5 ms·

We also have this thing called night, as well as weather and seasons.

by kgabis 3y ago

awestroke 3y ago
And we also have this looming thing called climate emergency, which should conceivably motivate us to forge ahead with renewables and adjust our energy usage patterns to match production peaks, lest we doom humanity to extinction
- badtension 3y ago
  I feel like this is one of the biggest missed opportunities. Why do we insist on our energy system to be infinitely flexible and full power available 24/7? Is a habit of doing the laundry at night worth more than additional millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere? I understand convenience, laziness and inertia (resisting change) but I also think changing the times when we click "power on" is a simpler solution than mining millions of tons of more lithium, no?
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    You would have to retrofit every residence to handle daily brownouts (circuits for lights, furnaces and medical equipment stay on, everything else off). You would have to completely rebuild most of the manufacturing industry, as many plants have startup times measured in hours or days. It'd be cheaper to just build nuclear.
    - awestroke 3y ago
      Industry uses most of the energy. The industry is already moving towards their own price optimizing energy usage and/or storage.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Like computing, having high uptime has a value all its own compared to an unreliable system. Countries which do have regular brownouts you find people buying their own (inefficient, polluting) generators to get round it. Smart demand-response may yet become a thing, but it's not yet a commodity product. You need a system to send out "turn off" notifications, and a system for measuring that in realtime, and a system for paying people. Some grids _do_ have this, but only for very large consumers.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Many grids do have this for normal residences, but it only covers your air conditioner not everything (and maybe water heater). By running your AC on half duty cycle all day your house still stays cool enough and they are able to reduce substantial peak demand. For most people HVAC and water heating are the two biggest demands, and also ones where simple management can result in a substantial changes in demand without affecting your comfort.
      - badtension 3y ago
        Making thermostats that are aware of dynamic energy pricing or, better yet, are in part controlled by the energy company (I want my house to be 21-24 C, I don't care when the cooling happens) would give us massive flexibility. All power hungry devices should at least have that capability (maybe other than the kettle, lol). This is literally a cost of $20 hardware in many cases.
        bluGill 3y ago
        In most houses the HVAC and water heater are the only devices that the user can accept not being in full control. Everything else is like the kettle: when you turn it on you want it on now.
  - adwn 3y ago
    > Why do we insist on our energy system to be infinitely flexible and full power available 24/7? I like to heat my home during winter. We have a (modern, highly efficient) heat pump, so we need most electricity during January, just when the least amount of solar insolation is available [1] and when it sometimes stays cloudy and below 0°C continuously for days. But I guess we'll just have to be more flexible and turn off heating, light, and electricity in general for a week, no big deal. [1] I wonder if there's a causal relation between cold weather and low solar insolation?
    - lazide 3y ago
      Regarding [1] - are you being sarcastic?
      - adwn 3y ago
        Is that a serious question?
        lazide 3y ago
        Yes. The dominant (essentially only at the surface) source of heat on the planet is the Sun? When would insolation NOT correlate with temperature?
        adwn 3y ago
        Of course it was sarcasm. I meant to highlight the major problem for using renewables for heating: you'll need most of the power when the least amount of daily solar insolation is available – in winter. This means you either need a lot of storage capacity, or a lot of transfer capacity from far away places, to cover several days of dunkelflaute [1]. This problem is solvable, but it's hard and expensive to solve in practice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
