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Switzerland bolted 5,000 solar panels onto a dam wall 8,000 feet up in the freezing Alps. The plant now makes three times more winter power than any farm down in the valleys (www.ecoportal.net)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/goodnewseveryone@piefed.social
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Up on the dam, almost everything that looks like a problem becomes an advantage.

The plant sits above the fog line, in thin, clear air that lets far more sunlight through.

The higher you go, the stronger and cleaner the sunlight becomes.

Cold actually helps, because solar panels work more efficiently when they are not baking in heat.

And then there is the snow, which acts like a giant mirror, bouncing extra light up onto the panels from below.

Scientists call it the albedo effect, and it can lift a mountain plant’s output well beyond anything possible in the valley.

A test site at a similar height recorded yearly output far above a typical Swiss plant.

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[–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

crawls out of a manhole

Aaaaannnnddd we can do district heating and cooling with combined heat and power plants! Denser cities are well suited for a shared heating/cooling grid that's a lot cheaper and efficient than owning your own equipment for heating and cooling. It also leaves more rooftop available for greenspace or for solar panels.

Additionally you can use combined heat and power (CHP) plants to make the heat needed for the system, including using heat to make cooling with absorber chillers.

The Danes have one of the most advanced thermal grids in the world so far by complexity. They even use heat pumps to recover waste heat from sewage, data centers, and supermarket fridges/freezers (which actually makes them far more energy efficient btw since it's a smaller thermal lift, and the pumped energy is sold into the grid to make money instead of just being waste)

We could literally heat and cool the entire world but we dump it all as waste heat 🫠

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