Most liked posts in thread: Surely Not! Solar Panels and Electric Charging Points

Solar panel technology is improving rapidly and the last couple of years has seen the development of super lightweight panels, although I'm not convinced it was "impossible" 4 years ago.

As regards as EV chargers are concerned, if my experience is anything to go by then those EV chargers that have been put in at football grounds, such as Forest Green Rovers and Stevenage, are unavailable on match days.

My car has a range of 250 miles in perfect conditions; this can come down to 180 to 190 in the worst conditions (cold, wet and dark conditions requiring the use of wipers, lights and heating). My return journey for home matches is exactly 200 miles, which means for most of the season I don't need to charge my car until I get back home. For those matches at the peak of winter, a short coffee and charge stop on my outward journey is sufficient. Even if there were chargers available, at the ground, I don't think I'd use them, as I prefer to park at a location where I can get away quickly after the match.

 

The thing is though that's largely the Northern Cities' own fault. London's transport links are good because for a long time, London has put real effort into putting together a joined-up plan. Get out of London and you end up with a massively disjointed system because of all the different operators and the different local governments who are making decisions.

It needs to start with Cities (and even Towns) getting joined up plans inside of them (Some have started, Manchesters for example has got much better) and then we will see Northern Cities getting better and more robust travel systems and from there we need the cities and regions to start working together to ensure they are well-joined up.

I don't see that happening though as there is too much bickering and oneupmanship between the different parties competing for seats and even between people on the same council. It's the problem with modern politics, its not about making things better with actual plans, it's about soundbites to appeal to a group that once elected they ignore

 

The problem with that is the batteries, there aren't enough Rare Earth Elements for the world to meet even the phasing out of Petrol/Diesel cars that are planned let alone when you start factoring in every home needing a significant battery and the grid needing large arrays to store excess power generated from Solar that unlike fossil fuel it can't just be scaled back when demand is lower than supply (or even Wind where the turbines can be turned off). The big problem with Gas right now for us is that we don't have ways to store it so we have to sell excess and then have to try and buy it back when we need it which if we can it's at inflated rates but it's much easier to build gas storage facilities (or to regenerate old mothballed ones) than it is to magic up rare earth sources.

Until we have a breakthrough in battery tech which allows for a smaller physical size, with more capacity, cheaper, more robustness (both in lifespan and safety in general use, they are so easy to damage and potentially cause a fatal situation), more efficient charging, and less impacted by temperature while also not requiring rare earth metals (which as their name suggests are rare while also causing major ecological and health damage) then the move to solar and EV's is doomed. And the problem is they have been talking about a battery revolution since the 90's but none of the ideas has ever turned out to be viable so all we have got is a fairly minor interation's of rare-earth metal-based batteries. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that big revolution is going to come and be something affordable and viable before we implement the various green commitments that have been made by ourselves and much of the rest of the world

 

Server farms certain are power-hungry, if you look at this image from a google data centre



you have 3 racks, each rack has around 25-30 servers in it. Each of that server will have a PSU's ranging from a normal desktop of 500-600W anywhere up to several thousand and they don't have one, they can generally have anywhere from 2 to 4 PSU's so they can handle a PSU failure.

And from this picture you can get an idea of how big the room is


That one isn't even full, you can see a space place for another 3-column rack (maybe even 2) to go in. And this is just one room, most of the big data centres from the likes of Google and Amazon will have atleast a dozen such rooms, maybe even more in some of the massive ones.

Obviously having that many machines produces a massive amount fo heat in the room, the enemy of a computer is heat so not only are the servers often using elaborate water cooling on the components to keep them cool but the rooms themselves are airconditioned to further help.

The thing is though much like the negative press when it comes to Cryptos energy use it's not that clear cut. These data centres are often in the middle of nowhere with plenty of land around them and they are able to take advantage of their own renewable arrays, usually a combo of Solar and wind but in some places, they may include hydro. These most likely wouldn't exist without the data centres so it's not like they are being powered by large amounts of fossil fuels. Certainly, the increased move to the cloud is actually more environmentally friendly than having lots of localised servers