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the best solar and wind ad you can imagine is russian energy grid attacks and how communities had built diverse workarounds to mitigate the grid going down here and there. it also spawned local businesses to maintain these stations which greatly helps local economies.
𝖸𝖾𝖺𝗁 𝗌𝗈𝗅𝖺𝗋 𝖼𝖺𝗇’𝗍 𝖻𝖾 𝖺 𝗆𝗈𝗇𝗈𝗉𝗈𝗅𝗒 𝖻𝖾𝖼𝖺𝗎𝗌𝖾 𝖢𝗁𝗂𝗇𝖺 𝖺𝗅𝗋𝖾𝖺𝖽𝗒 𝖼𝗈𝗇𝗍𝗋𝗈𝗅𝗌 𝟫𝟢% 𝗈𝖿 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗉𝖺𝗇𝖾𝗅𝗌 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗆𝖺𝗋𝗀𝗂𝗇𝗌 𝖺𝗋𝖾 𝗌𝗈 𝗋𝖺𝗓𝗈𝗋 𝗍𝗁𝗂𝗇 𝗍𝗁𝖺𝗍 𝖶𝖾𝗌𝗍𝖾𝗋𝗇 𝖼𝗈𝗆𝗉𝖺𝗇𝗂𝖾𝗌 𝖼𝖺𝗇’𝗍 𝗆𝖺𝗄𝖾 𝖻𝖺𝗇𝗄 𝗈𝗇 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗁𝖺𝗋𝖽𝗐𝖺𝗋𝖾. 𝖨𝗇𝗌𝗍𝖾𝖺𝖽 𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗒 𝗁𝖺𝖽 𝗍𝗈 𝗀𝖾𝗍 𝖼𝗋𝖾𝖺𝗍𝗂𝗏𝖾 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝗌𝗍𝖺𝗋𝗍 𝗅𝖾𝖺𝗌𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗌𝗁𝗂𝗍 𝗈𝗋 𝗌𝖾𝗅𝗅𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗒𝗈𝗎 𝖺 𝖻𝖺𝗍𝗍𝖾𝗋𝗒 𝗐𝖺𝗅𝗅 𝗃𝗎𝗌𝗍 𝗍𝗈 𝗅𝗈𝖼𝗄 𝗒𝗈𝗎 𝗂𝗇. 𝖠𝗇𝖽 𝖾𝗏𝖾𝗇 𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗇 𝗒𝗈𝗎 𝗌𝗍𝗂𝗅𝗅 𝖼𝖺𝗇’𝗍 𝗌𝖼𝖺𝗅𝖾 𝖿𝖺𝗌𝗍 𝖻𝖾𝖼𝖺𝗎𝗌𝖾 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗀𝗋𝗂𝖽 𝗂𝗌 𝖺 𝟣𝟫𝗍𝗁 𝖼𝖾𝗇𝗍𝗎𝗋𝗒 𝗋𝖾𝗅𝗂𝖼 𝗍𝗁𝖺𝗍 𝖼𝖺𝗇’𝗍 𝗁𝖺𝗇𝖽𝗅𝖾 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗏𝗈𝗅𝗎𝗆𝖾 𝖺𝗇𝗒𝗐𝖺𝗒.
Don’t worry, the market will adapt to solar becoming a better product.
Isn’t that what you always tell us?
I mean, a surplus in the electricity grid is actually sort of a problem, especially if you don’t have any way to store the extra energy.
we can just put a white blanket on top of the panels…
I’m ignorant of the mechanism of solar panels and electrical grids…do they just explode if they are set up and not draining power?
Because why can’t you just cut the inflow of electricity on a signal? I’d appreciate actual answers.
We setup a 25kw setup recently in Pakistan but ran out of money to have inverter and batteries for it. So far they have been up for a couple months, none have exploded yet.
Can’t it go to some AI datacenter or smth?
Problem counter: 0
You know I’ve really come around to solarpunk as a concept.
I used to genuinely be against solar because the carbon costs barely break even, but the very simple point was made to me that solar panels are an ideal ore for making solar panels – meaning the carbon costs of solar panels goes down once we start recycling them. Add the independence solar panels give people (that punk aspect), and yeah I dig it.
Can you point me to a study saying carbon cost barely breaks even? Compared to what?
The owners of my family’s last house left us with solar panels, and as a struggling barely middle class family, it helped my parents afford all our expenses; from groceries to rent and even a vacation. It makes me so happy to see solarpunk become so popular, the good it can do is nothing short of awesome.
