5 ms·

Because the solar farm is going to saturate the energy market on sunny days, and fail to produce energy at night and on cloudy days. There's diminishing returns

Because the solar farm is going to saturate the energy market on sunny days, and fail to produce energy at night and on cloudy days. There's diminishing returns on intermittent energy sources once peak production is saturated. Comparing intermittent sources of electricity to dispatchable sources of energy is comparing apples to oranges.

pydry 4y ago
It's insane to fret about saturating the energy market when 40% of electricity is produced by gas on a sunny day and electric car drivers are gagging for differential pricing tariffs. Intermittent electricity produced now is worth more than baseload in 14 years later.
- amanaplanacanal 4y ago
  Exactly. Worry about saturating when we are actually close to that happening.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    It's not just close to happening, it already is happening in Australia and Hawaii: https://solarbuildermag.com/policy/grid-saturation-lessons-from-australia-and-hawaii/ https://solarbuildermag.com/policy/grid-saturation-lessons-f...
    - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
      So don’t build more solar in those locations. That’s not an excuse for other places where this is not the case.
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        Right, but then how do you displace the remaining fossil fuel use? It's only a matter of time until the "other places" are also saturated. How do you get from 40-50% decarbonized energy to zero? The solution is non-intermittent energy generation. Hydro and geothermal are great for places that have the right geography and geology. But nuclear is the only other non-intermittent form of decarbonized energy we have*. * Some would point to biomass, but I don't consider them decarbonized: the biomass could have been a carbon sink if it wasn't burned. It's emissions by virtue of opportunity cost. An it's not a very scalable form of energy anyway.
        Panzer04 4y ago
        But nuclear is a terrible complement to intermittent power sources. Nuclear wants to run 24/7 - not intermittently. IMO, gas is going to be around for quite a while as a peaker for renewables - and the more renewables come online, the less necessary it is as a peaker, but it will still be needed.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        pydry 4y ago
        >Right, but then how do you displace the remaining fossil fuel use? The cost effective way would be with wind farms, pumped/battery storage and demand shifting. (this would be a nice problem to have, by the way, but we are STILL churning through terawatt hours of gas while the sun is shining and the wind is blowing all over). Nuclear power isnt dispatchable. It's not just 5x more expensive. It would overproduce during times when we don't need electricity and underproduce when we do.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        You do exactly what Australia is doing and build PHES and dispatchable loads like electrolysis for fertilizer and smelting as well as adopting EVs. Also your SA example is cherry picking a time when a bunch of transmission infrastructure has been destroyed because it was built to sub par standards and hit by a storm. When this happened last time there was only large centralised fossil fuel generation and there were weeks of blackouts and other problems. Seems like a pretty good case for more rooftop solar.
        Manuel_D 4y ago
        Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to deploy enough storage to make intermittent sources viable. Hence why plans for a renewable grid assume that compressed air, heated sand, or giant flywheels will deliver storage at orders of magnitude better than the existing battery and pumped hydro systems. Australia is not a big success story: Fossil fuels still comprise over 60% of electricity sources for Australia - it's no better than the USA. They are not using renewables for chemical and metallurgy industries. And this is despite Australia having some of the best weather and geography for solar power. Sweden is the country making the most progress into green hydrogen, but it's still experimental at this point. Sweden also gets 40% of it's electricity from nuclear and 40% from hydropower, too. It's hardly a poster child for the success of wind and solar over nuclear power. Intermittent sources need to be backed by a dispatchable source. For countries that don't have widespread hydroelectric potential like Sweden, intermittent sources are not viable except as a supplement to fossil fuels.
    - midasuni 4y ago
      Home battery to story a day’s worth of power, $15k, job done.
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        And what powers the turbopumps that make your plumbing work? What powers the streetlights? Or datacenters that run your internet services and cell phone networks? Or the smelters, factories, and chemical plants essential to a developed society? If we're going to load shift (read: turn off the power) to these industries, then the cost of reduced industrial output needs to be included. If you only run your smelters half the time, then your steel output is reduced by half, and the cost of steel increases along with any products that use steel. The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. Global battery production is only ~400 GWh of batteries per year. A day's energy storage amounts to over a century of battery production. Storage is nowhere near as simple as "buy a battery".
