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Natural gas is not universally available and cheap. It is also tied to politics in Europe as much of their natural gas is from Russia. --- To be clear, I'm no
by csours 7y ago
Natural gas is not universally available and cheap. It is also tied to politics in Europe as much of their natural gas is from Russia.
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To be clear, I'm not in love with coal; I'd much rather have a mostly solar powered grid, but I think it will be more expensive and complicated to get there than just "put some solar on it"
When solar wins some percent of the total market (20%?, 40%?; I don't know) then things get complicated. Immediately obvious is the fact that generation is tied to sunlight, so when it is dark out due to rain or nighttime or shortened seasons, grid capacity will be reduced.
There are other issues besides production though. Generators with great big spinning metal shafts currently (heh) control the frequency of alternating current power that we use in our homes. Direct Current Inverters can mimic the A/C sine wave, but it's not exactly the same.
It's great to have batteries or other storage, but will you have storage equivalent to 20 or 40% of grid capacity? Or will you have to make hard decisions about how to apportion energy?
Maybe you think everyone should have a home energy storage point? Sure, that's great. Do you think that should be mandatory or voluntary?
Think about the consequences of each of these decisions. Think about what you are asking your neighbors to do. Think about the goals of grid operators and how they might reach them.
- greglindahl 7y ago> Direct Current Inverters can mimic the A/C sine wave, but it's not exactly the same. Some places use batteries to provide frequency stabilization for cheaper than the spinning metal they used to use. Odd that you would pick one of the most cost-effective use-cases of utility-sized batteries as an example.
- csours 7y agoI know batteries are for used for quick response grid stabilization, but I've always read that they are worse at maintaining frequency under load. Do you have a source that talks about frequency stabilization in particular?
- greglindahl 7y agoThe Hornsdale battery in South Australia gets talked about on the news on a regular basis, as in pretty much every frequency stabilization event gets written up with how much better it was than the spinning metal that's also contracted for stabilization in that part of Australia. BTW you might also note that HVDC and DC-to-DC interconnects are becoming popular. If your theory about batteries being bad for frequency stabilization were true, they'd also be big problems.
- csours 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current I'm not an electrical engineer, so all of this has been my lightly informed opinion. I don't have the right words or depth of knowledge to convey my impressions, sorry. I don't know about big problems, but there are certainly complications and concerns when converting DC to AC at grid scale, as you can see in the Disadvantages portion of the wiki. Sorry I don't have a better source. I don't think batteries are "bad" for frequency stabilization, I just don't think they're good at it. With regard to spinning metal, I think you may be referring to flywheel storage? Flywheels do have lower energy density than batteries. I was referring to base load generation by spinning generators.
- greglindahl 7y agoThere is no mention of frequency stability in the disadvantages section. Do you have any response to the main point of my comment? I was referring to the same thing you were with "spinning metal". At the top of this thread, you said "great big spinning metal shafts".