Ok, but what do you do when you’re short of power at night? Keep in mind to turn on conventional power stations it’s expensive & time consuming. Once they startup they need to stay on for a long while to be efficient & cheap.
The real solution is to store excess power in batteries. Lithium ion is too expensive to scale, Sodium ion batteries are economically & capacity viable AFAIK.
Thats just not what this post is about. Obviously storing is the way but until then yiu just gotta turn em off
I don’t think you realize the work involved in integrating a new unreliable power source into the grid. Its a delicate dance to anticipate demand to keep power always available. Having more power than you need is bad for the grid, which is why the costs go negative: power companies want it off the grid ASAP.
Conventional power stations can stay on all the time & that’s awesome for the grid stability. There is no power gap renewables are filling. So to turn solar on we need to turn off a coal powered plant. If this new source cannot match the reliability it hinders to grid than help. So there’s no question of “turn it off when you don’t need it”.
We need to turn off fossil fuel power generation for more renewables, sure, but it doesn’t alleviate their problems right now.
I’ve read that gravity batteries and sand batteries are ecologically sound options that work on the scale needed to support large sections of the electrical grid.
I hesitate on
that work on the scale needed to support large sections of electrical grid
That first link is for a 10MW, 8 hour battery. 10MW is on the smaller end of generators, you’d need quite a few of these to start making an impact. For example, a small gas turbine is like 50MW, a large one is over 250MW.
And you could say “just build a lot of them” but the capacity per unit of area tends to be pretty low for these types of technologies.
Building them where we have ample space is okay. But now this power has to be transmitted, and we are already having a lot of problems with transmission line congestion as-is. The real advantage of energy storage is when it’s done local, no need for transmission lines.
Plus there’s permitting/stability issues as well. These wouldn’t work if the area was prone to earthquakes or other natural events.
That’s fair. They’re certainly imperfect, but a large improvement over electrolytic cells for large scale storage.