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Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
131–140 of 231 posts
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#132One of the best things about the solar/wind + storage combination is that it's decentralized and cheap at small scale. This makes serious electrification of remote and impoverished places viable. It reminds me of the wildfire spread of cell service in places that didn't have phones before, only on a larger and more important scale. Give a village cheap electricity, and awesome things will happen. This gets to another…
I wrote a couple pro-nuclear comments here. I'm perfectly happy with wind and solar and think we should roll it out as fast as we can, as well as nuclear. Many of the wind/solar advocates, on the other hand, are strongly anti-nuclear. Given the state of the climate that just doesn't make sense to me. All these technologies have their own advantages, and we should use each where it's most effective.
Technologies also have risks.
If the risk of a technology is the vast devastation of life it should not be used.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#133One thing to add: Electric cars. They come with energy storage in-built.
By rough calculation, if 10% of cars in my city (Perth, Australia) were electric, their batteries could supply the entire city's demand for duration of about 2 hours (or 10% of demand for 20 hours etc). This could work really well for demand balancing and peak shaving - overcapacity (which in Perth is massive, since the policy is to maintain supply even on extremely hot days, when demand shoots up and generation capacity goes down) and spinning reserve could be tremendously reduced.
I suspect some good software and a little hardware will be needed to account for the owners' needs optimally.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#134One of the best things about the solar/wind + storage combination is that it's decentralized and cheap at small scale. This makes serious electrification of remote and impoverished places viable. It reminds me of the wildfire spread of cell service in places that didn't have phones before, only on a larger and more important scale. Give a village cheap electricity, and awesome things will happen. This gets to another…
Please do not use "western" when you mean "developed".
Good point. What I really wanted to say was "American" in terms of cultural bias, but "developed" in terms of social structure. Got neither right, I suppose.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#135One of the best things about the solar/wind + storage combination is that it's decentralized and cheap at small scale. This makes serious electrification of remote and impoverished places viable. It reminds me of the wildfire spread of cell service in places that didn't have phones before, only on a larger and more important scale. Give a village cheap electricity, and awesome things will happen. This gets to another…
I wrote a couple pro-nuclear comments here. I'm perfectly happy with wind and solar and think we should roll it out as fast as we can, as well as nuclear. Many of the wind/solar advocates, on the other hand, are strongly anti-nuclear. Given the state of the climate that just doesn't make sense to me. All these technologies have their own advantages, and we should use each where it's most effective.
I'm neither pro- nor anti-nuclear. I'm not afraid of it and recognize that it has value (I really like the idea of using it for base load generation with wind/solar), but I also think it's a very limited solution, due to its expense, complexity, and political difficulties. If we can build a purely solar/wind/storage model that is inexpensive, safe, and uncontroversial, I'd much prefer that.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote a couple pro-nuclear comments here. I'm perfectly happy with wind and solar and think we should roll it out as fast as we can, as well as nuclear. Many of the wind/solar advocates, on the other hand, are strongly anti-nuclear. Given the state of the climate that just doesn't make sense to me. All these technologies have their own advantages, and we should use each where it's most effective.
Technologies also have risks. If the risk of a technology is the vast devastation of life it should not be used.
Compared with the vast devastation of life which is already taking place as a result of climate change? I'll take my chances with the nukes.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#137One of the best things about the solar/wind + storage combination is that it's decentralized and cheap at small scale. This makes serious electrification of remote and impoverished places viable. It reminds me of the wildfire spread of cell service in places that didn't have phones before, only on a larger and more important scale. Give a village cheap electricity, and awesome things will happen. This gets to another…
Westerners arguing that Nuclear is better for them in no way means solar is not better for an African village in the middle of nowhere.... Or are you arguing that Westerns should adopt solar so that African villagers get slightly cheaper solar? That seems like an inefficient form of aid. On a side note: solar is not cheap on a small scale, it might be convenient, green, safe, etc. but not cheap (cheap infers low cost…
No, I'm not arguing that Westerners should adopt solar as a form of aid for Africa. I don't see how you could have concluded that from what I said.
