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The actual problem with painel solars, is that they require an existing infrastructure to sync with the AC grid but if that infrastructure fail, or just get out of sync, it could trigger every painel solar fail safe making the damage 10x worse especially if the infrastructure depends on the solar panels to supply most of the energy
it’s long past time we took businessman out of control and replaced them with scientists.
Literal free goddamn energy from the sky and these greedy fucks are going to burn the world down because they can’t flip it for a buck
It sounds dumb, but because you can’t turn off solar power, if it produces more then you need, you have to use it somehow or it can damage equipment. Hence the driving prices into negative territory. It’s a technical problem more than it is a financial one.
It is a financial problem. Technically you can just cover the solar panels. But that’s not good financially.
“Damaging equipment” is just nonsense. I’ve got an off-grid solar system. When the battery is fully charged the solar panels simply stops producing. It has potential (voltage) but no current until you draw power. Just like a battery is full of energy but it just sits there until you draw power from it.
All solar systems could have smart switches to intelligently disconnect from the grid as needed, some inverter already do this automatically. So it’s not a technical problem. It’s a political problem.
This can cause degradation of the PN junction on the panel shortening life. The plans I’ve seen all have a resistive heater some place to dump the excess when full. Smart equipment does help mitigate most issues like moving the resistance point on the panel for lower efficiency when signaled to do so but less is not the same as none.
It is a technical problem of how can you convince electrical companies to overcome a problem they have no financial incentive to solve.
that’s not a technical problem. that’s a weakness of the people’s resolve problem. we can, at any time, force them to do the right thing.
I’m aware its not a technical problem, I was using the word ironically to point out the person I was responding to was wrong to say it…
Also saying we can at any time fix a problem is just being ignorant of the many near impossible steps needed to fix the problem. In this case the problem is capitalism. We could come up with ways to end capitalism or make capitalism work in the interest of humanity, but will it realistically ever happen? No it wont, private money won, look at the topics discussed for presidential debate, never a mention of doing something about private capital owning Washington. Just super effective wedge issues.
Sounds like energy companies or independent entities should invest in energy storage so they can get paid to draw from the grid.
But then you’ve got cities like Morro Bay, CA that are trying to stop a plan to replace a coal plant with a battery storage facility because batteries are supposedly dangerous.
Gotta love any time anybody argues against replacing coal with something else, and the tactic is to spread FUD about the thing that is NOT coal!
Factorio players: hold my beer
you know we could just put our collective foot down and take the power away from them.
The real special bit is that this crap isn’t coming from, say Harvard, who one expects is all about business, but MIT which is supposed to be about Science and Engineering.
Well then there is another way of seeing this: there is an engineering/difficulty with such large power fluctuations that “drive electricity prices negative” because it implies a much more variable demand on existing power infrastructure.
This reminds me of a quote (that probably isn’t real) from Westinghouse to Tesla in regard to wireless energy transmission he was trying to create.
“This is wonderful, but where would we put the meter!?”
If only there were some way to take energy made from sunshine and store it in some form for later. Like in a battery. Or as heat. Or in a flywheel. Or just use the energy for something we’d really like to do as cheaply as possible. Like sequester CO2. Or desalinate water. Or run industries that would otherwise use natural gas.
What is this “Battery” you speak of? The only Battery I know of is the Powder Battery on a warship.
I think they’re taking about battery chickens; just don’t tell the vegans that’s how we store electricity!
Makes me wonder how many chicks per second (CPS) factory farms use.
In that case it would even fix their negative price cost “problem”
This is what gets me. Relative efficiency of stuff is pretty much nullified when the energy used is free. Total power use still matters because it will determine the total size of the array of solar panels to generate the power needed.
But this is near and dear to my heart. I like hydrogen as energy storage. If you burn it, you get water. Natural gas is just CH4, so the output of burning it is 1CO2 + 2H2O. But a lot of natural gas stuff can also use hydrogen with little modification, so we don’t have to upend entire industries to adapt. Machines can be updated to use the new fuel type with little expense and we’re not throwing out entire production lines to replace them with ones based on electricity.
Why hydrogen? Simple, hydrolysis. Using power generated for free from the sun, you can split water into its base components. Hydrogen and oxygen. With some fancy knowledge, you can capture pretty much all of the hydrogen and none of the oxygen, and store it for use.
