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Whole renewable energy industry is dead end without usable grid scale storage. Like inventing a car without brakes.
by TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
Whole renewable energy industry is dead end without usable grid scale storage.
Like inventing a car without brakes.
- cinntaile 3y agoAssuming there is no solution to when the sun is not shining you still managed to reduce the usage of coal, no?
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoNo, because you can't switch off the coal power plant on spot, it takes around a week.
- cbmuser 3y agoYou actually can and we're doing that in Germany. The plants remain on stand-by. However, you always need conventional power plants on the grid as otherwise you won't be able to do load-following. Most 100%-renewable-energy plans suffer from a deficit of knowledge how large electricity grids actually work. There is a reason why there is no 100%-renewable-energy grid anywhere in the world which does not heavily rely on hydro power or geothermal power.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoBut you are still burning coal, because you need to keep them hot, otherwise they will get damaged.
- cinntaile 3y agoYou can (and this is being done in practice) regulate the power output instead of turning it off completely and then turning it on again, doing it your way would be extremely detrimental to the power plant's life due to thermal stress. It's also the case that different coal plants have different capabilities so when you claim it takes a around week to turn off a plant, you should provide some more information about the plant (type) you're talking about.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoYou can disconnect output, yet you need to still burn coal anyway, unless you want to damage the coal power plant.
- cinntaile 3y agoI'm not talking about disconnecting output, I'm talking about reducing it. You don't burn as much coal, which was my original statement.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoBut idle = power plant still running on 80% so you are still using 80% of coal input to just keep it running on empty.
- cinntaile 3y agoCoal plants for load following end up around 20-40%, nowhere near your 80% number. They have to, because the energy grid demands that they're capable of doing this because it's just not economical to run them at 80% when there is such variability.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoI have been told that the big problem is actually transmission and load scaling. Energy storage is a big part of that, but really boring, non headline grabbing things like better/more transmission lines and slightly more sane usage patterns make up the low hanging fruit.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoSolar/wind power plant + storage at the same place and consider it as one unit. Then you have a powerplant which can supply electricity on demand (as gas, coal, nuclear can) and you don't need to worry about rebuilding whole grid.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoBut ultimately you still need to move the electricity. I know in Texas, we are largely making more wind/solar power than we can even transmit. There are projects to address this, but they are slow.
- cbmuser 3y agoYou still have the unresolved problem that wind and solar do not produce on-demand. Any other market would have dropped a production machine already that does not produce on-demand. It's like having a worker that only works when they feel working and be it 3 AM in the morning. No company boss would accept such a behavior in the long term. For wind and solar, it's just widely accepted and rather than accepting that you can't build an electricity grid on top of unreliable generation, people try to come up with all kind of weird solutions to force a solution based on solar and wind.
- hef19898 3y agoAnd seem to fail to understand that industrial electricity demand is flexible nowadays. And has been for almost a decade now. So to put it in your words, yes, companies are absolutely accepting that kind of behaviour from their electricity suppliers. Companies are even benefiting greatly from it.
- hef19898 3y ago400+ GW of installed solar in 2023 seems hardly a dead end...
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoThat's installed. How much energy does it produce during night? 0W
- hef19898 3y agoAssuming a balanced installation across the world, that number is more like 200 GW. But whatever.
- cbmuser 3y agoYes, because electricity consumers in the US profit at night when solar cells in Asia are generating electricity. /s
- hef19898 3y agoThat wasn't the question so, was it?
- sokoloff 3y agoThe energy produced in a day from a solar panel is closer to 4-5 hours of its peak rating, not 12 as your statement suggests.
- defrost 3y agoThings take time. Currently there's more than 100 concentrated solar thermal plants, generating 7GWh of power, deployed around the world with a another 30 under construction right now in China and a third generation plant being designed here in Australia while the second gen is currently being built and tested after the success of first gen pilot. https://theconversation.com/batteries-wont-cut-it-we-need-solar-thermal-technology-to-get-us-through-the-night-203545 https://theconversation.com/batteries-wont-cut-it-we-need-so... It's happening, it just hasn't yet arrived at scale. In parallel we're also seeing the rise of solar -> green hydrogen | ammonia | methanol for use in heavy primary industry (mining and transport) which is a decent chunk of fossil fuel use to be displaced.
- cbmuser 3y ago»It's happening, it just hasn't yet arrived at scale.« Making it at scale is a MAJOR challenge. Germany alone consumes up to 1.6 billion kWh on a single day. That's the capacity of 16 million Tesla-S batteries with 100 kWh. Solving the storage problem is simply infeasible and is never going to happen in the foreseeable future!
- plastic3169 3y agoGermany has 50 million cars. Are you saying that after those have been turned eletric their batteries alone would be enough to cover the countrys battery needs?
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoUsually people buy cars to drive them around, not to use them as batteries for poorly designed grids.
- defrost 3y agoErgo the rise of concentrated solar thermal plants (CSPS) and using excess peak solar to produce hydrogen, ammonia, methonal, etc for off peak (night time) demand. Batteries aren't the only way in which energy can be offset by 10 hours to meet lower night time demand.
- Kon5ole 3y agoRenewables still help without storage. Every TWh of electricity produced from wind and solar is a TWh that was not produced by burning coal. If you reduce the coal consumption in the existing coal power plants by 50% it's as beneficial as closing half the number of plants. That said sure, we need to build storage, and I think the first and most important step is to remove the political obstacles currently in place to prevent people and companies from generating and storing their own electricity.