Swiss satellite antennas make a comeback as solar powerhouses
reuters.com
reuters.com
If you replace the panels with mirrors and have an ultra efficient high power panel in the middle the dish form factor would work (and this is how they built them in the 80s though I think they were heating water for steam back then) but that's not what they're doing here.
I do wonder how electricity pricing plays into this: having panels that are optimized for production in mornings and afternoons will produce less overall, but could provide more valuable power overall.
All of this means it's going to be more expensive than standard mounting hardware. Not by a lot, but solar panels have become cheap enough that even small differences matter.
I’m also not convinced this is the densest layout for the panels. Pretty sure I could get 5-10% more onto this dish, not counting removing the focus.
(In humor of course -- Switzerland is impressive, I'm fully aware that there's plenty of rural agriculture and other such "suboptimal imperfection" there etc.)
A flat plate won't have the rigidity of the existing dish, and replacing it probably will cost more than the project is worth.
It got famous in 2006 when it intercepted proof of CIA black sites (mentioned in the Wikipedia article as well). Until then, the Swiss public didn't really know the scope of the system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_(interception_system)
What a joke! Wouldn't everyone benefit from cheap green technology?
(BTW, this isn't new or Chinese. Both Japan and South Korea had done versions of this. Japan originally learned it from Germany.)
All this to say by the time Yellen or anyone has started complaining, the subsidizes are gone already. The Chinese companies has been incubated into very competitive companies.
The US is starting to reconsider the idea of industrial policies now. The recent op-ed by Marco Rubio suggests even the traditional free-market party is rethinking it.
> All this to say by the time Yellen or anyone has started complaining, the subsidizes are gone already.
Just because the subsidies are gone doesn't mean they haven't had their effect. Once you've already paid to develop the technology and build the factory, the incremental cost of making more units is much lower and you can outcompete companies that never received subsidies to do that.
> The US is starting to reconsider the idea of industrial policies now. The recent op-ed by Marco Rubio suggests even the traditional free-market party is rethinking it.
One of the big problems the US (and Europe) have is that subsidies aren't just money. We keep passing rules the cost of which can be absorbed by large established companies, but make it harder to get new companies off the ground. Meanwhile developing countries don't impose those rules.
That isn't a short-term disaster when you already have a lot of large established companies that have already recovered their startup costs, but it's a long-term disaster. New companies form in places where that isn't the case, and those companies start to take market share from your own established companies.
But it's a hard problem to solve because the inefficiency doesn't have a single cause. It's not some specific individual rule, it's the existence of thousands of separate rules that require teams of compliance bureaucrats to operate under, and identifying and eliminating the ones that can't survive a cost/benefit analysis is specialized detail-oriented work not easily turned into a sound bite. Meanwhile the ones who most know how to identify the least efficient rules are the compliance bureaucrats, but they want to keep them because that's their paycheck.
Oh 100%. I totally agree with you there but the implementation of these policies make it very hard for someone like Yellen to point her finger at and say "Get rid of it to play fair." because by the time she does, it's already gone. The subsidies are now in the capital of these companies as you've rightly pointed out. How do you even fight that? I don't know how the US can continue to defend global free market in the face of market distorting measures like these without putting up trade barriers. Otherwise we risk becoming de-industrialized over time.
Suppose the government collects taxes and uses the money to fund, say, transportation infrastructure, or Social Security, or the Department of Defense. Normal things governments do.
But also inherently a subsidy. Whoever is using the transportation infrastructure is receiving a benefit, whoever is paying the taxes is footing the bill, and whenever these are not exactly the same party in exactly their proportionate share -- and they never are -- then the party receiving more in benefits than they paid in taxes is receiving a subsidy.
We could never actually get them to balance, but we don't even try. Every tax credit and deduction is a subsidy and the US tax code is a zillion pages long because it's full of them. But every deduction is also a tax on everybody else, because if you get to deduct your solar panels then somebody else has to supply the money you didn't when the government pays Lockheed for fighter jets.
Which brings us back to the problem of subsidies. A subsidy is when you tax one industry and use the money to benefit a different one. But then you're hurting the first one. You can't just generically subsidize the entire economy, somebody has to be the source of the money. We often try to do this, but it's preposterous, it's the thing that makes the tax code a zillion pages long and then everybody gets their requested deduction but they all just require a lot of paperwork only to cancel out. Or create a net transfer to the constituencies with the most powerful lobbyists, which is even worse.
On the other hand, you can do the opposite of that, and create a net tax on the entire economy. All you have to do is waste the tax money on something inefficient, so people are paying but not benefiting. Now you want to know how to make your country's industries more competitive? Stop wasting tax money.
Which brings us back to my other point: Compliance overhead is a tax.
I bet those antennas can be tiled more efficiently with triangles.
Manufacturing would be more than +10% because existing lines would need to be retooled to produce it, and it would require different packaging. Volume will be lower as well, so margins need to be higher. 50% more expensive? Or maybe even the same price as a normal panel twice the wattage.
Installation would be more than 2x because standard mounting wouldn’t work, so it would be 3x the time (probably) plus figuring out how to mount them. Since you have an odd shaped roof, that would also likely increase difficulty/costs.