It’s inefficient compared to some other technologies, in that it takes a lot of power compared to how much hydrogen/oxygen you get, but bluntly, if it’s coming from solar, who cares? Not like we’re paying for the power anyways.
I keep thinking about this in the form of industry. Say a factory uses natural gas in boilers to make something hot. Whatever the material, whatever the reason, that’s what they’re doing. With little modification, the system can be adapted to hydrogen, and the company can build a hydrogen hydrolysis reactor on site using either city water, rain water, lake or river water… Even an underground well. The reactor runs all day and generates hydrogen, stored in a large, high pressure tank, also on site, then pipelines run it to the machines, boilers, whatever, to run the production lines. It’s free to run, and only requires a single capital investment.
Hydrogen, also, can be stored indefinitely and not “lose charge” unlike other, battery-based storage systems (or heat, or flywheels). So hydrogen is ideal for long term energy storage. Fuel cells are still the most efficient way to convert hydrogen to electricity, and yeah, you lose a lot of potential energy in the electrolysis/fuel cell conversions, but the energy input is free in the first place, so who cares?
I’m not saying we should go all in on hydrogen. I’m just saying that it’s worth continuing to develop the technology for it. Batteries, capacitors, storage via heat or flywheels, they all have their place in the energy future. At least until fusion makes them all obsolete (once we find a way to make that self fueling or use materials that are not extremely limited. IMO, we’re making good progress but we’re decades, if not centuries away from something practical, given our currently known planetary resources).
And yes, battery EVs are a good thing. Hydrogen electric vehicles… Let’s just say “too soon”, and leave it at that. Batteries for daily charge/discharge for home use, absolutely. Larger scale heat/flywheel storage, absolutely. But longer term than days to months, hydrogen may be the better option. It’s certainly a good option for industry that currently relies almost exclusively on natural gas.
Hydrogen is troublesome as an energy storage. The roundtrip efficiency (electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity) is just… very not worthwhile compared to batteries. Then beyond efficiency there is still the question of “how do we store hydrogen safely?”
Storing energy indefinitely is not a problem for electricity storage, since we are pretty much guaranteed to use the stored energy up in a single day.
Yep. When you’re using the energy quickly, within days or weeks, then hydrogen is extremely impractical.
The merits of hydrogen are in long term storage and cycles. A well built storage tank can last a lifetime. To be fair, a poorly built one might not last a year… So it’s very dependent on the external factors involved.
Batteries have their flaws, which I think we all know by now. Weight (regardless of state of charge), volume (energy density), charging speed, cycle life, etc.
It’s all about the application. Is the energy storage method going to be efficient for the desired outcomes.
Regardless of what other outcomes are in play, one that should be constant is to preserve the environment. Lithium technologies have reached a high level of development in recycling, so, for the most part, the environmental impact of end-of-life batteries is effectively mitigated to a large extent. This is a great thing that we have developed.
We need to do the same with solar PV panels, and mitigate as much of the environmental impact as we can from that as well. I know that’s something that’s being worked on, but we’re not at the same level of efficiency as we are with batteries, probably due to the comparatively long life of PV panels, vs the comparatively short lifetime of lithium cells. We’ve simply had a lot more lithium to deal with and find ways to recycle, so far. I’m sure PV panels recycling will come along as more early adopters upgrade to something newer, and more panels get into the stage where they need to be recycled. I haven’t checked in on PV panel recycling in a while so I’m not sure how outdated my information is.
To be clear, I am not, have not, and would never suggest that we move all our efforts into any technology, including, but not limited to, lithium, solar, wind, hydrogen, or anything else that’s been discussed. IMO, we need to leverage several technologies to achieve our long-term goal of global net zero, while meeting the energy demands of everyone.
I just feel like hydrogen is treated like a dead end technology, and I can’t blame the public for thinking so. A lot of the information about it as an energy storage solution is either very old, or still in its infancy. From electrolysis, which is a very old idea, to hydrogen fuel cells, which are extremely new by comparison. IMO, there’s a lot of work that can be done here, and we need to keep looking into it. Maybe it goes nowhere, maybe it becomes so practical that other solutions seem like shit by comparison. I don’t think either of those is likely, we’ll probably land somewhere in the middle of those extremes. I don’t know, and I’m not a scientist, so I’m just hoping we, as a society of people, keep working on it.
