161–170 of 260 posts
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Plus /actual/ flywheels to compensate for non-synchronous generation: https://www.esbinternational.ie/case-studies/details/moneypo...
You would need supercapacitors, but you can make an inverter emulate inertia almost as well as flywheels, and more than well enough to not make a difference once you push the energy into a few kilometers of non-zero impedance grid.
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LFPs are cheap and safe, with very good cycle counts. Sodium seems to be actually hitting real commercial production volumes (ex - GM just announced a sodium ramp up days ago, CATL has been producing them for a while). I expect we'll see sodium mature a good bit over the next decade (right now - it's just not quite as good as LFP, but it has a lot of promise in temperature extremes and cheap input materials) So sure…
No, storage (and transmission) are, in fact, THE issue. They always were. Solar is cheap and easy to install. Balancing a net zero grid without storage and with the pitiful transmission we have now is simply not possible. See: california. The entire CAISO is a power laundering scheme to allow california to have publicly have huge amounts of solar power that overproduces enormously (including strongly negative power p…
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...
This is more from a lot of coal power plants being converted to gas over the past 20 years than solar overtaking the outputs of those power plants. Coal output shrinking, solar output rising, the lines have crossed. Coal is unpopular in all but a few areas where coal mining is still a part of the local econonmy. I used to work near a coal plant and every day I'd go out to my car and it would have little black particl…
Total electricity produced by coal + gas is down over the last 20 years. Total electricity production is up, the difference is from wind and solar. This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc, and yet the trends continued because the underlying economic reality heavily favors battery backed solar.
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Utah passed a balcony solar bill; I think they're the only ones so far. Oregon tried in the short session last year, but it got shut down by fire marshall type people, sadly.
Interesting on Utah. Re Oregon, was the fire Marshall acting in good faith in that scenario? Recently reading about fire-truck size in the US I start wondering what the motivation is for some views about things around fire safety (amongst a million other things). Maybe good faith is too cynical. Maybe just hard-to-change attitudes.
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Total electricity produced by coal + gas is down over the last 20 years. Total electricity production is up, the difference is from wind and solar. This administration swapped to actively suppressing Wind and Solar via tariffs etc, and yet the trends continued because the underlying economic reality heavily favors battery backed solar.
The numbers for 2014-2024: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/table.php?t=epa_03_01... I doubted what you wrote, but everything you said is correct (for the last 10 years, at least). Over the time period, natural gas increased 740 TWh/year (to 1870) and coal decreased 940 TWh/year (to 650). Electricity production is up ~7%, but that's quite low compared to the growth of everything else. > This administration swap…
In other news: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states In 2025 US produced from solar 388.82 TWh, from gas 1,807.34 TWh. So solar has long way to grow to replace gas in US electricity production.
That shift is going to happen a lot quicker than people expect, here's the expected 2026 US grid additions: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205 - Solar: +87 TWh/year (assuming 23% capacity factor, lower end of US range) - Gas: +9TWh/year (6.3GW new, 4.6GW retirements, higher end of US capacity factor of 60%) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67206 This is in the face of massive growth…
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/hungary
Gas turbine manufacturing factories are very expensive and gas turbine manufacturers have already experienced turbine market crashed in 2018. Nobody wants to sit on loans for expensive idle factories in 5 years when the AI hype stops.
https://www.primary.vc/articles/the-gas-turbine-bottleneck-r...
Per MWh costs of residential solar are usually 2x per MWh costs of utility scale solar. Utility scale solar power plants buy and install solar panels at larger scale and cheaper.
Most places can't run on residential solar + battery 365 days in year and need grid connectivity. As more homes install residential solar + battery the grid costs, which are independent of the number of hours when the grid is used, will stay the same. The amount of consumed gas will be lower. The costs of building gas power plants will stay the same (they are the backup), the costs of maintaining gas power plants will increase (more frequent ramping up and down).
"Ramping damage in gas turbines refers to the wear and tear or stress that occurs as a result of frequent changes in the operating load, also known as load cycling. Gas turbines are designed to operate efficiently at steady-state conditions, and deviations from these conditions can lead to various issues"
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeff-shan-a8962b36_ramping-da...
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> West Asia war Oh, snap, did Turkey attack Cyprus again? :-p What West Asian war? Isn't Iran firmly in the Middle East by any reasonable definition?
West Asia is a less Eurocentric than “Orient” or “Middle East.” I like it.
"Asia" is a Greek name, fully Eurocentric.
The entire continent doesn't even make sense. Geographically, sure, culturally, absolutely not. It should either be Eurasia or probably about 5 different continents (South of Himalaya aka Indian subcontinent, North of Himalaya aka Siberia + Central Asia + China + South East Asia, South of Caucasus + Kopet Dag aka Middle East, etc).
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I suspect sodium is better than lithium today. The win is that sodium is much more forgiving of high temperatures so they can be run without cooling fans/pumps. Lithium battery installations are actually loud owing to all of their cooling infrastructure. No cooling means the sodium batteries are easier/cheaper to maintain (no mechanical failures). Maybe not as energy dense, but you could still come out ahead long ter…
Seems likely. But I can't buy sodium ion today like I can LFP. The chemistry definitely seems to be better than LFP long term, but higher manufacturing costs and low scale means it's just not as available. CATL is predicting that they'll hit price parity for sodium against LFP this year, commercial scaling still needs to happen, though. Meanwhile, manufacturers can pick up prismatic LFP from all sorts of places, at g…
https://www.bluettipower.com/products/sodium-ion-battery-pio...
In other news: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states In 2025 US produced from solar 388.82 TWh, from gas 1,807.34 TWh. So solar has long way to grow to replace gas in US electricity production.
That shift is going to happen a lot quicker than people expect, here's the expected 2026 US grid additions: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205 - Solar: +87 TWh/year (assuming 23% capacity factor, lower end of US range) - Gas: +9TWh/year (6.3GW new, 4.6GW retirements, higher end of US capacity factor of 60%) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67206 This is in the face of massive growth…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting on Utah. Re Oregon, was the fire Marshall acting in good faith in that scenario? Recently reading about fire-truck size in the US I start wondering what the motivation is for some views about things around fire safety (amongst a million other things). Maybe good faith is too cynical. Maybe just hard-to-change attitudes.
Firefighters are infamous for creating elevator regulations that require being able to rotate a stretcher, which lead to less elevators duet to the immense costs, which is both completely unnecessary and defeats the entire purpose of the regulations for safety since now they have to drag injured people down stairs
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2025/02...