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        1st half 2022 china alone produced 280GWh of batteries. This is 8 hours storage for every W of nuclear added in the largest historical year of generation. > And what powers the turbopumps that make your plumbing work Because moving water around using wind power is far future scifi tech and not something done for centuries.
        Manuel_D 4y ago
        Right and China is also set to produce 80% of the world's batteries. Emphasizing "China alone" seems strange shen china alone produces the vast majority of the world's batteries. Between that and the lockdowns in China, I'll be interested in seeing if the final figures for lithium batteries are even close to the 1,000 GWh global production figures that people had predicted. Moore's law unfortunately doesn't play out in heavy industry. And again, the question is how do you move the water around when the wind isn't blowing? Or do you think citizens are just going to be okay with plumbing that only works on windy days. The point is that household energy use is hardly the only kind of thing that needs to be backed up by a storage system. Energy demand cannot easily be cut without making significant sacrifices in standards of living and industrial output. Yes, people have used wind pumps to pump wells in villages and homesteads. But that's because they didn't need that water on demand, it's just a labor saving device used opportunistically. But it's a lot harder to pump water to the top of a skyscraper, and to a city of millions of people. This kind of pump [1] is not a drop in replacement for this [2] kind of pump. In conclusion, we'd need a way to provision massive amounts of storage to get renewables and o become a reliable source of primary energy. It's costs are being measured in the context of opportunistically replacing fossil fuel power. But in a context where fossil fuel use is not permitted, it would be highly impractical without an incredibly performant form of storage. Perhaps heated sand, compressed air, electrolysis, etc. will deliver that. But thus far they haven't, and in the absence of such a storage system nuclear power would be a more reliable path of decarbonization. 1. http://www.historyofwindmills.com/images/historyofwindmills/picture-of-windmill-waterpump.jpg http://www.historyofwindmills.com/images/historyofwindmills/... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Wood_Screw_Pump00.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Wood_Scr...
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      So we displace the 70% of emissions that currently aren't electrical supply. And oh look, now there is enough overprovision to increase grid penetration to 90% Now with the leftover time and resources a little bit of storage still leaves us with change.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  40% of electricity may be produced by gas on a given day, but that 40% is being produced mostly at night - which is is not going to be displaced by further investments in solar. "Base load" isn't a reference to generation, it's a reference to demand. Base load refers to the load during the lowest period of energy demand in a 24 hour period. Unfortunately, load peaks when solar is producing no energy and load at its base when solar is producing the most energy [1]. Without storage, these excesses of solar production when load is at its base cannot be shifted to the time when load is at its peak. Renewables look great if you just look at generation. But the goal isn't simply to generate clean energy, the goal is to displace fossil fuels. This is why non-intermittent sources like nuclear and hydroelectricity are, contrary to your assertion, far more valuable for decarbonization. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve#/media/File:California_average_hourly_electricity_generation_from_natural_gas,_solar_energy,_and_all_other_sources_in_selected_months_of_2020_(50705225643).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve#/media/File:Califor...
  - nine_k 4y ago
    I live in NYC, and about 50% of energy coming to my apartment comes from nuclear and hydro sources, according to the energy company. But NYC has a few gas-fired peaker plants, and during summer they are fired at the hottest time of the day, when AC load soars. More solar power would certainly help this specific problem. I suppose that somewhere farther from ocean, where day and night temperatures vary more, a solar plant should have an even bigger effect in the summer. (In the winter though the picture changes.)
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Unfortunately the solar potential north in New York is pretty bad. It's not just the weather, it's the angle of incidence with the sun. The further away from the equator you go, the less light per square meter of land you get.
      - nine_k 4y ago
        Indeed so! But I suppose there may be enough slanted surfaces facing approximately south. If solar were cheap enough to depoy, it could help. But possibly it may be not, due to labor costs. I still see some (tall, multifamily / office) houses in Brooklyn and even on Manhattan adorning their roofs with solar panels. I know only one house that incorporated them right from the start though, it's on Coney Island, facing the ocean. I think when someone comes up with translucent solar panels which can work as window shades on a skyscraper while looking good from the outside and not requiring a fortune to deploy, that will change the face of metropolises around the globe.

