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Depends what your starting assumptions are. Do you think we need enough lithium ion batteries to store 6 months of storage at the standard US energy consumptio

by elihu 3y ago

Depends what your starting assumptions are. Do you think we need enough lithium ion batteries to store 6 months of storage at the standard US energy consumption rate to get through winter? If you do, then you're right: we can't build lithium ion batteries on that scale. If your assumption is that we need 12 hours of energy storage to get through the night, then it's a much more realistic goal. One could even imagine the batteries being on the same premises where the energy is generated (by solar) and used, in which case it's imposing no load on the energy grid. If we consider that long-distance high voltage DC lines are an option, we might not even need storage in the first place. In the middle of the night in the US we could be buying solar power from Morocco and Australia. We just need to have the political will to finance the construction of those cables. Apparently China has plans to build a trans-Pacific HVDC line so they can buy solar power from Chile. Maybe that's just talk and they won't actually complete the project, but at least they're willing to set ambitious goals.

Gibbon1 3y ago
One thing to that I don't have a solid source of numbers to back up but I highly suspect is that eventually the power will be more expensive during the late night than the early morning. As a result a lot of demand will shift to reflect that.
- elihu 3y ago
  That could be, though it's likely to be location specific. Areas with good hydroelectric might just have steady pricing -- solar during the day, hydro at night. EV owners often get reduced rates for charging at night; that could go away. That's an argument in favor of electrification of our major highways: if cars and trucks can charge while in motion, that shifts their time of maximum energy consuption to the daylight hours when people do most of their driving, and which better aligns with solar production. You might even have highways more-or-less directly powered by adjacent solar farms. Fortunately highways and solar farms both have reasons to exist in sparsely-populated countryside.

by elihu 3y ago

Gibbon1 3y ago

One thing to that I don't have a solid source of numbers to back up but I highly suspect is that eventually the power will be more expensive during the late night than the early morning. As a result a lot of demand will shift to reflect that.

elihu 3y ago
That could be, though it's likely to be location specific. Areas with good hydroelectric might just have steady pricing -- solar during the day, hydro at night. EV owners often get reduced rates for charging at night; that could go away. That's an argument in favor of electrification of our major highways: if cars and trucks can charge while in motion, that shifts their time of maximum energy consuption to the daylight hours when people do most of their driving, and which better aligns with solar production. You might even have highways more-or-less directly powered by adjacent solar farms. Fortunately highways and solar farms both have reasons to exist in sparsely-populated countryside.