5 ms·

You're not solving the problem. There are lots of applications for "free" electricity, but there aren't many applications for unpredictable and unstable bursts

You're not solving the problem. There are lots of applications for "free" electricity, but there aren't many applications for unpredictable and unstable bursts of free electricity.

batpangolin 6y ago
But these applications will appear.
- ThomPete 6y ago
  so will fusion. Much better to spend resources building high density energy like fusion than these Rube Goldberg machines.
  - batpangolin 6y ago
    Are you suggesting that fusion is a close-to-viable technology which has been held back because it hasn't had enough research resources spent on it?
    - ThomPete 6y ago
      No,I am suggesting that its as close as the magic solutions to wind and solars intermittency issue we hear so much about and therefore the money would be better spent creating something as powerful as fusion than something to help a inferior and backwards looking type of energy that doesent even provide 1% of the worlds energy.
      - ben_w 6y ago
        The low end estimate for the cost of completing ITER is $22 billion, and it’s a 500 MW (thermal) output reactor. The cost estimate for batteries was about $137/kWh last year. Therefore, ITER costs about as much as ~160 GWh of storage, which is enough for the entire UK for 4 hours 40 minutes… or the thermal output of ITER for 13 days, 9 hours. Which is enough to cover even the least productive production gaps in combined wind and solar output. Also, those batteries are rechargeable and last at least 1000 cycles, which would be a bit more than 36.5 years of drain (even with negligible recharge time), which is 16.5 years longer than the planned lifetime of ITER. And remember, the batteries are made at a profit, even including the cost of building the factories.
        ThomPete 6y ago
        wind and solar provides less than 1% of the worlds energy. That should provide you with a pretty good reason why your calculation is useless in this discussion.
        ben_w 6y ago
        PV alone made 3% of global electricity in 2019. Wind was 5.3% of global electricity demand in the same year. PV has been growing at close to ~37% per year (compound) since 1992, and at current rates will be making almost all electricity by 2025 and all power (i.e. enough to electrify transport, heat, etc.) by 2030. And given wind and solar are currently the two cheapest form of power, it is very plausible the growth of these two will continue at least to the 50% point.
        ThomPete 6y ago
        Electricity is less than 20% of the world energy consumption. I find it fascinating that a tech focused forum like HN is so intent on taking an inferior solutions like wind and solar which literally can't provide enough heat for the majority of needs we have, can't scale, requires insane amounts of land, requires complex daisy chains of different solutions to work, isn't reliable, requires absurd amounts of resources, needs backup from oil, coal, gas or nuclear and won't be able to deliver anything even close to useful baseload and most importantly is so inadequate when it comes to thinking about any future civilisations energy needs both in scale and density. A forum like this people still clings to these Rube Goldberg constellations and think they are somehow supportiing progress. Especially since 3billion people still don't have proper access to energy. Oh well.
        ben_w 6y ago
        > Electricity is less than 20% of the world energy consumption. I know. I made implicit reference to that with the 2025/2030 split. > I find it fascinating that a tech focused forum like HN is so intent on taking an inferior solutions like wind and solar which… Has it occurred to you that you might be… wrong? I mean, when I find myself disagreeing with a lot of smart people, I do ask myself that question. I could go thought all of your claims separately, but I’ve never found that to be successful at convincing anyone.
avianlyric 6y ago
Ginormous batteries come to mind. Buy low (so low it’s negative) sell high. We’ve seen Tesla do it quite successfully in Australia, no reason why we won’t start seeing similar thing happening in the U.K. I also suspect that there are many applications of unpredictable bursts of free electricity (I don’t really know what “unstable” electricity means when it comes to pricing). The most obvious is district heating, it’s a massive natural energy store. You can use the electricity to reduce your consumption of what other energy supply you normally use. Then there are things like canal pumps. You could basically turn canals into huge hydrostores by varying their level by a few cm. This is just demand shifting, but no reason why you can’t do it. Basically any application that currently involves topping up a natural energy store, whether that be pumped water, heat, or just any lifted mass. Could be converted to shift demand to take advantage of low or negative energy prices. All of these systems have natural buffers that can be utilised safely and cheaply. They just need the economic incentive to make it happen. And there are far more of them in the world than most people realise.
leoedin 6y ago
The applications can be any process which converts electricity into another usable form of energy. Some we do already, like aluminium smelting and steel manufacture. Some we have the technology to do, but don't currently do because the economics don't work - water desalination, hydrogen production through electrolysis, electro-chemical synthesis of ammonia. We currently make hydrogen and ammonia from methane - there's no financially viable way to make it from electricity which is generated from fossil fuels (and therefore always costs more). Once that electricity becomes free or negative, it completely changes the economics.
- runeks 6y ago
  > The applications can be any process which converts electricity into another usable form of energy. You’re ignoring capital costs. Try to think of all the things you know what consume electricity and compare the price of that thing to the cost of the electricity it consumes. Specifically, free electricity is only useful if the cost of electricity is a high percentage of the cost of the machine that consumes it. E.g. building a $10M machine that normally consumes $100k worth of electricity in its lifetime doesn’t make sense just because the electricity becomes free (or even priced at negative $100k). You’d still be spending 99% on the machine itself, thus saving — at most — 1% due to cheaper electricity.
chriswarbo 6y ago
Maybe not directly, but it can be useful with a buffer. The most obvious buffer would be batteries, e.g. installing a PowerWall on a building; but there are a whole bunch of more direct use-cases, which may be more efficient. For example, we wouldn't want unpredictable/unstable bursts of heating and cooling for buildings; but it would be very useful for a heat source/sink, which a building's heating/cooling can use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning Likewise, batteries which will be used on a known schefule don't need to be charged as quickly as possible (which is the current assumption for most charging). For example, we can slow/delay charging of commercial vehicles in case prices go down. Datacentres can also spin up machines in seconds to take advantage of lower energy costs. Cloud providers like AWS allow resources to be auctioned off, e.g. we can put latency-insensitive tasks (backups, indexing, report generation, etc.) in a queue until resource costs drop below $X/minute (if it lingers for too long we can either re-insert with a higher threshold, or cancel and process at normal price).

