why is it that all these renewable energy prosthelytizers can never articulate a coherent solution/end game? He is right, the number of pv cells needed to generate the required electrical energy is irrelevant - that is only a part - and possibly only a small part - of the problem. He gets us to all the required PV panels, but glosses over the question of storage, hydrogen, how hydrogen can be stored, air transport, etc. etc. etc. What's the point of a video like this? Waste of time and electrons...

Don't remember China pulling out of the Paris accord because of the economic impact. They didn't put a tariff on PV imports either.

China has far less need to cheat than the US, they have the largest renewable energy production in the world by a big margin and it's growing quicker than most countries.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by BSR.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by BSR.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

These guys make a start at assessing the energy/carbon cost, but stop well short of completing the job. What is the life-cycle carbon cost of PV cells used to produce the electrons; what is the life-cycle cost of the storage of electrons prior to going into the EV, etc. Only then can you make an honest carbon balance sheet.

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The short answer is "It depends!"

I know it's a crappy answer, but there are way too many parameters at play. There are many games today that have scripted scenes in them that are pretty cinematic. Think of GTA III, from 2001. The cut scenes in that game still outshine the actual gameplay of GTA V today.

If the scene is scripted, then all the animation, and camera movement can be fine tuned and all compute resources are pooled into the viewport of the camera. This allows the artists to focus all of the trickery on the shot itself, but not the rest of the world. From a PVS or scene-graph stand point, you have pretty much reduced the complexity to just what you are seeing.

I do not know how they made this demo and cannot comment on it with any authoritative capital. I've written 3D engines before (not for videogames though) and can comment on the technology I think I'm seeing here. My comments are just an opinion based on what I know. I do not have access to Unity and have never used it before. But here it goes:

For a scene like this, there should be reduced/canned computation in:

• Collision detection and response
  
• AI
  
• Animation / IK
  
• PVS
  
• Texture Atlasing
  

The shaders, unless they are geometry (the ripping of the skin/flesh in the Adam scene) could or could not be reduced in scope and complexity. I am not sure if they are scripted or dynamic. By scripted, I mean a geometry shader that reads vertex data from a VBO stream or some memory buffer instead of computing the vertices on the fly. It's still real-time, just not dynamic.

Most of the graphics you see here are standard applications of technology that's been around for a while:

• PBR shader
  
• Motion Blur Shader
  
• Depth of Field Shader
  
• Cascaded Shadow Maps Shader
  

The particle system seems pretty standard as well.

This is a great demo and I am extremely impressed with the art direction, but the engine itself is, after all, Unity with PBR for the characters, and maybe Global Illumation for the indoor scenes, which I believe they licensed from Geomerics.

They cannot make a game from this. This has a fixed PVS which allows them to pool all resources in the shot where the camera is facing. It's still real-time, but you can't free roam. There are some neat shaders applied here, but I'm more impressed with the sound than anything else.

This thing needs english subtitles!

BTW this has to be the saddest stage and lighting I have ever seen for a PV. They got the good camera angles, and an editor who knows his shiat, but those lights...I have seen better in highschools! And almost no time spent on the routine.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

What part of "do not have a choice" do I not understand? How about the subject of the 'choice' you are denied. Now that you have clarified that you don't have a choice about how the electric company pays you, or how solar works, I'll reiterate, you still DO have a choice about how to use the power you generate. Making better use of that choice would serve you well, but you seem intent on claiming it's all out of your control (and that you're forced 'at gunpoint' to sell all your production cheap and buy it back expensive rather than find a way to use it directly). I'm intent on making the best use of the choices available to me (and I bet to you) in order to make intelligent choices about my energy, choices that have saved me thousands to date, and should save me tens of thousands in the long run, and save uncounted tons of CO2 from being produced. You have instead invested in a system that now serves your needs terribly, and now want to tell others how solar is not economically viable or green, both of which are absolutely backwards from my experience and research.

You were not kidnapped, you walked into that guys home and put his gun to your own head. I wonder if you've even investigated 'net metering' in your area, it could make your system work for even you.

OK, so energy cost VS energy produced is ALL you want to compare. Then you MUST include all energy costs to be reasonable, including the energy cost of cleanup of coal waste failures (that right there already totally tips any scale against coal, it can't come close to making the energy that cleanup takes), the energy used in upkeep of coal waste storage for centuries, the energy costs of habitat destruction/reconstruction by coal mining itself, the mining itself, transportation of the coal, power plant operation (construction, upgrading, and maintenance), and the cost of mitigating the 20-40 times the amount of CO2 pollution, health issues, loss of sunlight (solar dimming is real), etc. The list of energy costs goes on and on for coal, while the list for the energy cost of solar panel production and use in some cases is damn near zero (where it's made with leftover chip wafers in solar powered factories it barely takes any extra energy at all, but I do understand that most aren't made that way now).

