What about STORING excess power and delivering it during the day at a same level ? That is a critical part! I remember last time it was too expensive.
Tell me you didnt read the article without telling me.
Solar and batteries can power the world
281–290 of 473 posts
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bet you didn't even see the tragic farce when writing your solution. Land development requiring ”2-car homes" is the driver of the problem! An apartment only has to heat one or two walls facing the outside instead of 4. That's 50-75% right off the top of your energy usage, with the mean closer to 75%.
There's nothing farcical about wanting one's own space where there's space to have one's own space. I'm grateful to no longer be sharing walls with a domestic abuse couple on one side and a midnight banshee on the other wall when she got busy. Energy is cheap, people are exhausting.
And that gets into another coordination problem we're unable to solve. It's a solved problem to build apartments where you can't hear your neighbors, but the builders don't have incentive to spend the money upfront to do so and we add regulations to make it more expensive for them to do so. So people go on thinking "apartments suck" and not the correct "we shouldn't let people build apartments which suck".
Also, living in SFH isn't avoiding all problems. I'd rather live in a properly-built apartment than my old house when my neighbor left her dogs outside to bark for the entire work day, every single day, and all the city would do is fine her a hundred bucks every few months. (or if you want to say "rural", that's 1 a small fraction of the population and 2 I like hospitals).
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> so those are the ones that need to be addressed. Make energy so expensive that people have to move away or burn their old house.
You'd think, but then you get Northeastern states paying poor people thousands of dollars a year to keep their oil heat going.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which requires constant, continuous resource extraction Is there an upper bound on battery limits with regards to resource extraction?
It's probably fairly high, considering the existence of the sodium-sulfur battery. It's not economically competitive since it operates at high temperature, but it's based on very abundant materials.
What about salt water batteries? Seem almost commodity
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#285Providing 90% of power is not "powering the world". It really helps to also have a complementary storage technology with low capacity capex, even if the round trip efficiency is lower. This would complement batteries in the same way ordinary RAM complements cache memory in a computer.
The goal of getting to renewables is to not remove every carbon source but to slow the rate of change so we can adapt. 90% meets that.
The goal ultimately is to get to 100% non-fossil fuel. CO2 is removed so slowly from the atmosphere that emissions have to go to nearly zero (preferably, to less than zero) or else we're just delaying disaster.
The point I was making before, btw, was that renewables can get to 100%, but doing it with just batteries as storage is really stupid in many places. Batteries, while necessary and very useful, are not a panacea. In a place like Europe, adding the complementary low capex storage could cut the cost in half (otherwise, excessive overprovisioning of solar, wind, and/or batteries are needed.)
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#286I 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…
I build off-grid electrical campers (Mercedes eSprinter) with extended 600kWh batteries (11 times more battery capacity than the default model) and charge them from solar panels at home. I disagree with your negative mindset, people who ride in my eCamper quickly learn you can go 100% solar and use you camper at home to store all neighborhood solar and even charge other EVs from our eCamper battery. We make our own parallel battery cell dis/charger to extent the LFP battery life to 20000 charges (one a day for 50 years).
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable. Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse t…
That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.
But why should American taxpayers be responsible for making the technology affordable for everyone? Why shouldn't Europe or China be expected to shoulder this financial burden?
EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding my response. I fully support local subsidies for solar and renewables. My question is why my tax dollars should go toward making it affordable for everyone, including non-Americans. Either market dynamics will handle that naturally, artificially (i.e., China's manufacturing subsidies), or else it is up to the local government to address the shortfall.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing farcical about wanting one's own space where there's space to have one's own space. I'm grateful to no longer be sharing walls with a domestic abuse couple on one side and a midnight banshee on the other wall when she got busy. Energy is cheap, people are exhausting.
And that gets into another coordination problem we're unable to solve. It's a solved problem to build apartments where you can't hear your neighbors, but the builders don't have incentive to spend the money upfront to do so and we add regulations to make it more expensive for them to do so. So people go on thinking "apartments suck" and not the correct "we shouldn't let people build apartments which suck". Also, livi…
And the usual engineer mindset to consider the options to be 1 or 0, no?
I just live far enough from the center of it all that I have a vacant quarter acre and thicker windows that happened when the last owner's mistakes caught up with me the current owner. For medical, I have UCSF, and for major medical, I have medical tourism, something I fully endorse from experience. And yes, not everyone can do that. And well, I can't touch my toes and they probably can. Life's funny that way.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#289Earlier 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.
It helps that the cost of a simple cycle gas turbine power plant (before the recent data center demand spike) is around $600/kW, maybe a factor of 20 cheaper per kW than a nuclear power plant. So backing up the whole grid with such generators wouldn't be that expensive.
Re: Solar and batteries can power the world
#290>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels. I think a lot of people truly dont get this . Those days when the wind isnt blowing, the sun isnt shining and the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be easily handled with, e.g. power2gas. It's pretty expensive…
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, because most of that nuclear generation would be during times it wasn't needed. The residual 5-10% in the renewable + batteries world is highly nonuniform, utterly unsuited to being covered by nuclear.