You're not solving the problem. There are lots of applications for "free" electricity, but there aren't many applications for unpredictable and unstable bursts of free electricity.

batpangolin 6y ago

But these applications will appear.

ThomPete 6y ago
so will fusion. Much better to spend resources building high density energy like fusion than these Rube Goldberg machines.
- batpangolin 6y ago
  Are you suggesting that fusion is a close-to-viable technology which has been held back because it hasn't had enough research resources spent on it?
  - ThomPete 6y ago
    No,I am suggesting that its as close as the magic solutions to wind and solars intermittency issue we hear so much about and therefore the money would be better spent creating something as powerful as fusion than something to help a inferior and backwards looking type of energy that doesent even provide 1% of the worlds energy.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      The low end estimate for the cost of completing ITER is $22 billion, and it’s a 500 MW (thermal) output reactor. The cost estimate for batteries was about $137/kWh last year. Therefore, ITER costs about as much as ~160 GWh of storage, which is enough for the entire UK for 4 hours 40 minutes… or the thermal output of ITER for 13 days, 9 hours. Which is enough to cover even the least productive production gaps in combined wind and solar output. Also, those batteries are rechargeable and last at least 1000 cycles, which would be a bit more than 36.5 years of drain (even with negligible recharge time), which is 16.5 years longer than the planned lifetime of ITER. And remember, the batteries are made at a profit, even including the cost of building the factories.
      - ThomPete 6y ago
        wind and solar provides less than 1% of the worlds energy. That should provide you with a pretty good reason why your calculation is useless in this discussion.
        ben_w 6y ago
        PV alone made 3% of global electricity in 2019. Wind was 5.3% of global electricity demand in the same year. PV has been growing at close to ~37% per year (compound) since 1992, and at current rates will be making almost all electricity by 2025 and all power (i.e. enough to electrify transport, heat, etc.) by 2030. And given wind and solar are currently the two cheapest form of power, it is very plausible the growth of these two will continue at least to the 50% point.
        ThomPete 6y ago
        Electricity is less than 20% of the world energy consumption. I find it fascinating that a tech focused forum like HN is so intent on taking an inferior solutions like wind and solar which literally can't provide enough heat for the majority of needs we have, can't scale, requires insane amounts of land, requires complex daisy chains of different solutions to work, isn't reliable, requires absurd amounts of resources, needs backup from oil, coal, gas or nuclear and won't be able to deliver anything even close to useful baseload and most importantly is so inadequate when it comes to thinking about any future civilisations energy needs both in scale and density. A forum like this people still clings to these Rube Goldberg constellations and think they are somehow supportiing progress. Especially since 3billion people still don't have proper access to energy. Oh well.
        ben_w 6y ago
        > Electricity is less than 20% of the world energy consumption. I know. I made implicit reference to that with the 2025/2030 split. > I find it fascinating that a tech focused forum like HN is so intent on taking an inferior solutions like wind and solar which… Has it occurred to you that you might be… wrong? I mean, when I find myself disagreeing with a lot of smart people, I do ask myself that question. I could go thought all of your claims separately, but I’ve never found that to be successful at convincing anyone.

