From a grid stability point, you can’t produce more than is used, else you get higher frequencies and/or voltages until the automatics shut down. It’s already a somewhat frequent occurence in germany for the grid operator to shut down big solar plants during peak hours because they produce way more power than they can dump (because of low demand or the infrastructure limiting transfer to somewhere else)
Negative prices are the grid operator encouraging more demand so it can balance out the increased production.
Spot on! I hoped this comment would be higher! The main problem isn’t corps not making money, but grid stability due to unreliability of renewables.
To be fair, the original tweet is kinda shit to begin with. They’ve unnecessarily assigned monetary value to a purely engineering (physics?) problem.
The original commenter’s (OC’s) point has nothing to do with renewables’ reliability.
It is entirely to do with generation vs demand. Grid operators could ask other generators like coal, nuclear, hydro, etc. plants to curtail so inverter-based renewables can export power, but that’s not likely because those producers can’t ramp generation up and down as easily.
Grid stability is a problem when you have overcrowding of generation without enough demand on given feeders. This is moreso an issue with the utilities anyways and how they plan their transmission and substation upgrades.
Well I wasn’t expecting to find THE right answer in the comments already. Kudos!
And to everyone reading through this post: If you have questions, need more explanations or want to learn more about the options that we have to “stabilize” a renewable energy system and make it long term viable, just ask!
What options do we have to stabilize a renewable energy system and make it long term viable?
Well, I set myself up for this, didn’t I… 😅 Actually I was kind of hoping for a more specific question, as I would need to respond with a wall of text - and I would like to avoid that as it is kinda rude to force people to read so much and it makes discussion difficult.
So maybe 3 options:
- Wall of text
- You have a more specific question in mind to rephrase
- I try to summarize my wall of text, but I might not get the point across
Piggybacking on your grid stability point, another issue I don’t see getting addressed here is ramp rate.
If we install enough solar where 100% of our daytime load is served by solar, that’s great. But what about when the solar starts to drop off later in the day?
A/Cs are still running while the sun is setting, the outside air is still hot. People are also getting home from work, and turning on their A/Cs to cool off the house, flipping on their lights, turning on the oven, etc.
Most grids have their peak power usage after solar has completely dropped off.
The issue then becomes: how can we serve that load? And you could say “just turn on some gas-fired units, at least most of the day was 100% renewable.”
But some gas units take literal hours to turn on. And if you’re 100% renewable during the day, you can’t have those gas units already online.
Grid operators have to leave their gas units online, running as low as they can, while the sun is out. So that when the peak hits, they can ramp up their grid to peak output, without any help from solar.
There are definitely some interesting solutions to this problem, energy storage, load shifting, and energy efficiency, but these are still in development.
People expect the lights to turn on when they flip the switch, and wouldn’t be very happy if that wasn’t the case. Grid operators are unable to provide that currently without dispatchable units.
If we install enough solar where 100% of our daytime load is served by solar, that’s great. But what about when the solar starts to drop off later in the day?
Store the surprus of energy from the solar panels and use that as a buffer with batteries or gravity
But some gas units take literal hours to turn on. And if you’re 100% renewable during the day, you can’t have those gas units already online.
Why not? Just time it and start it hours before, wind energy could help in that too
Gravity energy storage doesn’t scale well. I’ve replied to other comments with more detail on this.
There are more feasible energy storage technologies out there, but these are super cutting edge and are not ready for grid-level deployment yet.
The future of grid level energy storage is almost certainly not going to be gravity based. At least not on a large scale.
You can’t have 100% of load be renewable/solar and have gas units online on top of that. That’s over generation. You have to match the supply exactly with the demand. If you mismatch, you destabilize the grid. Undersupply causes blackouts, oversupply melts power lines.
If a unit takes 10 hours to start, solar hours are from 6am to 6pm, and peak load is at 7pm with 0% solar; when do you recommend we start this unit? At the minimum, we’d have to order it on at 7am. Units have to run at a minimum load, let’s say 100MW for this unit. So now you can’t 100% solar from 7am to 6pm, you have to leave 100MW of room for this base loaded unit.
This doesn’t even factor in regulatory requirements like flex, spinning reserve, and other balancing and reliability requirements. Grids are required to have emergency units available at an instant to prevent mass destabilization if parts of the grid fail.
One solution to what you’re describing is to expand the grid. If your grid stretches half the planet, when the East starts to experience night, the West still experiences day and can ship electricity from renewables to the East to make up for their self curtailment. The same goes for wind where if one location on the planet doesn’t experience wind, odds are another location does and the power can be shuffled around.
Another option is to build out more battery storage such that any clipped energy from solar or wind - that is, the energy that can be generated from your solar or wind resource but that can’t be exported because it would overload your inverters or transformers or exceed your PPA agreement with your utility - is stored and can be exported for 2-4 hours as the sun goes down or wind dies out.
Not a lot of renewables sites are colocated with battery storage, but more and more are.
