The whole site
Everything
Five sections, twenty-two pages. The complete register, in section order.
A curve, not a breakthrough
- Four decades, every doubling, a fifth offThe price of a solar module has fallen by roughly a fifth for every doubling of cumulative production, repeated since the 1970s — a learning curve rather than any single invention.
- Al Dhafra and the 1.35-cent contractA single auction result that made the cheapest electricity ever contracted a solar one, and what conditions made that number possible.
- Bhadla: 2,245 MW on 14,000 acresOne of the largest single sites in the world, and what that much land actually looks like when it is covered.
- What a panel is made ofSilicon, silver, glass, aluminium and an encapsulant — and which of those is the constraint.
- Ten million panels to washDust on glass is a measurable loss, so cleaning is an operating cost with its own machinery and its own water problem.
After dark
- Hornsdale answered in millisecondsThe installation earned its keep less by storing energy than by answering a frequency drop faster than any spinning machine can.
- Where the containers areA battery installation is a yard of containers, a transformer and a fence, sited for the grid connection rather than the view.
- Frequency, and what spinning metal used to doA grid used to be stabilised by the inertia of enormous rotating machines; without them, stability has to be manufactured electronically.
- The hours that matterStorage is not measured in capacity alone but in how many hours it can cover, and the difference between two and eight hours changes what it is for.
- What is not lithiumPumped hydro still holds most of the world's stored electricity, and the alternatives to lithium are chosen for duration rather than density.
Heat uphill
- Three or four units for oneA heat pump does not make heat, it moves it, which is why its output can exceed the energy put in without breaking anything.
- The cold endPerformance falls as the outside gets colder, which is exactly when the heat is wanted, and that trade is the whole engineering argument.
- The refrigerant problemThe working fluid is itself a greenhouse gas in most units, and replacing it changes the pressures the machine must handle.
- District heatAt city scale the same physics runs through a pipe network instead of a garden, with very different economics.
Unsolved
- The carbon is in the rock, not the fireCement releases carbon dioxide from the limestone itself during calcination, so a clean fuel does not fix it.
- Clinker, and what can replace itCutting the clinker fraction is the one lever that works today, and its limits are set by what the concrete has to do afterwards.
- Reducing iron with hydrogenIron ore has always been reduced with carbon; doing it with hydrogen changes the furnace, the feedstock and the entire plant around it.
- The electric arc routeMelting scrap in an arc furnace is the low-carbon route that already exists, and it is limited by how much scrap there is.
Not proven
- Not proven, and who says soDirect air capture works at pilot scale and its cost at climate scale is disputed by people with no axe to grind; the disagreement is the story.
- The energy penaltySeparating a gas that is 0.04 per cent of the air costs energy that has to come from somewhere, and that arithmetic decides everything.
- Where it goes afterwardsCapture is only half a process; the storage half needs geology, monitoring and a very long time.
- Pilots, and what they proveA pilot demonstrates that something can be done, not that it can be done cheaply or often, and conflating the two is the commonest error in the field.