One thing I’m particularly excited for in this field is solid state batteries. But that’s also in its infancy. I know a lot of work is being done on them, so we’ll see what happens.
My point, if I have any point at all, is that we need to keep researching varied technologies for it. While solid state might be the right answer for EVs, and cellphones and most consumer electronics, they might not be the best solution for other applications. We need answers to energy demands of all sorts and giving up on something like hydrogen when there’s still research to be done, isn’t a great idea. We don’t know what researching a technology could uncover. Maybe an air battery that’s hyper efficient and has a high energy density, better than solid state technologies could hope to achieve. Maybe a lot of things. We just don’t know.
Let’s try everything and figure out what works for what application.
I agree that H2 can have certain applications as a bridge technology in some industries, but there is a very important parameter missing in your premise.
Even if solar power seems “free” at first glance it really isn’t. It needs infrastructure, e.g. Photovoltaic Panels and lots of it. So just having H2 instead of a battery for an application means, it needs thrice the PV capacity or even more and with it the grid capacity. Now add to that, we aren’t just talking about replacing electricity from fossil fuel plants by PV, but about primary energy as a whole, which makes the endeavor even more massive. Also H2 will not magically become much more energetically efficient in its production, transport, storage and usage, because there are physical limits. (Maybe with bacteria for production) The tech could and should get better concerning longevity of the electrodes for example. Also as the smallest molecule out there, storage will never be completely without losses. And long term storage requires even more energy and/or material.
All this is to say, that efficiency is still paramount to future energy supply, since also the material is limited or just simply because of costs of infrastructure and its implications on the biosphere. Therefore such inefficient energy carriers as H2 or what people call “e-fuels” should be used only where the enormous power and/or energy density is critical. H2 cars should therefore never be a thing. H2 or e-fuel planes, construction machines or tractors on the other hand could be more appropriate uses.
There’s certainly costs involved with solar. Even the act of cleaning the panels is going to increase maintenance costs. More panels to clean, more cost. More space needed for the panels, more cost. It might not be much per panel, but it’s still a cost. The wear of the panels is more cost, they only last so long before they degrade, and replacements are not free, so if the panels degrade without doing a lot of “work” (aka the outcome of having them) vs the cost of installing and maintaining them, was it worth it? These are all economic questions that also need to be considered.
Yes, it’s not free, but it’s the closest thing to “free” power we have. Literally pennies for gigawatt hours of output. If that power isn’t consumed, then it wasn’t useful to produce. Whether that generated power goes into batteries, homes, or hydrogen production, that’s going to be something we have to solve for.
I see a hydrogen reactor + fuel cell “generator” as a secondary storage system to batteries. When production is unusually high, push the power into hydrogen. It’s not nearly as efficient, but it can be stored for much longer without losing any. It can be stored far more densely than what can be accomplished by batteries. If the batteries are full and your PV plant is still pouring out unused watts, rather then let that energy go to waste, pushing it into hydrogen storage is a better option. If you don’t need it for 6 months, a year, two years? No big deal. When production is low and your batteries are almost out, just fire up the fuel cell and recharge from the excess energy you couldn’t put in the batteries. It’s inefficient, yes, but bluntly, it’s better than letting any of the excess production go to waste.
There’s other competing technologies for the same purpose. I see hydrogen as the second stage of storage. It’s not as good as the first stage, but it’s better than turning to fossil fuels to generate power.
I don’t know if that’s the right answer to the problem. I don’t know if it’s even a good idea. All I know is that it is possible. IMO, it’s not a bad idea.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if I’m saying anything at all here, it’s that we need to keep researching everything. I don’t want anyone to drop research on another technology to dedicate to hydrogen, just as I wouldn’t want anyone to drop hydrogen to research something else. We need to keep looking into this stuff.
