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Solar and batteries can power the world

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Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#221

Post by coryrc »

bluGill wrote: post #96
dv_dt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond the other better insulation comments, pairing electric with heat pumps that are SEER 10+ goes a long way to improve heating efficiency. Old resistive heaters are 1:1 on energy to heat, while newer heat pumps operate to much lower temperatures, and give you 1:10 or 1:15 electric:heat energy ratios.

My heat pump is SEER 19, and it can't heat my house below 25F. I think this is mostly due to it not being large enough - it was sized to cool my house on the hot summer days, and more energy needs to move on the cold winter days.

SEER, while a useful first-order approximation of efficiency, is for cooling and not heating. HSPF-V is for cold climates. Likely you just don't have a cold-climate heat pump which maintains full capacity down to -10°C (and some a little lower still), even before you get into appropriate maximum capacity.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#222

Post by orthecreedence »

dv_dt wrote: post #56
declan_roberts wrote: post #5

The article is just wrong. And only mentions energy used for heating in passing. Heating requires MASSIVE amounts of energy. I should know bc I have a whole house battery and solar system (almost 30 kWh battery and 24kW solar). It keeps the lights on, but not heating. I live in a mild climate. The reality is that battery/solar requires major quality of life and activity time shifting trade-offs.

Beyond the other better insulation comments, pairing electric with heat pumps that are SEER 10+ goes a long way to improve heating efficiency. Old resistive heaters are 1:1 on energy to heat, while newer heat pumps operate to much lower temperatures, and give you 1:10 or 1:15 electric:heat energy ratios.

> 1:10 or 1:15 electric:heat energy ratios

Under what circumstances? I've seen higher-end units that do maybe 1:5 in ideal conditions (heating to 68F when the ambient temp is 55F), but never seen units that do 1:10 or 1:15. This was about 2-3 years ago I did this research. Have things improved that drastically in the last few years?

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#223

Post by gpm »

nradov wrote: post #207
Retric wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road. The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means w…

We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power. Perhaps we will eventually, but until that actually happens the base load requirement represents a hard limit on the amount of solar generation capacity that the grid can handle.

We started scaling batteries after solar (because the technology reached the point where they were profitable after solar)... but they're being installed at scale now, and at a rapdily increasing rate.

Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours and 40 minutes. It's a non-trivial amount of dispatchable power.

[1] https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/fuel-mix?iso=caiso&date=202...

Batteries are a form of dispatchable power not "base load". There is no "base load" requirement. Base load is simply a marketing term for power production that cannot (economically) follow the demand curve and therefore must be supplemented by a form of dispatchable power, like gas peaker plants, or batteries. "Base load" power is quite similar to solar in that regard. The term makes sense if you have a cheap high-capitol low running-cost source of power (like nuclear was supposed to be, though it failed on the cheap front) where you install as much of it as you can use constantly and then you follow the demand curve with a different source of more expensive dispatchable power. That's not the reality we find ourselves in unless you happen to live near hydro.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#224

Post by pishpash »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #185
DangitBobby wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you _can_ run it on 90% solar plus 10% fossil fuels to achieve 100% power availability, which is what GP and the article suggest.

The issue is that to achieve that you can't just build 90% solar plus 10% fossil fuels. You would need to build 100% solar + 100% fossil fuels for the 10% of the time solar doesn't work.

Infrastructure cost for 100% is the same as infrastructure cost for 10%? That's not true. The distribution network is the part that can't be scaled, but it can also be reused for either source, so it doesn't double in cost.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#226

Post by hvb2 »

lazide wrote: post #166
entropicdrifter wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, agreed. It's a lot easier to be empirical when the scale of the requirements is quite literally unimaginable without just dealing with raw numbers.

Germany’s renewables rollout would like a word….

If you mean what they started in the 90s? That's not what this is about. The conversation was about not being able to rightsize today.

Germany did jumpstart their market successfully but that was in a wildly different time. Want to talk about what a typical KWp of installed solar cost at the time?

Hindsight....

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#227

Post by KaiserPro »

pydry wrote: post #200
aidenn0 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And nuclear is already in the 5-10% range in the US, so if we just maintained that level, we could get carbon free.

No, you couldnt. Nuclear power is not dispatchable.

> Nuclear power is not dispatchable.

I mean it is, its just slower.

but if you have batteries, then you can divert the power to the batteries to keep them topped up.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#228

Post by cloverich »

FEELmyAGI wrote: post #169
jacquesm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My conclusion is that you didn't even try to understand the GP.

Then please explain, to me he brought up an unrelated point about ethanol (which is often poorly understood and mischaracterized anyways) consuming a portion of agriculturally productive land. Which BTW this agricultural land that produces ethanol is probably not even close to the best place in the country for industrial scale solar from a LOT of perspectives.

My "try to understand" take: We subsidize corn, then use it yo make a less efficient fuel. The money involved in this process likely takes away from subsidies to other forms of energy. There are a great many activities we do not subsidize, but solar is one that if we did, would produce an outsized benefit to society. And the more we do, the better. Redirecting an ethanol subsidy to solar would be a far more beneficial long term strategy for energy independence and overall standard of living in the US. Going all in on Solar would be a transformative and likely relatively short investment period that would last and benefit a long time. We have done many large scale infrastructure projects in the US, and it is frustrating to see the resistance to this one, being both less disruptive and more "all around win" than any other i can think of.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#229

Post by Aperocky »

germandiago wrote: post #92
anon7000 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US. Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll h…

So here I go: if it is so stupid, why it is not done yet? Try not to blame anyone. Do it rationally if you can, from your message I understand your opinion. I say this as a person that has lived in a developing country the last 15 years. It is not that simple IMHO...

It is being done, just not here.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#230

Post by ryzvonusef »

ronb1964 wrote: post #130

I build off-grid camper vans for a living and install solar + lithium battery systems regularly. The technology has matured a lot in the last few years. What used to take a massive roof array and a bank of heavy lead-acid or AGM batteries to run basic appliances now fits in a fraction of the space with lithium. The limiting factor in real-world installs isn't the panels or the batteries anymore, it's getting customer…

there is a youtube video I watched where an RV guy converted as many appliances and gadgets on his vehicle to Direct DC as he could, saved a lot on wastage from DC-AC-DC conversions.

We need mundane home DC solutions.

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