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It's not a technical issue, but an economic one. If you have so much wind and solar generation that they spend too much of their lifespans sitting idle and not
by anonporridge 4y ago
It's not a technical issue, but an economic one.
If you have so much wind and solar generation that they spend too much of their lifespans sitting idle and not generating income, they potentially never even pay for their initial build cost and basic maintenance, let alone be a better investment than just buying a treasury note yielding 1%. That's a recipe for long term stagnation and depression.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoWell the economic part is solved by solar/wind/batteries being much cheaper than all the other options, that's why this model overprovisions wind and solar. So yes, lots of solar might make it more cost effective to add some wind and/or batteries and vice versa but that's a good thing and what this model explores.
- theluketaylor 4y agoIf whole solar or wind farms find themselves sitting idle someone will drop off some containers nearby to split water into hydrogen or run a data center or something else that drinks power and skip the grid middle-man. Over-idle is not going to be a real issue; someone will always find a way to use of excess power.
- anonporridge 4y agoYeah, that's demand response. Bitcoin miners are the key players innovating in that space right now. It's something that can very easily be packaged up in portable containers. I believe Chinese miners for years had a yearly migration to soak up massive amounts of excess hydro power during the rainy season that would have been otherwise wasted. There might be a place for more generic computation datacenters, but they would have to find a relatively unique customer that has compute loads that can be turned off and on at a moment's notice, and potentially be down for days, weeks, and even months. There's probably a startup to be founded here, if you can figure out how to severely undercut equivalent AWS services to justify the lack of uptime guarantees. I don't know enough about hydrogen production to know if it can be quickly spun up/down to suck up variable load. I imagine gas transport infrastructure is going to be the biggest blocker.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoOver idle already is a real issue. Who is going to build a hydrogen generator or data center with a 80% idle time, operating only 12-4 PM?
- pfdietz 4y agoAnother use is thermal batteries. Dump the power into a resistively heated mass and use that for industrial purposes. Thermal storage can be incredibly cheap per stored unit of energy.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI agree that there are solutions, I just think it is silly when people propose these high capital solutions. E.g. run a desalination plant 4 hours a day, ect. The real solution, like you mention, is more capacity + storage. Pumped storage is my personal favorite, as it is much cheaper than batteries for anything more than 2 hours of power/day. Pumped seawater has a pretty small footprint.
- tuatoru 4y agoAnyone for whom the ROCE is better than 1% (per the given scenario). I doubt that data centers will be built, but there are other uses beside hydrogen -> ammonia->urea. Desalination, for instance. Carbon capture, to make money in the carbon credit markets. Even at 4 hours a day, mechanical capture with plausible costs can compete with forests.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI sincerely hope it gets there. My understanding is that carbon capture equipment isn't currently economically viable with 100% uptime