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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

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.
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        > Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to deploy enough storage to make intermittent sources viable. They're viable even without storage as evidenced by installing new capacity at a rate of net generation of about 20% of the entire cumulative nuclear fleet per year. And getting enough storage is well understood, it is just not a priority in most places until around 70% penetration and progress towards decarbonizing transport is met. > 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. Australia has languished under a government that was openly hostile to renewables for years. South Australia has been operating at over 90% gross renewables for a week and this is after only a few years of large scale effort with insignificant storage and limited ability for interstate transmission due to storm damage. > Sweden is the country making the most progress into green hydrogen, but it's still experimental at this point. https://gh2.org/countries/sweden https://gh2.org/countries/sweden https://gh2.org/countries/australia https://gh2.org/countries/australia Looks like about the same level of investment for similar targets to me. Could it be that was another example of blatant lies? > For countries that don't have widespread hydroelectric potential like Sweden, intermittent sources are not viable except as a supplement to fossil fuels. Yes. 90% for a week right near the beginning of the transition is a 'suppliment'. Very sound conclusion from the evidence at hand. This constant lying must be exhausting. Just sell your coal shares.
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.

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.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      > Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to deploy enough storage to make intermittent sources viable. They're viable even without storage as evidenced by installing new capacity at a rate of net generation of about 20% of the entire cumulative nuclear fleet per year. And getting enough storage is well understood, it is just not a priority in most places until around 70% penetration and progress towards decarbonizing transport is met. > 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. Australia has languished under a government that was openly hostile to renewables for years. South Australia has been operating at over 90% gross renewables for a week and this is after only a few years of large scale effort with insignificant storage and limited ability for interstate transmission due to storm damage. > Sweden is the country making the most progress into green hydrogen, but it's still experimental at this point. https://gh2.org/countries/sweden https://gh2.org/countries/sweden https://gh2.org/countries/australia https://gh2.org/countries/australia Looks like about the same level of investment for similar targets to me. Could it be that was another example of blatant lies? > For countries that don't have widespread hydroelectric potential like Sweden, intermittent sources are not viable except as a supplement to fossil fuels. Yes. 90% for a week right near the beginning of the transition is a 'suppliment'. Very sound conclusion from the evidence at hand. This constant lying must be exhausting. Just sell your coal shares.

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.