201–210 of 226 posts
It’s somewhat humbling that this is essentially entirely done by one country. For all their faults, I am in awe of the scale and success of their industrial policy.
Too put the facts crudely, the world would be fucked climate change wise without China. The oft heard "why do anything while China is the problem" would be hilarious, if people repeating bald-faced bullshit didn't grate so much.
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A very large part of the people on this planet have (almost) no winters. We could start with those ~3 billion people. Also wind has proven to be a very good supplement to pv.
Those people already use almost no energy compared to everybody else.
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I don't see you countering my argument, only attempting to ridicule it ("slighty more sophisticated", "trope", "these silly hippies", "been aware of the concept of winter", "existence of winter as a gotcha"). That sucks, man :-( > If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it […] There are many ideas for seasonal storage of PV-generated electricity, but so far there is no concrete plan that's both scalable…
> 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there. This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x. Additionally that implies the overprovisioned power is worthless in the summer, which does not have to be the case. It might make certain processes viable due to very low cost of…
That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs.
But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.
Batteries are probably going to kill long-range transmission lines and open up remote generation at a scale never thought possible. Desert solar, remote hydro, etc etc. As the price continues to fall and the density continues to rise the economics of transmission completely change and will decouple the location of power generation from the use of that power dramatically. This decoupling of location and use will drast…
I don't think this makes sense. Rail freight is about 20x more expensive than transmission at current battery densities. Transmission: $41.50 per MWh per 1,000 miles. https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81662.pdf Rail freight: $160 / ton per 1,000 miles. At 220 Wh/kg a ton of batteries is 200kWh. So rail costs $800 per MWh per 1,000 miles without considering the cost of the batteries themselves.
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This is just a slighty more sophisticated version of the "solar doesn't work at night" trope. The implications of bringing it up is that these silly hippies haven't even thought of this basic fact so how can we trust them with our energy system. Meanwhile, actual energy experts have been aware of the concept of winter for at least a few years now. If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it, you'd need to…
I don't see you countering my argument, only attempting to ridicule it ("slighty more sophisticated", "trope", "these silly hippies", "been aware of the concept of winter", "existence of winter as a gotcha"). That sucks, man :-( > If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it […] There are many ideas for seasonal storage of PV-generated electricity, but so far there is no concrete plan that's both scalable…
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I don't see you countering my argument, only attempting to ridicule it ("slighty more sophisticated", "trope", "these silly hippies", "been aware of the concept of winter", "existence of winter as a gotcha"). That sucks, man :-( > If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it […] There are many ideas for seasonal storage of PV-generated electricity, but so far there is no concrete plan that's both scalable…
What amounts to „concrete plan“? Right now we’re still in the state where building more generation is the best use of our money with batteries for load shifting a few hours ramping up. So it’s entirely expected that there is no infrastructure for seasonal storage yet. However the maths for storing energy as hydrogen and heat looks quite favorable and the necessary technology exists already.
1) demonstrated ability in a utility-scale plant
2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size
Yes, that's hard to meet. But the thing is, we've seemingly heard of hundreds of revolutionary storage methods over the last decade, and so far nothing has come to fruition. That's because they were promised by researchers making breakthroughs in the lab, and forecasting orders of magnitude of cost reductions. They're doing great experimental work, but they lack the knowledge and experience to judge what it takes to go from lab result to utility-scale application.
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Surely batteries will be used in conjunction with solar, and as solar is already distributed (except for high latitudes), the need for power distribution will diminish as once you're setup with solar and batteries, you only really need the transmission lines to sell any excess power. Presumably, once solar is rolled out at scale, there will be little demand for purchasing excess power.
Heavily depends on the details. Extreme case sometimes used to argue against PV is the Arctic circle. Anywhere in the Artctic circle has to choose between enough batteries to cope with entire days when the sun's below the horizon *or * a transmission line further south where the sun's still up. Or a different renewable, or nuclear, my point here isn't any particular answer just that there's cases where you might go f…
I can imagine that they might go several months without usable sunlight, so yes, they'll likely need some form of energy distribution unless they plan on burning blubber for their energy needs.
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What amounts to „concrete plan“? Right now we’re still in the state where building more generation is the best use of our money with batteries for load shifting a few hours ramping up. So it’s entirely expected that there is no infrastructure for seasonal storage yet. However the maths for storing energy as hydrogen and heat looks quite favorable and the necessary technology exists already.
"Concrete plan" means a technology which satisfies all of these requirements: 1) demonstrated ability in a utility-scale plant 2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size Yes, that's hard to meet. But the thing is, we've seemingly heard of hundreds of revolutionary storage…
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"Concrete plan" means a technology which satisfies all of these requirements: 1) demonstrated ability in a utility-scale plant 2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size Yes, that's hard to meet. But the thing is, we've seemingly heard of hundreds of revolutionary storage…
Electrolysis hydrogen is only a little bit more expensive than hydrogen derived from methane and electrolyzers with dozens of megawatt are available. That seems pretty solid to me at this point in the energy transition.
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Electrolysis hydrogen is only a little bit more expensive than hydrogen derived from methane and electrolyzers with dozens of megawatt are available. That seems pretty solid to me at this point in the energy transition.
Hydrogen generation isn't the problem, storing it over several months is. Economical, safe, and reliable storage of hydrogen is very much an unsolved engineering challenge. If it weren't, hydrogen storage plants would shoot out of the ground left and right: Even here in Germany, we have such an abundance of solar electricity during the summer months that wind generators have to be turned off and the spot price of ele…