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Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

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Re: Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

#51

Post by bluGill »

philipkglass wrote: post #29
Rover222 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least at this point solar can be driven by pure market forces, it doesn't need federal subsidies to make sense.

It's unfortunately worse than coal subsidies. There are direct Federal orders that obsolete coal plants are not allowed to shut down. One example from Washington state: https://www.opb.org/article/2026/06/18/federal-order-keeps-w...

There is open, and there is operating. This plant hasn't produced power in a while, but if someone wants to it is still open and so you just need to fire up the boilers again. The order just keeps it available to start again, it doesn't force it to burn coal. Closing the plant means they don't have to do maintenance, and perhaps they will tear it down.

Re: Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

#52

Post by bryanlarsen »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #39
bryanlarsen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

can you explain the economics of that to me, because it doesn't track my understanding. 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.

Any sort of seasonal storage is horrendously expensive and completely infeasible using economics alone. It's really only a concern once our power grid is 98%-99% carbon-neutral and we want to get it to 100%.

A battery storage facility has watts and watt-hours roughly equivalent. A typical storage battery is around "1C" -- it takes about one hour to fully charge or discharge. The limiting factor on the build price is the MWh -- if you keep the power the same but double the storage the price of the plant still roughly doubles.

A typical daily storage facility wants around 4C, so that coupling between power and energy for batteries is not a significant drawback.

Seasonal storage is not coupled in this way. You increase MWh by increasing the size of your reservoirs. You increase MW by increasing the number of pumps/turbines. MWh is usually a lot cheaper than MW. A typical pumped storage facility today has MWh only being 10-20X the MW which means they're tuned for daily-ish usage (see top line). One tuned for seasonal usage would have that ratio >> 100.

Re: Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

#53

Post by epistasis »

ericd wrote: post #43
epistasis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, manufacturing capacity was the basis of US military dominance, which was the underpinning of the post WW2 US-led world order. That's pretty clearly eroded, and we're not sure we could win in a war against China, especially not a full-on war of attrition, and they're not sure about that either, and so they're steadily getting more willing to throw their weight around geopolitically, trying to get a setup that's…

Manufacturing dominance was for WW2, but post WW2 it's really high tech and Silicon Valley that gave us dominance.

Silicon Valley was built on defense contracts for control systems, that's what funded all early semiconductor work, what built the technical empire that led to software's dominance in more recent decades.

And Ukraine is proving that heavy manufacturing competence is not the key discriminator. Now light manufacturing, high tech, and bottom-up organization and logistics are letting a small country defend itself against a far far far larger enemy with 4x the people and an absolutely massive dominance in heavy industry and manufacturing of heavy vehicles.

The biggest weakness of Ukraine is the same weakness of the US at the moment: inability to manufacture large amounts of interceptor missiles for air defense. That's not a heavy industry problem, that's a technology problem, a logistics problem, an operations problem. This requires the skill of Apple, not the skills of GM. And in the time it takes the US to scale up production, Ukraine is going to invent their own far cheaper option from scratch.

And that's because the US has not yet moved beyond the style of military industry built on massive high-capital manufacturing, that's slow moving and design iteration measured in years rather than months. The US is currently repeating the same mistake, but even worse, with its drone initiatives because the rewards are based purely on corrupt personal relationships rather than any sort of competitive process.

Heavy industry and manufacturing are not the model for building a military of the future, or an economy of the future.

Re: Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

#54

Post by bryanlarsen »

bluGill wrote: post #50
bryanlarsen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The water requirements for pumped hydro for seasonal storage is a lot less than for generation. - pumped hydro reuses the water in a loop rather than sending it downstream like generation - pumped hydro only needs to produce power a few times a year rather than 24/7/365 like generation.

Only if there is a very large lake at the bottom. If that lake doesn't exist then you have to build it at great cost. You also lose a lot to evaporation if you do this.

Where "very large" is still a lot smaller than the water requirements for hydro generation.

Re: Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

#55

Post by bryanlarsen »

bluGill wrote: post #49
bryanlarsen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem with pumped storage is most of the places we can use it are already taken and have been for years. > pumped storage is still significantly cheaper for seasonal storage Only because most of the costs have been financially depreciated long ago. Try to build a brand new dam nearly anyplace and the costs will be much higher.

> we can use it are already taken

There are literally millions of unused locations identified that are suitable for pumped storage: https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/

hydro generation sites are mostly taken. pumped storage doesn't need flow, just 2 reservoirs (one or both of which can be built) and a elevation change.