pydry 4y ago

It's insane to fret about saturating the energy market when 40% of electricity is produced by gas on a sunny day and electric car drivers are gagging for differential pricing tariffs. Intermittent electricity produced now is worth more than baseload in 14 years later.

amanaplanacanal 4y ago
Exactly. Worry about saturating when we are actually close to that happening.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  It's not just close to happening, it already is happening in Australia and Hawaii: https://solarbuildermag.com/policy/grid-saturation-lessons-from-australia-and-hawaii/ https://solarbuildermag.com/policy/grid-saturation-lessons-f...
  - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
    So don’t build more solar in those locations. That’s not an excuse for other places where this is not the case.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      Right, but then how do you displace the remaining fossil fuel use? It's only a matter of time until the "other places" are also saturated. How do you get from 40-50% decarbonized energy to zero? The solution is non-intermittent energy generation. Hydro and geothermal are great for places that have the right geography and geology. But nuclear is the only other non-intermittent form of decarbonized energy we have*. * Some would point to biomass, but I don't consider them decarbonized: the biomass could have been a carbon sink if it wasn't burned. It's emissions by virtue of opportunity cost. An it's not a very scalable form of energy anyway.
      - Panzer04 4y ago
        But nuclear is a terrible complement to intermittent power sources. Nuclear wants to run 24/7 - not intermittently. IMO, gas is going to be around for quite a while as a peaker for renewables - and the more renewables come online, the less necessary it is as a peaker, but it will still be needed.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - pydry 4y ago
        >Right, but then how do you displace the remaining fossil fuel use? The cost effective way would be with wind farms, pumped/battery storage and demand shifting. (this would be a nice problem to have, by the way, but we are STILL churning through terawatt hours of gas while the sun is shining and the wind is blowing all over). Nuclear power isnt dispatchable. It's not just 5x more expensive. It would overproduce during times when we don't need electricity and underproduce when we do.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        You do exactly what Australia is doing and build PHES and dispatchable loads like electrolysis for fertilizer and smelting as well as adopting EVs. Also your SA example is cherry picking a time when a bunch of transmission infrastructure has been destroyed because it was built to sub par standards and hit by a storm. When this happened last time there was only large centralised fossil fuel generation and there were weeks of blackouts and other problems. Seems like a pretty good case for more rooftop solar.
        Manuel_D 4y ago
        Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to deploy enough storage to make intermittent sources viable. Hence why plans for a renewable grid assume that compressed air, heated sand, or giant flywheels will deliver storage at orders of magnitude better than the existing battery and pumped hydro systems. Australia is not a big success story: Fossil fuels still comprise over 60% of electricity sources for Australia - it's no better than the USA. They are not using renewables for chemical and metallurgy industries. And this is despite Australia having some of the best weather and geography for solar power. Sweden is the country making the most progress into green hydrogen, but it's still experimental at this point. Sweden also gets 40% of it's electricity from nuclear and 40% from hydropower, too. It's hardly a poster child for the success of wind and solar over nuclear power. Intermittent sources need to be backed by a dispatchable source. For countries that don't have widespread hydroelectric potential like Sweden, intermittent sources are not viable except as a supplement to fossil fuels.
  - midasuni 4y ago
    Home battery to story a day’s worth of power, $15k, job done.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      And what powers the turbopumps that make your plumbing work? What powers the streetlights? Or datacenters that run your internet services and cell phone networks? Or the smelters, factories, and chemical plants essential to a developed society? If we're going to load shift (read: turn off the power) to these industries, then the cost of reduced industrial output needs to be included. If you only run your smelters half the time, then your steel output is reduced by half, and the cost of steel increases along with any products that use steel. The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. Global battery production is only ~400 GWh of batteries per year. A day's energy storage amounts to over a century of battery production. Storage is nowhere near as simple as "buy a battery".
