The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills • Hacker News Board

Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#121

Post by sunstone » Sun, Jun 21, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

hairytrog wrote: post #21

Exciting. But here are some problems. - Unfortunately, they are averaging the entire US, which is made of several grids, so the bad days are not that bad in their analysis. To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need. - Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid. If Covid has taught us anything, it i…

The key enabling technology is to tie all the separate grids together with High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power lines. This technology is flying under the radar but it's getting cheaper very quickly and it allows for continent size electric grids.

To give a sense of how cheap it's getting consider that there's a proposal to send solar energy from North Australia to Singapore using this tech. That's about 4000km distance total with about 3000km of that under the ocean. 4000km is very close to the distance from Seattle to Miami. If Singapore can afford this then for sure the US can dig around in the couch and come up with enough spare change to build this out.

Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#122

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 5:38 AM UTC

spenrose wrote: post #35

hairytrog wrote: post #21

Exciting. But here are some problems. - Unfortunately, they are averaging the entire US, which is made of several grids, so the bad days are not that bad in their analysis. To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need. - Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid. If Covid has taught us anything, it i…

Hi! You don't seem to like renewables much [1][2]. (You do post about the promise of nuclear energy, including fusion, which for whatever reason seems to be associated with skepticism about renewables [3].) Finally, you called our attention to the need to be skeptical about COVID-19's impacts in mid-April [4]. Cool, cool. "To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewa…

[deleted]

Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#123

Post by evgen » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

bretpiatt wrote: post #120

evgen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So CPS energy and it’s grid are disconnected from the rest of the national grid and have no reliance upon external sources to ensure dispatchability? Cool. Would love to hear more about how they managed that trick.

> Cool. Would love to hear more about how they managed that trick. The grid isn't one big national national. Our national grid is a bunch of separate grids. Since San Antonio is on the middle of Texas it is on the Texas Interconnection manged by ERCOT [1]. Here's information on the overall grid generation where if you look at the fuel mix report for 2020 YTD you'll see 26% is Wind so overall it is also above 20% [2].…

So they rely upon the external grid and pass the externalities involved in being being able to dispatch power when you flick the switch to some non-renewable plant elsewhere. Gotcha.

Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#124

Post by fomine3 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 12:26 AM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #103

nordsieck wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most data centers needs non-stop 24/7 reliability, and there are very few use cases where it makes sense and is even possible to delay your workload waiting for lower energy prices. Perhaps your parent was thinking of EC2 spot instances? > Lastly, data centers and smelters are expensive capital investments, and typically the economic calculation requires them to be run non-stop to recoup the capital investment. I s…

Perhaps your parent was thinking of EC2 spot instances? Maybe, but the whole reason cloud providers offer ephemeral instances is precisely because letting the machines sit idle is a waste of capital. I suspect this is true for almost all commercial operations. I'm not sure if that's the case. I think it depends on the efficiency of production, ability to stockpile the product and the demand. Not all factories operate…

A system that heats water in tank for bath by heat pump at idle time is popular in Japan since mid 2000s (named "Eco Cute"). It expects unused power is found in midnight because of nuclear plants keeps generating power all time. It looks works well until 2011 earthquake. After that, not much nuclear plants working so the assumption isn't very good. Modern systems has connected to HEMS to heat water when power is generated by solar panel. AFAIK currently not connected with smart power grid.