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Imagine if we went the other way: "they spent billions on solar infrastructure, so that they could keep the lights on only when the sun was shining". We don't
by dahfizz 5y ago
Imagine if we went the other way: "they spent billions on solar infrastructure, so that they could keep the lights on only when the sun was shining".
We don't have the storage. We are not close to sniffing the amount of storage we need to be 100% reliant on solar + wind.
- dahfizz 5y agoTo get a sense of scale: The USA uses on average ~76 twh per day. Tesla produced ~100 gwh of batteries over the whole last year. So if we nationalized all the tesla gigafactories, it would take us over 760 years to produce enough batteries to store a single days worth of electricity. I do not think grid storage is solvable with current technology.
- pfdietz 5y agoWhat a terrible argument. A global energy supply system is a huge thing. That means it will make sense to spend literally trillions of dollars on it. This will mean building enormous capacity to build its components, including as many battery factories as we need.
- dahfizz 5y agoOnce we agree that the solar + wind solution will cost trillions and take decades to scale up anyway, the benefits of fusion start to shine through. We may as well invest all that time and money in scalable production that doesn't exhaust the earth's supply of natural resources.
- pfdietz 5y agoWhat benefits? The fusion solution would be even more expensive, and not available for decades, if ever.
- zardo 5y agoThat sounds like a proposal for just not de-carbonizing until fusion is ready. Is that what you mean? When do you think we could have say 5% of the worlds power coming from fusion reactors?
- dahfizz 5y agoI'm happy to increase renewable energy production where possible. My point is that saying "we can just be 100% solar" is just as impractical and far fetched as saying "we can just be 100% fusion". Renewable advocates would be more successful if they were realistic about the problems with significant solar reliance.
- pfdietz 5y agoI disagree. 100% solar is much less far-fetched than 100% fusion, because the latter is a much larger technological and economic stretch.
- adonovan 5y agoSo don't use batteries. Pumping water uphill is still the most efficient large-scale technology for electrical storage.
- dahfizz 5y agoPumped hydro is a lot more promising than batteries for sure, in that current capabilities is off by a factor of a thousand instead of a million. The largest pumped hydro station[1] provides up to 24 gwh of storage. So three thousand of these stations (costing $12 trillion) would store one day's worth of electricity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
- dreamcompiler 5y agoAgreed that pumped hydro is the most efficient storage solution but it's limited by geography: You can only do it where there's an existing significant elevation change. Building a sufficiently elevated lake artifically by heaping thousands of cubic kilometers of dirt is not cost-effective. That is, the energy that would be required to build it would vastly exceed the total energy it could store integrated over its lifetime.
- zardo 5y agoYeah building mountains is not a realistic solution. Thermal storage is probably the best replacement where pumped hydro isn't feasible.