There’s no single solution to our energy needs, as of right now. I don’t see one emerging in our lifetimes. The only goal I want to see pursued, if not obtained, is net zero for climate change. Stop the destruction of the environment, especially, but not limited to, our energy needs. Whatever gets us there, whether hydrogen, nuclear, fusion, solid state, flywheel, heat storage, thermoelectric, geothermal, hydroelectric, or whatever… I’m game. I feel like hydrogen still has a lot of discoveries that can be made, and I really don’t want to see it abandoned because of a lack of popularity in the consumer space. It’s there, it’s green, it’s got potential, let’s keep trying to get it to a place where it can be beneficial, just like with everything else in that market segment.
It is not only economic cost though. As I’ve mentioned, materials are also limited (on the same level as: There isn’t enough copper to wire all motors needed to replace all cars today with EVs). And it needs alot of surface area compared to the concentrated power plants of the past, which means an even bigger impact on the biosphere (especially if not done on rooftops in cities but in mountain ranges or fields, etc.). Don’t get me wrong; solar energy, if done right, is the only source that doesn’t interfere with natural cycles and does not increase entropy of the planet (which makes it actually sustainable). Using it inefficiently though, means inefficient use of other resources which are limited. (Not only economic. But on that note: Public infrastructure is always built with costs in mind, because we shouldn’t waste tax money, so we can do a better and more comprehensive job with what we have.)
So if there is a more efficient way to store energy for long periods, then it should take precedence over a very inefficient one. This will get complex since it is very much dependent on the local conditions such as sunshine, water sources and precipitation, landscape, temperatures, grid infrastructure and much more. As an engineer, I would throw in though, that if you need this secondary storage, that is not much cheaper, doesn’t have some very essential advantage, or doesn’t mitigate some specific risk, but is much more inefficient over your primary storage, then the system’s design is… sub-optimal to put it mildly.
For the argument of exploring everything: We simply can’t. More precisely we could, but it would need much more time, money and resources to arrive at the goal. And since climate catastrophe is already upon us, we don’t have that time and need to prioritize. Therefore a technology that has a physical, not human-made, efficiency limit loses priority as a main solution. That doesn’t mean, that H2 should not be looked into (for specific purposes, where it is essential or the reuse of existing infrastructure is the better option), but that we have to prioritize different avenues, with which we can take faster strides towards true carbon neutrality.
P.S. it doesn’t help, that today’s H2 is almost exclusively derived from natural gas.
Or use it to generate hydrogen for simpler, cheaper, more reliable, sustainable hydrogen powered cars.
We don’t even have enough lithium to replace the average country’s existing cars, let alone all of them, or literally anything else that requires lithium.
Most battery chemistries are moving away from rare earth metals like lithium. Solid state batteries are the next step, and they use things like sodium cloride, I.E salt, as their base.
What that article describes sounds like an awesome development. Too bulky for vehicles at the moment, but possibly excellent for grid storage.
Not sure where our good buddy @[email protected] went, but let me assure you. As of right now, 100% of available hydrogen stocks are fossil fuels derived.
Hydrogen vehicles being green is a fantasy pedaled by fossil fuel companies to not have to move away from natural gas. While it is possible to generate hydrogen through electrolysis, functionally, none actually is. It’s far far cheaper to do so from natural gas, and probably always will be.
Promoting hydrogen as a “solution” is basically promoting fossil fuels green washing.
And I’m not sure where you are getting you information on lithium, but it’s probably the best short and medium term option. Beyond that, gravity storage (pump water up hills, and maybe some kind of hydrogen system that doesn’t require transporting the stuff where it can be made and stored in place when solar or wind energy is abundant.
There are a lot more ways to store energy other than lithium and hydrogen.
Pumped storage, vanadium redox battery, sodium battery, … I’d even say they are most suited for grid-level energy storage.
Hydrogen is a pain to deal with. It requires excessively thick walled containers to store etc.
A better solution is to do what plants do. Pin it to a carbon atom. Synthetic hydrocarbons would also be a lot easier to integrate into existing supply chains.
Pin it to a carbon atom.
Where’s the carbon going to come from? If it’s anywhere but the CO2 in the atmosphere (or at least sequestered on its way to the atmosphere), your energy solution isn’t carbon neutral anymore. And if it is from the atmosphere, then there are efficiency challenges there at concentrating CO2 to be useful for synthetic processes.
Most syngas today comes from biological and fossil feedstocks, so it’s not really a solution to atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Isn’t one the issues with hydrogen motors that they are a bit explodey? Genuine question, haven’t looked into it in a long time.
