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US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

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Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#311

Post by MarsIronPI »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #153
slashdev wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Vancouver, Canada natural gas was completely phased out as of the beginning of 2025 in most new construction.

What is NG good for? Induction cook tops perform better than gas ones, heat pumps do better than gas heaters. The only gap I can think of are just in time hot water heaters.

Natural gas is good for when the power goes out. I've never seen natural gas go out in my life. If you have an electric stove and the power goes out, you simply can't cook stovetop meals until the power is restored. Oh, and if you're thinking of using a generator to power your house if the grid is out, know that most generators run on natural gas.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#312

Post by hamandcheese »

bob1029 wrote: post #190
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just grid forming inverters? https://spectrum.ieee.org/electric-inverter-2667719615

These do not address the concern of fault current handling. This is a much more localized and severe condition than frequency deviation. Think about dropping a literal crowbar across the output of a solar inverter. This is a situation the grid has to deal with constantly. I'd argue that nothing that uses semiconductors would be suitable for the task. They get you to maybe 2x rated current capacity for a meaningful du…

If this becomes a big enough problem, surely we can add artificial rotational inertia to the grid, right?

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#313

Post by MarsIronPI »

Aurornis wrote: post #198
tastyfreeze wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas cooktops are good for still being able to cook when the power is out.

Interesting fact: A lot of modern gas cooktops have safety features that will cut the gas off when the electricity is out. The safety mechanisms are powered by electricity, so if they can't confirm that the operation is safe they fail with the gas valve shut off. It comes as a surprise to most users because power outages are so rare. They just assume it will work until 8 years later when they try to cook something du…

> Interesting fact: A lot of modern gas cooktops have safety features that will cut the gas off when the electricity is out.

Huh, I did not know that. The natural gas stove that I grew up with has a good ol' fashioned pilot light, so it's fine even when the power goes out.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#314

Post by gitaarik »

exabrial wrote: post #120
Kon5ole wrote: post #3

Solar can be deployed by hundreds of thousands of individual efforts and financing at the same time, with almost no bureaucracy. It starts to produce electricity basically the same day. I can't imagine anything being able to compete with that for speed and scale - or costs, for that matter. Once deployed it's basically free.

It’s too bad solar degrades over time. I think it’d be more of a no-brainer if we could actually manufacture it at scale domestically without it losing its efficiency over a 15 year period.

After 15 years you can just replace them

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#315

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

spockz wrote: post #178
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is NG good for? Induction cook tops perform better than gas ones, heat pumps do better than gas heaters. The only gap I can think of are just in time hot water heaters.

I think NG outperforms in high efficiency heaters when the outside temperature is around 1-4 degrees Celsius with humidity as it causes ice buildup on the external unit which then has to be cleared using resistive heating. Also if only little hot water is required sporadically, heating it just in time with gas is more efficient than keeping a buffer heated for long times. Also, heat pumps do best when the temperature…

Heat pumps do fine down to -20C or so. The modern ones have all sorts of tricks to avoid icing. (mostly they run the cycle in reverse which is extremely efficient since you are heating the ice on the compressor with the warmer inside air)

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#316

Post by mirekrusin »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #311
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is NG good for? Induction cook tops perform better than gas ones, heat pumps do better than gas heaters. The only gap I can think of are just in time hot water heaters.

Natural gas is good for when the power goes out. I've never seen natural gas go out in my life. If you have an electric stove and the power goes out, you simply can't cook stovetop meals until the power is restored. Oh, and if you're thinking of using a generator to power your house if the grid is out, know that most generators run on natural gas.

You can use bbq.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#317

Post by [deleted] »

idiotsecant wrote: post #248
energy123 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Solar with storage is an amazing resource. Without storage it's counterproductive if it's grid tied. Solar creates the economic incentive for storage. Without solar coming first, storage cannot occur. You can see this in California. In the beginning, it made sense to install only solar, because energy developers are compensated at the margin. Once the grid is saturated with solar, then the marginal economics change…

Huh? You don't need solar to build storage. Lots of generation sources become much, much better with storage. Storage is what you use to compensate for bad transmission, and we have plenty of bad transmission.

[deleted]

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#318

Post by energy123 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #248
energy123 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Solar with storage is an amazing resource. Without storage it's counterproductive if it's grid tied. Solar creates the economic incentive for storage. Without solar coming first, storage cannot occur. You can see this in California. In the beginning, it made sense to install only solar, because energy developers are compensated at the margin. Once the grid is saturated with solar, then the marginal economics change…

Huh? You don't need solar to build storage. Lots of generation sources become much, much better with storage. Storage is what you use to compensate for bad transmission, and we have plenty of bad transmission.

You really don't understand. There is likely some foundational gap in your understanding of microeconomics and marginal decision making. Put my initial reply into ChatGPT and ask it to spell it out.

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#319

Post by wesleyd »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #153
slashdev wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Vancouver, Canada natural gas was completely phased out as of the beginning of 2025 in most new construction.

What is NG good for? Induction cook tops perform better than gas ones, heat pumps do better than gas heaters. The only gap I can think of are just in time hot water heaters.

> What is NG good for?

The biggest advantage of NG is that we can store months of it. (Currently we can store only seconds of electricity, if that. Citation needed!)

I have a dream that some day we will come up with an efficient process for generating methane from atmospheric CO2, water, and electricity, and we’ll be able to take advantage of our extensive natural gas grid. (Natural gas is essentially methane.)

Re: US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

#320

Post by chii »

lazide wrote: post #115
chithanh wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has a negative price precisely because at that given moment, nobody can use it for anything else.

Yes…. And capital costs to capture that ‘moment’ productively are likely not in favor, if this situation exists long term. For example, Free power for an hour is useless if someone is running an aluminum refinery, because you can’t just start and stop it; and it costs so much capital to make that only operating 1 hour out of 24 is not economic. And that is for a situation where electrical power costs are one of the m…

Yep, exactly this.

The cost of CO2 capture, and conversion into usable fuels, is in the cost of the setup of the infrastructure etc (as well as cost to run the pumps once setup, which in this case is where the free electricity goes).

The return on such an investment is likely negative, because the synthesized fuel does not sell for much (compared to the same fuel that is extracted off the ground and refined - look at natural gas as prime example). Therefore, even if electricity is negative (ala, free), you cannot make money from doing it.

Either the cost of the carbon emissions is captured as part of the cost of fossil fuel extraction (and returned to this carbon capture/conversion system) to make it break even, or something else has to happen (like massive efficiency increase in doing such conversions) in order to make it economical.

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