31–40 of 87 posts
Also true for California for quite some time. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/california-solar-... What's going to happen in the future is that May will be a month of extreme electricity abundance, with a good chunk of the electricity just not being collected at all because the grid doesn't need it, and it will be cheaper to have unused electricity in May than to have too little solar in December.
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Doubtful, the tradeoff is solar cost versus storage cost. Pumped hydro and gravity are waaaaaaaay too expensive compared to excess solar panels. Pumped hydro takes massive construction projects, which are very very expensive these days. Gravity storage (non-water, meaning non-hydro) never made any sense at all, the material costs are just way too high. Iron-air storage is still being proven out, but it still requires…
Lithium is the way, almost as cheap as sodium for a superior capability profile. Like solar, it just got cheap enough incredibly fast. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/07/27/global-battery-storag... https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news... https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...
Of course once we have solar that we won't use in summer there will be programs to use that power. I suspect things like ore refining, steel mills, and the like: will start running in summer only. They will go offline in winter for maintenance. (Investors will make a ton of money buying in summer and selling in winter - as they already do for lots of other commodities that have seasonal aspects)
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And eventually that arbitrage will be big enough to justify a pumped hydro/gravity/iron-air storage.
Doubtful, the tradeoff is solar cost versus storage cost. Pumped hydro and gravity are waaaaaaaay too expensive compared to excess solar panels. Pumped hydro takes massive construction projects, which are very very expensive these days. Gravity storage (non-water, meaning non-hydro) never made any sense at all, the material costs are just way too high. Iron-air storage is still being proven out, but it still requires…
The arbitrage is solar cost vs storage cost vs other energy source cost vs capital cost vs transmission cost.
Appropriately priced risk with all of those factors in and what you get out is solar+storage capping the price of other energy sources.
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Cool, that's still not a grid for stability purposes.
can you expand? I'm not sure I get it. isn't then having a wider interconnection better for stability and to handle solar? they can share cheap power in gluts and pull in other sources at night and so on.
articles like this talking about high solar or wind in one state are tricking people into thinking we're can actually increase inverter power sources past about 25-30%.
local power authorities power mix data is about contracts and paper not energy.
this kind of article is basically just lying to people.
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Large-scale battery storage is already expanding rapidly, and is way cheaper than pumped storage.
pumped storage is still significantly cheaper for seasonal storage. The cut off is about 2 weeks now -- if you need to pull from storage more than twice a month batteries are cheaper. If you need to pull from storage less than twice a month pumped storage is cheaper.
Also true for California for quite some time. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/california-solar-... What's going to happen in the future is that May will be a month of extreme electricity abundance, with a good chunk of the electricity just not being collected at all because the grid doesn't need it, and it will be cheaper to have unused electricity in May than to have too little solar in December.
And eventually that arbitrage will be big enough to justify a pumped hydro/gravity/iron-air storage.
If you look at the pumped storage projects built and under construction in China, they are all daily focused.
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I think the challenges for heavy industry aren't as much the cost of energy, as it is the capital cost, and a workforce that has lots of options for higher paying jobs. Heavy industries are usually pretty low on the value chain in economies. They do not provide much return on capital, compared to the high tech options and service options that are available in the US, but not available anywhere else in the world. The…
> I just don't get it! What's the appeal? its the k shaped economy. the big opportunities are great if you can get into them, but otherwise all there is is serving coffee to the wealthy. People are already poorer without a ladder or fulfilling work at the bottom
People understand that these jobs are worse than what's currently available, yet for some reason want them here.
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Or possibly the return of some heavy industry?
I always wondered that - but will it be economical to have the plants not working in the months of the year that the energy isn't free?
If there's enough free energy and automation there gets to be a point where there will be people will start to disregard the capital costs as well and run 0ish input cost businesses with a vertical stack of stuff that they produced with 0ish input cost.
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Large-scale battery storage is already expanding rapidly, and is way cheaper than pumped storage.
pumped storage is still significantly cheaper for seasonal storage. The cut off is about 2 weeks now -- if you need to pull from storage more than twice a month batteries are cheaper. If you need to pull from storage less than twice a month pumped storage is cheaper.
Are you just talking about total capacity dominated breakeven? The economics of both want daily cycles. Water has a more favorable power/$ scaling curve for storage if you have a site.
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Or possibly the return of some heavy industry?
I always wondered that - but will it be economical to have the plants not working in the months of the year that the energy isn't free?
Of course every plant is different. There is a big difference between "batch" processes where you can shutdown after any batch, and "continuous" processes where startup/shutdown is a large process since the machines depend on running. They have different abilities to respond. Some plants/processes use more energy than others - obviously if they don't use much energy they don't care about free energy much either. The more energy a plant uses the more they are interested in cheap energy. In some cases a less efficient process may suddenly become better when solar is "free"