By efficiency, I mean comparing all the costs associated with having a solar farm, including real estate taxes, an interest rate representing opportunity cost of land and equipment, system maintenance, installation labor, accounting and management, insurance or an amount reflecting risk of damage from a variety of sources, and depreciation with the cost of simply paying for electricity as provided by a utility company. If the actual cost of solar is more than what you could by a ulility per kilowatt hour, I would deem solar as inefficient.
It’s actually inefficient - you lose about 20-30% in the process. I used to sell quite a bit of overnight power to some pumped storage facilities. Cali uses it quite a bit and would like to install more, but drawing from aquifers and flooding valleys has its detractors.
That and vast distances, saw a huge loud bright impressive ufo up close 30 years ago, still can't explain today, can't prove aliens not weird test black project, but gives a chance of distance has a solution.
Xfiles last season, quantartined the solar system because all humans do is lie and war, explore Uranus as much as you like but don't leave the system.
I on back of napkin estimated there were one space faring civilization per hundred million stars. If that is accurate, then our Milky Way Galaxy currently has space five faring civilizations right now. In five billion years or so, our galaxy is destined to “collide” with the Andromeda Galaxy, providing potential contact with another ten space faring civilizations, not accounting for extinctions or the accumulation of long surviving advanced civilizations.
Issue is, we are likely only advanced enough for a few hundred years to send / receive contacts from outter space in all of human history before we destroy ourselves and get forced back to the stone age. And this will be the case with most species in the universe, most will never get our tech level, which took 1million+ years to get to then only a very brief window of tech.
Those are all what we called "levelized costs". And when you take that all into account, solar farms are right now delivering solar at prices as low as $13.50/MWH. By comparison, the next cheapest source of electricity is combined cycle gas which has a levelized cost of around $38/MWH. Those are real numbers, based on arms lengths transactions where solar farms enter into 20 year contracts to sell at that price, meaning they took into account all the taxes, interest rates, opportunity costs, O&M.... and are still making a profit selling at a price that's 1/3 of the next lowest cost source of electricity. If "the actual cost of solar is more than what you could by a ulility per kilowatt hour, I would deem solar as inefficient." then the reverse is true. And since in fact the reverse is true, solar would, by your own logic, be deemed "efficient". Not trying to win an argument here, it just happens to be my industry and I play around with these spreadsheets every day and know the numbers very well and the data is clear on this. You may well have last done a deep dive on this 10 or even as few as 5 years ago and your conclusion would have been accurate. It is most definitely not accurate any longer. If you're honestly interested in this and would like to talk about specific current numbers that you think I have wrong or that support your conclusion I would love to discuss them. This is a fast moving field, and it's important to look at actual current data when coming to conclusions.
no process is 100% efficiency, li-ion is maybe 90% charge/discharge efficiency, transmission losses another 5% I am actually interested as am formulating a business along the lines and last numbers I crunched, solar with storage was nowhere near close to shale gas powered plants. I'd love to read some sources as I considered solar but battery storage was the sticking point. Not to mention Donnie's tariffs on Chinese panels Mind you, I may have been pricing consuming from the grid vs going solar & was discounting the cost of gas infrastructure