        lazide 3y ago
        I couldn’t tell because many people make arguments (or imply) that it doesn’t matter with an apparently straight face all the time! Including large scale gov’t programs. Including other comments on this exact thread where people did exactly that.
  - digging 3y ago
    It's often >90 degrees Fahrenheit at night in for months on end where I live, and houses are built cheaply and in a style completely unfitting a hot climate (that is, thin walls, dark roofs, fully aboveground, thoughtless window placement, etc. Standard American Dumbass style). It's unhealthy to sleep in these conditions without AC, even fatal for some. So yes, we could survive without power at night. We just have to rebuild every building. As a long-term ideal I don't disagree with you. We should be building for resilience. But that's not a solution to climate change.
  - adrianN 3y ago
    Demand shaping is part of the plan, but opportunities are currently limited. For most applications demand can only be shifted by a short time.
    - badtension 3y ago
      Water heating, AC, fridges and freezers, maybe even EV charging (in some cases) could be done at any time during the 24 hour period, if setup with proper hysteresis.
      - adrianN 3y ago
        Shifting some load by a couple of hours is indeed often possible, shifting it by 12 hours is already difficult.
        badtension 3y ago
        Interesting, I would have thought in many cases it is maybe not trivial, but easily doable at worst. Do you have some personal experience with that?
        adrianN 3y ago
        A friend is working at Siemens R&D on this topic.
- kgabis 3y ago
  Renewables alone won't let us decarbonise, they are too expensive and intermittent. We need lots of nuclear if we want to stand a chance.
ChrisRR 3y ago
I don't know why people always comment this on posts about renewables as if it's some kind of gotcha. When there's no sun, then other countries probably have sun. When there's no sun, there's hydro. When there's no hydro there's wind. When there's no wind, there's tidal. When there's no tidal there's geothermal. And when there's none of those, there's stored energy in batteries. And if for some reason all of those combined can't satisfy the demand, then there's nuclear as a last resort. And if there's none of any of those at all, then we've probably got bigger problems anyway
- kgabis 3y ago
  Those things don't add up - there's often no wind, no sun, no hydro. Energy storage is also orders of magnitude too small to store reasonable amounts of energy. I would argue we should start with the cleanest source of energy (which is nuclear, of course) and fill the gaps with renewables.
- lazide 3y ago
  Many of the plans for the future currently involve drastically undersized battery storage and decommissioning nuclear. That’s why.
  - ChrisRR 3y ago
    So... my point still stands even without nuclear?
    - lazide 3y ago
      I can’t tell what your point is, frankly. That everything is fine until it isn’t, then we’re boned? Or that it will never go wrong, unless we have ‘bigger problems’? (Which are what exactly? alien invasion?) Lack of power either way certainly won’t help! If by design nuclear is offline, fossil fuels are offline, and battery capacity (or other storage) is insufficient for known (but infrequent) weather events, then we’re designing an inevitable and destructive catastrophe as we have no Plan B for when realtime production is insufficient. And that will happen some day, regardless of how much capacity we build. It’s currently the norm on many days. One that will kill a lot of people, especially the physically weaker ones, and be very destructive economically. One that will also play out randomly based on weather, and for which we’ll have no real Plan B. Being flippant about it seems rather macabre.
hedora 3y ago
We also have space lasers and mirrors. I can imagine some sort of orbital parabolic mirror setup that keeps a few acres at 2000C in the dead of winter and vaporizes any birds that fly over the power plant site. We're nowhere near the point where that would make sense, but it could let us harness more than the earth's surface area of sunlight for energy production. It will probably have to wait until after we plunge ourselves into some a perpetual winter trying to mitigate climate change. Of course, a ring world or dyson sphere would make it obsolete.

