101–110 of 191 posts
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Good stuff. I was wondering if maybe a desalination plant could work..
How? Or was that meant ironically? Desalination plants use a lot of power, but it's not obvious to me how to use it to store power.
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This makes me wonder how do you stop generating with a solar farm that is made of PV panels. They're entirely passive, right? The light hits them and they output electricity. How do you stop them? I guess the process is somehow invertible, and once reached a certain static charge each panel stops absorbing energy? In which case you're sort of already dumping the (non)produced energy in the environment- as heat, on ea…
It's electricity. Break the circuit and it stops flowing.
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tl;dr: the Australian grid is working on a faulty system because of politics. This is not a technical limitation there.
I'm not sure I understand, in what system would this not happen? You can say that the goverment should store the extra electricity but that's not as easy as it sounds. Most things need very specific geographical or technical conditions for pumped hydro, compressed air energy storage, boreholes, hydrogen, molten salts. So in what system wouldn't this happen?
Sure, storing energy is hard but spending it is easy.
Hell, give me free electricity and I will be running a pyrolysis rig, making biofuel for free.
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If the grid were smarter it could schedule demand for the excessive production times. It could be used, for example, in render farms or other non-time-critical high load batch operations.
Some places have flexible pricing, where electricity costs more at certain times, which allows users of electricity to do this. I don't think it should be the grids responsability to do that kind of scheduling. It would be nice if everywhere we had some kind of hourly pricing adjustment that would fluxuate within some predefined price range, then you could hook into the grids api to determine when to run your applian…
This is also why the turbine based systems that coal and hydro systems are so important to the stability of the grid. The physical momentum of the spinning metal stores considerable energy and can smooth over short lived inbalences in power consumption.
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I'm going to hazard a guess. If we assume the numbers for a sort of medium-size nuclear plant, we've got a total power generation of 500MW. Dumping that kind of power is... hard. If I haven't missed an order of magnitude, that's enough to boil an Olympic-sized swimming pool in about 25 minutes (500MW to boil 2.5ML of water, assuming STP). So you'd either need to build and maintain the infrastructure to burn that kind…
> Dumping that kind of power is... hard. Why not route it to a nearby neighborhood? It's free it doesn't matter if a lot is lost in transmission and you don't need to pay somebody to take it.
It's a PV farm, they could just take parts of the PV grid offline instead of playing arbitrage games such as paying others to take their power or trying to build storage systems (though any half-smart PV solar farm has some minor storage on-site.) It's not like the entire system is hooked to a singular large MPPT controller. They aren't bound by the typical issues of energy generation which nuclear or constant hydro-…
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The ground is a poor load and also there's a finite amount of energy you can dump into it because every watt that goes in gets turned into heat, you'd liquify the ground very quickly at the multi MW scale.
Well, I don't know. Let's think about how you would turn off solar panels. I remember hearing about solar panels (~10 years ago?) that would actually break under very-sunny-but-zero-load conditions, so I did some research using queries like 'solar panels without load' and am led to think that this isn't usually a huge problem (with regular/modern panels?). But physically speaking, unless you cover the solar panels wi…
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Some places have flexible pricing, where electricity costs more at certain times, which allows users of electricity to do this. I don't think it should be the grids responsability to do that kind of scheduling. It would be nice if everywhere we had some kind of hourly pricing adjustment that would fluxuate within some predefined price range, then you could hook into the grids api to determine when to run your applian…
Some kind of real time pricing api would do wonders. I wonder how we would solve the issue of having a bunch of devices waiting for the price to drop under $x and as soon as it does all of these scheduled devices kick in to action causing the price to immediately shoot up. Probably need some way to distribute price cheap times so not everyone gets it at the same hour.
(Same thing also happens with iron / steel. I would assume electricity is the same, but I don’t have much knowledge. )
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Why do they have to pay someone to take the electricity? I could take a dollar bill and rip it in half (perhaps not legally, but besides the point). I understand there's costs to shutting down a system. So, they might keep it running. But what I don't get: the electricity producer has to pay someone to take the excess electricity off their hands? The producer can't route the excess to, well... nowhere?
1. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. In practical terms the energy has to go somewhere. Maybe they could build massive dump resistors to burn off the energy that way but doing so would only increase load on everything (shortening component lives) for no gain.
(The heat being dumped is usually low-temperature waste heat, not final output.)