Another huge expensive problem is transporting it is not easy. At room at atmospheric pressure and temperature, it takes up like 2-3 grams per gallon of space, making it super inefficient to transport.
You could pressurize it, but that makes it insanely flammable and a risk of it leaks. You could also cryo-freeze it, but that is also very expensive to transport, it require a lot of energy to freeze it, maintain it during long transports, and to unfreeze it at it’s destination.
Building a hydrogen delivery infrastructure is probably the best way to overcome this, but that would also take years and billions.
I’m no expert on the field, but I’d imagine a lot of energy departments would rather do that cost and effort towards building new green energy plants that can deliver power to grids rather than only help cars. Car-wise, most things are transitioning to hybrid or electric anyways, so they also benefit from a green power plant.
The only way I’ve seen hydrogen make sense is where it’s made and stored on site for later grid level generation. Transporting it makes very little sense for all the reasons you mentioned. Salt concerns and ammonia have both been discussed as potential storage options. But you wouldn’t move it around. Store it in a fixed location and generate the electricity on site. If you don’t have to move it, hydrogen might make some sense.
Pure hydrogen doesn’t explode. It’s only if you mix it with oxygen. The Hindenberg glowed red not blue
Good thing there’s no oxygen around then. Petrol doesn’t burn without oxygen either, but it’s still dangerous. Additionally typical fuel cell hydrogen cars, store the hydrogen in tanks up to 10,000 psi, which is where the explosion part happens.
Agreed. Petrol cars are also explodey. As are EVs. In fact most energy dense objects are explodey.
The issue with the 10000 psi tanks are the size and weight. Not the explodeyness.
I have doubts that hydrogen will ever work in any industry, but it definitely won’t work for cars. The storage and distribution challenges are never going to make it cost competitive with just regular lithium batteries on a marginal per-joule basis. Even if the energy itself is free, the other stuff will still be more expensive than just charging car batteries off the existing grid.
Didn’t China have a community use lots of solar and they ended up with such a glut of excess power that they didn’t know what to do with it?
All communities should have that. Electricity should be free and it would be plausible to make it free. Except for maintenance costs, but that would be peanuts compared to what we pay now.
Would it really be peanuts? Solar panel manufacture isn’t exactly cheap, nor entirely sustainable (see, for instance, the black market for sand; and economics/politics over lithium mining). Solar panels also degrade; new technology replaces old and has to be paid for and made and installed; the infrastructure tying it all together isn’t free either…
I feel like solar power, for all its excellence, is not as simple as upgrade as my rts-/tycoon-/sim-gamer’s mind thinks it should be.
Upgrading is never simple or straightforward. But it is something we need to do otherwise we won’t have a planet to live on.
Call me stupid, but why don’t they just charge enough to cover costs and a bit of profit? The current pricing model is broken if you can’t run a solar plant profitably.
It is all quite complicated.
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A renewable producer (e.g. solar panels) cannot produce energy 24/7. And when it produces energy, you are not guaranteed the production is stable.
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A consumer cannot consume energy 24/7. And when they consume energy, you are not guaranteed the consumption is stable.
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To make the issue worse, a producer may not be producing energy when the consumer wants it, and vice versa.
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Currently, energy storage is not widely installed. Hence any produced energy must be consumed at the same time.
The factors above combined means that there will be a mismatch. If the production is too great, your electricity appliances will probably explode and whatnot. If the consumption is too great, you experience blackouts. Neither are desirable.
Now consider there is a middleman. The grid. Producers sell energy to the grid. Consumers buy energy from the grid.
At some point in time, due to the factors above, the grid will need (A) zero to negative prices to encourage consumers to buy & use more energy from it, and to encourage producers to produce & sell less energy to it. Or (B) increased prices to encourage consumers to buy & use less energy and producers to produce & sell more energy. A flat price is not realistic. (Residential users only have a flat rate because our demand patterns are more stable.)
But due to the production patterns of renewable energy and consumption patterns of our society, there is a not-insignificant risk that renewable producers will consistently face scenario (A) above making it difficult to cover back the costs.
Number 2 is not inherently true. We can incentivize time-of-use, and push it to time-of-generation. Not with all loads, of course, but with a lot of them, and a lot of very heavy loads.
