4 ms·

Exponential drop in the cost of solar/wind is good, but will not necessarily continue for long, and to become a large % of the grid will also need to come with

Exponential drop in the cost of solar/wind is good, but will not necessarily continue for long, and to become a large % of the grid will also need to come with gigantic storage projects. If all it took was plopping enough solar panels down and wiring them up, this would be pretty straightforward. Nobody knows how to quickly scale up the storage though. Lots of pumped back hydro? Trillion dollar projects, and we have water crises all over, so we can't just dam up any river that it is convenient to do it either.

pydry 4y ago
Pumped hydro is the only way, really. Coire glas, snowy 2, fengning, etc. The problem isnt so much the scale or cost, just the amount of time it takes to commission and build them. You can deploy a solar farm in months, but pumped storage is like building a dam. It takes several years. There also isnt a lot of point to storage unless you turn the gas off sometimes and I think we basically never do even at the sunniest and windiest. Not yet. We should have been preparing for this for years rather than letting Putin pull the rug out from under our feet.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Pumped storage is in the same category as nuclear. If it's already built then we might as well use it as long as it's not about to collapse, but any new build is probably dubious from a cost benefit angle. There's some articles going over the numbers for Snowy 2 and it'll probably be a bad investment overall.
- deepdriver 4y ago
  Pumped hydro isn't feasible everywhere, you really need the right geologic conditions.
  - pydry 4y ago
    It's feasible in most places. You can also usually run power lines to the ones where it isnt. Europe is essentially already using the alps as a battery.
- xienze 4y ago
  > We should have been preparing for this for years rather than letting Putin pull the rug out from under our feet. Not to be that guy, but one does have to wonder what European leaders were thinking was going to happen after sanctioning a major source of their oil and natural gas.
  - jackmott42 4y ago
    They knew what would happen, but felt it was necessary. The other risk is Russia knocking on your door next if you let them walk over Ukraine.
deepdriver 4y ago
Sand and basalt-based thermal batteries sound promising. Essentially just heat up rocks in insulated containers, then run Rankin- or Stirling-cycle generators off the stored heat. Power-to-weight's probably awful, but that doesn't matter for grid applications, just cost per kWh: https://newatlas.com/energy/sand-battery-polar-night/ https://newatlas.com/energy/sand-battery-polar-night/ https://scitechdaily.com/gridscale-storing-renewable-energy-in-stones-instead-of-lithium-batteries/ https://scitechdaily.com/gridscale-storing-renewable-energy-...
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
No-one thinks we need lots of storage, except people who used to think renewables didn't work, and would never be cheap, and we didn't have room and they'd kill all the birds and now need another way to put off facing being totally wrong for a short while longer.
- jackmott42 4y ago
  I'm not sure if you think this requirement is not actually necessary, or if you are thinking of using nuclear to make up a large percent of the base. The latter is certainly an option.
  - MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
    It's generally not necessary in the quantities and timeframes used in some anti-renewables arguments (those often being "now" and "all the capacity the renewables are generating"). It sometimes comes to people as a surprise how little solar / wind is actually installed and that the production mostly follows the peaks in daily consumption. Basically, the idea is that if we go installing new renewables at current speeds, we won't need any real battery storage for years.
- xienze 4y ago
  Of course you need storage. The sun doesn’t shine all day and the wind does stop blowing every now and then.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  When it's the dead of night, no wind, no solar, and the ambient temp. is 85 F here in Texas how are we going to power everyone's AC without an energy storage solution? Texas isn't really a state known for building hydropower.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy/atlas-of-100-percent-renewable-energy#/country/US-TX https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy... Well here's a prediction of how they'd do if they could store a small amount of hydrocarbons made from green energy. 3 hours of battery storage. And if they can't handle the flexible gas, a few more batteries would do it. 12 hours. I mean they could just run a gas plant and capture the carbon as the oil industry has been claiming they will, but that would be cheating wouldn't it. We need that last watt of power to be pure and green or else the massive amount of money saving renewables that Texas has already installed doesn't count.
pedrocr 4y ago
> Exponential drop in the cost of solar/wind is good, but will not necessarily continue for long Maybe not, but the predictions on this have tended to do linear extrapolation of a clearly exponential trend. Things like this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAXDEAYXgAA7up_.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAXDEAYXgAA7up_.jpg We won't be exponential forever, an S-curve will show up eventually but the conservative estimates are not even close. > and to become a large % of the grid will also need to come with gigantic storage projects This isn't really true. There are already grids with 60%+ renewables without any storage projects to speak of. Large grids already have a lot of diversity and the existing hydro is already a big buffer. > Lots of pumped back hydro? Trillion dollar projects, and we have water crises all over, so we can't just dam up any river that it is convenient to do it either. Most of the time those kinds of estimates are predicated on the assumption that we must produce exactly what we consume and thus storage needs grow exponentially. If you have a really really cheap source of power (right now solar) and your problem is that you can't store it, just overproducing it is a better solution. The reality is that we will do a mix of many things but all the simulations I've seen show this to be well within even our current technology and cost. Most claim the total cost of the resulting energy goes down not up.
Swenrekcah 4y ago
This is exactly correct and is the reason nuclear plants need to be a critical part of all future electrical grids.

