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Why not 2025?
by ebikelaw 8y ago
Why not 2025?
- jdpedrie 8y agoWhy not next Wednesday? edit: /s
- briandear 8y agoPhysics. And arithmetic.
- stcredzero 8y agoWhat are the politician's reasons?
- rhacker 8y agoI would assume it would be better to use 30%-40% effecient panels that will come out in 10 years than forcing everyone on the current 23% tech.
- ebikelaw 8y agoEfficiency is pretty much irrelevant when the land in question is worthless. You just cover more land. With current utility-scale equipment you need only 300000 acres of PV to generate all power demanded in California today.
- tedsanders 8y agoIt is extremely unlikely that commercial cells will be high-efficiency multijunction in 10 years. Silicon has been dominant for decades, and its lead in cost-effectiveness has only grown.
- kitsunesoba 8y agoThis was my thought. Fully clean power by any deadline is great, but I would’ve expected something more aggressive from CA. This seems rather tame.
- jmcgough 8y agoWe probably need to make significant improvements to the grid in order to support this. Solar power doesn't feed into the grid at a consistent rate, so we need to be able to store large amounts of energy for off-hours.
- ebikelaw 8y agoDo we need a quarter century to make that happen? California built Shasta Dam in 8 years with a population 7 times smaller than today's and with early Industrial Age technology. How long could it possibly take to install some pumps at Whiskeytown to pump water back into Shasta during the daytime? The Pacific AC Intertie goes right over both lakes already.
- dragontamer 8y agoOkay, I like pumped hydro as much as the next guy but... one pumped hydro dam isn't enough for the entire state of California. Assuming 1GW pumps, that means you can pump a GW-worth of power during the day, and tap ~800MW of power at night (assuming 80% efficiency due to evaporation and other conversion losses). It seems like the Shasta Dam is currently ~700MW and plans to be ~2GW soon. To give you the scale of power demands. ----------- Its estimated that California's current Solar capacity is ~30GW btw. Soooo... you'll need like 8 to 15 dams the size of Shasta to absorb that power. Well, you wouldn't need to absorb all of it. You'd need to absorb just enough to run California at night. But still, you can see the amount of electrical usage California already has, and how much storage it needs. Especially if solar continues to grow. Solar + Wind is nifty, because Wind generates most power at night, while Solar generates most of its power during the day. But even with a team of different plants working together, the energy storage problem is serious. That's just the day-night cycle. Weather cycles (ex: hot, but cloudy days) are probably harder to plan for. ------------ EDIT: Anyway, pumped-hydro HAS to be part of the plan. Its one of the few Giga-scale storage methodologies we have. But even then, Gigascale isn't enough. Realistically, California (or really, the world in general) just needs to builds its economy around the concept of "negative cost energy". Sometimes, there will be energy out there that needs to be absorbed by someone. IIRC: Germany has aluminum plants which spin up to absorb the cost. People can plan to charge their electric cars during negative-cost energy times, or run their AC-units on overdrive to store some extra cold air. That's the sort of thing that will be sustainable in the long term. Pumped Hydro (and other energy storage tech) will capture what we can to use later. But building out a "smart grid" which can take advantage of negative-cost energy would be the most obvious way to take advantage of solar. Peak Solar only lasts for an hour or two. But for those two hours, negative cost energy costs will become a thing.
- Eire_Banshee 8y agoBecause not every engineering problem is a software problem. You cant just pop some adderall and code all weekend to fix things like this.