Our old nuclear/coal model pushes a lot of these loads overnight to reduce daytime demand and “level the curve”. Steel mills and aluminum smelters often operate overnight and shutdown during the day, because that is what nuclear and coal needed.
With solar and wind becoming predominant, we need to reverse those overnight, “off peak” incentives, and push consumption to daytime hours.
The concept is known as “demand shaping”. It is an underutilized method of matching production and consumption, but it is essential if solar and wind are to become our primary source of power.
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why don’t they just charge enough
Because who would pay 10 cents per kilowatt hour when there’s someone else who will pay someone to take that energy off their hands?
The problem is caused when the market clearing price is lower than the cost it took to produce it, and some of those costs are in the past.
It’s like getting a boat and going fishing. If you pay $10,000 for the cost of the trip, and bring back $8,000 worth of fish, you can’t just force people buy them from you for a 25% markup.
That’s not what they were saying, they were saying that it’s not economical to have an abundance of electricity when people need it the least, and little or no electricity when people need it the most. It would be one thing if utilities could sell solar electricity at peak demand hours for a higher price, to make up the difference, but that’s just when solar generation is slowly down significantly or stopped entirely.
And, yes, I know that battery storage could theoretically solve this, but battery technology is not currently capable of providing electricity for the entirety of the time we need it. New technologies are being developed right now with the goal of achieving long term grid storage, but they are still in the R&D phase. I’m confident a suitable storage technology, or multiple technologies, will eventually come to market, but it’s going to take a while.
Regardless, it is likely we will always need some kind of on-demand power generation to supplement renewables and maintain grid stability, and I think nuclear is the best option.
But we shouldn’t act like the problem is that utilities are just greedy. Many utilities aren’t even for-profit companies, as many are either not-for-profit cooperatives or public entities. Sure, there are also many for-profit power utilities as well, maybe even some with connections to the fossil fuel industry, but generally power utilities are not some great villain.
A thing you can use which gets forgotten often in the conversation is “natural” / physical batteries, or better put stores of latent energy. Essentially, “push heavy thing up hill, make it come down later”.
I know little about it, but you can release the kinetic energy stored in heavy objects at higher altitudes basically whenever, using say a dynamo on the wheels of a wagon of heavy rocks you previously pushed uphill.
There have been proposals for technology like this. Putting a motor above an abandoned mineshaft and suspending a weight. Charged by raising the weight, discharges by lowering against a load.
The issues is the capacity ends up being pretty tiny, not really at a grid level.
You’d need a TON of motors to get to something a grid could actually use to stabilize, and by then the economics don’t work out. Let alone the actual space requirements of that many motors
Additionally, a lot of the advantages of batteries come from local storage, where you don’t need to transmit the energy long distances anymore, and these “natural” batteries tend to take up a lot of space.
A better and more accessible form of “natural” energy storage are already in most homes. Heat pump water heaters in homes could do things like make the water extra hot during solar hours, when power is cheap, so they can make it until the next morning without turning back on.
Or with better building envelopes (insulation) we could run more cooling during solar, maybe even make a ton of ice. Then later in the day, when solar drops and the grid load peaks, you can still cool the building with ice.
The physical battery idea has been a thing for decades in the form of a pump storage plant where during times of excess electricity, they pump water up a hill, and when power is needed it works like a hydroelectric power plant. The problems with these however is that in order to get a meaningful amount of power and longevity, you need a lot of water and space to build one of these which makes them massive and expensive up front. I have one near me, but I also live near one of the biggest lakes in the world, which helps.
Yes, pumped storage is definitely an existing technology that serves this need. I live near a massive one as well. However, large-hydro recently has not been considered as renewable form of generation due to the disruptive impact it has to local ecosystems.
I know in the US, new projects do not get approved due to permitting and water board issues. So I don’t think we’re going to see any new construction.
I really like your response. Right behind you about energy storage.
Whoever cracks that nut is an instant billionaire in my opinion. The first cheap, effective, and practical storage technology is going to change the world. But we’re not there just yet.
I’m curious on your statement about nuclear. While I do think nuclear is a great energy source, I’m not sure I agree on the on-demand part.