> a brand new dam

pumped storage facilities generally don't use dams.

Re: Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

#56

Post by bluGill »

buckle8017 wrote: post #6

Utah isn't a power grid. They're on the western interconnect. Combined solar and wind are about 25-30% of production there. These articles about individual states are trash.

So? We can still measure how much power everyone in a state uses, and how much power the state generates. Utah generates a lot of power from non-renewable sources, and I assume (but I can't find data) they have the ability to generate a lot more but didn't because solar was used instead. That solar is a big part of what Utah generates is just big news.

Now if we are comparing a hypothetical place that doesn't have anything else this wouldn't be interesting, but that isn't the case. (I'm sure my suburb generates more energy from solar than anything else - as you would expect the only other generation we have is backup generators)

Re: Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

#57

Post by ericd »

epistasis wrote: post #53
ericd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, manufacturing capacity was the basis of US military dominance, which was the underpinning of the post WW2 US-led world order. That's pretty clearly eroded, and we're not sure we could win in a war against China, especially not a full-on war of attrition, and they're not sure about that either, and so they're steadily getting more willing to throw their weight around geopolitically, trying to get a setup that's…

Manufacturing dominance was for WW2, but post WW2 it's really high tech and Silicon Valley that gave us dominance. Silicon Valley was built on defense contracts for control systems, that's what funded all early semiconductor work, what built the technical empire that led to software's dominance in more recent decades. And Ukraine is proving that heavy manufacturing competence is not the key discriminator. Now light m…

If by heavy industry you mean shitloads of steel production, I mostly agree, but if you count things like domestic rare earth minerals processing, semiconductors, solar, batteries, I'm not so sure. I don't know the official ontology of what goes in heavy vs light. If magnets are going to be one of the key strategic resources in warfare, though, we should probably get that supply chain down. And being able to replace ship losses still seems relevant.

And yeah, controls, signal processing, decisionmaking, etc are all going to be big determinants, and we're no slouches in that stuff. It used to take a huge bomber fleet and an absurd number of bombs to score as many hits on target as a single B-52 load can now score, thanks to the ability to strap cheap guidance packages onto dumb bombs, margin of error has gone from on the order of half a mile to single digit yards.

Re: Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

#58

Post by s1artibartfast »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #52
s1artibartfast wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you explain the economics of that to me, because it doesn't track my understanding. 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.

Any sort of seasonal storage is horrendously expensive and completely infeasible using economics alone. It's really only a concern once our power grid is 98%-99% carbon-neutral and we want to get it to 100%. A battery storage facility has watts and watt-hours roughly equivalent. A typical storage battery is around "1C" -- it takes about one hour to fully charge or discharge. The limiting factor on the build price is…

humm, I was thinking about it differently. I would expect most pumped storage to have variable and diminishing cost per MWh (up to a point). Part of this is the turbines, but also other fixed project costs and economies of scale. If you hold MW fixed, the First MWh of the project is going to be more than the next until you hit diminishing returns due to specific site saturation.

As an interesting side note, China has roughly 80 GW of pumped storage built or under construction. Most of the big ones I have looked at are about "10C".

This is comparable to the GW output from their nuclear reactors built or under construction.

Tangent: have you been following the Medog Hydropower Station? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medog_Hydropower_Station

Re: Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

#59

Post by bluGill »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #54
bluGill wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if there is a very large lake at the bottom. If that lake doesn't exist then you have to build it at great cost. You also lose a lot to evaporation if you do this.

Where "very large" is still a lot smaller than the water requirements for hydro generation.

Large enough to replace all that water requirements, without making the lake levels so high that it impacts generation. Which is to say your lake at the bottom needs to have a large surface area when full - much larger than the lake at the top.

Re: Utah produced more power from solar than any other source in May, a new first

#60

Post by bluGill »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #55
bluGill wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with pumped storage is most of the places we can use it are already taken and have been for years. > pumped storage is still significantly cheaper for seasonal storage Only because most of the costs have been financially depreciated long ago. Try to build a brand new dam nearly anyplace and the costs will be much higher.

> we can use it are already taken There are literally millions of unused locations identified that are suitable for pumped storage: https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/ hydro generation sites are mostly taken. pumped storage doesn't need flow, just 2 reservoirs (one or both of which can be built) and a elevation change. > a brand new dam pumped storage facilities generally don't use dams.

You have to have something to keep the water contained between the two.
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