Very high snow load or flexible solar panels are similar (but larger) niches.
Looks like someone does make them though! And my guess is someone does already have all the mounting knowledge, it just may not be the regular solar install guy, so it may take tracking someone down.
[https://lasolarfactory.com/en/products/triangle-solar-module...]
Unlike the other products in their site, that link doesn’t have specs and wants someone to ‘contact us for details’ which doesn’t seem like a good sign.
This is also why utility scale solar has been the trend lately - it’s often more economical to turn some random low value flat land half way across the state/country into a maximally cost effective solar installation and then sell the power. Which means square panels on the simplest and easiest racking they can figure out.
Every random person figuring out their own bespoke solution is a lot more expensive.
if it will actually pay back that quickly, that’s awesome - then you get to bypass whatever insanity your utility is doing to cause those high prices. I haven’t heard of any up to code installations having nearly that good a payoff. Where are you located?
Bespoke is a lot more fun/cooler though.
See product page & screenshot: https://www.trienergia.com/prodotti/residenziale/73/modulo-f...
Most solar setups I see seem to focus on simple static structure that I presume is intended to be low cost / low maintenance.
Is maybe the altitude / exposure here maybe a substantial advantage?
Then when in the future they need more capacity they can put in better receivers and motors quickly.
Those dishes are monuments to what in hindsight is called the Space Age and while they'd probably fail to qualify for conservation for conservation's sake alone, giving them a second career as heliostats seems like a very pragmatic way too keep them, and keep them serviced even.
Trackers almost never make economic sense; panels are now so cheap that it is usually cheaper to just take up more area.
But when the hardware has already been deployed and then abandoned, this can work. Hence the word "former" in that quote in the article!
https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4633260773345847&w=4sSFiMh...
In Texas, where land is cheap and sun plentiful, they have a project where they're just laying them out on the ground. No support structure, no expensive clockwork to tip them this way and that. They want to get more watts, they buy more dirt-cheap panels and lay them on the ground too.
See, all that support structure costs more than the panels these days. Way more. You want to spend your money wisely, ditch the supports, buy more panels instead.
Plus, the support structure is free in this case, it's definitely cheaper to lay solar panels on those dishes than tearing them down just to lay panels on the floor. Also, having solar panels laying flat on ground level sounds like skimming on infrastructure to save money short term but having to pay higher maintenance long term: you have to keep the panels relatively clean for them to work, having them slanted and elevated a bit means that less dirt get on top of them and rain washes most of it regularly.
As the article says, there are many "large" solar panel projects planned in Switzerland, specially in the mountains, where the snow will reflect the light and increase electricity production in winter (where electricity is the most expensive). But it takes a very long time (sometimes many, many years) until those projects are approved, if they are approved at all. This is known to be a problem, and government did try to speed this up, but it still is far too slow. (I'm Swiss.)
Anyway. I'd guess they'd do better to lay them on the ground next to those dishes, than the expense of climbing up there and fastening them to that massively expensive superstructure. Not to mention the danger to life and limb, climbing around up there.
Generally speaking it's just a mistake to mount solar panels in some difficult-to-reach expensive place.
Optimal: A large flat space near the existing grid, with generous road access and clearance. On cheap land and cheap supports. Where it can be serviced, not too far from the service center.
Those dishes fail on half of those metrics.
Nothing in Switzerland is cheap, least of all land. Practically nothing in Switzerland is flat either. What little flat land we have is used for agriculture and cities.
And nobody is going to convince me you can't find the same square footage as, my god, some radio dishes! somewhere in Switzerland.
No, this whole OP article is eco-theatre.
Tearing the antennas down down also cost money.
I don't know the rules for new solar structures, but keep in mind in some places in Switzerland you can't even paint the house the color you want.
It's a little wacky, but at RF the dish performance isn't actually degraded as much as you might think by the panels. It's possible that at night the system could be used for its original purpose and then in the daytime generate solar.
I can maybe see just mounting them to concrete sleepers or something....
Sure the structure is free so why not, but even that needs maintenance, just ask Arecibo. It's unclear from the article if they plan to use these as sun-tracking panels, but the burden of that would make it rapidly economically unfeasible.
Putting solar panels on existing structures avoids all of those problems and produces just as much energy. There is a lot of space on existing buildings that doesn't yet have solar panels and we should be making much more of an effort to improve on that.
It looks really really neat.
It looks like something out of a scifi movie and i like big dishes.
And stop insulting my country.
WE have a long history of nuclear power and the incident in Tschernobyl was a real big WTF moment for us.
My parents were probably young parents and it was not clear at all what the real impact was. The news suggested to clean/wash all vegetables and still TODAY you need to check your hunt for too high radiactive values.
It was NEVER obvious and Fukushima showed again HOW unreliable it can be and how little we know about this.
Am i against Nuclear? No.
But you would never have been able to push for nuclear 20 years ago because it took ages to even get climate change on the proper radar.
I also believe, that at least in germany, we don't need it. It will be easier and cheaper and better to invest A LOT in PV, Wind, Battery and EVs.
