about 25% of the photonic energy into electric power. Even if the follow-on conversion to electricity was only 35% efficient, you still get 315W/m^2 with 1,000W/m^2 of input power from the Sun. If you insist on using direct conversion with photovoltaics, you only get 250W/m^2. That means solar thermal gives you 26% more power to work with. In reality, we can use larger 8m to 10m trough style reflectors to bump up the conversion efficiency to 45%, or 405W/m^2, which means 62% more power available.

Photovoltaics last for 25 years. Solar thermal lasts for at least 75 years with little to no degradation in output over that time. As long as the metal doesn't corrode and is kept clean, solar thermal makes as much power as the day it was originally built. Electronics and batteries degrade quite a lot over 25 years. In practice, no battery we make actually lasts for 10 years under daily use, or it's lost so much capacity that it's not capable of storing the amount of power we need to survive. On a planet like Mars where near-zero corrosion takes place because free Oxygen and water vapor in the atmosphere are exceptionally low, so the reflector field is almost immortal. Only the diurnal temperature swings will eventually "crack" the "hard candy shell" (aerospace coating) we apply to the Aluminized steel reflector panels.

We can use a very thin sheet steel as the reflector material, stamped and ribbed for added strength, coated with Aluminum using hot dip or CVD, polished, and then overcoated to prevent abrasion (very important on Mars) or even a modest amount of corrosion (far less likely on Mars), because the dynamic pressure of the wind on the reflector is exceptionally low. Maybe we don't even want a traditional polished coating, but rather a very fine micro-texture coating that is faster and cheaper to apply but more durable because minor scratches or surface imperfections won't affect specular reflectivity as greatly as with a true "mirror quality finish". SureFire applies this sort of micro-texture coating to the Aluminum reflector found in some of their military flashlights. The reason for using a texturized coating in those flashlights is more uniform reflection / distribution of light. There is not a very tight / bright beam with a very large but irregular "beam spill area". There are no "hot spots" and "cold spots" using that reflector shaping. It's very uniform. The beam can still be tightly focused, but it's as if over the entire area covered by the beam, you have a singular beam intensity. This could be better for the ultimate durability of the receiver tube assembly which carries the working fluid through the plant. The reflector will need to be modestly larger to achieve a given temperature, but the uniformity will be overall more efficient and better for durability of all parts of the trough- less warping of the metal over time.

Since the metal we require is Iron and Aluminum, rather than Silicon, the energy input to produce metal will be lower. Despite Silicon's extreme abundance, obtaining extreme purity metal from the ore is where the energy sink comes into play. The Iron and Aluminum used by a solar thermal power plant do not require extreme purity to produce high quality energy output. The manufacturing methods described are already in use by Earth-based industry for making cars, particularly sheet steel stamping, Aluminized coatings of exhaust manifolds / piping, and ceramics-based overcoating to create the "hard candy shell" to protect the metal from corrosion.

This reduced complexity solar technology can still provide substantially greater total energy output over time, per unit of energy input into the entire manufacturing and construction process. Your "up-front" energy investment advantage is significant by itself, but since all the equipment won't have to be replaced at least 3 times over 75 years, the advantage compounds over time. This concept is easier to understand in terms of dollars and cents. Treat 1 Watt-hour of energy input or output as $1, to produce however many kilograms of metal of whatever kind, as required, and you will get a dollarized energy output-to-input ratio over time. That is the "payback ratio" associated with whatever technology choices you make.

Treat the production of 1kg (50MJ/kg) of virgin steel as costing $13,889 in terms of energy input. A 1mm thick 1m^2 sheet of steel weighs 7.85kg (7,850kg/m^3 of steel / 1,000), so it costs $109,029. At 35% efficiency, you get 175W/m^2/hr (500W/m^2 * 0.35) or 1,050Wh/m^2/day (500W/m^2 * 0.35 * 6hrs), so payback is $28,743,750 (1,050Wh/day * 365 days per year * 75 years), in terms of energy output over 75 years. Energy payback ratio is therefore 263.63:1 (output:input). Even over 25 years, it's $9,581,250, so 87.88:1. You need more metal for the support structure and receiver tube, but for energy cost to equal 1.6kg of polysilicon, we're talking about 30kg of steel per square meter, and real life photovoltaic panels are always heavier per square meter due to the extruded Aluminum frame and PVC backer the photovoltaics are mounted on, both of which consume higher energy metals. This is before we add the weight of electrical wiring and power inverters.

