5 ms·

Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam ? By "base load" I mean the insurmountable blocker for renewable adoption.

Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam ? By "base load" I mean the insurmountable blocker for renewable adoption. The storage industry has already proven it can basically double national installed capacity from one year to the next: It did so in 2023 and 2022, and in 2021 it more than tripled the previous year’s tally. The continuation of this trend just gets more impressive with time: A few years ago, doubling storage capacity only meant building 1 gigawatt. Now, the industry is looking at adding 14 gigawatts in a year, requiring an unprecedented amount of work at project sites around the country. It's hard to believe how quickly the renewable revolution is happening. The rise of AI? What about the rise of renewables, holy hell. I was browsing panels the other day for my upcoming project to convert our entire house to solar (we only bought last year, it's top priority for me, for my children's future) and I cannot believe that I can buy top of the range 550W panels for about $200USD per panel, like, my electricity bill is about $400 a month. It's totally ridiculous. I cannot believe people more people haven't caught onto this. I'll be able to pay off the whole system, including batteries in about two year's worth of electricity bills, granted I'm mostly installing myself, it's wild.

otherme123 3y ago
I've been in your boots for 15 years, and I barely convinced anyone. Even my thermal panels are viewed with suspiction, and people don't believe me when I told them my hot water come from them with a little help from an electric heater in the winter. They pay themselves once per year, easily. Frustratingly, the more common doubt is "if it's so good, how are there so few people doing it?" At this point I gave up. I enjoy my free electricity, and even earn some money, but quietly. A pending change in households is going 24/48V DC. The inverters are costly, and they feel stupid when you know a lot of appliances have an AC/DC transformer to undo what your $3K inverters are doing 10 meters away, losing maybe 20% in the process.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  Frustratingly, the more common doubt is "if it's so good, how are there so few people doing it?" Do you think that 15 years back it was prohibitive from a cost perspective now? Was it always this economically viable? I mean ~ $200 a panel, it's a true no brainer, maybe the initial outlay was a little too much for people way back when? On the other hand, I guess with peaking electricity prices in many parts of the world, it would've easily paid itself off by now for most people.
  - otherme123 3y ago
    Yes, it make less sense 15 years ago. I got some help from the government with the loan. IIRC, I calculated the break even in 7-8 years. In fact, I also bought a sun tracker, because at the time it was cheaper than to buy more panels.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Every time I bring up that subject, people get aggravated and point out that lower voltage means larger cables, which is true, but I wonder if the tradeoff of paying more for thicker cables is worth the simplicity it brings.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    What simplicity? Houses aren't limited from being off-grid because of 120vac conversion efficiency, and the new hotness in batteries is HVDC which makes chargers cheaper because it aligns battery voltage to common DC MPPT voltages from solar panels. The industry has been literally moving away from low voltage DC recently.
  - ssl-3 3y ago
    It might pay for itself eventually. Suppose I'm making toast -- a process that normally uses around 1100W, anywhere in the world. At 120V, that's about 9A, which is fine for a 15A branch circuit running with 14AWG wire (the very cheapest of wire that we ever use for this stuff in the States). At 48V, making toast requires about 22A, and thus needs something more like 10AWG wire, which uses about 2.5x as much copper. But that bigger wire only needs to be purchased and installed one time, while any efficiency gain gets to be kept (presumably) forever. And that efficiency gain (achieved by having fewer, simpler electronics between the sun and the toast in my kitchen) means a smaller solar array, and a smaller battery bank -- stuff that does wear out eventually. So why not do both? Why not stick with high voltage (because it's cheaper), and also switch some things over to DC? Neither the wires in my walls nor the electromechanical bits of my toaster know or care if things are being powered with 120VAC or 120VDC. The toast comes out the same either way. Why must voltage also decrease?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > my thermal panels How cold is it where you're at? I'm weighing putting in a new tankless boiler system, as well as a rooftop PV, but thermal solar might be a better bet.
  - Y-bar 3y ago
    Solar thermal works well even in northern latitudes, for example this municipal bath uses them extensively: https://maps.app.goo.gl/w571B7hTXCUBpN7Q6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/w571B7hTXCUBpN7Q6 Edit: This building is of course a bit exceptional in that it is both well-aligned south-facing and has no trees or other things shading it. Another thing working in it's favour is that reflections from water, ice, and snow also provide a non-negligible boost in captured energy.
  - otherme123 3y ago
    Winters average 5-10ºC, summers 15-20ºC (nights included). Winter months average 100 hours/month of sun.
jimbob45 3y ago
There can be extenuating circumstances. Adding panels would void my roof’s warranty and I couldn’t afford a broken roof if something were to happen. I’m good at math. I can see that solar would save me buckets of money for a small investment. It’s just that my hands are tied for other reasons.
ben_w 3y ago
I don't think it's a scam, scams requires malice, and it's sufficient that people don't expect exponential change even when it's happening reliably for ages — after all, even when people do learn about exponential growth, many say things like that it has a "knee" or reaches an "inflection point".
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  There's a survivor bias, many things do stop growing at some point, but these are harder to notice. You're more likely to perceive the things which did scale exponentially.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Sure — all exponentials eventually turn out to be sigmoids, or some quote to that effect — but I'm unclear why this matters as I'm suggesting most people don't even know what an exponential really is and what to expect from them in even the short term?