Double return VS coal, because you get twice as many KWH per dollar with solar PV, or better.

Again with the 'spend more energy to produce one KWH of PV than with coal', show me some data. Everything I can find shows you're 100% wrong if you look at the lifespan of panels which become energy neutral in well under 3 years on average (some much sooner) and last 20-30 years, while coal continues to need more energy to produce more (filthy) energy. Perhaps in the extremely short term you have a point about cost/production, but any time period over 3 years puts PV ahead of coal in energy costs/energy produced, and in their 20-30 year lifetime they do much better.

Coal made power is NOT cheaper than solar made power. If it was, I would not save money with a solar system. I have already saved money with solar VS buying the same amount of coal produced power, therefore solar PV is cheaper than coal. Period. If it wasn't, our electric companies would not be 'farming solar' here as fast as possible, they would be building more coal plants.

Some people support coal because they have been misinformed about alternatives. That's why I have continued our discussion here, because your information is wrong based on my personal experience and research, and I fear you might convince someone to not even look into solar enough to see how wrong you are, how much money they could save (if they do it properly), and how much pollution they could not create.

Um...I DO grow my own vegetables in my backyard too. It's cheaper, and I get far better produce with zero carbon footprint. Another statement you've made that I take personal exception with. It's not a HUGE effort, but is some effort, but the returns are great and totally worth it. I think many people stopped subsistence farming because they're lazy, overworked, and/or live without any place to farm. I've been doing it since I was 12 and ate my first self grown corn, and I've never had reason to question that decision. I've read about people spending $50 to grow $5 in tomatoes...I'm not one of them. I spend $50 on manure to grow >$1000 in produce yearly, and have enough to give >1/2 of it away.

Not a single one of your examples are 'more viable' than PV in every situation, and private owned home solar doesn't take public dollars away from public power projects. I looked into wind-it's way more expensive for the same generation power along with numerous other issues, nuke-also far more expensive with other long term major issues, solar thermal-hardly working as hoped yet in the few, hyper expensive plants in existence, wave-not yet but fingers crossed, hydro-DISTEROUS for the environment and short lived. (You left out geothermal, which is excellent where it's possible.)
Also, most of your examples are not viable for residential use (what we're talking about here), as you said are more expensive (so are bad economic choices), and/or have other serious ecological issues that PV does not.

Money is the only reason to stick with coal or nuclear, and that's only because the companies that use it get away with not paying for most of the true long term costs, and even with that it's now FAR more expensive to buy that coal/nuke power than it is to make your own with PV, leaving NO real reason to stick with coal or nuclear....so what are you talking about?

I'm obviously talking Swahili here... What part of "do not have a choice" don't you understand? I don't get to set the tariffs or when the sun comes up, and batteries enough to load shift significantly in Aus are still in the 20-30 grand area. You are fortunate you live in a place where the energy company still allows you a reasonable price for the energy you produce. The acceptance you talk about is the same acceptance a hostage gives it's kidnapper when they have a gun held to their head... Perhaps you're even lucky enough to have multiple energy providers competing for your custom. In Aus, it's almost entirely single provider in the realm of electricity supply.

However, that's neither fucking here nor there when it comes to energy returns... Energy returned on energy does not once mention the word "dollars" or "money"...

A simple analogy would be using a thousand 200 dollar bicycles to pull a load or 1 200 thousand dollar prime mover. The bikes are cleaner, certainly, but once you pay the wages of 1000 people to ride them/feed them, give them accomodation etc (vs 1 guy in the truck), and then work out just how long those people can continuously ride, the cost of the fuel in the truck etc, the truck becomes the obvious answer. That's why we use trucks instead of team pulled wagons, they are just better suited to the task. The same counts for energy generation, we need a clean prime mover, and we're going to have to suck up the cost to do it. If we're going to save the world, we're going to have to make sacrifices in the form of paying more until someone invents clean abundant energy generation that is also cheap.

Your "double the return on coal" is completely unsubstantiated.

Of course solar PV is cleaner than coal, but you need to expend far more energy to generate 1 KW/h of PV energy than you do to generate 1 KW/h of coal energy... It's part of the reason why coal is cheaper than solar and why so much of the world still relies on it. Because people cannot see past their wallet to the bigger picture.

I would love if PV on roofs were the answer, just like it would be awesome if everyone could farm their own vegetables in their backyard. But we moved beyond subsistence living to mass production a long time ago because people realised it was a huge effort that paid relatively small returns. Residential solar PV is a convenient foil to keep people thinking that it's making a difference when we could be investing public dollars in to wind (more viable), nuke (more viable), solar thermal (more viable), wave (more viable), hydro etc. And a lot of those techs are probably going to be more expensive than solar PV. What did that Native American fellow say? 'When it's all gone to shit, will you eat money?'