We also have this thing called night, as well as weather and seasons.

by kgabis 3y ago

We also have this thing called night, as well as weather and seasons.

And we also have this looming thing called climate emergency, which should conceivably motivate us to forge ahead with renewables and adjust our energy usage patterns to match production peaks, lest we doom humanity to extinction

badtension 3y ago
I feel like this is one of the biggest missed opportunities. Why do we insist on our energy system to be infinitely flexible and full power available 24/7? Is a habit of doing the laundry at night worth more than additional millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere? I understand convenience, laziness and inertia (resisting change) but I also think changing the times when we click "power on" is a simpler solution than mining millions of tons of more lithium, no?
- zdragnar 3y ago
  You would have to retrofit every residence to handle daily brownouts (circuits for lights, furnaces and medical equipment stay on, everything else off). You would have to completely rebuild most of the manufacturing industry, as many plants have startup times measured in hours or days. It'd be cheaper to just build nuclear.
  - awestroke 3y ago
    Industry uses most of the energy. The industry is already moving towards their own price optimizing energy usage and/or storage.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Like computing, having high uptime has a value all its own compared to an unreliable system. Countries which do have regular brownouts you find people buying their own (inefficient, polluting) generators to get round it. Smart demand-response may yet become a thing, but it's not yet a commodity product. You need a system to send out "turn off" notifications, and a system for measuring that in realtime, and a system for paying people. Some grids _do_ have this, but only for very large consumers.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Many grids do have this for normal residences, but it only covers your air conditioner not everything (and maybe water heater). By running your AC on half duty cycle all day your house still stays cool enough and they are able to reduce substantial peak demand. For most people HVAC and water heating are the two biggest demands, and also ones where simple management can result in a substantial changes in demand without affecting your comfort.
    - badtension 3y ago
      Making thermostats that are aware of dynamic energy pricing or, better yet, are in part controlled by the energy company (I want my house to be 21-24 C, I don't care when the cooling happens) would give us massive flexibility. All power hungry devices should at least have that capability (maybe other than the kettle, lol). This is literally a cost of $20 hardware in many cases.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        In most houses the HVAC and water heater are the only devices that the user can accept not being in full control. Everything else is like the kettle: when you turn it on you want it on now.
- adwn 3y ago
  > Why do we insist on our energy system to be infinitely flexible and full power available 24/7? I like to heat my home during winter. We have a (modern, highly efficient) heat pump, so we need most electricity during January, just when the least amount of solar insolation is available [1] and when it sometimes stays cloudy and below 0°C continuously for days. But I guess we'll just have to be more flexible and turn off heating, light, and electricity in general for a week, no big deal. [1] I wonder if there's a causal relation between cold weather and low solar insolation?
  - lazide 3y ago
    Regarding [1] - are you being sarcastic?
    - adwn 3y ago
      Is that a serious question?
      - lazide 3y ago
        Yes. The dominant (essentially only at the surface) source of heat on the planet is the Sun? When would insolation NOT correlate with temperature?
        adwn 3y ago
        Of course it was sarcasm. I meant to highlight the major problem for using renewables for heating: you'll need most of the power when the least amount of daily solar insolation is available – in winter. This means you either need a lot of storage capacity, or a lot of transfer capacity from far away places, to cover several days of dunkelflaute [1]. This problem is solvable, but it's hard and expensive to solve in practice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
        lazide 3y ago
        I couldn’t tell because many people make arguments (or imply) that it doesn’t matter with an apparently straight face all the time! Including large scale gov’t programs. Including other comments on this exact thread where people did exactly that.
- digging 3y ago
  It's often >90 degrees Fahrenheit at night in for months on end where I live, and houses are built cheaply and in a style completely unfitting a hot climate (that is, thin walls, dark roofs, fully aboveground, thoughtless window placement, etc. Standard American Dumbass style). It's unhealthy to sleep in these conditions without AC, even fatal for some. So yes, we could survive without power at night. We just have to rebuild every building. As a long-term ideal I don't disagree with you. We should be building for resilience. But that's not a solution to climate change.
- adrianN 3y ago
  Demand shaping is part of the plan, but opportunities are currently limited. For most applications demand can only be shifted by a short time.
  - badtension 3y ago
    Water heating, AC, fridges and freezers, maybe even EV charging (in some cases) could be done at any time during the 24 hour period, if setup with proper hysteresis.
    - adrianN 3y ago
      Shifting some load by a couple of hours is indeed often possible, shifting it by 12 hours is already difficult.
      - badtension 3y ago
        Interesting, I would have thought in many cases it is maybe not trivial, but easily doable at worst. Do you have some personal experience with that?
        adrianN 3y ago
        A friend is working at Siemens R&D on this topic.
kgabis 3y ago
Renewables alone won't let us decarbonise, they are too expensive and intermittent. We need lots of nuclear if we want to stand a chance.

ChrisRR 3y ago

I don't know why people always comment this on posts about renewables as if it's some kind of gotcha. When there's no sun, then other countries probably have sun. When there's no sun, there's hydro. When there's no hydro there's wind. When there's no wind, there's tidal. When there's no tidal there's geothermal. And when there's none of those, there's stored energy in batteries. And if for some reason all of those combined can't satisfy the demand, then there's nuclear as a last resort. And if there's none of any of those at all, then we've probably got bigger problems anyway

kgabis 3y ago
Those things don't add up - there's often no wind, no sun, no hydro. Energy storage is also orders of magnitude too small to store reasonable amounts of energy. I would argue we should start with the cleanest source of energy (which is nuclear, of course) and fill the gaps with renewables.
lazide 3y ago
Many of the plans for the future currently involve drastically undersized battery storage and decommissioning nuclear. That’s why.
- ChrisRR 3y ago
  So... my point still stands even without nuclear?
  - lazide 3y ago
    I can’t tell what your point is, frankly. That everything is fine until it isn’t, then we’re boned? Or that it will never go wrong, unless we have ‘bigger problems’? (Which are what exactly? alien invasion?) Lack of power either way certainly won’t help! If by design nuclear is offline, fossil fuels are offline, and battery capacity (or other storage) is insufficient for known (but infrequent) weather events, then we’re designing an inevitable and destructive catastrophe as we have no Plan B for when realtime production is insufficient. And that will happen some day, regardless of how much capacity we build. It’s currently the norm on many days. One that will kill a lot of people, especially the physically weaker ones, and be very destructive economically. One that will also play out randomly based on weather, and for which we’ll have no real Plan B. Being flippant about it seems rather macabre.

hedora 3y ago

We also have space lasers and mirrors. I can imagine some sort of orbital parabolic mirror setup that keeps a few acres at 2000C in the dead of winter and vaporizes any birds that fly over the power plant site. We're nowhere near the point where that would make sense, but it could let us harness more than the earth's surface area of sunlight for energy production. It will probably have to wait until after we plunge ourselves into some a perpetual winter trying to mitigate climate change. Of course, a ring world or dyson sphere would make it obsolete.