4 ms·

Store the power. Batteries, pump water up into lakes, melt salt, etc.

kalleboo 6y ago
From the numbers we saw during the Texas power outage, the amount of batteries required would be mind-boggling. Lots of places do not have the geography required for pumped storage, or it is already fully exploited (building a new dam is also an environmental disaster) Molten salt also still seems to be in it's infancy. The most practical solution I could see today to live without baseline power would be to build a massive inter-continental HVDC grid. Large grids have a tendency to be fragile and have catastrophic failures though.
- godelski 6y ago
  To be honest the best probably would be to get small modular reactors (SMRs) into mass production. That would give economies of scale along with other benefits. But we aren't quite there yet. I'd imagine if SMRs became popular larger reactors would as well too.
  - manicdee 6y ago
    Can you imagine how a Texan operator of a SMR would have cut corners and what the damage to their plant would have been in this cold snap? Remembering that the damage to Texan energy production was due to failure to winterise their equipment after the last two cold snaps. It has happened before, they were told it was going to happen again, but the legislature decided that it was best to let the market decide the outcome. An SMR operator refusing to winterise their plant would end up in a similar situation: part of the equipment freezes or ices over (because antifreeze costs money), leading to an inability to scale up production until ambient temperatures rise far enough to defrost the frozen plant.
    - pbourke 6y ago
      Isn’t nuclear federally regulated today?
      - godelski 6y ago
        Yes, and nuclear facilities have significantly different standards from other facilities. The parent's comment is bad because the SMR wouldn't explode or leak if it wasn't properly winterized. It would shut down. But there is a lower chance of that happening simply because the significantly higher standards surrounding nuclear.
        manicdee 6y ago
        Where did I suggest a SMR would explode or leak?
- bildung 6y ago
  Texas' (additional) problem was lack of connectivity to the rest of the country. With a proper grid the outages wouldn't have occured.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Also, there will be hundreds of millions of EVs in about 10 years. With not-so-small batteries, charged by distributed rooftop solar. Many / most of the EVs will have batteries that are overprovisioned for daily driving in order to enable distance driving.
adrianN 6y ago
Making Methane is important too. We already have infrastructure for storing vast amounts of natural gas. We can just use it to store Methane made from Water, CO2 and electricity.

From the numbers we saw during the Texas power outage, the amount of batteries required would be mind-boggling. Lots of places do not have the geography required for pumped storage, or it is already fully exploited (building a new dam is also an environmental disaster) Molten salt also still seems to be in it's infancy. The most practical solution I could see today to live without baseline power would be to build a massive inter-continental HVDC grid. Large grids have a tendency to be fragile and have catastrophic failures though.

godelski 6y ago
To be honest the best probably would be to get small modular reactors (SMRs) into mass production. That would give economies of scale along with other benefits. But we aren't quite there yet. I'd imagine if SMRs became popular larger reactors would as well too.
- manicdee 6y ago
  Can you imagine how a Texan operator of a SMR would have cut corners and what the damage to their plant would have been in this cold snap? Remembering that the damage to Texan energy production was due to failure to winterise their equipment after the last two cold snaps. It has happened before, they were told it was going to happen again, but the legislature decided that it was best to let the market decide the outcome. An SMR operator refusing to winterise their plant would end up in a similar situation: part of the equipment freezes or ices over (because antifreeze costs money), leading to an inability to scale up production until ambient temperatures rise far enough to defrost the frozen plant.
  - pbourke 6y ago
    Isn’t nuclear federally regulated today?
    - godelski 6y ago
      Yes, and nuclear facilities have significantly different standards from other facilities. The parent's comment is bad because the SMR wouldn't explode or leak if it wasn't properly winterized. It would shut down. But there is a lower chance of that happening simply because the significantly higher standards surrounding nuclear.
      - manicdee 6y ago
        Where did I suggest a SMR would explode or leak?
bildung 6y ago
Texas' (additional) problem was lack of connectivity to the rest of the country. With a proper grid the outages wouldn't have occured.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

Also, there will be hundreds of millions of EVs in about 10 years. With not-so-small batteries, charged by distributed rooftop solar. Many / most of the EVs will have batteries that are overprovisioned for daily driving in order to enable distance driving.

adrianN 6y ago

Making Methane is important too. We already have infrastructure for storing vast amounts of natural gas. We can just use it to store Methane made from Water, CO2 and electricity.