avianlyric 6y ago

Ginormous batteries come to mind. Buy low (so low it’s negative) sell high. We’ve seen Tesla do it quite successfully in Australia, no reason why we won’t start seeing similar thing happening in the U.K. I also suspect that there are many applications of unpredictable bursts of free electricity (I don’t really know what “unstable” electricity means when it comes to pricing). The most obvious is district heating, it’s a massive natural energy store. You can use the electricity to reduce your consumption of what other energy supply you normally use. Then there are things like canal pumps. You could basically turn canals into huge hydrostores by varying their level by a few cm. This is just demand shifting, but no reason why you can’t do it. Basically any application that currently involves topping up a natural energy store, whether that be pumped water, heat, or just any lifted mass. Could be converted to shift demand to take advantage of low or negative energy prices. All of these systems have natural buffers that can be utilised safely and cheaply. They just need the economic incentive to make it happen. And there are far more of them in the world than most people realise.

leoedin 6y ago

The applications can be any process which converts electricity into another usable form of energy. Some we do already, like aluminium smelting and steel manufacture. Some we have the technology to do, but don't currently do because the economics don't work - water desalination, hydrogen production through electrolysis, electro-chemical synthesis of ammonia. We currently make hydrogen and ammonia from methane - there's no financially viable way to make it from electricity which is generated from fossil fuels (and therefore always costs more). Once that electricity becomes free or negative, it completely changes the economics.

runeks 6y ago
> The applications can be any process which converts electricity into another usable form of energy. You’re ignoring capital costs. Try to think of all the things you know what consume electricity and compare the price of that thing to the cost of the electricity it consumes. Specifically, free electricity is only useful if the cost of electricity is a high percentage of the cost of the machine that consumes it. E.g. building a $10M machine that normally consumes $100k worth of electricity in its lifetime doesn’t make sense just because the electricity becomes free (or even priced at negative $100k). You’d still be spending 99% on the machine itself, thus saving — at most — 1% due to cheaper electricity.

chriswarbo 6y ago

Maybe not directly, but it can be useful with a buffer. The most obvious buffer would be batteries, e.g. installing a PowerWall on a building; but there are a whole bunch of more direct use-cases, which may be more efficient. For example, we wouldn't want unpredictable/unstable bursts of heating and cooling for buildings; but it would be very useful for a heat source/sink, which a building's heating/cooling can use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning Likewise, batteries which will be used on a known schefule don't need to be charged as quickly as possible (which is the current assumption for most charging). For example, we can slow/delay charging of commercial vehicles in case prices go down. Datacentres can also spin up machines in seconds to take advantage of lower energy costs. Cloud providers like AWS allow resources to be auctioned off, e.g. we can put latency-insensitive tasks (backups, indexing, report generation, etc.) in a queue until resource costs drop below $X/minute (if it lingers for too long we can either re-insert with a higher threshold, or cancel and process at normal price).