And narrowly measuring "cheap" in cost per kwh does not address my point - that the up-front cost to get power at all is far cheaper for solar/wind + storage. A village is not a city. It doesn't need a gigantic power plant, and can't afford one. Look at it this way - I could buy myself a can of soda for a buck, or I could buy a bottling plant for a million bucks. In terms of cost-per-liter, the bottling plant is a huge bargain. But I don't need a bottling plant! It's actually useless to me. A can of soda? That's useful, and scaled correctly for my budget and needs.
I don't think this is hard to understand.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
That part of your comment wasn't off-topic, but the part about "chest-beating" was, and it provoked a wildly off-topic digression. Had you followed the HN guidelines and limited your comment to its substantive and civil portion, I don't believe that would have happened.
One little jab in the entire thread by me. Not mean spirited but an accurate description of what people do. All in all, I thought I was quite patient and I explained why I thought we can, and should try, to have more intelligent discussions on HN. I'm afraid that I didn't convince the other guy. "HN comments sections cannot be more than superficial" Anyway, I'm sure the moderators will figure it out before we become…
I take the point, but one thing we've learned in trying to have a sizeable online forum where the values are 'civil and substantive' is how destructive the little jabs can be. If we're to have the intelligent discussion you speak of, we all need to edit our jabs. It takes discipline, and there's a cost (a certain blandness), but it's necessary. I've had to learn this the hard way, and am far from the only one.
I've often wondered why jabs, swipes and sarcasm are so corrosive on HN when anyone who knows about the history of discourse knows what a lively role they have played. Literary wit, especially, is frequently scathing—both an art and a sport. Not having an answer to that is why it took me so long to learn not to engage that way on HN.
But I think I know the answer now. It's because this community is many orders of magnitude larger than those were, and so the lowest common denominator is both much nearer and much suckier. Keeping that at bay is HN's major task, and the main purpose of the site guidelines. It makes the discourse a little more bland, but the alternative is not lively exchanges of high wit, it's YouTube comments.
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote a couple pro-nuclear comments here. I'm perfectly happy with wind and solar and think we should roll it out as fast as we can, as well as nuclear. Many of the wind/solar advocates, on the other hand, are strongly anti-nuclear. Given the state of the climate that just doesn't make sense to me. All these technologies have their own advantages, and we should use each where it's most effective.
Agreed. The only objection I have to wind and solar is that they are insufficient. We should use them as much as possible, but we're going to need nuclear if we want to replace fossil fuels.
The more advanced (Stanford Energy Symposium) research that I've seen suggests that there is only one possible power source that we can look to long term to meet the energy needs of the world, and that is Solar Energy. Nuclear Energy just won't be possible to build out quickly enough, inexpensively enough - even if we could do it safely.
In particular, check out Nate Lewis's Solar Energy 101 (https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodca...) - In the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) where he makes a strong case that the only choice is Solar - not because it's a good one, but because there is nothing else out there that can meet our needs (And he spends a bit of time talking about Nuclear Energy, and why it comes up short).
Re: Why Energy Storage Is About to Get Big – And Cheap
#140If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here. Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just…
There are places where solar is less than helpful -- up here in Scotland, we're north of Moscow: in midwinter we get as little as 4.5 hours of daylight every 24 hours (6 hours here in Edinburgh, in the south). Also, we tend to live in apartment buildings: many dwellings, only one roof, shared gardens. (On the flip side, we're in one of the world's best areas for wind and tidal power.) The point is, the far north (thi…
Sweden in 2014 produced about 64 TWh (42%) from large hydro and 62 TWh (41%) from nuclear. The rest came from wind 12 TWh (7.9%) and from other 13 TWh (8.5%)! other being mostly biofuel and waste.
The interesting thing here is probably the change over time. In 2005 the distribution was 72 TWh (hydro), 70 TWh (nuclear), 0.9 TWh (wind), 12 TWh (other). With wind growing by 13x and the others staying relatively static, and energy use going down slightly. [1] There is quite a lot of variance per year, as the winter weather changes energy consumption quite significantly.
Electricity export has gone from about zero (2005-2007) to 15 TWh (2012-2014).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Sweden