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Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

bbc.com

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Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#241

Post by toomuchtodo »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #231
DennisP wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that the factory costs something too. If you're only running half the time, now you need to spend twice as much on factory to make the same amount of stuff each month. So if we build a wind/solar grid without enough storage, this sort of demand management isn't a free lunch. It's just that instead of the power company paying the cost of intermittency, it'd be externalizing that cost to everybody else,…

You could have a car charger that is remotely controlled by the power companies and can be disabled to shed/elevate electricity consumption in the country.

Tesla already supports this in some Scandinavian countries, where vehicles are controlled as distributed aggregate load.

It’s no different than Google getting paid when utilities send a signal to Nest saying, “power is going to be expensive shortly, precool everyone’s home in this geobound and then raise the temp so we don’t have to start gas peakers up.”

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#242

Post by heavenlyblue »

cbmuser wrote: post #158
mlok wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also : * Produce hydrogen for hydrogen-powered vehicles * Bitcoin, I guess

The apparatus to produce hydrogen from electricity doesn’t like fluctuations in its power input.

This is why you have many smaller ones and disable them one by one instead of varying the power supplied to them.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#243

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

aclelland wrote: post #18
martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

Grid storage is such an interesting topic to me. We are all used to energy storage at a small scale (phone batteries, even electric cars) but the challenges of needing to store such vast amounts of energy seems like an almost impossible task, even the large Tesla battery in AU only seems to be used to help smooth the grid supply. It seems that the Scottish landscape might lend itself to more Hydro but that'll be an u…

Yes, at least one utility in Vermont is offering discounted Tesla Powerwall leases: https://greenmountainpower.com/rebates-programs/home-energy-.... No solar installation is required.

The utility keeps the battery charged, uses the power during times of peak load for the grid, and the homeowner can use the battery as a backup power source.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#244

Post by ben_w »

ThomPete wrote: post #236
ben_w wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The low end estimate for the cost of completing ITER is $22 billion, and it’s a 500 MW (thermal) output reactor. The cost estimate for batteries was about $137/kWh last year. Therefore, ITER costs about as much as ~160 GWh of storage, which is enough for the entire UK for 4 hours 40 minutes… or the thermal output of ITER for 13 days, 9 hours. Which is enough to cover even the least productive production gaps in combi…

wind and solar provides less than 1% of the worlds energy. That should provide you with a pretty good reason why your calculation is useless in this discussion.

PV alone made 3% of global electricity in 2019. Wind was 5.3% of global electricity demand in the same year.

PV has been growing at close to ~37% per year (compound) since 1992, and at current rates will be making almost all electricity by 2025 and all power (i.e. enough to electrify transport, heat, etc.) by 2030. And given wind and solar are currently the two cheapest form of power, it is very plausible the growth of these two will continue at least to the 50% point.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#245

Post by sir_bearington »

Corazoor wrote: post #230
sir_bearington wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power to gas needs a source of carbon to produce methane. No, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not a good candidate for this, since it's at very low concentration. Theoretically one could use biomass, but thats a very inefficient method of carbon collection. Also, exist prototype power to gas facilities are ~50% efficient, just for the power-to-gas step. Even with a 66% efficient combined cycle gas turbine, wh…

> Power to gas needs a source of carbon to produce methane. Only if you want to produce syngas (methane). If you store the resulting hydrogen directly, no carbon source is needed. That makes storage more location dependent, because the cost-competitive options are salt-caverns, but we are talking about long term storage here... Production of SynGas is more important to replace the current use of ground-pumped methane…

The whole point of power to gas (methane) is that we can reuse the existing natural gas storage, distribution, and generation infrastructure. Hydrogen brings with it other challenges. Namely grid scale deployment of energy cells, storing hydrogen. Basically it's swapping one set of challenges with a different set of challenges. Maybe it's easier, maybe it's not. Neither of these two solutions have been deployed at any significant scale so we really don't have a good idea.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#246

Post by rhodozelia »

WalterBright wrote: post #209
dahfizz wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is electricity the primary cost for the things you list? Once you have paid for the factory, equipment, employees, materials to manufacture aluminum or jet fuel, I can't imagine the stakeholders just shutting everything down if the cost of electricity fluctuates. For actual buffers to be developed, we need applications that are super cheap to set up but expensive to run. Storage heating / cooling is a good idea, I ca…

> from the top of my head Charging your electric car battery. BTW, heating/cooling my house is half my energy bill. Time shifting that could easily cut that by a third. All I need to make that work is variable rates. But with fixed 24/7 rates, nobody has any incentive to do that.