Can you clarify how the recycling works? We had BP solar panels and after 6-7 years they all cracked (the crystalline silicon couldn’t handle the sun or heat) and stopped working
If they cracked, your installer may have fucked up. You need to leave a gap between panels because they expand with humidity and heat, kinda like flooring.
They were installed correctly and BP said they were faulty. They offered to replace them if an NDA was signed
Don’t worry, there are literally startups, and Elon Musk, working right now to block sunlight from you and sell it back to you.
Lack of capitalist imagination
We own the land you need to build the solar panels on.
We own the factories that build the solar panels
We own the solar farms.
If it were feasible, it would have been done as quickly and easily as poking holes in the ground in 1859.
TIL modern medicine isn’t feasible because you couldn’t do it in 1859
There is literally limitless energy available to us. But as long as the people in charge benefit from people believing the supply is limited, people will be made to believe the supply is limited.
There literally was limitless energy available to the literal ancient Egyptians, as well as literally 19th century literal London.
Why did it take fossil energy to literally reach our present state?
That limitless energy is presumably also literally available to you, why aren’t you literally using it now and why are you limited?
I do, and they did.
Wind, hydro and solar were the only sources of energy long before somebody decided to revolutionize the industry using coal and oil. They also burned wood though, but even that is more sustainable than fossil fuels.
Here’s the article this is responding to if anyone wants to read it. Here’s the study it’s reporting on.
I’d say the tweet is at least a little bit disingenuous because the article is not arguing against the adoption of solar power, rather the focus is on what the challenges to California’s solar goals are and what possible solutions might be. The tone is “economic constraints might slow down solar, how can that be addressed?” This is all from 2021, and it looks like since then the slowdown in solar capacity increase it cites as a concern has not materialized, still lots of consistent growth since then. I haven’t read enough to know whether this is because the study was wrong somehow, or that it’s premise that solar installation costs might not continue to drop just didn’t pan out, or that the increased subsidies it suggested came through, but it’s an interesting topic.
It’s colosally stupid to tie solar power generation to It’s economic value. We are quickly heading to a future with climate extremes without doing something different.
Well there is one problem with negative electricity prices though. It’s that you’re gonna have to pay to produce electricity, charge batteries you might not have, or disconnect from the grid. I suspect fancy new inverters allow doing the latter automatically, but people with older setups will have to either do it manually by the hour when prices go negative, or upgrade their setup.
Good news is that negative electricity prices also apply to fossil fuels so there’s incentive to reduce production there too.
It’s not stupid to acknowledge that individuals and businesses make decisions on the basis of money. That isn’t the same thing as giving climate concerns a lower relative priority. You can have climate as your highest priority, and still pursue that priority much more effectively by considering financial incentives and their effects, and to me that is what this article and connected study seem to be doing.
Nothing matters if the planet is nearly uninhabitable.
I’m not sure what your point is
Im saying its insane to worry about the economy when we are facing down making parts of the earth uninhabitable.
I see, but I’m saying that nobody is worrying about the economy here except as a means to make sure more solar power is deployed, in service of not making parts of the earth uninhabitable, and I don’t see how there could be an objection to that.
Solar panels costs continued to drop. A bit slower, but still. https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2025/Jul/IRENA_TEC_RPGC_in_2024_2025.pdf#p91
My unscientific personal experience answer to your last paragraph’s question:
The study didn’t anticipate that California power companies would be so unbelievably corrupt and that the price of electricity would nearly double since 2021. We pay $.40-$.60/kWh while the national average is like $.12-$.16 so us Californians are willing to do literally anything to get away from the PG&E cartel. There is supposed to be a governing body that reins in the prices but it’s controlled by the Governor. In this case that’s Gavin Newsom who just happens to own hundreds of millions worth of shares in the utility companies….🤔
This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there’s a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
There are of course solutions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an engineering challenge to implement.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.
No. No no no. You can literally turn solar generation off, nearly instantly. It’s called curtailment and it’s done all the time in saturated markets. Older residential inverters don’t have the reactive technology, but residential solar is a drop in the bucket compared to utility-scale solar.
The economics of that are great. Negative power prices are an incentive to store energy and get payed for that. Then release the energy again later in the day or at night to earn money on it again.
Yes, and plenty of companies are doing just that. The effect is that as they charge the batteries, they increase demand and that increases the electricity price a bit. Grid doesn’t tip over and everybody wins!
Trouble is that at some point they run out of batteries. Batteries are expensive. And when they run out of batteries, the demand drops and the grid has to figure out where to dump the excess. And the price drops again.