As someone with a technical background this is the stupidest problem with solar that I don’t get… just turn off the panels in groups until generation is closer to demand… how have engineers not figured that out. And if they have why does this still get written about.
Someone is an idiot. Maybe it’s me?
I’m adjacent to this problem, so I have a little context, but am not an expert at all.
To my knowledge, we don’t have granular control over panels. So we can shut off legs of a plant, but that’s a lot of power to be moving all at once.
Instead, prices are set to encourage commercial customers to intake more power incrementally. This has a smoother result on the grid, less chance of destabilizing.
A customer like a data center could wait to perform defragmentation or a backup or something until the price of power hits a cheap or negative number.
Thanks that’s helpful.
But right…?
Solar plants can be reduced to rationalize supply.
To my understanding. The bigger issue is you can’t as effectively do this with other non-renewables like coal/gas… so this not a solar problem but a problem of legacy power plants.
So stupid. The narrative as well.
I’m in solar/BESS, and I mean more and more DER sites are making use of string inverters which break out arrays into greater chunks than with central inverters. With those, you have more granularity of control where you can drop entire blocks/strings at a time to fall to your curtailed export rate.
You might ask yourself though why DERs can’t just ramp inverter outputs up or down to match curtailment automatically across a whole site. You can absolutely do that, but what happens is your solar or wind resource stays high on the DC or low frequency (LF) AC side, respectively, while power frequency AC is low on the other side of the inverters. This is referred to as DC:AC ratio in the biz, and the higher that ratio, the more losses your inverters experience and less efficient they are. This also puts a huge strain on your inverters and can lessen their operational lifetime.
But really, DERs tie into the grid at distribution level and so they don’t fall under the regulations of FERC & NERC (at least in North America). This means that smaller producers don’t have the same requirements for control as do utility-scale players, so the incentive to control these string inverters at that granular level isn’t there. It’s much easier to just trip the main breaker and wait until the utility gives you the go ahead to turn back on.
I suspect that at lot of producers may want to look into greater control capabilities in the future, but this also depends on inverter OEMs too allowing that control.
But the thing is, you CAN simply turn them off at the press of a button (or an automated script) so its really a complete non issue. As long as big solar installations control systems are accessible by the grid operators, it should be fine.
If you’re spending billions to build a solar plant that has to turn off all the time during peak hours then you’re wasting your money. That seems like a fundamental issue to me, not a non-issue.
It’s two sided.
Yes you waste money by not exporting the electricity-transformed version of your resource (wind, sun, chemical potential, etc.).
But on the flip side if you export lower across your whole site, this means more losses at the inverters which can shorten operational lifetimes and lead to quickened inverter failures and needs for replacement. Those maintenance costs eat into your profit as well.
As someone in the industry, I’d imagine that inverter-based producers really just react to the rate structures of whatever grid and utility they hook up to. If the incentives of that utility favor one mode of operation during supply-demand mismatches - such as complete site curtailment - then that is what generators will do. If the incentives favor partial generation where only certain blocks of your solar or wind or BESS plant are switched off while others remain on, then we could see more producers do that.
Ultimately though you need to have a way to operate your site in those conditions to help balance out operation and nonoperation. If whenever a curtailment signal comes to your site, and in response you always shut off Block B while leaving Block A on, then Block A will experience accelerated lifetime degradation over Block B. Inverters, transformers, cables, panels will fail faster in Block A than Block B. But if you could rotate your curtailment/demand response such that certain blocks/strings are used sequentially and that lifetimes are averaged out, this might solve the problem. Think about how farmers rotate which crops they plant in which of their fields to avoid famine and soil degradation.
I think demand response is taking off in the utilization markets like in buildings and industrial settings, but really I think the principles we’ve learned from that should be carried over to generation markets as well. It’s only a matter of time as the industry matures and smart technology penetrates the grid and generation markets.
Are there any solar plants that cost a billion dollars each?
Secondly, you want to over build solar, so that you have enough capacity during off peak hours. Grid storage is obviously the better solution, but seems not widely available enough yet.
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’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.
You can do more with them too actually. You can ramp down the AC power production incrementally to meet curtailment requirements, in theory. When you do that though you subject your inverters to greater strain/losses and less efficiency which shortens your lifetime.
If inverter-based producers in solar, wind, and/or BESS want their sites to last for 30-40 years so that ROI is achieved via operation, then it is in their interest to protect their equipment and operate as much as possible at rated conditions or de-energized conditions.
You might think that it would make sense to have more of a slider control between ON and OFF to save everyone, from producers to grids to consumers, but my guess from being in the industry is that grids don’t really supply incentives for that kind of operation. If they did, maybe you’d see more variable control at utility- and community-scale levels.
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!
Seriously if it was free for me to run a hot tub I would be a more relaxed person…but somehow these negative power prices never seem to trickle down to the consumer 🤔.
It still costs real money to maintain the infrastructure; so even if the power was always free; you would still have to pay something to cover the maintenance costs.
