Alec Stapp: Contender for favorite chart of all time: Predictions vs. Reality for solar energy.

Contender for favorite chart of all time: Predictions vs. Reality for solar energy.

Recently I’ve enjoyed: johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/06/futu...

Damn ya beat me to it

You can uniformly bank on almost all predictions being wrong. You just won't be able to guess in which direction.

Prediction markets devastated.

Long straddle options ftw

But if you predict the predictions will be wrong, you create a paradox and the world will end

Worth it just to be right

What actual users have found is that solar panels still make power when it's raining You can install them quite far north and they still pay for themselves in a few years You can use them to roof a field and still farm underneath them. Some crops actually do better

This is one of the big success stories The ones that I've seen in BC are high enough to operate a combine under them www.agritecture.com/blog/2022/2/...

Largest Farm to Grow Crops Under Solar Panels Proves To Be A Bumper Crop For Agrivoltaic Land Use — AGRITECTUREwww.agritecture.com This agrivoltaic farm generates enough to power 300 private homes, and grows tomatoes, turnips, carrots, squash, beets, lettuce, kale, chard, and peppers.

I think that we are going to see a lot of food production using this technology Climate change is pushing the temperature sun and shade variables out of whack for many crops. This technology can tailor the micro environment for the use desired For livestock, it provides shade and weather protection

Worried that the panels will block too much crop sun? Grow something that does better in more northern climates lmao.

Actually, most crops grow better under solar panels than crops grown under direct sunlight. Up to 300% better has been observed www.ivey.uwo.ca/sustainabili...

The unexpected reason$ farmers are planting crops under solar panelswww.ivey.uwo.ca If you have lived in a home with a trampoline in the backyard, you may have observed the unreasonably tall grass growing under it. This is because many crops, including these grasses, actually grow be...

I'm going to guess direct sun tends to burn sensitive crops.

I think that you are probably correct. It could also be that plants really don't like dry heat And irrigation is not the solution, water isn't as easily available as people think Plant recalls in Southern California and Mexico are because of overuse of water. Toxins build up in our food plants

Yeah, I just toured a solar field with an integrated farm. Planting underneath the solar panels actually helps the panels' efficiency when the plants respirate during photosynthesis. It's really cool.

Yes. It's a win win On Dairy and Livestock farms the animals love them. Shade and rain protection and if you collect the rain in a trough a water supply

Solar is doing *shockingly* (er, sorry) well here in Ireland.

There is a special place for punsters. Just saying😂

I didn't even realize what I'd said until *just* before I hit the reply button... IE historically has had no natural resources for power, other than burning wood or peat. Solar and wind, however, are doing really well here. (We're waiting until we extend the house before getting solar.)

Lesson learned the hard way. Don't put solar on an old roof. Replace the roof, you'll be glad you did. Solar panels double the lifetime of a new roof

When I got solar panels on my house in San Jose, they were installed by a roofing company, which also offered a discount on replacing the roof. (However, my roof was metal, and would be good for longer than the life of the solar panels.)

SICKOS.EXE

Another great one

Why did everybody predict it to go down?

I’m guessing that they’d guess early adopters in sunny places would get in early and fewer people would follow. (Note the graph is about annual additions, so they thought less would be added, not there would be less in future years.)

That was my mistake! I was reading it as projected capacity, not projected new capacity.

Did the same initially - why I deleted and added the parenthetical.

This and a lot of people bought into the fossil fuel pandering that clean energy is not efficient enough and is "more expensive than using coal and sht"

Yes, I think this is 100% motivated reasoning/propaganda.

I don't have access to the model, but it kinda looks like it's close to "assume it will be the same as last time" with a little actual feedback fed in

Because time series analysis is The Worst™️, and it's really forking hard to improve on "just assume what happened last time will happen this time"

I’d guess it’s survey data, possibly if experts with models, but yeah, definitely a tendency to expect things to not change too much. But the forecasts of slowdowns are surprising.

Hmmm the more I think about it the more it looks like it *is* dependent on ~ just the current state and the previous state. You're starting close to zero with small change, so it thinks it ought to stay at zero. Only after it's been non-zero for a minute does it predict rise...

...and even then it's sensitive to drops. But it will eventually notice large changes, but it's guaranteed to lag. Maybe. Or it could be something completely different. Who can say?

If there's a subsidy or credit for renewable energy the Energy Information Agency-the usual source for estimates like this-is required to make use forecasts assuming the programs will not be renewed (continuing a credit as-is requires new legislation, which they're not allowed to assume).

Prediction did not have detailed information about China.

Who I believe, in 2022, installed more solar than all other countries, for all time, combined.

Thus my comment. :)

Bastards. We’ll beat them with peat and dung.

Ah sounds like someone’s been studying up on semi submerged passive houses. I’m in.

Well I was going to burn the peat and fling the dung. As is our way.

do they just assume linear adoption instead of any kind of network effects or economies-of-scale that make exponential adoption happen?

They consistently make the mistake of assuming it's a saturated market, with no attempt to consider the impact of rapidly increasing ROI as it gets cheaper, capacity increases and efficiency increases. It's not the type of product with a narrow market!

Energy is sort of literary everything, and there's nolimit to what you cam do with it. Lots of things go frm "impossible" to "just brute force it bro" witwith enough energy

I've been working on some energy assessments for a small town, and their electrical bills didn't make sense at first because they quietly installed a 1.5MW photovoltaic array that we had to Sherlock Holmes our way back into. I love these kinds of surprises.

How do you quietly install a 1.5MW array anywhere, nevermind in/near a small town???

Pretty easily - we got 12 KW on a single family home on a 0.1 acre lot; panels are probably <10% of our lot area. I'm guessing you could do it as covered parking for the supermarket, or even on top of the supermarket without anyone noticing.

Just remembered that the IKEA where I live (SYD) has ~990kW on the roof. I believe it's still the largest IKEA in the southern hemisphere. Hopefully they cover the rest of the roof someday. Are there supermarkets where you are with enough roof area for 1.5MW of solar? Nothing here that big AFAIK

Right, but 1.5MW is going to be thousands of panels. In a small town that ain’t going unnoticed

It was installed on the other side of the river from the town in a clearing surrounded by trees. It's not something we expected to find, and no one told us about it during our investigation. When we asked the utility, they sent us a net-metering schedule, and that's how it clicked.

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