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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

#331

Post by harperlee »

lukan wrote: post #193
kragen wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their…

Ships carrying energy are a pretty easy explosive target as well. Local ressilence is needed in any case and mass produced batteries can provide that safety.

Diesel, iron or aluminum, from your parent post, are difficult to explode… (personally, no clue about magnesium); and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available, you don’t necessarily need to produce an actual reversible energy store.

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

#332

Post by m4rtink »

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.

Most states have sizeable underground gas storages, often reusing old oil and gas fields. The capacity being from weeks to months of normal use, possibly much longer with some rationing. This mostly turned out to be sufficient to enable a quick switch to LNG and other sources.

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

#333

Post by tvier »

silvestrov wrote: post #266
jillesvangurp wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 win…

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

This isn't true, there are currently facilities doing exactly this. For example, this steel mill in Ohio.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250215223931/https://gridbeyon...

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

#334

Post by bee_rider »

pydry wrote: post #281
adrianN wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power2Gas and using the existing infrastructure for gas storage is a known solution for storing months of power. It might not be the cheapest solution though.

Power2gas+solar/wind produced energy is a lot more expensive than natural gas and requires solar/wind to routinely overproduce. ...hence why there isnt much of it. It either requires subsidies or for natural gas to be taxed more. Windless night produced electricity from stored solar energy via windgas is still cheaper than nuclear power produced on sunny, windy days though: https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-p…

Solar is always producing, at some percentage (may be very a very low percentage) of full capacity. So, we want it to routinely overproduce. That’ll also cut the days that we need to dip into storage.

> It either requires subsidies or for natural gas to be taxed more.

Subsidies are hard to calculate anyway. For example almost all fossil fuels get a pair of massive subsidies; we let them dump their carbon into the air for free instead of charging for it, and we build and man a bunch of aircraft carriers to go around defending the shipping lanes that it gets sent through.

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

#335

Post by idiotsecant »

Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #235
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.…

I do not feel as optimistic about any uptick in cables as I do about solar and wind. Solar and wind can grow through a multitude of small, plug-and-play projects. Cable projects like HDVC are still giant, long-term punts.

This is literally the problem. Transmission is desperately needed, much more than generation right now. The issue is that it's hard to explain to people why this is, and even when they understand they react like you do.

RENEWABLES NEED TRANSMISSION!!! We need to be building unprecedented Manhattan project levels of transmission, yesterday! But instead we will put some solar panels on a car park and feel like we did our part. Solar is the easy part. Storage and/or transmission is the hard part.

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

#336

Post by shmeeed »

HPsquared wrote: post #155
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is a New Yorker magazine house style thing. I'd assume the author uses numerals in the book this article is based on.

If there are two options, you can trust they'll go for the more verbose one.

Autors are often paid by word count. Note that I'm not saying that's the reason here, but it could be.

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

#337

Post by themaninthedark »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #292
berkes wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting side effect is that this reliance on cables introduces a dependency on copper which already is in short supply and which can be mined only in specific regions. So it re-introduces some geo-political dependencies. Not in the way fossil fuels or unranium do, because a copper cable won't "burn up" to produce the energy, but they do need some upkeep. Another dependency this introduces is the network itself. A…

The Spain/Portugal blackout happened when network management failed to predict a workable source mix. Basically human error. Political pressure is hardly a renewables problem, and is more likely to mitigate it than make it worse. Currently we get a lot of energy by shipping it as physical cargo around the world through various unstable regions after it's produced by hostile regimes - which is not exactly a recipe for…

Right, they are blaming the "thermal powersources"(non-renewable) for the waveform of the grid collapsing.

They also initially said that there was "high ion flux" from the sun too.

I am not EE or in power gen but it smacks a bit more of politics than analysis.

https://www.eng-tips.com/threads/spain-and-portugal-power-gr...

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

#338

Post by ferguess_k »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #69
aaomidi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US was giving $7500 for each car sold to Tesla. But sure, CHYNAAA

Whatever the number is in the west, China has on average ~ 10x the amount of subsidies than the west when it comes to manufacturing. Policy makers are trying to decide whether it’s too risky to shut down all manufacturing of heavy machine capable industries and hand it over to China.

West simply decided to de-industrialize itself (at least some countries, not all of them) and asked the other countries to do the dirty work for them so they can focus on finance and such, so of course the West has less subsidies -- and no one is forcing the West's hand NOT to give subsidies. Now it takes triple hard to pick it back, if the West really wants.

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

#339

Post by pikminguy »

ertgbnm wrote: post #330
thijson wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear comes from the supernova that created all the heavy elements in our solar system. Fission is releasing energy trapped during that event. So from that standpoint, even Nuclear is solar in origin.

Well the sun didn't make those elements. Some other star did so they aren't solar. Also by that logic everything that is not a hydrogen atom would be "solar" so I don't think we can stretch the analogy.

Helium and Lithium were also created in the pre stellar era of the universe, hydrogen was the majority by far but not the only element that wasn't created in stars. I think anything past 3 on the periodic table is exclusively stellar though.

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

#340

Post by stefs »

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?

a nuclear power plant is very expensive and takes a long time to build. they're also designed to deliver constant output (i don't know how fast they can de-/increase output), so if power prices get into negative territory due to overwhelming solar output, nuclear power plants might have to operate at a loss, making its product comparably expensive. there are environmental factors (need for water sources for cooling), political/nimbyism and fuel dependency from foreign powers. so nowadays you have trouble finding willing investors. also, due to low demand there are few nuclear plant building companies left.
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