I’m thinking in the next several years the electric companies will only be maintaining electric lines as generation decentralizes
Yep, PG&E charges me a connection fee, a maintenance fee, and delivery fee. However the dynamic rates for electricity never go below $0.40 (and go up to $.70 with more price hikes in the works) even at the cheapest times when the state electricity market is at negative rates. Funny how that works.
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.
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.
Not sure where our good buddy @Hypx@fedia.io 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.
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.
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.
Pure hydrogen doesn’t explode. It’s only if you mix it with oxygen. The Hindenberg glowed red not blue
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.
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.
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.
Your “technically you can” is actually a huge logistical nightmare to implement.
Having electricity rates go really low is intended to incentivize people or companies to sink the excess energy to wherever they can. And also to discourage producers to produce more at that hour, if they are able to.
“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.
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.
No, unfortunately, you can’t.
Ground doesn’t typically dissipate power, rather, power is dissipated in the circuit/load — so if you just hook a wire to ground, you’re dumping gobs of power into the wire. If you do this in your home (DON’T), best case it will trip the breaker, worst case it will melt and catch something on fire.
It’s easy enough to burn a kilowatt — just boil some water. But it’s entirely something else to burn megawatt, or yikes, gigawatt scale power.
Didnt Nikola Tesla try to sell Westinghouse on providing free unmetered electricity to everyone on earth and got laughed out of the room?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is idiotic. The fact is your electricity transmission system operator has to pay a lot of money to keep the grid stable at 50 or 60Hz or your electronics would fry. With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or the other, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services. Negative pricing is an example of such a balancing service. Sounds good, but for how long do you think your electricity company can keep on paying you to consume power?
People also don’t realize that too much power is just as bad as too little, worse in fact. There’s always useful power sinks: pumped hydro, batteries, thermal storage, but these are not infinite.
Stupid question but can we not like, make toggleable solar panels? Like if I Just pull the plug extracting power from a solar panel does it explode or break or something?
Not really. You can discharge into the ground, but for large installations even the ground has a limited (local) capacity.
Edit: explain yourselves, downvoting cowards
Why isn’t this as easy as storing some of that excess energy in a home battery and letting the rest down in a wire into the ground? Then if it’s smart enough it could only give back energy when needed.
The easiest solution is to send the power somewhere else where it can offset the use of fossil fuels. This solution is fraught with political hurdles, subject to market forces (due to privatization) and often grid compatability issues(looking at you Texas). It is, however, a time tested and common method for mitigating excess production.
While water in pipes is often a metaphor for electricity, it’s not particularly useful here. You can’t ground out part of a charge. Energy storage is the solution though. Batteries are good, pumping water up back up into dams to be regained from a hydro plant when needed is ideal, as I understand it.
Well, that’s what they’re doing some places. The batteries assets are not in private homes usually though, they’re by themself or run by power-consuming industries. Batteries are expensive though, and they degrade quickly if you use them wrong. In the EU, ENTSO-E defines the market rules, trade systems and messaging systems that energy companies and asset owners play by. Sometimes the revenue-generating asset is a battery, sometimes it’s a hot water boiler, wind park, factory, hydro plant etc.
You’re answering the wrong questions. I don’t think people are assuming that it’s simple to manage the power grid (if so, they shouldn’t be…) but rather why are we locked into a system that lets business profit motive be responsible for the continued existence of the ecosystem.
This whole thread has way too many people who see the price as some kind of made up number that dictates how people behave, rather than recognizing that the price is a signal about the availability of useful real-world resources.
Even if the prices were strictly mandated by a centrally planned tariff that kept the same price throughout the day, every day, we’d still have the engineering challenge of how to match the energy fed into the grid versus taken out of the grid.
The prices are just a reflection of that technical issue, so solving it still needs to be done.
With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or the other, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services.
Speaking as a flashlight enthusiast…there’s many different ways to get a constant and consistent current. Sure we’d need to scale it up from a pocket-sized device to a whole fucking power grid, but with a big enough driver with the right arrangement of capacitors and all that, you’d easily be able to get a totally consistent current out of wind or solar
Having knowledge in power electronics i can confidently say the DC output of solar is easily and regularly inverted in phase with grid. In fact, DC is often used for undersea cables switching AC to dc then back to AC, All at extremely high voltage and varying demand(up yo 600kV/600MW but varying by installation).
Wind turbines go online after the blades start spinning and connect to the grid in the same way as any other generator, controlled by internal electronics. Power is regulated through blade feathering and can be turned off as supply exceeds demand. This, other than for maintenance reasons, is why you might see one turbine spinning while the next is standing still. This capability actually means the grid is MORE stable with wind power.
Any further fluctuation is managed in the same way as conventional power generation.
sounds more like we should just change away from a shitty system that needs to be a specific frequency. If only there was an alternative…
high voltage DC, it was a bad idea in the past due to the difficulty of changing voltage, but Buck boost converters exist now, as due inverters.
To start the frequency of the electricity isn’t the issue. Second all modern electronics use switching power supplies which don’t care about frequency. That’s two incorrect things just in the second sentence that they literally said was fact.