41–50 of 124 posts
In my county in California, the county purchases the electricity while PG&E provides the infrastructure. The 50/50% solar/wind plan is only around $4/month more than the standard plan. https://ebce.org/residents/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi! You don't seem to like renewables much [1][2]. (You do post about the promise of nuclear energy, including fusion, which for whatever reason seems to be associated with skepticism about renewables [3].) Finally, you called our attention to the need to be skeptical about COVID-19's impacts in mid-April [4]. Cool, cool. "To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewa…
Digging into someone's comment history to paint an agenda is a very reprehensible behavior. I was a Covid-19 skeptic as well, I changed my opinion when I saw that the overall death rate YoY - the excess deaths painted a very bleak picture. To think that someone would go down my comment, post, or tweeting history to comment on my bias makes me wonder if it's worth being on social media at all.
I think this person has an agenda they want to push and they want to shout down anyone with ad-hominems who doesn't share their world view.
Is this not against hacker news guidelines?
Dang?
This article did mention solar, wind and batteries and carbon-free so it might be ok.
Not convinced. I’m using utility solar for about 20% of my electricity needs, precisely to experience what’s claimed. Average cost is 50% above regular sourcing, and rising significantly. https://twitter.com/ctdonath/status/1274157769889918978?s=21
I installed 10kW on my home DIY in AZ. Cost was $1.00W and $0.70W after tax incentive. It took me 3 weekends all by myself. It works out to like 1.7c/kWh over the life of the asset. Next step is to add batteries and go off grid. Right now, the utility pays me 9.6c/kWh so I’m not in a rush until they further sabotage net metering. My cost pre-solar was 14-16c/kWh. Also, the cap on grid connected was 10kW and it’s abou…
In my county in California, the county purchases the electricity while PG&E provides the infrastructure. The 50/50% solar/wind plan is only around $4/month more than the standard plan. https://ebce.org/residents/
California is sunnier than most parts. That makes a big difference.
Exciting. But here are some problems. - Unfortunately, they are averaging the entire US, which is made of several grids, so the bad days are not that bad in their analysis. To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need. - Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid. If Covid has taught us anything, it i…
Hi! You don't seem to like renewables much [1][2]. (You do post about the promise of nuclear energy, including fusion, which for whatever reason seems to be associated with skepticism about renewables [3].) Finally, you called our attention to the need to be skeptical about COVID-19's impacts in mid-April [4]. Cool, cool. "To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewa…
Regarding the immense capacity required for wind/solar: see Figure 10 of https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424.... They essentially optimize the renewable mix to minimize cost while considering different scenarios for storage costs. The optimization must meet 100% of the demand at 100% of times for the grid in a few different states over the last decade of real data. Plot shows the levelized cost of power or LCOE (the color) in the storage energy vs storage power capacity space. In Arizona, it's no problem, renewables are for sure gonna work out even without a storage miracle. Not so much everywhere else, although I bet most people are so climate woke they wouldn't have a problem paying double for power. I don't want to though.
There are flaws here as well. First, how will they enforce the optimal mix of solar and wind? Will they set quotas of how much of each can be built? As soon as you fall out of the optimum, prices go up. And then there's the material/engineering issue. This kind of storage production is out of this world. Yes, Tesla is going to make 100 $/kWh batteries and they will have dozens of giga factories, but we'd have to produce more than we have ever made. That scares me, and even then, the cost is not lower than natural gas. Gentlemen, natural gas is king - it's so cheap, and easy, and dispatchable.
For resiliency, the key is distributing your power and not depending on others to get things to work. So don't rely on solar plants in another state, or gas pipeline, or whatever. Get it done locally. The paper averages the nationwide demand and production which requires a national grid, and this is not resilient. Grid failures tend to cascade and everyone is affected. Some literature on terrorist or weather based grid vulnerabilities (might not be accessible since this enters sensitive info):
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/assault-on-california-power-sta...
- Lanza, R. Fragility of Energy Networks. in INTERNATIONAL SEMINARS ON PLANETARY EMERGENCIES AND ASSOCIATED MEETINGS- 47thSession (2014). doi:10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004
- Wang, S. et al. An Optimization-Based Adaptation Framework for Coastal Electrical Infrastructure Resilience To Climate Change.
PS. Love the character attack with insinuation of conspiracy theorist. Nicely done. To be clear, I get paid by nuclear lobbyists to troll sites like these.
Exciting. But here are some problems. - Unfortunately, they are averaging the entire US, which is made of several grids, so the bad days are not that bad in their analysis. To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need. - Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid. If Covid has taught us anything, it i…