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Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

newyorker.com

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Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#261

Post by tim333 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #238

I recall that other power plants such as thermal power is still required to provide “inertia” for the whole system, as solar fluctuates a lot. The recent Spain-Portugal outage showed that there is not enough inertia in the system. I don’t really understand inertia in power plants but I wonder if it helps to push nuclear as primary and solar as secondary?

The best way of doing things changes as market prices for the various options change. At the moment we mostly have renewables, wind and solar backed up by natural gas powered plants that can increase and decrease power rapidly. As time goes on and batteries and solar get cheaper things will probably move more to those. Nuclear is good for constant power but expensive.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#262

Post by froh »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #175

The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine. That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized.…

for the rest (as the sun shines again after some time) storage sounds like a viable alternative to the list in your comments...

other than that I agree

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#263

Post by short_sells_poo »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #197
buckle8017 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better grid connections helps with variable weather but it does nothing for solar biggest down side. Seasonal variation from December to May is enormous. Storing months of power is a problem with no known solution.

North south connections enable solar power from Africa to be used around the year. And while solar is down in the winter, wind production usually peaks. If you have thousands of km of cable, there is a lot of power that can be moved around.

Ah yes, what Europe needs once more is to become existentially dependent on a region that is both culturally and geographically distant and where Europe has very little ability to enforce and police it's interests.

Have we learned nothing from the 2022 energy crisis? The number of starry eyed suggestions here about distributed worldwide power networks and load balancing is astonishing given the realities that we actually live in.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#264

Post by markus_zhang »

pjc50 wrote: post #251
markus_zhang wrote: post #238

I recall that other power plants such as thermal power is still required to provide “inertia” for the whole system, as solar fluctuates a lot. The recent Spain-Portugal outage showed that there is not enough inertia in the system. I don’t really understand inertia in power plants but I wonder if it helps to push nuclear as primary and solar as secondary?

This is mostly a matter of control systems engineering: inverters tend to be perfectly grid-following, but there's no reason why the phase angle can't be adjusted to provide "virtual inertia". Same for battery systems - an early market for these in the UK is getting paid for "fast frequency response". Every battery can be a virtual flywheel. https://www.modernpowersystems.com/analysis/batteries-for-fa... Conversely,…

Thanks. One benefit about nuclear, maybe I’m overstretching a bit, is that it is a large system engineering project so hopefully it trains and retains many engineers and technicians. Maybe solar farm serves that purpose too? But somehow “nuclear” sounds more cool…

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#266

Post by silvestrov »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #164
audunw wrote: post #125

I would recommend reading or watching what Tony Seba has put out. He has correctly predicted where we ended up with solar, and his predictions for the next stage of the energy transition is very remarkable and uplifting. It seems overly optimistic at first but makes a lot of sense when you look at the trend lines.

I think the raw economics behind the transition are very interesting. People have a hard time imagining transformative changes. They keep trying to project the current state of affairs onto the post transition state. Of course the current state is mostly the result of how things used to work and not really a predictor for the future. When things stop working in the same way, a lot of other things start shifting. For…

Steel factories cannot shutdown temporarily due to high electricity prices. They need a steady source of electricity.

This needs to be taken into account. I don't know if factories can be made with better insulation so they can "hibernate" somewhat when electricity is expensive.

So they might want to be located in a location with both wind, solar and hydro to ensure a (somewhat) stable price.

Denmark has a lot of wind mills and use hourly pricing for most consumers. This means that the price can vary a lot from hour to hour. 21st of June the price of electricity itself (excl taxes and transmission) was negative 3 cents at 2pm and 18 cents at 8pm. That is a difference of 21 cents over 6 hours.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#268

Post by usrusr »

jonplackett wrote: post #158

> Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out? China produces pretty much all…

> China produces pretty much all the solar panels - That’s quite a big concentration of power, even more so than oil.

But that very much isn't a consequence of geology. Ramping up panel production is much easier than discovering oil deposits when there aren't any to discover.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#270

Post by adrianN »

pjc50 wrote: post #256
HPsquared wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any country relying on international cables for electricity would need to build and maintain full local backup power capacity. The combined cost of cables + backup may be more than storage cost. (Of course there are many factors which affect all these costs)

You might say "any country relying on international pipelines for gas would need to build and maintain full local backup capacity", except they didn't. Hence the Russia/Ukraine war causing all sorts of problems.

To be fair, many countries have several months worth of gas reserves.
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