Pumped hydro is a more scalable solution, but it’s slow to react and even that has its limits.
Peak energy production would be a good time to train the damn llms instead of building natural gas power plant I guess.
Sorry, but Johnny Oil with a shotgun to my head disagrees with your math. and while I never looked at the numbers myself, I am inclined to agree with him that such a plan would be disturbingly “unprofitable”.
-anyone around western spheres of influence in the vicinity of any sort of lever of power to authorize such changes in infrastructure investment
Yes but that would be woke soy and gay. You dont want to get gay woke soy in your ai. Thats against like the entire point of the thing!
Given the price of RAM and graphics cards, it is obvious that running LLM is at least somewhat limited by the amount of hardware available. So having that hardware sitting idle, except when there is too much solar power, is obviously not economically viable.
Power and grid infrastructure is a limitation that can exceed hardware availability in some regions. Musk has a datacenter with 20-something methane gas generators running throughout the day to power his mini-me sycophantic AI, Grok.
At the cost of a cultural deficit, solar could provide an environmental benefit there during the day.
Then you use taxation to change the viability. Make the non renewable energy so expensive for that usage that they’re better just to shutdown.
Gotta admit, didn’t think about that. Maybe the solution was a few guillotines all along. (This solution has its own problem tho, see the Robespierre gambit)
Channel it to an underground phase change storage.
The extra power issue is not that hard to solve, when you get close you can start mandating the inverters to have smart connection to the grid, so they stop providing power to the grid if demand is satisfied.
this is not the intractable problem you make it out to be.
there’s a fantastic way to smooth out production peaks, and hey, it fixes the lulls - it’s called storage. battery storage can take all kinds of forms, from pumped hydro to large stationary chemical batteries. we’re finally starting to see large rollouts of storage and it’s one of the few bits of light in a dark future.
You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
we figured out this problem centuries ago it is called capacitors. long term it is called batteries
Of course. Like I said, we know how to do it, but it’s still an engineering feat to get it done.
Neither of which grow on trees.
Edit: well I guess lemons grow on trees and those are batteries if you try hard enough…
my dude gravity is a battery if you know how to use it
There are only so many places where grid level pumped storage hydroelectricity works, and the capital and environmental costs are non negligible for most new locations.
That’s only one method of using gravity
The problem we have to solve is that the energy storage that’s built into the grid was built before widespread home solar adoption. We need new energy dumps, and those cost money. Of course the obvious answer is taxes, but good luck convincing Americans to pay for vital infrastructure
That relies on them not already being full and enough of them existing
shit like this burns power fast if you need to clear capacity. just ground it. i’m not that smart of an engineer and this is not that hard of a problem. the hard part is the grid, the interconnectedness, the load balancing, and that’s already done.
That would actually be sci-fi as fuck, and I’m now 100% for it. I want power plants to have constantly zapping Tesla coils
i was mostly just thinking arc gap sparking bullshit but tesla coils playing music for the workers and running the PA system. yesss now we are cooking
Reverse lightning rods.
Batteries? Boil water? Anything?
Use excess to boil water for steam turbines. Solved. Big oil has INSANE propaganda.
I have played factorio so im an expert. Just boil billions of gallons of water and store the steam for as long as you need with zero loss of enegry.
Bam
You just took the excess energy to generate more energy with it?!?
Steam store in tank. Tank lose little-to-lot depend on how long. Use steam night when no sun.
Or
Move water to higher tank from lower tank. When needed pour high tank through generator to low tank. Repeat.
Batteries are usually to expensive to have standing by on this scale.
Is it more expensive than excess production harming the grid or the economic impact of recurring blackouts?
Solar panels need an aperture.
Again, though, using gravity batteries or pumped hydro is a great way to manage excess juice, though these are expensive options.
They still cost much less than evacuating the entire coast line of the world when we finish melting the Greenland and Antarctic land ice.
Short term is grounding the power. Medium teen is building up storage or electricity intensive industries that can start up and shut down based on electricity swings.
You can dump megawatts. But there is no need for that. It’s not like solar panel inverters will just keep increasing voltage until they can push the power into the grid. They have an upper limit.
Basically I don’t see your point
Maybe I don’t know enough about electricity at large scale, but at small scale you can just cut the circuit. Electricity isn’t like water that just sits in the pipe when you close a valve, right?
It is a lot more like water than you think. The solution of “just cut the circuit” is like solving the problem of overflowing storm drains by “just plug the pipe”.
