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I want to someone to lay out for me what a solar/wind grid would look like. I WANT to be convinced. How is the intermittency gap actually bridged. Tell me. I WA

I want to someone to lay out for me what a solar/wind grid would look like. I WANT to be convinced. How is the intermittency gap actually bridged. Tell me. I WANT to know. >There are numerous markets with very high % of renewables already And what do those markets do when the sun ain't shining and wind ain't blowing? >all can be tailored to the price of electricity, given a smart utility. And this 'smart utility' it exists in the real world? Where?

adrianN 7y ago
You build a shitton of wind and solar and a good grid that is as large as possible so that it's always windy somewhere in your grid. Peak production capacity should be a good bit higher than peak consumption. During the buildout phase you replace coal with gas peaker plants (you'll need them later). Then you add enough batteries and hydro storage to get you through a night or a bad day. If you can, use demand shaping technologies, e.g. charge electric cars and run aluminium smelters when it's particularly sunny or windy. Then you add power-to-gas facilities that produce Methane from electricity and use the existing infrastructure for strategic NG reserves to store it. For long periods of low production (e.g. winter) you turn the gas back into electricity. How much wind and solar you need depends on how good you are with lowering demand, for example by insulating homes, shifting transportation to trains and building heat pumps.
- mlyle 7y ago
  > Then you add power-to-gas facilities that produce Methane from electricity and use the existing infrastructure for strategic NG reserves to store it. For long periods of low production (e.g. winter) you turn the gas back into electricity. The efficiency of this process is like 35%. (power to gas to power with methane). If you're making a bunch of methane anyways, it might be OK to fill in a little with this, but this does not sound like a great overall strategy. Why not just throw in a little nuclear for base load, and then everything looks a lot better/easier?
  - adrianN 7y ago
    I'm in favor of doing that, but I don't think it's necessary or helps a whole lot. Nuclear power plants need to run close to max capacity all the time to make financial sense at all. So you can't use them to bridge over low production for wind and solar. They also take ages to build. Nuclear might make sense for district heating in winter, but people generally don't like having nuclear plants close to where they live.
    - macspoofing 7y ago
      >Nuclear power plants need to run close to max capacity all the time to make financial sense at all. That's right. And we know that they work and they can scale with our needs. We know we can make them cleaner and more efficient. Maybe wind and solar just isn't the technology of the future for anything by niche applications.
      - adrianN 7y ago
        Nuclear would have been a good solution if we started thirty years ago. By today we don't have enough time to go 100% nuclear before we emitted to much CO2. We have less than ten years of current emissions left if we want to stay below 1.5°. Building nuclear power plants takes longer than that.
        RockIslandLine 7y ago
        "Building nuclear power plants takes longer than that." So fix that broken process. This is a nonsense result.
        ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        Production of all carbon free energy, sources: solar + wind + nuclear, is not enough to get to 100%in a decade, unfortunately
        mlyle 7y ago
        We can't get to 100% with solar/wind in a decade, either. Do what we can with solar/wind, and also start building nuclear base load.
RockIslandLine 7y ago
"How is the intermittency gap actually bridged. Tell me. I WANT to know." There are several different ways. Demand response is significant. Large users are already paid to reduce their usage during times of tight supply. It should be economical at some level to push that much further down the list. Some utilities today already do time-of-day pricing, so make it much more explicit and allow many more people to participate. The idea that we must allow anyone to use as much electricity as they want at any time is ridiculous. For seasonal and time of day issues, the intermittency issue is mitigated by the fact that different technologies are strong at different times. Wind is most active at night. So the answer to "what do you do when the sun isn't shining" is in fact "install wind". Similarly, wind is weak in summer. Guess what? Summer has the longest daylight periods. So solar panels produce electricity for many more hours per day. "Use electricity during the day and use much less at night" is a reasonable solution. Again, the bullshit idea that we need to allow everyone to use all of the electricity that they want at any time needs to go die in a fire.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  I like to point out that at the very worst you can keep existing nuke plants and nature gas fired peeking plants around for another 15-30 years. Which means you kick the solar and wind will never work because of storage 'problem' 15-30 years into the future. And as you said a significant proportion of 'baseload' customers will chase price whatever it is.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  >Wind is most active at night. No it isn't! Wind speed goes down at night! Wind is also highly variable across seasons and across years. Wind and solar do not complement one another very well (though, geography permitting, they may - see Texas). >the bullshit idea that we need to allow everyone to use all of the electricity that they want at any time needs to go die in a fire. This is your problem. You're expecting that our energy use will go down and align with what solar and wind can do. This isn't going to happen. The population is growing. Energy use is growing faster than population is growing. Third-world has still decades of growth to go. Energy use will go up. Accept that, and internalize it. Maybe if we had no options I would be amenable to hoping for lower energy use, but we have nuclear technology that can scale to our needs, is carbon-free, and has tiny land-use. All the alternatives have major downsides. Biofuels require thousands of acres of corn or whatever. Wind is terrible for birds, requires building high-tech machines (equivalent of jet-engines) with a lot of moving parts, needing lots of maintenance. Solar has huge land-use requirements. Both wind and solar contain rare earth elements which need huge mines to extract and we're not even sure we have enough of those to meet demand if everyone switches to those technologies. Meanwhile, there's nuclear. All ready for a major renaissance, and people who purport to care about fossil fuel emissions are still spreading FUD about it.