Economy of scale, independency, cheap, easy, win-win.
Edit: PV are just crystals, they should be even cheaper to build than now and with more flexible PVs you can do a lot of interesting and reasonable things. You can use them as fences (there was already a news article about it), you can put them on facades, around light posts, on your balcony, use them as sun shades etc.
Wind became a lot better with no one really talking about it. And wind energy grows quadratically by radius. Big wind mills make A LOT more energy
Batteries will be a game changer. We need them for EVs anway, we use them in laptops and smartphones. In germany we have a very good power grid but in 2th world countries like the USA you have a lot of Grid problems. Add batteries to it. And even in countries like canada you have the 'outback' with grid issues after bad weather.
Alone the batteries for EVs will help a lot of providing necessary buffer capacity.
We tend to forget how big and impactfull our oil consumption actually is. Its a lot easier to have batteries and 'thin' power lines than transporting oil from the ground to refineries to gas stations.
The current situation is not better, its just paid off
> WE have a long history of nuclear power and the incident in Tschernobyl was a real big WTF moment for us.
Sadly yes, but at least we didn't lose our brain as much as Germany.
The whole 'we are psychologically damaged and so can't evaluate properly' doesn't really work for me as an argument.
Yes, my parents are also psychologically damaged by this episode, if you show them scientific data they get angry. The last 50 years of fear mongering and propaganda have worked well. The whole 'any mushroom might kill you' is just nonsense.
> But you would never have been able to push for nuclear 20 years ago because it took ages to even get climate change on the proper radar.
Nuclear is a good idea climate change or not. Most nuclear reactors were build for practical reasons not climate.
And nuclear would have been commercially the best option by far, if back then we actually evaluate coal plants the same way as we do now in terms of fossil fuels and regulation.
We already have the right combination, water and nuclear. But instead of having our own policy we adopted the 'Germany will surely have cheap energy for us' strategy and that backfired.
> I also believe, that at least in germany, we don't need it. It will be easier and cheaper and better to invest A LOT in PV, Wind, Battery and EVs.
My math indicates something very different. Germany in 2000 had 20% nuclear, even with minimal learning effects, building nuclear would have been considerably cheaper then all the cost Germany had for their 'green' (coal energy) strategy. Not just the investment, Germany also had very high electricity prices during that whole time. And with the energy crises the amount of money they are using reduce the impact of the energy crisis is immense.
And with all that investment and cost, they aren't even close to fully replacing fossil fuel.
Battery are nonsense, so far can only be used for grid stabilization, not any serious outage. And if you take the cost large scale batteries (that have yet to be invented) into account, the whole solar/wind/battery plan looks even worse.
Go look at Li-Battery prices, they are not coming down in price anywhere as close to as people thought. And the grid scale battery startups are all taking much, much longer then claimed or are bankrupt.
> Economy of scale, independency, cheap, easy, win-win.
A single nuclear reactor is economics of scale. And if you build many of them, you get economics of scale in that too.
As I said, even if you consider the price paid by UAE for South Korean plants (literally built in a country with no nuclear regulator and no educated workforce), and you just take that cost. Germany would have saved money. If you take into account the cost reduction from building 40-50 plants, its not even close.
The simple fact is the fastest most efficent and cheapest de-fossilization ever done has been done with nuclear. We have literal prove that this is true. When all these countries were sitting around formulating the Kyoto protocol, France already had a green grid.
P.S: Fukushima killed less people then German coal plants do every year. German coal plants have been systematically murdering the population for centuries, not to mention causing all kinds of health issues, particularly in children. All this ridiculous panic about radioactive mushrooms, despite there not being a single reliable cause of death from that while everybody is having lung issues because of coal. Its just incredible how people who are usually smart and informed on a subject believe all the Greenpeace panic propaganda.
Turning of nuclear before coal is a gross criminal act, and the people responsible should be imprisoned.
Articles are poping up that those small scale reactors are also getting more and more expensive. Wouldn't they not just succeed if they would deliver what they promis?
There are also plenty of articles telling me that all of those nuclear power plant projetcts took longer and are more expensive than they thought, including the last example of this "Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant".
Uran is not limitless and thorium is not finished being researched as far as i know.
And at the end of the day, you still have to handel radiactive waste.
While this is going on, PV, Wind and Batteries are getting cheaper.
Btw. we will have plenty of capacity available sooner than later. My EV has 100 kWh and this is already enough to buffer a whole house for heating and lights in winter.
All those EV batteries will be used for secondary live after normal lifetime soon. Regarding costs: i read the opposite that the prices are going down faster than people originally thought they would.
Would our world look different today if we globally agree on just doing nuclear? Doing proper research with proper money behind it and aligning globally?
Yes.
Did we do it?
No.
So what gives? I bet you the world would look better than today if everyone would vote me in as the leader of earth.
My point is: I can investe in PV, EV etc. now. I don't have to ask anyone so i do. People in rural areas can do that too, poor people as well.
PV/Wind and batteries are a fundamentally great thing to have and there might be a reality out there with so much nuclear power so that you could make h2 or methan for cars and heat houses by just converting it 1:1 but batteries and heat pumps are smart technology to have.