The power has to go somewhere. If you don’t do anything about it, the voltage in the cables will rise until things start to fry. Real world power balancing involves adjusting the output of power plants (e.g. how much fuel to burn) in response to changes, and in some cases, dumping power into the ground as safely as possible. This problem gets complicated when power grids span vast distances and involve many different power plants that all need to be in sync or things catch on fire.
In the case of solar power, this is part of why improved large-scale battery technology is so important. It lets you absorb the excess power at peak generation times, and then release that power at night.
Can’t you cut the power at each individual solar panel? I assume that the amount of electricity out there is low enough to not cause that kind of problems?
You’re pretty much describing what hybrid inverters do for home solar panels. They can disconnect and not export to the grid when you don’t need it and just power your house and charge your batteries.
But hybrid inverters are quite a bit more expensive than standard grid-tied inverters that are always pumping into the grid.
For instance, I just had to replace my home inverter that died and I got a cheap 6 kilowatt inverter for about $1,300. A hybrid inverter would be at minimum 3 or 4k.
Im not that guy, but im picturing moreso just that solar panels come preinstalled with the glass that turns opaque when it recieves voltage. When your batteries are full and the grid isnt pulling power, that would progressively look more and more like either a short citcuit or, more likely, an open circuit. When the voltage rises too much due to na open circuit, the solar panel shuts off by turning the glass opaque, which also adds a load to the battery hopefully trickling its voltage down.
Again, that would increase cost significantly. I didn’t think of this at first because my array doesn’t have RSD because it’s older but all new solar arrays in the US and elsewhere have what’s called rapid shutdown technology for firefighter safety and it is a device that is mounted to each solar panel and does effectively reduce the output to zero or near zero on each solar panel in the event grid power is lost or somebody hits the rapid shutdown emergency button. So the technology is already in place to do what you’re describing but more cost-effective and less elaborate.
Also, something I should have mentioned is that newer inverters like my own, even though they are grid-tied, can be configured to export nothing and only power the home even without a battery. But the problem with this whole line of thinking is that it would screw over homeowners who should be getting money for the solar they put into the grid, but would be getting nothing in these scenarios.
Another point of failure, another cost… do you retrofit old panels? There are challenges with this at scale
It’s not only possible but also required already. The system needs to be able to shut itself off to protect the grid.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy
So what you’re saying is that if it’s distributed enough (say, on the roofs of houses, sized to serve the needs of the occupants) it’s not a problem.
Distributed vs centralized has no impact here. It’s all about excess power across the entire grid.
Sure, the solar system I own generates a few kilowatts and if I’m home cooking or running AC, I use almost all of it. But if I’m not home, my AC is off, fridge isn’t running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid. My neighbor’s down the street do the same thing, their next door neighbor, the houses all in my neighborhood, and across the entire city, we’re all doing this. A hundred or thousand homes generating excess few kilowatts adds up to megawatts
Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it’s still payment. I’m not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power
But if I’m not home, my AC is off, fridge isn’t running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid.
And if it couldn’t do that, your solar panels would warm up a little bit and nothing else of consequence would happen. Ditto for your neighbors’ solar panels, and everybody else’s. Whoop-de-do.
It wouldn’t even cause a net increase in the urban heat island effect, because if that energy weren’t hitting solar panels it would just be heating up people’s roofs instead.
Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it’s still payment. I’m not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power
You’re conflating an technological problem with an economic one. The only reason you claim my proposal wouldn’t work is because you don’t want it to because it cuts into your profit.
a giant flywheel for every town!
Pumped Hydro is a pretty safe storage method using preexisting technology if you have hills in the area.
i don’t want safe, i want DANGER!
Store it as compared air in steel tanks buried underneath your home. No protective coating.
why not hydrogen?
Already done and he hasn’t blown himself up yet.
sounds like he’s not even trying then
Giant flywheels are also safe. Great for smoothing out energy generation from a fickle source as well.
not if you leave them uncovered!
Like any hydroelectrics it has large environment impact and dam failures tend to be the deadliest industrial disasters when they happen. Also most good locations have already been used. You cannot just build it wherever (without insane costs). Pumped hydro is hardly a solution here.
Pumped hydro isn’t the same as a hydroelectric dam. Because both reservoirs are engineered and you don’t have the concrete wall as the single point of failure, you don’t have the same risks involved. Pump Hydro can be whatever size you want and spread out to distribute the grid load.
Also, are dam failures worse then Climate Change or are they just more dramatic?