adrianN 7y ago

You build a shitton of wind and solar and a good grid that is as large as possible so that it's always windy somewhere in your grid. Peak production capacity should be a good bit higher than peak consumption. During the buildout phase you replace coal with gas peaker plants (you'll need them later). Then you add enough batteries and hydro storage to get you through a night or a bad day. If you can, use demand shaping technologies, e.g. charge electric cars and run aluminium smelters when it's particularly sunny or windy. Then you add power-to-gas facilities that produce Methane from electricity and use the existing infrastructure for strategic NG reserves to store it. For long periods of low production (e.g. winter) you turn the gas back into electricity. How much wind and solar you need depends on how good you are with lowering demand, for example by insulating homes, shifting transportation to trains and building heat pumps.

mlyle 7y ago
> Then you add power-to-gas facilities that produce Methane from electricity and use the existing infrastructure for strategic NG reserves to store it. For long periods of low production (e.g. winter) you turn the gas back into electricity. The efficiency of this process is like 35%. (power to gas to power with methane). If you're making a bunch of methane anyways, it might be OK to fill in a little with this, but this does not sound like a great overall strategy. Why not just throw in a little nuclear for base load, and then everything looks a lot better/easier?
- adrianN 7y ago
  I'm in favor of doing that, but I don't think it's necessary or helps a whole lot. Nuclear power plants need to run close to max capacity all the time to make financial sense at all. So you can't use them to bridge over low production for wind and solar. They also take ages to build. Nuclear might make sense for district heating in winter, but people generally don't like having nuclear plants close to where they live.
  - macspoofing 7y ago
    >Nuclear power plants need to run close to max capacity all the time to make financial sense at all. That's right. And we know that they work and they can scale with our needs. We know we can make them cleaner and more efficient. Maybe wind and solar just isn't the technology of the future for anything by niche applications.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      Nuclear would have been a good solution if we started thirty years ago. By today we don't have enough time to go 100% nuclear before we emitted to much CO2. We have less than ten years of current emissions left if we want to stay below 1.5°. Building nuclear power plants takes longer than that.
      - RockIslandLine 7y ago
        "Building nuclear power plants takes longer than that." So fix that broken process. This is a nonsense result.
      - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        Production of all carbon free energy, sources: solar + wind + nuclear, is not enough to get to 100%in a decade, unfortunately
      - mlyle 7y ago
        We can't get to 100% with solar/wind in a decade, either. Do what we can with solar/wind, and also start building nuclear base load.

RockIslandLine 7y ago

"How is the intermittency gap actually bridged. Tell me. I WANT to know." There are several different ways. Demand response is significant. Large users are already paid to reduce their usage during times of tight supply. It should be economical at some level to push that much further down the list. Some utilities today already do time-of-day pricing, so make it much more explicit and allow many more people to participate. The idea that we must allow anyone to use as much electricity as they want at any time is ridiculous. For seasonal and time of day issues, the intermittency issue is mitigated by the fact that different technologies are strong at different times. Wind is most active at night. So the answer to "what do you do when the sun isn't shining" is in fact "install wind". Similarly, wind is weak in summer. Guess what? Summer has the longest daylight periods. So solar panels produce electricity for many more hours per day. "Use electricity during the day and use much less at night" is a reasonable solution. Again, the bullshit idea that we need to allow everyone to use all of the electricity that they want at any time needs to go die in a fire.

Gibbon1 7y ago
I like to point out that at the very worst you can keep existing nuke plants and nature gas fired peeking plants around for another 15-30 years. Which means you kick the solar and wind will never work because of storage 'problem' 15-30 years into the future. And as you said a significant proportion of 'baseload' customers will chase price whatever it is.
macspoofing 7y ago
>Wind is most active at night. No it isn't! Wind speed goes down at night! Wind is also highly variable across seasons and across years. Wind and solar do not complement one another very well (though, geography permitting, they may - see Texas). >the bullshit idea that we need to allow everyone to use all of the electricity that they want at any time needs to go die in a fire. This is your problem. You're expecting that our energy use will go down and align with what solar and wind can do. This isn't going to happen. The population is growing. Energy use is growing faster than population is growing. Third-world has still decades of growth to go. Energy use will go up. Accept that, and internalize it. Maybe if we had no options I would be amenable to hoping for lower energy use, but we have nuclear technology that can scale to our needs, is carbon-free, and has tiny land-use. All the alternatives have major downsides. Biofuels require thousands of acres of corn or whatever. Wind is terrible for birds, requires building high-tech machines (equivalent of jet-engines) with a lot of moving parts, needing lots of maintenance. Solar has huge land-use requirements. Both wind and solar contain rare earth elements which need huge mines to extract and we're not even sure we have enough of those to meet demand if everyone switches to those technologies. Meanwhile, there's nuclear. All ready for a major renaissance, and people who purport to care about fossil fuel emissions are still spreading FUD about it.