How much money do you need to save for the incentive to exceed the effort and discomfort? If you make $50 an hour how much effort will you spend every day to save $50 a month?

I am sure the variable rates helped to incentivize people to conserve electricity in Texas recently but that is an extreme case.

Electricity infrastructure is capital intensive and long term stable rates are required to finance it.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#247

Post by ThomPete »

ben_w wrote: post #244
ThomPete wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wind and solar provides less than 1% of the worlds energy. That should provide you with a pretty good reason why your calculation is useless in this discussion.

PV alone made 3% of global electricity in 2019. Wind was 5.3% of global electricity demand in the same year. PV has been growing at close to ~37% per year (compound) since 1992, and at current rates will be making almost all electricity by 2025 and all power (i.e. enough to electrify transport, heat, etc.) by 2030. And given wind and solar are currently the two cheapest form of power, it is very plausible the growth…

Electricity is less than 20% of the world energy consumption.

I find it fascinating that a tech focused forum like HN is so intent on taking an inferior solutions like wind and solar which literally can't provide enough heat for the majority of needs we have, can't scale, requires insane amounts of land, requires complex daisy chains of different solutions to work, isn't reliable, requires absurd amounts of resources, needs backup from oil, coal, gas or nuclear and won't be able to deliver anything even close to useful baseload and most importantly is so inadequate when it comes to thinking about any future civilisations energy needs both in scale and density. A forum like this people still clings to these Rube Goldberg constellations and think they are somehow supportiing progress. Especially since 3billion people still don't have proper access to energy. Oh well.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#248

Post by rhodozelia »

Scoundreller wrote: post #193
dan-robertson wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the problem is that what people actually want is not exposure to volatility in the energy market so much as cheaper energy prices. And energy looks cheaper if you just get wholesale prices because you are not paying for the insurance against high prices that your energy provider is probably buying. It isn’t easy to convince people that they are picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, so I’m not sure I woul…

With smart enough appliances, we could smooth out that volatility. Shed the pool heater/cleaner, beer fridge and the hot water heater when things get incredibly expensive. Put the washer/dryer in slow-mo when prices are high. Ultra-chill the freezer and A/C when prices go low/negative. Turn on a resistive heater and shut off the gas heat when things are negative... Instead we want complicated too-big-to-fail grid sto…

the grid is quite reliable in most of the world and provides as much power as you want whenever you want.

I much prefer simple dumb appliances than smart crap that is garbage after 5 years. If the price is high like in Texas recently I can decide to not use the dryer.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#249

Post by rhodozelia »

Scoundreller wrote: post #196
bluGill wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people have too much depend that is fixed for spot prices to make sense. If you have two meters putting one on spot might make sense - but that only works if there is something is stopping you from changing what meter is active.

Depends on what you’re doing. All I really need is for my technology to work, and all-in that’s under 100w. Each light bulb is ~4-6w. Too many people think about the above two because it’s easier to see/feel/touch while it’s really thermal loads that are the bulk of household loads. If I have to go down to 15C or deal with 30C, delay my shower/dishwasher/clothes washer/dryer to save enough bucks when it could really…

How much would you have to save? For me it is thousands I can’t be bothered to delay kids bath times to save five bucks!

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#250

Post by ocschwar »

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

Negative electricity prices are not inherently a problem. They can mean a nuclear plant paying a wind farm to curtail production so that it can ramp its own production slowly, but there is nothing inherently bad about that.

And they are a huge opportunity for every electricity user who can time-shift consumption: every refrigeration device, every thermal device, battery chargers, data center UPS banks, you name it.

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