Then you either have small cheap and safe, without much capacity (so you need many of those), or big, with the problems of the big hydroelectric projects.
Of course pumped hydro has and will have its place in the grid, but it cannot solve all the energy storage problems.
Apparently you can do something similar with sand if you live in a desert.
Thermal sand batteries are a thing, I think?
That was some solution talked about on Undecided.
Gravity Batteries? They’re much, much easier using water compared to solid masses.
You could store solar energy as heat in sand and use turbines(if you have water) or Sterling Engines(if you don’t) to spine a generator. Peltiers are a solid state method to convert heat to electricity, but they aren’t very efficient.
You can cover them with a sheet You can pump water. You can do desalination. You can overcool houses during summer so the house is pleasantly chilly when you get home. Plenty of industrial processes already set the machines in-phase. You can do cool displays arcing it through the fucking air.
Youre inventing problems so your stonks stay valuable.
You can store it in batteries, what are you on about?
We don’t have that many batteries (yet).
Oh no, I have too many megawatts, and somehow no batteries, turbines or any other shit, what could I possibly send it to
The humble ground:
Why waste it on the ground when we could start desalinating seawater
That is not how it works.
When you short something to ground, it’s everything in between that needs to dissipate the heat. Think about what “sending it to ground” means—it means you connect the hot to the ground. But with what do you connect the two? A wire? Sure, but you better hope that wire can dissipate all that power, because that’s what it’ll try to do.
You can’t just “dump power on the ground.” That’s not how it works.
So, I’m not good at these things, what you’re saying is that if I take a 240V cable in the street and just shove it into the ground, the cable will end up uh… melting? Trying to saturate itself until it matches the resistance of the ground or something?
If it’s a low resistance path to ground, it’ll get very very toasty! If it’s a lousy ground though, then it won’t…but it also won’t consume any power, so it’s not an effective way of scrubbing off electricity.
A good ground (low resistance) is found in your household wiring (the ground and/or the neutral). Of you short to that…well…you can guess what will happen! (Let’s hope you have proper circuit breakers.)
Yeah it’s, like, normal. I don’t know what I was confused about.
Guess those SWER powerlines are just for show then
There are two parts of this problem:
- If you are connected to the grid and using it you need to pay for it somehow. This is not a capitalisim thing this is a maintenance issue. Deploying lots of rooftop solar reduces the amount people are paying the grid operators for the same infrastructure as before while they are still using it. This could be solved by making the grid operators public utilities again and charging taxes instead of billing electric rates. Either way rooftop solar owners are going to need to pay grid fees unless they are entirely disconnected from the grid (this is rarely ever the case).
- It creates issues where generation may outstrip load as well as transmission and storage capacity. A lot of this can be solved with more investment but if you are earning less of power sales and still need to maintain everything this can be financially challenging.
There is also a third problem where home solar isn’t centrally planned resulting in cases where utilities need to delay homeowners’ solar installations while they figure out grid capacity.
Uh, most countries have a base utility fee that’s charged, and then usage on top of that.
Tried that one?
Most of summer our bills are negative use because we have a fuckoff huge solar array, but we still pay “property charges”
How about just decoupling grid fees from electricity costs? As in a base fee and in turn a cheaper price on electricity used
That seems to be what is happening in some states. They have a minimum price which is effectively the cost of hooking up to the grid.
Then separate the infrastructure fee, my family switched to solar and has since paid $0 on usage, but still pays electricity bill in form of the minimum cost to maintain infrastructure.
Also with a big grid, there’s will be enough industry consuming large amount of power during daylight hours for a long time, that’s why with variable power rates power is still more expensive during daylight hours, you don’t have to worry about the generation outstripping load for a long time, and if we hit that it would be a good news as we can all focus on storing power and phase out fossil fuels.
I don’t see a problem with being disconnected from the grid. That’s even preferable I think. The only reason that isn’t already the case is bcz of calitalism.
It’s so efficient that I can’t fit my money cog into the machine!
That’s why we need a way to store the power overnight, this is a well known and obvious problem, and there are solutions. Batteries, flywheels, sand bins, etc. Solutions which should also raise the price of the electrons produced, just to make the fuckers happier.
Not everyone who writes under the banner of MIT is sincere.
I mean yes, but what’s genuinely problematic is the variability of the sun. Since it doesn’t shine at night, you have to store the energy generated during the day somehow. What about winter, especially in parts of the world where it lasts a very long time? How can we transfer the energy generated in, say, the Sahara desert to Svalbard? Solar is great for generating electricity, but storage and transport of said energy is not completely resolved, yet.