Money being the only concern is what got us to where we are at the moment ffs... =)

You certainly have a choice in how you use the electricity.

I think YOU missed the point, if you can only sell your power for 8 c perkwh, and pay 36c per kwh, and you sell ALL the power you make, then buy it back later, YOU are subsidizing the power company, who makes 28c on every kwh you sell them. No one is subsidizing that 8c they pay(I would hope, 350% profit is already insane) so what "high feed in tariff" are you talking about?

The power grid is fairly smart, and takes into account the amount being produced by ALL sources, and shuts/ramps down those not needed. For you to be sending power when it's not required would require more PV generation than the entire grid uses, because ANY other generation could be put on hold until night. The certainly DO do this on a 'few hundred times per second' basis, at least here in the US. Solar generation may jump up and down on individual systems, but the total amount fed to the grid by all solar systems in an area is fairly stable, and doesn't jump radically from a cloud...come on.
Here, peak power is at peak temperature time, mid-late afternoon, when businesses turn up the AC and people get home, exactly when PV makes the most power, I can't speak for AU.
The point being that the grid CAN and DOES adjust rapidly to account for all generation methods, and it does already shift production because some of the need is supplied by PV.

Not so, the return on energy invested is at least double the return on coal in the long term...for the consumer, that's why you save money VS the electric company in the long term.
It's certainly not cheap or easy to deal with the waste in the US where the company(s) (and the taxpayer when it goes bankrupt) has to pay for destroying major river systems because of inevitable waste releases...as happened recently and repeatedly. Only if you ignore most of the actual costs of coal can you think it's cheaper, if you count all the costs, it's FAR more expensive.

ALL the power/energy needed to produce PV panels is reflected in their cost...100%.
Again, to be a bad way to reduce carbon pollution, you MUST assume it takes more carbon to make a panel VS the amount of carbon pollution it saves VS coal power production of the same amount of KWH. That's simply not the case by a long shot, so it does significantly reduce CO2 production, by around 20-30X vs coal. Even in Germany and Denmark, where it's often overcast, they found ....
"solar PV works out to about 50g of CO2 per kWh compared to coal's 975g of CO2 per kWh, or about 20x "cleaner."" In places with better weather, it can be up to 40X.
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/how-much-co2-does-one-solar-panel-create

Once again, my electric company doesn't pay me a dime, it trades me power based on peak and non peak hours. Yours on the other hand makes 350% profit on every kwh you produce. I save cash because making (and USING) my own power is FAR cheaper than buying (mainly) coal produced power from the electric company. No "high feed in tariff" required at all. No feed in tariff at all, in fact.
It obviously makes an inroad on reducing carbon because, beyond the panel's production and shipping, there's ZERO carbon, unlike coal which produces more carbon per 10 KWH than it likely took to make each of my 20 panels, meaning they pay off their carbon debt in about 100 hours of sunlight, and are total carbon savers for the rest of their 20 year lifespan.
If we're going to fix climate change, we need to be HONEST about energy production, not compare 150%-350% of the cost of one production source with 5% of another production source to be able to say the 5% source is better.

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! Nuke requires a jump in your bill (even with the HUGE government subsidies the nuke industry gets at every step), but it's better than home mounted PV which SAVES you >50% off your 20 year power costs without a taxpayer cent?!?!? Please think about that.

I'm not basing my figures or thoughts on any study, but on my own personal, long term, economic experience with a system.
As someone who purchased a solar system for purely economic reasons, and has found it to be a HUGE cost saver over buying coal/nuke power from the electric company, all without counting subsidies at all, and even considering I paid top dollar for my system and have battery backup (that produces nothing but cost thousands), I'll simply say you're completely wrong in your assessments based on my own dispassionate, no child having, purely economical experience and leave it there.
I'm happy saving 50% of every power/dollar, you are accepting of giving away around 80% of your power/dollars to the power company. That doesn't make solar unworthy, non-"green", or economically unviable, it makes it a TERRIBLE choice for YOU because you're doing it wrong, and your electric company is punishing you rather than incentivizing you.

I don't think intellect or "brightness" has anything to do with it. It's desire/zealotry that is the key to staunch belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary (or complete lack of supporting evidence) paired with ignorance, sometimes deliberate, sometimes incidental. It's a faith thing, which makes it akin to religion.

eg. the discussion we are having re: solar PV, I mentioned James Hanson who was really the first modern scientist to codify man made global climate change. Climate deniers ridicule him for his stance on global warming, and many environmentalists hate him for his staunch pro nuclear stance.