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Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

sciencemag.org

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Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#51

Post by gdubs »

anonuser123456 wrote: post #36
krferriter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm renting a house in central NC and May-September our power bill skyrockets from AC. The windows are not insulated at all and we have a lot of them. Even the floors, walls, and ceilings leak heat like crazy, you can feel it just putting your hand close to the wall or ceiling. We run AC to get it down to 76F and it's still crazy expensive and using a lot of unnecessary power. We need to encourage insulation, es…

You are probably conflating window insulation with window air leaks. The best windows generally available are R-5 at best on initial installation and degrade over time as The argon leaks. They are also extremely expensive. Not a very good investment. But most energy losses in older buildings are from leaking air not thermal conductance. So upgrading to R-1 but sealed and we'll installed Windows can do a lot without h…

We have an old house and the energy auditor was selling us hard on attic air sealing and insulation. Claim was that windows weren’t gonna make as big of an impact given the stack effect. (They’re also historic “wavy glass” windows, and we’d like to keep them.)

Do you think attic air sealing, or more effective attic insulation would have a big impact? It does feel like the roof turns into a radiant heater in the summer.

(The only energy auditor available in the area is also in the business of providing the insulation, which is why I’m skeptical.)

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#52

Post by jedberg »

ivanhoe wrote: post #18
Animats wrote: post #7

$0.02/Kwh for the solar part is pretty good. A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California. Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas…

There should be also more focus on proper thermal insulation of houses in warm climate, which is something that is not often mentioned. Lots of energy gets lost on AC simply because heat easily enters the houses.

Definitely. A lot of our houses were built when a/c wasn’t necessary so you actually wanted to let heat in. The average summer high in LA was in the mid 70s during the 1950s. Now it’s in the high 80s and sometimes hits 100+.

The house my dad grew up in he no a/c. We had to install it in the 1980s. Now it would be unlivable without.

But the thermal profile is terrible. It’s designed to bring heat inside year round.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#53

Post by imtringued »

driverdan wrote: post #13

> In March, an analysis of more than 7000 global storage projects by Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that the cost of utility-scale lithium-ion batteries had fallen by 76% since 2012, and by 35% in just the past 18 months, to $187 per MWh. I hate it when they list battery prices this way, it's very misleading. That's the amortized cost of $187 per MWh cycle, not the battery's upfront cost. Assuming 2000 cycles…

That isn't just misleading, it's completely wrong.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#54

Post by oblio »

pstrateman wrote: post #37
krferriter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm renting a house in central NC and May-September our power bill skyrockets from AC. The windows are not insulated at all and we have a lot of them. Even the floors, walls, and ceilings leak heat like crazy, you can feel it just putting your hand close to the wall or ceiling. We run AC to get it down to 76F and it's still crazy expensive and using a lot of unnecessary power. We need to encourage insulation, es…

Why would the landlord spend money on insulation to save you money on your electric bill? There's the problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Performance_Certifica...

The article says UK but it's actually EU.

As with most things, make it a legal requirement.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#55

Post by akie »

pstrateman wrote: post #37
krferriter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm renting a house in central NC and May-September our power bill skyrockets from AC. The windows are not insulated at all and we have a lot of them. Even the floors, walls, and ceilings leak heat like crazy, you can feel it just putting your hand close to the wall or ceiling. We run AC to get it down to 76F and it's still crazy expensive and using a lot of unnecessary power. We need to encourage insulation, es…

Why would the landlord spend money on insulation to save you money on your electric bill? There's the problem.

The government should enforce energy efficient building standards and tax those who don’t comply.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#57

Post by jjoonathan »

bobthepanda wrote: post #5
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #3

Why lithium ion batteries — are they much cheaper to make than new gravitational potential (i.e. hydroelectric) storage systems?

Hydro can be extremely disruptive to ecosystems, and you also need a suitable site for it. It's very situational, from what I understand.

Like that time Banqiao dam burst and killed 100,000 people...

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#58

Post by dv_dt »

Animats wrote: post #7

$0.02/Kwh for the solar part is pretty good. A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California. Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas…

> Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage.

In general, yes, but if you look for a term called the duck curve which characterizes that frequently the load comes up after peak output, or even after sunset. For coastal CA wind often helps fill that offset as winds frequently come up near sunset, but it's not always a guaranteed thing.

So there does need to be some sort of offsetting storage - even if it's fairly short term. But, that gives us a nice set of market niches for renewable storage to grow up though with early smaller uses growing to larger uses. ie. peak offsetting for daily variation at small capacity, to larger uses of multi-day/weekly variation compensation, maybe extended weather variation offset, to massive uses for scales like seasonal offset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

PS: and oddly enough, some of the old recommendations for efficiency are backwards for a newer renewable grid: e.g. getting a thermostat that schedules lower temperatures into the evening can push power use to later, vs pre-cooling during the day when you might consume the electric coming off panels w/o the need to store it in a battery.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#59

Post by onetimemanytime »

jedberg wrote: post #52
ivanhoe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be also more focus on proper thermal insulation of houses in warm climate, which is something that is not often mentioned. Lots of energy gets lost on AC simply because heat easily enters the houses.

Definitely. A lot of our houses were built when a/c wasn’t necessary so you actually wanted to let heat in. The average summer high in LA was in the mid 70s during the 1950s. Now it’s in the high 80s and sometimes hits 100+. The house my dad grew up in he no a/c. We had to install it in the 1980s. Now it would be unlivable without. But the thermal profile is terrible. It’s designed to bring heat inside year round.

>>The average summer high in LA was in the mid 70s during the 1950s. Now it’s in the high 80s and sometimes hits 100+.

10 degrees plus in changes over a few decades?

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#60

Post by bit_logic »

Maybe we don't need the batteries if the synthetic fuel tech becomes good enough (there are companies working on this such as Prometheus and Carbon Engineering). Could it be possible for California to become a major oil producer state with extremely cheap solar? Cover the Mojave desert with solar and convert the excess power into oil? It seems definitely possible if there was a carbon tax (which should exclude such synthetic fuel from the tax since it's carbon neutral when it's burned). Without such a tax, maybe it's possible but much more difficult to compete with fossil oil.
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