1kg (1,500MJ/kg) of virgin polysilicon costs $416,667 in terms of energy input. You need 1.6kg to 2.8kg of polysilicon per square meter of photovoltaic panel, according to NASA, so cost is $666,667/m^2. At 25% efficiency, you get 125W/m^2/hr (500W/m^2 * 0.25) or 750Wh/m^2/day (500W/m^2 * 0.25 * 6hrs), so energy payback is $6,843,750 (750Wh * 365 days per year * 25 years), in terms of energy output over 25 years (assumes zero equipment degradation over time, which is not reality). Energy payback ratio is therefore 10.27:1 (output:input). If your panel efficiency is 35%, your ratio is still 14.37:1 (again, with zero degradation over time). Every 25 years, you produce new panels, so absent much more efficient conversion or much lower energy input cost, this is paltry in comparison to solar thermal.

At only 10.27:1, our energy payback ratio using photovoltaics is so low that we're in serious danger of "going upside down". 25 years later, we must once again pony-up all the energy required to create the next generation of photovoltaics. The energy cost of recycling polysilicon-based photovoltaics exceeds the energy cost of producing virgin metal, which is why nobody does it. With the aid of simple energy math and treating watt-hours of energy as dollars, using electronics to generate electricity is a loosing game, regardless of where the game is played. The only true "game changer" would be a dramatically more efficient photovoltaic cell or a dramatically reduced energy input to produce the quantity of polysilicon required. In the real world, NASA pays $1,000,000 per kilowatt for the privilege of using 35% efficient photovoltaics on Mars-bound spacecraft. Triple-junction 35% efficient photovoltaics tech is quite real, but the cost of using it is equally "unreal". Energy is money and money is an abstract representation of energy. There is no way around this issue.

That is why Mars colonization efforts require a "nuclear spark plug" to "light the fire" underneath that process. Everything else has an unfavorable energy payback ratio. We need that 24,000,000:1 ratio to start playing this interplanetary colonization game. If fusion could feasibly deliver 240,000,000:1, that'd be "just about right" for the scale of the operation we want. We'll use our nuclear reactors to build-out the necessary solar thermal power plants and thermal energy storage, to melt ice, perform electrolytic metals refining, and grow food. A Mars colony is going to be a tank farm (humans, food, water, gases, molten salt, industrial chemicals, etc). Human civilization was built on steel and concrete. Nothing fundamentally changes after we arrive on Mars, apart from providing air and water and food in pressurized enclosures. Technologically advanced human civilization is still very much a "concrete and steel" endeavor.

A colony of a million people realistically requires around 100 gigawatts of power, at all times. A Ford class super carrier generates about 32kW per person. They have a supply of air to breathe (requires very little energy input beyond circulation and filtration) and water to drink (minimal energy input). They most certainly do not grow their own food aboard ship, nor are they building pressurized living spaces for people.

Last edited by kbd512 (2024-10-18 21:27:03)

Calliban · 2024-10-18 16:49:35

Kbd512, good post.

If Mars does indeed contain large amounts of trapped methane, it will make the job of building up solar thermal capacity a lot easier.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adm8443

We can reduce powdered iron oxides to iron metal by blowing methane over it at 800°C.

4Fe203 + 3CH4 = 8Fe + 3CO2 + 6H2O

The iron powder can be converted into mild steel using an electric furnace. We can also use methane to make acetic acid. That would allow food production without sunlight. A large chunk of the 100GWe that was calculated as being needed to support a million people is needed for food production. The original plan was to grow plants under LED lights. If Mars fossil methane can be used to support food production through acetate production, then we avoid the need for a huge chunk of power supply. Martian natural gas is a game changer, if we can find it. Even without atmospheric oxygen to burn it in, natural methane would be an enormously useful resource on Mars.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-10-18 16:52:32)

tahanson43206 · 2024-10-20 07:50:39

The story below this heading reports on a major investment by Google to produce solar power in Texas....

One of the largest solar projects in the US opens in Texas, backed by Google
JENNIFER McDERMOTT
Fri, October 18, 2024 at 2:36 PM EDT·3 min read
13

One of the (to me surprising) claims in the article is that most components are made in the US.

If a NewMars member has the time, please investigate to add some detail to that report.

(th)

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Re: Going Solar...the best solution for Mars.

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