you are watching coldfusion tv. welcome to another coldfusion video in this video we're going to take a look of a state-of-the-art in solar power energy generation specifically solar power plants this may seem like an odd idea but it's really been picking up steam in the last two years or so. in this video we'll take a look
How Many Solar Panels To Power The Us, this video is brought to you by squarespace one of the easiest ways to build a website. the coldfusion website i'm building is coming together nicely so hang around till the end of the video to see how it's progressing and also get a special offer this month china, just completed the world's largest floating solar power plant, and it's now operational
this is kind of strange because china was once seen as the world's largest polluter, but now maybe they're cleaning up their act. the plants built by chinese photovoltaic manufacturer sun grow floats in water two to ten meters deep interestingly this plant was built on an old coal mining site that has been filled with rainwater because of the mining activities the water there is otherwise mostly useless the advantages of such a plant is that no land needs to be cleared and the water also provides ambient cooling for the plants environment? reducing long-term damage from heat. the downside it's only 40 megawatts of power output. for comparison australia is building a 330 megawatt land-based solar power plant and a 650 megawatt one is being built in india but if you want to take a look at the world's largest land-based solar power plant it all circles back to china
they have a whopping 1,500 megawatt solar power plant and for those of you wondering one megawatt can power roughly 400 homes so let's zoom out on our perspective here a little bit how do the largest solar power plants compared to the largest nuclear power plants? here's a general table of all the nuclear power plants over 1,000 megawatts as we can see they range from about 1,000 megawatts all the way up to almost 7,000 so we can say solar power plants are about half the average here so let's take a look at coal. the average here is a little higher maybe three to four thousand megawatts, so the solar plant output is a bit under half here
so this is very interesting a lot of people usually laugh or a very skeptical of solar power but as we can see the largest solar power plant already has half or just under half the energy output of the average large-scale coal or nuclear power station what's more about all of this is that if you look at the years in which these solar power plants are commissioned? it's all mostly been happening in the past two to three years. this is all very new stuff so what this means is that at this point? the technology is at its worst efficiency and the most primitive it will ever be solar power plants are only going to get better from here on. alright, so this sounds all pretty good
but what about the energy storage how do you store the received energy from the sun to use at night? well, there's a couple of options. you should go down the battery road with the implementation of a new use for an old technology specifically battery packs like tesla's power packs they of the utility scale battery packs that are used in california and also used to currently power entire islands in hawaii from solar power with this method the off demand storage issue could be solved for power plants that use solar thermal energy directly storing excess energy in molten salt is also a solution one of the more interesting methods i've heard of is a little experimental it involves storing energy within rock cavities such as mountains using pressure a friend of mine who i met at the st. gallen symposium is doing this with his company, alacaes i've already briefly mentioned him in my europe video
but we'll be doing a video together on this technology. it's pretty interesting stuff this experimental method could be a future solution to the off-peak energy problem with power plants that are in suitable geographical locations another problem with solar is that obviously when it's smudged or cloudy you're hardly going to get any power from the sun? for this reason solar power plants are probably going to be a complementary technology to take the strain of the main power grid until energy storage solutions get perfected so i know as some of you would be thinking what about the pollution caused by the actual production of solar panels well as it turns out the amount of environmental damage caused by the production is totally dependent on who's creating the solar panels in the first place. the environmental impact ranges from virtually nothing all the way to pretty devastating in places where environmental consideration isn't a priority
the main risk comes from the chemicals used fabricating solar panels requires chemicals such as sodium hydroxide hydrofluoric acid and carbon tetrachloride which can all lead to dangerous waste byproducts? according to studies done by stanford and the us government most of the dangers from solar panel manufacturing come from upstream in the supply chain this is where the raw materials are being treated in other words. it's most dangerous for the actual workers which using the panels however if regulations are followed. it is a safe work environment but the big question is that with china being one of the world's biggest solar panel? manufacturers are they following the proper workplace and environmental regulations? in the past a chinese firm was caught dumping toxic solar panel waste into a river
while this was a few years ago and since then from the limited data received china is getting much cleaner in the production pipeline it still raises some questions. at this point it really is up to the integrity of the firms to make sure that they're doing the right thing the safe recycling of old solar panels is also an emerging industry with australia leading the way so on this point if companies obey regulations and solar panel recycling becomes commonplace we could have a future with true clean energy on a large scale without waste. it sure, isn't the final destination and clean energy whether it's rapidly becoming a valid stepstone so why have these solar plants only been coming online in the past two to three years? well in a video that i did a while ago on solar i did mention that there was a rule similar to moore's law called
swanson's law it's a rule of thumb about how quickly the price of panels will drop in relation to time the cost of solar panels are dropping rapidly and will continue to do so so right now and in the future. it's enabling mass-scale solar panel production so there you have it, the strange world of solar power plants what was once completely unfeasible due to cost is now becoming a silent trend in the utility energy generation marketplace? what are your thoughts? do you think this is the right way to go and a valid step towards clean energy or do you have some reservations? against it let me know your thoughts in the comment section below if you like this video feel free to give it a thumbs up and if you need to this channel feel free to subscribe
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