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Solar and batteries can power the world

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Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#231

Post by pixl97 »

arrowsmith wrote: post #63
toasty228 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People still build houses like energy is cheap and abundant. A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very little heating or cooling. Spend 50k on insulation that will last the life of the building instead of 50k on heating and cooling devices which will need constant maintenance and replacement + fuel and end up costing 10x more over the life of the building. A modern house with modern insulation…

Why shouldn't energy be cheap and abundant?

Take plants that can use enery from the sun 'freely'. Is it cheap for them? Not really when you look at the evolutionary battle between plant species. There is always another plant willing to take your place if you're inefficient, slow growing, not poisoning the ground around you, or some other trick to keep you alive.

Any means to keep energy cheap and abundant must be by force because it is not a natural order.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#232

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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.

If you build batteries on the scale that the article suggests (and is probably going to happen in the real future) you can use batteries charged from fossil fuels.

It's a few percent dirtier (round trip losses) but in return you can use gas plants that are 50% more efficient to charge them rather than run peaker plants.

And of course that's ignoring wind which is nearly as cheap as solar and anti-correlated with it.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#233

Post by aidenn0 »

pixl97 wrote: post #220
aidenn0 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to clean the eaves of my house myself because nobody I hire will believe me that you can't point a pressure washer at the eaves without water getting inside the walls. "I'll just avoid the vents" doesn't work when you can see daylight between the roof and the wall all around the house.

I'm guessing you don't live in a place with tropical storms or really severe weather. Where I am your house would flood when 80mph+ winds blow the rain up your walls.

Indeed, that is the case. However the house is only 55 years old, so a freak storm destroying it isn't out of the question.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#234

Post by adrian_b »

panick21_ wrote: post #16

Nuclear could have powered the world easily and we could have done it with 1960s technology. And we could easily do electricity and heating with nuclear quite easily. The only thing that's actually tricky is synfuels and solar/battery doesn't solve that. High temperature reactors using heat to create hydrogen is arguable the better path to synfuels then electrolysis. And we can go to 100% of electricity from nuclear,…

Making hydrogen from water and solar light is certainly better than using nuclear energy for that.

There is no reason for consuming valuable nuclear fuel, for which better uses exist, instead of using free solar light.

The efficiency of converting solar energy into hydrogen is already acceptable. The same is true for the efficiency of converting hydrogen and concentrated carbon dioxide into synthetic hydrocarbons, which are the best means for long term energy storage, and also for applications like aircraft and spacecraft.

The least efficient step remains concentrating the diluted carbon dioxide from air.

While the efficiency of converting solar energy and water into hydrogen by artificial means is already better than that of living beings, the living beings are still much more efficient in converting H2 and CO2 from air into organic substances.

Besides improving the efficiency of the existing techniques, an alternative method of CO2 capture would be the genetic engineering of a bacterium that would produce some usable oil from H2 and air, with an improved productivity over the existing bacteria, which use most of the captured energy to make substances useful for them, not for us, so unmodified bacteria would not have a high enough useful output.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#235

Post by coryrc »

Windchaser wrote: post #104
lstodd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First question should be: what latitude? Because where I live around 55th this winter we had five straight weeks below -15c / 5f daily average plus enough snowfall that it was infeasible to clean anything but the most major roads. Solar is out of question in these conditions and when thermal pump fails you have to evacuate. When just grid electricity fails you have to either have some sort of stored fuel backup or ev…

> The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics To be fair, 90% of the population lives within 45 degrees of the equator. If we're talking about global energy solutions for CO2 reduction, we can go a long way just by focusing on what works in these areas of the globe. The article does also point out that hydro/wind are going to be important at higher latitudes…

Most space heating is in the Northern parts though, so those are the ones that need to be addressed. There are solutions that are a pareto improvement, but it's a coordination problem and the USA is sufficiently broken and unable to solve those.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#236

Post by cogman10 »

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 haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power

That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time.

Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installation.

Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city [1].

I think people are just generally stuck with the perception of where things are currently at. They are thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.

[1] https://www.idahopower.com/energy-environment/energy/energy-...

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#237

Post by zrail »

toasty228 wrote: post #39
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.

People still build houses like energy is cheap and abundant. A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very little heating or cooling. Spend 50k on insulation that will last the life of the building instead of 50k on heating and cooling devices which will need constant maintenance and replacement + fuel and end up costing 10x more over the life of the building. A modern house with modern insulation…

Would you be willing to quantify what "mild" means to you, maybe in terms of a USDA zone? There are maps for both US and Europe:

https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/pages/map-downloads

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USDA_hardiness_zones...

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#238

Post by bluegatty »

1/2 the 'cost' of electricity is borne by grid operators, which are usually regulated monopolies. They are generally overstaffed, inneficient bureaucracies. I'm not against public service obviously but I don't think that's the issue, rather it's just related to 'monopoly' provider status.

Hydro One in Ontario was by far the largest occupant on the Sunshine list (>$100K salaries) and have always been. They pay dramatically above market wages, have more staff than they need. It's the 'old boys clubs of old boys clubs'.

If energy prices drop, they will be able to charge more money to justify more 'infra', staff and expanding budgets.

The best thing we could ever do is get rid of our dependency on the energy grid.

If our homes could be powered like our cars ... that would be amazing and open up a ton of competition in a landscape which now has almost no competition.

That said - there are definitely theoretical efficiencies at scale and if we did get rid of the grid, we may never be able to get it back.

It's plausible that 'decentralized energy' may be very advantageous in that it puts a lot of competitive pressure on the centralized elements. Then we get the best of both worlds.

Edit: value chain and institutional power dynamics is the only real way to look at all of these systems. It's incredibly naive to think that some arbitrary technology is going to change any landscape. Case and point is this issue itself - that we 'grow' fuel instead of doing something arguably more efficient is a function of structural power.

Re: Solar and batteries can power the world

#239

Post by turtlebits »

lazide wrote: post #155
turtlebits wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with underestimating capacity, the problem only really applies to off grid. For regular homes, it just means less savings.

It means some other infrastructure (fossil fuels?) needs to take up the slack, and people underestimate actual costs at larger scales. It’s the big issue in Germany for instance - it’s all fun and games until Winter.

Which is fine, since you're still reducing your reliance on the grid.

However, when you're off grid, underestimating capacity means your SOL and need to buy a generator and burn fuel on-site.

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