For most parts of the world, the only reason why the problem with the variability isn’t solved yet, is because governments don’t want to invest in the electricity grid. We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money. And it’s unrealistic to say that energy needs to be trabsported from the Sahara to nordic countries. Finland already needs to cut its nuclear reactors, because the renewables in Finland produce so much energy. Only the furthest regions north can’t use solar.
Also the other problem is political, without borders we could be transmitting power from places in daytime to places in nighttime. We already have grids that span across different timezones.
We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money.
When discussing large public projects whose scale is larger than anything before seen, the money is mainly an accounting placeholder for the real resources that need to be expended.
Grid scale storage has been expanding at an exponential pace, but the sheer magnitude of the materials and engineering work that needs to be done to make a dent is pretty huge.
Bloomberg projects that total cumulative installed capacity should hit 2 Terawatt hours by 2035, noting that would represent 8x the number for 2025. But when you compare those numbers to just how much electricity is produced or consumed, with 22,000 TWh per year, we’re talking about demand periods measured in minutes, not even hours, much less days.
At scales large enough to make enough of a dent to show up in global energy stats, we need to recognize that even infinite money would run into the real resource constraints of how much capacity we as a species have for pulling minerals out of the ground, processing them into useful materials, and engineering them to be useful energy storage solutions (whether pumped hydro or other gravitational systems, compressed air, flywheels, or whatever battery or fuel cell chemistries can store energy in an efficient way).
We have some technologies, but need things to improve significantly before storage can actually meet the needs for power that meets demand at any given moment in time. In the meantime, matching supply and demand in real time is a true engineering challenge, not just a monetary challenge.
we need to recognize that even infinite money would run into the real resource constraints of how much capacity we as a species have for pulling minerals out of the ground
You can store electricity by stacking rocks. You can store it by moving large volumes of liquid. You can store it with sand. If we are in danger of exhausting these resources I think problems have gotten bad enough that energy storage is no longer a going concern.
A gravity storage system that stores about 100 MWh and outputs about 25 MW is much, much larger than the 65 battery containers they’d replace. It stores basically 4 hours worth of energy in what appears to be a large steel and concrete structure 150 m tall (the equivalent height as a 30-40 story building) on a 100m x 100m footprint.
If we’re talking about storing a terawatt hour, then we’d be talking about about 10,000 of these gravity storage systems needing to be built. That’s what I mean by existing technology not really meeting the scale requirements of the problem.
Gravity storage systems all basically suffer from this problem. Water-based solutions need to be sited on favorable geography to have large scale (otherwise water itself isn’t dense enough to compete with concrete and stone and sand).
Meanwhile, storing the same 100 MWh of energy in containerized lithium batteries would basically require a 4x6 stack of 40-foot shipping containers that each can store 4MWh.
We can get there on storage, but we’re talking about decades of planning and implementation, across all technologies, before we can even credibly reach storage representing one whole day’s electricity usage. How many man hours of labor does that engineering and planning and building represent? How much steel, energy, and machinery would these projects use up?
Anyone who talks about this stuff without recognizing the scale involved is basically not serious about solving it. It’s an engineering problem that exists independently of money (and it’s also a money problem, but that part will probably pay for itself because of how valuable a solution to this problem would be).
already needs to cut its nuclear reactors, because the renewables in Finland produce so much energy.
sounds actually good. And also Finland could use other renewables like Wind, Geothermal and Tides.
I’m not saying it has to be transported, but it’s well-known that we could theoretically cover the world’s electricity needs by placing some solar panels in the middle of a desert, if only that energy could be transported. At the same time you would avoid all the NIMBYs etc. Of course it’s not realistic, that’s why other forms of electricity are used, like wind and geothermal.
There are many ways to store the energy without chemical batteries.
We can use thermal batteries by heating water or other liquids and then release it at night. We can use kinetic batteries like compressing springs and then releasing them at night to turn a generator. Water batteries like hydro dams where you pump the water into a reservoir during the day and then release at night to again power a generator.
Giant. Freaking. Lasers.
Hey, I never claimed it was efficient.
That isn’t really a problem for where many people live though, nor for very long, so some modest storage medium and transmission lines (which likely already exist to many places dark in the winter) coupled with wind or whatever else makes sense locally would be just fine for those locations where it is a problem. There’s no need to transmit from the Sahara to islands at the poles either, there’s so much sun to go around, and so many places to gather it.
Mirrors in space
Musk is this you?