pydry 4y ago

Pumped hydro is the only way, really. Coire glas, snowy 2, fengning, etc. The problem isnt so much the scale or cost, just the amount of time it takes to commission and build them. You can deploy a solar farm in months, but pumped storage is like building a dam. It takes several years. There also isnt a lot of point to storage unless you turn the gas off sometimes and I think we basically never do even at the sunniest and windiest. Not yet. We should have been preparing for this for years rather than letting Putin pull the rug out from under our feet.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Pumped storage is in the same category as nuclear. If it's already built then we might as well use it as long as it's not about to collapse, but any new build is probably dubious from a cost benefit angle. There's some articles going over the numbers for Snowy 2 and it'll probably be a bad investment overall.
deepdriver 4y ago
Pumped hydro isn't feasible everywhere, you really need the right geologic conditions.
- pydry 4y ago
  It's feasible in most places. You can also usually run power lines to the ones where it isnt. Europe is essentially already using the alps as a battery.
xienze 4y ago
> We should have been preparing for this for years rather than letting Putin pull the rug out from under our feet. Not to be that guy, but one does have to wonder what European leaders were thinking was going to happen after sanctioning a major source of their oil and natural gas.
- jackmott42 4y ago
  They knew what would happen, but felt it was necessary. The other risk is Russia knocking on your door next if you let them walk over Ukraine.

deepdriver 4y ago

Sand and basalt-based thermal batteries sound promising. Essentially just heat up rocks in insulated containers, then run Rankin- or Stirling-cycle generators off the stored heat. Power-to-weight's probably awful, but that doesn't matter for grid applications, just cost per kWh: https://newatlas.com/energy/sand-battery-polar-night/ https://newatlas.com/energy/sand-battery-polar-night/ https://scitechdaily.com/gridscale-storing-renewable-energy-in-stones-instead-of-lithium-batteries/ https://scitechdaily.com/gridscale-storing-renewable-energy-...

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

No-one thinks we need lots of storage, except people who used to think renewables didn't work, and would never be cheap, and we didn't have room and they'd kill all the birds and now need another way to put off facing being totally wrong for a short while longer.

jackmott42 4y ago
I'm not sure if you think this requirement is not actually necessary, or if you are thinking of using nuclear to make up a large percent of the base. The latter is certainly an option.
- MezzoDelCammin 4y ago
  It's generally not necessary in the quantities and timeframes used in some anti-renewables arguments (those often being "now" and "all the capacity the renewables are generating"). It sometimes comes to people as a surprise how little solar / wind is actually installed and that the production mostly follows the peaks in daily consumption. Basically, the idea is that if we go installing new renewables at current speeds, we won't need any real battery storage for years.
xienze 4y ago
Of course you need storage. The sun doesn’t shine all day and the wind does stop blowing every now and then.
sidewndr46 4y ago
When it's the dead of night, no wind, no solar, and the ambient temp. is 85 F here in Texas how are we going to power everyone's AC without an energy storage solution? Texas isn't really a state known for building hydropower.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy/atlas-of-100-percent-renewable-energy#/country/US-TX https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy... Well here's a prediction of how they'd do if they could store a small amount of hydrocarbons made from green energy. 3 hours of battery storage. And if they can't handle the flexible gas, a few more batteries would do it. 12 hours. I mean they could just run a gas plant and capture the carbon as the oil industry has been claiming they will, but that would be cheating wouldn't it. We need that last watt of power to be pure and green or else the massive amount of money saving renewables that Texas has already installed doesn't count.

pedrocr 4y ago

> Exponential drop in the cost of solar/wind is good, but will not necessarily continue for long Maybe not, but the predictions on this have tended to do linear extrapolation of a clearly exponential trend. Things like this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAXDEAYXgAA7up_.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAXDEAYXgAA7up_.jpg We won't be exponential forever, an S-curve will show up eventually but the conservative estimates are not even close. > and to become a large % of the grid will also need to come with gigantic storage projects This isn't really true. There are already grids with 60%+ renewables without any storage projects to speak of. Large grids already have a lot of diversity and the existing hydro is already a big buffer. > Lots of pumped back hydro? Trillion dollar projects, and we have water crises all over, so we can't just dam up any river that it is convenient to do it either. Most of the time those kinds of estimates are predicated on the assumption that we must produce exactly what we consume and thus storage needs grow exponentially. If you have a really really cheap source of power (right now solar) and your problem is that you can't store it, just overproducing it is a better solution. The reality is that we will do a mix of many things but all the simulations I've seen show this to be well within even our current technology and cost. Most claim the total cost of the resulting energy goes down not up.

Swenrekcah 4y ago

This is exactly correct and is the reason nuclear plants need to be a critical part of all future electrical grids.