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the potential to generate an average of 6.6 kilowatt-hours of electricity per square metre, per month.
That seems like not much. A household using 1kW (slightly below average) would need more than 100m² of solar panels, which seems like a lot. I'm open to being convinced that solar pv has gotten so cheap that it's worth using on a large scale even in Canada, but I'm not sure if those numbers are going to add up. I'd expect wind power to be a better bet.
So, calculated on https://pvwatts.nlr.gov/pvwatts.php, a 10kW array at the optimal fixed angle of about 40* will produce 13,253 kWh over a year, which would be about one household's energy use averaged over the year but would fall short quite a lot in winter months:
Chart of energy produced/used for a 10kW array and the electricity pattern of a gas-heated Winnipeg home (12kWh/yr):
A ground mount array of 18 - 550W bifacial panels would present about 45m2 of panel but to put them in a "farm" without shading from solsice to solstice would cover 86m2.
Speaking from experience, I run 23kWh of panels on an offgrid home and I have to supplement with a generator for about 6 weeks of the year even with 43kWh of battery storage. I'm also further north than Winnipeg.
I don't think that number is correct. Their source does say "monthly" in a few places (though notably, not next to the actual figures) but I think that's the daily average. Other sources [1] [2] also yield numbers closer to 6.6 kWh/day.
So it won't need 100 m^2 of solar panels per household; it'll only need about 3-4 m^2 of solar, which is also in line with what a residential rooftop installation would look like.
Monthly definitely sounds more correct, since that puts it at a pretty realistic 220W/m^2 with 12h of sun per day.
Does it have to be perfect? Even partial coverage would at least reduce demand from the grid and lower electricity bills for all. Winnipeg could be covering rooftops with panels wherever possible (and tenants could be hanging them from apartment balconies & windows like they recently approved in New York). Right now it's just farms and other businesses doing it, which they probably wouldn't be if it weren't for the fact solar starts paying for itself immediately upon use. I suppose these places have just worked something out on their own for when snow starts accumulating and/or are resigned to more of the benefits coming from longer summer days than in the winter. (I wonder if there's a possible market for accessories like heated "windshields" that can make snow clearing easier and less likely to invite damage.)
Sure, but this article is about the lack of utility-scale solar capacity (read: large solar plants), not small-scale, individual efforts.
Yes, it is. I guess I'm just thinking that as bills rise and capacity shrinks, there could be a provincial govt-led effort to reduce demand on the existing grid.
I'd definitely love to see some grants or other assistance to get people building their own capacity.
They had it but you had to use commercial installers and approved equipment sold through an installer. It came out to 3X as much as DIY, and they'd only cover half. Utter corporate welfare, I just bought the stuff myself and installed it and saved about $10,000
100m² seems substantially higher than what I've looked at before, but even using that estimate you could still power 40 homes with a single acre of solar panels. So, that would be something like 12K acres of solar panels to cover all of Manitoba's homes. It's not like that many people live in Manitoba, and there is a lot of land. How many acres of outdoor parking lots are there in Manitoba? Certainly seems like a meaningful contribution could be pretty easily made even using that high estimate for area required to power a home.
I think the article mostly focused on Manitoba because the current leadership of the province is left-leaning, but as mentioned in the article, it isn't the best place in Canada for panels. With hydro already covering like 95% of the need, I can see dealing with grey skies and snow making solar unappealing.
Saskatchewan on the other hand, is a sunnier province, the snow is way drier here than it is in MB (people in some places in SK use leaf-blowers instead of shovels for all of their snow. You can't do that in MB), it has less population per km^2, and its electricity grid is full expensive expendable resources. And if you don't care about money, and the environment is more your jam, it has the worst pollution to kWh of the provinces, though it does lose to Nunavut if you include the territories.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CA-NU/all/monthly
But, SK has a leader who wants to get relected in a province pretty controlled by the oil and gas industry. So even if Moe could take time away from his busy schedule of bullying children using the notwithstanding clause to look into this, I don't think that anyone in his circle would recommend it.
That's a problem not just in SK. We are set to see energy demand skyrocket, and it's a bonanza for whichever industry ends up feeding it. The industry players with the political clout and the capacity to rapidly scale if there's little environmental impact consideration are in O&G. Tim Hodgson was down in Texas not long ago talking about how in order to win the AI race the US needs to catch up to China’s 400MW/year lead in new energy capacity and how that must be achieved using Canadian natural gas. There's an enormous amount of money to be made in filling that demand, consequences be damned for everyone who isn't either in on the bonanza or getting their re-election or post-politics career funded via it.
(people in some places in SK use leaf-blowers instead of shovels for all of their snow. You can't do that in MB)
Come on, man. Sask and mb winters are roughly equivalent.
The principle obstacle in both places is really just capturing enough light throughout the year, even when compensating with a stronger panel tilt in winter.
Maybe it's just the specific areas I've lived in both provinces, but the winters were very different.
There's something magical about solar power which makes people think "it's only 12 thousand acres of solar panels, sounds easy!" You could probably fit them all in an area the size of Manitoba's second-largest city, no problem. Let's go ahead and start building a city-sized grid of access roads out in the woods to be completely levelled and filled with high-tech electronics, batteries, inverters, transmission lines, switching stations, and more solar panels than currently exist in Canada — how hard can it be?
I dunno, it's not impossible. It's just... there might be better ways to solve the problem.
Is there something magical about lemmy that makes you think I'm actually suggesting MB install 12K acres of solar panels?
No, and I didn't really mean to pick on you specifically — it just seems that way in general.
That seems to be the same conclusion that MB Hydro has reached, as well.
A household using 1kW (slightly below average) would need more than 100m² of solar panels
nah. You get 1 kwhr from 1m² panel . 100m² would be pumping out 2.4 kW constantly. I think you meant 10m².
That was based on the quote from the article. Are your numbers for Manitoba? By "constantly" do you mean "on average"?
Something is definitely wrong with those numbers. Assuming a conservative 12 hours of sun per day, that's only about 18 W/m^2. The best solar panels now are getting up to 300W/m^2 in ideal conditions, so anything under 100W/m^2 would be extremely surprising.