5 ms·

I have never quite understood how and why reliable energy should be produced from unreliable weather, and from what we gather climate change means the weather i

I have never quite understood how and why reliable energy should be produced from unreliable weather, and from what we gather climate change means the weather is going to become even more erratic.

karkisuni 3y ago
store unreliable energy in batteries and release reliable energy
matthewmacleod 3y ago
All sources of energy are unreliable to some extent – what matters is modelling that to understand the risk and put appropriate mitigations in place. For sources which have more inherent variability (such as solar or wind) the mitigation is often storage or over-provisioning. The addition of appropriate mitigations allows us to derive an energy source with the desired level of reliability. The cost of those mitigations (i.e. more storage required with erratic renewables) needs to then be traded off against other energy sources and the associated costs.
ceejayoz 3y ago
> I have never quite understood how reliable energy can be produced from unreliable weather... You build in more than one spot, with enough capacity and energy storage to account for fluctuations. The chances of it being cloudy and windless everywhere all at once is slim.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > The chances of it being cloudy and windless everywhere all at once is slim. Well. That statement means every location needs to generate all power needed through both methods.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Or just a sampling of areas coupled with batteries and a transmission grid
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    It means a resilient electrical grid will be large and made up of a variety of generation and storage methods in a variety of locations. We already do this with other forms of energy production; coal, oil, and gas burning plants need to go down for maintenance, which means we build more capacity for that too.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      I'm not saying we don't. I'm just commenting on that statement. It's easier to build a strong and realistic picture once statements that have unlikely implications are removed.
  - Tagbert 3y ago
    No, not every location. This means that the sum of the other areas not impacted by weather need to have enough capacity to power the whole, at least for a limited time.
- bequanna 3y ago
  Ah, energy storage. Fans of wind and solar paper over this like it is no big deal. When exactly can we expect to see this cheap, ubiquitous energy storage that will solve all of our intermittent generation problems?
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    When we needed massive technological improvements and production capacity for batteries to support cell phones, it happened. The same is now true for electric vehicles. There's little reason to think grid-scale storage is going to play out differently; humans are historically pretty good at this. Detractors of wind and solar like to pretend disingenously they're proposed in isolation by idiots, but that's hardly the case. You'll see hydro, nuclear, gas/biomass peaker plants, etc. in the mix, and you'll see overprovisioned capacity of the cheaper generation forms like wind and solar to account for seasonal or weather-related dips in production.
    - bequanna 3y ago
      So, we should create a problem of unimaginable scale because future people will solve it? Sounds like Boomer thinking: we’ll just screw over those spoiled kids.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        What is the problem of “unimaginable scale” you’re referring to? You can already get a home battery and enough solar to fill it. We’re already doing energy storage. As has happened with cellphones, EVs, solar, and wind, the more we do it, the cheaper it’ll be. No one’s proposing nuking fossil fuel plants and going “oops better fix that”.
MrMan 3y ago
[dead]
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
Same way you build reliable services on top of unreliable hardware - redundancy.
mschuster91 3y ago
The key thing is to build resilience into the system: - diversify power generation among multiple classes of electricity generation: geothermal, running water (=dams), solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, biogas/waste incineration, pumped-water storage. - build large grids with ample transmission capacity on long lines. China for example has built multiple HVDC links spanning thousands of kilometers - enough to span the entire US. - build out mesh grids. The more interconnections, the better the resilience against any kind of external shock. - incentivize large consumers (=heavy industry) to build out the ability to weather outages - basically, pay them to go offline when needed. Yes, some processes (e.g. glass smelters) cannot be stopped without incurring severe damages, but a lot can. - incentivize private consumers to invest in battery-backed fallbacks and solar panels on their roofs. A typical home runs at anything from 3-6 kWh - that's around 5.000€ for a battery that provides a day worth of regular electricity usage.

I have never quite understood how and why reliable energy should be produced from unreliable weather, and from what we gather climate change means the weather is going to become even more erratic.

karkisuni 3y ago

store unreliable energy in batteries and release reliable energy

matthewmacleod 3y ago

All sources of energy are unreliable to some extent – what matters is modelling that to understand the risk and put appropriate mitigations in place. For sources which have more inherent variability (such as solar or wind) the mitigation is often storage or over-provisioning. The addition of appropriate mitigations allows us to derive an energy source with the desired level of reliability. The cost of those mitigations (i.e. more storage required with erratic renewables) needs to then be traded off against other energy sources and the associated costs.

ceejayoz 3y ago

> I have never quite understood how reliable energy can be produced from unreliable weather... You build in more than one spot, with enough capacity and energy storage to account for fluctuations. The chances of it being cloudy and windless everywhere all at once is slim.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> The chances of it being cloudy and windless everywhere all at once is slim. Well. That statement means every location needs to generate all power needed through both methods.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Or just a sampling of areas coupled with batteries and a transmission grid
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  It means a resilient electrical grid will be large and made up of a variety of generation and storage methods in a variety of locations. We already do this with other forms of energy production; coal, oil, and gas burning plants need to go down for maintenance, which means we build more capacity for that too.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I'm not saying we don't. I'm just commenting on that statement. It's easier to build a strong and realistic picture once statements that have unlikely implications are removed.
- Tagbert 3y ago
  No, not every location. This means that the sum of the other areas not impacted by weather need to have enough capacity to power the whole, at least for a limited time.
bequanna 3y ago
Ah, energy storage. Fans of wind and solar paper over this like it is no big deal. When exactly can we expect to see this cheap, ubiquitous energy storage that will solve all of our intermittent generation problems?
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  When we needed massive technological improvements and production capacity for batteries to support cell phones, it happened. The same is now true for electric vehicles. There's little reason to think grid-scale storage is going to play out differently; humans are historically pretty good at this. Detractors of wind and solar like to pretend disingenously they're proposed in isolation by idiots, but that's hardly the case. You'll see hydro, nuclear, gas/biomass peaker plants, etc. in the mix, and you'll see overprovisioned capacity of the cheaper generation forms like wind and solar to account for seasonal or weather-related dips in production.
  - bequanna 3y ago
    So, we should create a problem of unimaginable scale because future people will solve it? Sounds like Boomer thinking: we’ll just screw over those spoiled kids.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      What is the problem of “unimaginable scale” you’re referring to? You can already get a home battery and enough solar to fill it. We’re already doing energy storage. As has happened with cellphones, EVs, solar, and wind, the more we do it, the cheaper it’ll be. No one’s proposing nuking fossil fuel plants and going “oops better fix that”.

MrMan 3y ago

[dead]

tenebrisalietum 3y ago

Same way you build reliable services on top of unreliable hardware - redundancy.

mschuster91 3y ago

The key thing is to build resilience into the system: - diversify power generation among multiple classes of electricity generation: geothermal, running water (=dams), solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, biogas/waste incineration, pumped-water storage. - build large grids with ample transmission capacity on long lines. China for example has built multiple HVDC links spanning thousands of kilometers - enough to span the entire US. - build out mesh grids. The more interconnections, the better the resilience against any kind of external shock. - incentivize large consumers (=heavy industry) to build out the ability to weather outages - basically, pay them to go offline when needed. Yes, some processes (e.g. glass smelters) cannot be stopped without incurring severe damages, but a lot can. - incentivize private consumers to invest in battery-backed fallbacks and solar panels on their roofs. A typical home runs at anything from 3-6 kWh - that's around 5.000€ for a battery that provides a day worth of regular electricity usage.