Our current nuclear plants take hours or even days to start up and wouldn’t provide enough reactivity for a highly renewable grid. Are you referring to a future Small Modular Reactor technology? One with a significantly faster startup and ramp rate?
For the longest time I thought people who had solar panels had a battery on their property somewhere, they’re panels would charge battery and they would only switch to the grid if their battery ran out.
I don’t know much about it, but this seems like a pretty viable solution and I still can’t believe this isn’t how it works.
that requires specialized equipment other than the battery. you need to generate AC from the DC of the panels and battery, and the easiest way to do that at the right frequency and phase is to follow the grid. that’s why most solar installations stop providing power without a grid connection; you need a wave to sync with.
if you want to be truly independent you need your own wave forming equipment. and not the cheap stuff either, like the 12V inverters for cars that give out square waves. that’s fine for like a drill, but plug a computer into that and there’s a chance it fries. it won’t charge, at least not for long.
also you need extra safeguards to not fry electrical workers when they disable the grid and your power comes flowing the other way.
Yeah you can do that. Not everyone does
abundance of electricity when people need it the least
Isn’t peak consumption around middle of the day for most countries?
it’s not economical
Mfw electricity being cheap to generate is not economical
No, peak generation in most countries is in the late afternoon when people come home from work, the ac kicks on, people start to cook + do other things around the house. You typically see a double- peak, one in the morning and one in the evening, although it varies based on the seasons. I’m an engineer who works in renewable energy and the stated problem is real- solar generation doesn’t line up very well with grid demand. You can work around this with energy storage but that is an expensive solution
Isn’t peak consumption around middle of the day for most countries?
I can’t speak to other countries, but in the US peak electricity demand generally occurs in the early evening.
Mfw electricity being cheap to generate is not economical
Cheap electricity is great for consumers, but not necessarily for producers. Some people might say, “well, screw producers,” but even if you take profit out of the equation, electric utilities need to be able to at least cover their expenses, and you can’t do that if the amount of electricity you’re generating relative to the demand is so high the price actually goes negative (meaning the utility is actually paying the consumer). Again, that’s good for consumers, but I’m sure you can see how that’s not a sustainable business model. And, like I mentioned before, it would be one thing if utilities could make up for this by selling for a higher price during peak, but by that point the sun is either setting or already set, depending on the time of year, so there’s just no solar electricity to sell, at any price.
Cheap electricity is great for consumers, but not necessarily for producers. Some people might say, “well, screw producers,” but even if you take profit out of the equation, electric utilities need to be able to at least cover their expenses, and you can’t do that if the amount of electricity you’re generating relative to the demand is so high the price actually goes negative (meaning the utility is actually paying the consumer). Again, that’s good for consumers, but I’m sure you can see how that’s not a sustainable business model.
Fully agreed: let’s eliminate business from the issue, and create national, for-service electric grids, that produce the cheapest renewables at all possible times in the most efficient way possible, disregarding hourly profit and taking into account exclusively the cost in €/kWh produced over the lifetime of each energy source.
Suddenly it’s obvious that the problem isn’t with renewables, but with organising the electric grid as a market
Public utilities still need to cover their expenses, and they’re not going to be able to do that if they’re charging negative rates in the middle of the day and have no electricity to sell once the sun goes down.
Do I really need to explain the concepts of taxes, subsidies, or fixed prices regardless of demand, to an adult?
I’m not sure what you mean. Are you saying that public utilities should be funded from taxes instead of charging for service? I don’t think having tax payers pay public utilities to overproduce electricity is going to fix the problem, especially since no amount of tax dollar funding can allow utilities to produce solar electricity when the sun isn’t shining.
The solution is obviously not exclusively from pricing models, we need other energy sources than renewables for the time being, that doesn’t mean we need to have market-based electricity pricing.
Imagine the state installing as many solar panels as society, guided by experts, democratically decides it wants, basically deciding as a society the energy mix instead of hoping that companies will install enough if we bribe them enough with taxes to do so, and if it’s profitable. Then, it decides a pricing model based on a mixture of subsidy and incentivising consumption during production hours.
Problem solved, innit?