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        1st half 2022 china alone produced 280GWh of batteries. This is 8 hours storage for every W of nuclear added in the largest historical year of generation. > And what powers the turbopumps that make your plumbing work Because moving water around using wind power is far future scifi tech and not something done for centuries.
        Manuel_D 4y ago
        Right and China is also set to produce 80% of the world's batteries. Emphasizing "China alone" seems strange shen china alone produces the vast majority of the world's batteries. Between that and the lockdowns in China, I'll be interested in seeing if the final figures for lithium batteries are even close to the 1,000 GWh global production figures that people had predicted. Moore's law unfortunately doesn't play out in heavy industry. And again, the question is how do you move the water around when the wind isn't blowing? Or do you think citizens are just going to be okay with plumbing that only works on windy days. The point is that household energy use is hardly the only kind of thing that needs to be backed up by a storage system. Energy demand cannot easily be cut without making significant sacrifices in standards of living and industrial output. Yes, people have used wind pumps to pump wells in villages and homesteads. But that's because they didn't need that water on demand, it's just a labor saving device used opportunistically. But it's a lot harder to pump water to the top of a skyscraper, and to a city of millions of people. This kind of pump [1] is not a drop in replacement for this [2] kind of pump. In conclusion, we'd need a way to provision massive amounts of storage to get renewables and o become a reliable source of primary energy. It's costs are being measured in the context of opportunistically replacing fossil fuel power. But in a context where fossil fuel use is not permitted, it would be highly impractical without an incredibly performant form of storage. Perhaps heated sand, compressed air, electrolysis, etc. will deliver that. But thus far they haven't, and in the absence of such a storage system nuclear power would be a more reliable path of decarbonization. 1. http://www.historyofwindmills.com/images/historyofwindmills/picture-of-windmill-waterpump.jpg http://www.historyofwindmills.com/images/historyofwindmills/... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Wood_Screw_Pump00.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Wood_Scr...
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    So we displace the 70% of emissions that currently aren't electrical supply. And oh look, now there is enough overprovision to increase grid penetration to 90% Now with the leftover time and resources a little bit of storage still leaves us with change.
Manuel_D 4y ago
40% of electricity may be produced by gas on a given day, but that 40% is being produced mostly at night - which is is not going to be displaced by further investments in solar. "Base load" isn't a reference to generation, it's a reference to demand. Base load refers to the load during the lowest period of energy demand in a 24 hour period. Unfortunately, load peaks when solar is producing no energy and load at its base when solar is producing the most energy [1]. Without storage, these excesses of solar production when load is at its base cannot be shifted to the time when load is at its peak. Renewables look great if you just look at generation. But the goal isn't simply to generate clean energy, the goal is to displace fossil fuels. This is why non-intermittent sources like nuclear and hydroelectricity are, contrary to your assertion, far more valuable for decarbonization. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve#/media/File:California_average_hourly_electricity_generation_from_natural_gas,_solar_energy,_and_all_other_sources_in_selected_months_of_2020_(50705225643).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve#/media/File:Califor...
- nine_k 4y ago
  I live in NYC, and about 50% of energy coming to my apartment comes from nuclear and hydro sources, according to the energy company. But NYC has a few gas-fired peaker plants, and during summer they are fired at the hottest time of the day, when AC load soars. More solar power would certainly help this specific problem. I suppose that somewhere farther from ocean, where day and night temperatures vary more, a solar plant should have an even bigger effect in the summer. (In the winter though the picture changes.)
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Unfortunately the solar potential north in New York is pretty bad. It's not just the weather, it's the angle of incidence with the sun. The further away from the equator you go, the less light per square meter of land you get.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      Indeed so! But I suppose there may be enough slanted surfaces facing approximately south. If solar were cheap enough to depoy, it could help. But possibly it may be not, due to labor costs. I still see some (tall, multifamily / office) houses in Brooklyn and even on Manhattan adorning their roofs with solar panels. I know only one house that incorporated them right from the start though, it's on Coney Island, facing the ocean. I think when someone comes up with translucent solar panels which can work as window shades on a skyscraper while looking good from the outside and not requiring a fortune to deploy, that will change the face of metropolises around the globe.