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The US is using so much solar power it'll have to prepare for the August eclipse

qz.com

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Re: The US is using so much solar power it'll have to prepare for the August eclipse

#11

Post by mikeash »

yathern wrote: post #9
brlewis wrote: post #6

The article doesn't mention a decrease in demand from air conditioning. Has that been factored in?

Are you implying that people will turn off their air conditioners for the brief <5 minutes of darkness? I really doubt this.

The partial eclipse will last about 2.5 hours. I don't know how much air conditioning would be impacted, but it's not just the totality at work.

Re: The US is using so much solar power it'll have to prepare for the August eclipse

#12

Post by tartuffe78 »

yathern wrote: post #9
brlewis wrote: post #6

The article doesn't mention a decrease in demand from air conditioning. Has that been factored in?

Are you implying that people will turn off their air conditioners for the brief <5 minutes of darkness? I really doubt this.

Well air conditioners are set to keep houses at a certain temperature. If the five minutes of darkness will have a measurable affect on temperature then air conditioners won't have to work as hard to keep houses cool.

Re: The US is using so much solar power it'll have to prepare for the August eclipse

#14

Post by pwg »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #3

QZ has become a spam and advertising cesspool. I couldn't find the story the first two times I tried until I realized by default it only shows ads and garbage until you click the small "show story" button.

I clicked over to the linked site using Firefox running NoScript in default deny JS mode.

The whole text of the article appeared, ready to read. Granted it is a very short article, but it appeared just fine.

Re: The US is using so much solar power it'll have to prepare for the August eclipse

#15

Post by wdick »

This happend a couple years ago in Germany. The actual challenge for the local utility company (one of the biggest 4) was not to compensate the missing energy output from solar, but in calculating the optimal backup energy plan to buy on the future/spot market. If you buy too much or not enough upfront, it just gets expensive. But the whole problem is keeping the cost low. Not a black out.

Friend of mine was in the dev-team for the spot trading software. (Sorry for my english)

Re: The US is using so much solar power it'll have to prepare for the August eclipse

#19

Post by luckydude »

jpitz wrote: post #17
crusso wrote: post #13

You know, darkness isn't something that just happens every day... wait...

This is during peak air conditioning load, and air conditioning is used most when when... wait... the sun is out.

Yeah but this article is silly. Solar isn't a given, you can have a cloudy day. Or days. So the grid already has to be prepared to deal with this.

It's a known problem, happens every night. The company that solves storage in a meaningful way is gonna get rich. By meaningful I mean at scale and portable. I know you can pump water up to a reservoir and let it back out to generate power but that's not portable. Anyone know if someone has an answer other than Musk's powerwall (which is kinda cool in that it is the definition of portable, completely distributed, but also sort of limited).

Seems like a fun problem to work on.

Re: The US is using so much solar power it'll have to prepare for the August eclipse

#20

Post by glitcher »

yathern wrote: post #9
brlewis wrote: post #6

The article doesn't mention a decrease in demand from air conditioning. Has that been factored in?

Are you implying that people will turn off their air conditioners for the brief <5 minutes of darkness? I really doubt this.

In a very near total solar eclipse in I believe the summer of 1991, it was a blistering hot day in Arizona and during the eclipse the temperature dropped substantially. I don't know the numbers, but I remember being surprised at how nice and comfortable the temperature drop was, which lasted for much longer than 5 minutes.
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