I mean, “economy” fundamentally is the allocation of limited resources, if something is limited at a point when it’s needed, then economical doesn’t sound like the wrong word to use? (I’m aware economical means cheap, BTW)
Sure we can we just don’t have the technology for a Dyson Sphere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Build big batteries on the grid get the solar in the middle of the day and release the engery back into it a 17:00 when everyone gets home and puts on the shower and kettle at the same time
Sounds like Communism to me. That system killed 100 gorillion people.
Dr Seuss made that??
Here’s 390 of his political cartoons:
https://calisphere.org/collections/26157/Edit: the one that was posted is from 2024-07-10
Yup that’s the free market , if someone can see a business case in operating a big battery by taking money to use the excess power and then again taking money to sell it back when needed everyone will be happy. Of course doing that will reduce the price difference
Or put the batteries in your home, charge it during the day on solar or whenever electricity is cheap, and use it whenever.
It can even be less dense batteries that you don’t need to put in cars.
I live love life England so not worth the squeeze for me to get solar
I was tempted by the outrageous electricity prices a year or two ago.
But then I swapped to Agile Octopus which pretty much halved my bills and made it not really worth doing. I work from home most of the time anyway, so my usage is spread over the day.
A case of the quiet part being spoken outloud. That’s my beef with nuclear energy as well - why? Solar power clearly work, and best of all, it isn’t centralized. Same with wind power. It even works in circumstances you might have to shut down nuclear power plants due to excessive heat. You even have to worry about the increasing load on the grid because they are easier to distribute. It needs energy storage, and there’s no shortage of means for energy storage.
Nuclear power plants are going to be charging you the same as coal plants for energy as long as they are owned by market tycoons. Nuclear power plants make the best sense in an ideal world where society matters and there aren’t people gaming the market. We do not live in an ideal world.
In this thread: a bunch of armchair energy scientists who think they’ve solved the energy storage problem all on their own.
Theres tons of ways that people with even a little brains could figure out, the problem is often cost or feasability.
A big burried water tank in my yard could be heated during the day and used to warm the house via underfloor heating at night, could do the reverse with chilled water in the middle of summer plumbed to an air recirculator with a heat exchanger. Its really simple engineering but expensive to implement.
I think an awful lot of people just dont understand the sheer scale of a lot of these problems, not the fundamentals.
It’s always economics.
There’s a joke I’ve heard that says something like anybody can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build one that just barely stands (i.e., one where the materials and labor actually cost money).
That also reminds me of my first router - it was my PC. 10x the cost and 1/10 the features of a purpose built router, but I already had the computer and just needed to provide internet to 1 or 2 more via Ethernet.
Likewise, it’s easy to design energy storage concepts of all kinds. It’s a lot more tricky if you want it to be economically viable and see mass adoption.
an awful lot of people just dont understand the sheer scale of a lot of these problems
Sheer scale is why we’re in this mess to begin with. Coal power for a population of 50M people living on either side of the Atlantic isn’t what caused climate change. It’s the scale up to provide power for 8B people that’s broiling the planet.
“Ah, but you don’t understand! There will be engineering obstacles to upgrading the grid!” is shit you can say when you aren’t spending billions to maintain the existing fossil fuel infrastructure that’s currently in place.
We have the capacity to reorient our economy around a predictable daily regionally glut of solar electricity. We already exploit time variable ecological events to optimize consumption. And we built out a global grid 40 years ago to handle logistics at this scale. You can move electricity from coast to coast and we routinely do. This isn’t an impossible problem, it’s just one that Western financial centers in particular don’t want to invest in solving.
A lot of energy storage solutions do exactly that - use heat as energy. i.e. solar heads rock, sand, salt etc. and then later on that heat is turned back into useful energy - either pumping water around households to heat them, or to drive a steam turbine. The bigger the volume of rock / sand / salt, the more efficient the process is.
I think salt would be easier than water, mostly due to water expansion characteristics, but that’s just my opinion.
Viable solutions with sand or rock have been developed and I expect over the next few decades a large number of such projects will be produced.
Oh yeah,I’m no expert. I can see salt being problematic if the system sprung leaks and contaminated the soil which wouldnt be uncommon once you have tens of thousands of houses rigged up. Im pretty sure most water based systems just use water and antifreeze.
Point is that the fundamentals are simple, when theres excess electricity and nobody is home convert it into stored thermal energy that can be used later when people are home, the devils will be in the details.
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