    - The_Colonel 3y ago
      > it's sufficient that people don't expect exponential change even when it's happening reliably for ages This sort of implied that people should have been expecting exponential change. But even if you know what exponential growth is, you couldn't know in advance with certainty if it would be the case for battery storage, renewables etc.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        For batteries and renewables, the growth had already been exponential for a decade or more prior to the relevant conversations and threads, but people were (even last month on HN) looking at the currently installed capacity and responding as if that was all it could ever be. (At some point the growth will slow, but that's never the criticism given in any replies I remember).
epups 3y ago
The US consumes approximately 4 trillion terawatts/hour of electricity. If this prediction holds true we will have 14 gigawatts of storage this year. You do the math and you tell me whether base load generation is still an issue or not.
- Toutouxc 3y ago
  > The US consumes approximately 4 trillion terawatts/hour of electricity. It's roughly 3800 TWh (Terrawatt-hours) per year, no need to invent new units.
  - epups 3y ago
    My bad! So, the issue is that the US needs 3800TW of electricity every hour, and by the end of this year it will have 0.014 TW of battery capacity. It is clear that batteries are not replacing base load generation any time soon.
    - rini17 3y ago
      facepalm Can I see the calculation how did you get from 3800 TWh per year to the same amount per hour?
    - Toutouxc 3y ago
      You're making the same mistake again. The operation in "Terawatt-hour" is multiplication, not division. It's not Terawatt-per-hour, it's Terawatt-for-an-hour. 1 TWh is the amount of electricity you consume when you run a 1 TW machine for 1 hour. Or a 2 TW machine for half an hour. Or a 500 GW machine for two hours. > US needs 3800TW of electricity every hour This alone should give you pause. "3800 TW of electricity" doesn't mean anything. A Watt is a unit of power. It's the flow of electricity, not an amount.
      - epups 3y ago
        I was trying to place everything in the same unit as much as possible so that we could compare, and it appears I failed miserably. However, you seem to be really good at it. Could you tell me which proportion of the US' electricity needs (I didn't want to say power before because then we are including things like oil) can be fulfilled with 14 gigawatts of batteries?
XorNot 3y ago
How much energy storage do you think those 14 gigawatts of batteries represent? How long do they provide 14 gigawatts for? Then go cost out how much it would cost you to deal with say, 3 days of solar under production due to grey skies for your house. In most studies, the capacity factor of a solar plant is about 25% at best, so that 550W panel is worth about 137W over the course of a year, presuming you can store all of it.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  In this case , yes, why can't my energy requirements be supplanted with a fully charged battery grid, solar from somewhere else, or gas peaker or something similar? Doesn't seem like a compelling case for running coal power plants 24/7 to be honest.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    For the same reason they're not now, and why you currently don't have batteries and are only just now considering solar panels: cost. For example, here's the breakdown of the Australian NSW energy regulators supply and demand dashboard: https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e... See the scale on the right for demand? The bottom is 6,000 MW. That's 24/7, all year round pretty much. My home state never drops below 6 GW of constant, continuous demand. That's baseload. Doesn't matter what it's made of, doesn't matter what it's components are, if you want to avoid brown outs or blackouts, then at all times there must be at least 6 GW of generation available overnight. So, applying the 1:3 rule-of-thumb for LiFePO4 power:energy, overnight we have a period of at least 8 hours where we need at least 48GWh of storage - and we're going to use all of it. Of course, that's a number where you scrape through - because to recharge that storage, you're going to have to supply at least double that amount of energy to support the baseload while you do it. So now you need 96 GWh of generating capacity. But solar doesn't have the capacity factor for it remember - 25% at best, over time. So optimistically we'll need to deploy about 384 GW of solar to charge that system. Only...we can't rely on that either, because 25% is...average over time. And we absolutely have to charge those batteries to make it through the following night. But wait: there's a big mismatch here. We can't just amortize over 384 GW of solar. Because all of that solar might be generating at full power during the day. Or it might be under-performing, or not performing at all. We have this massive surplus we need to have, but our batteries - 48GWh of them - are going to give us maybe 16 GW of power, and likely they'll be able to absorb energy slower then that (i.e. charging would be maybe 90+% efficient). We can't charge them faster then 16 GW: that big array is solely to try and meet an average amount of charge to get us through the next night - provided nothing else goes wrong. And we can't use it efficiently: because we also need the batteries during the day. Clouds over a solar plant kill the output instantly, so the battery has to step in to compensate and retain grid stability. So the actual amount of battery capacity we need, to get us through one night is going to get considerably larger then 48GWh (16 GW). In fact ideally we actually need...pretty much 384 GW of batteries. Because if our arrays perform well, we need to be able to soak all that power up to have enough charge to get through the night, but we also need enough batteries to sustain the arrays going down during the day and needing to run the grid off the storage momentarily...but we can't afford not to be charging, because on average we're only getting 96 GW - but the lows and highs are very far from that number. So from that one bit of analysis - and making no accounting for emergencies, equipment failures, efficiency of individual components (i.e. 90% battery charge efficiency + 10% losses in transmission lines etc.) we're currently at a tally of 384 GW of solar, 384 GW of batteries, and we have no redundancy whatsoever in this system. Because we can't get a reliable 6 GW from solar. Now obviously the picture gets better if you include other things: i.e. wind tends to match solar dips and does work at night, so a combined solar/wind capacity factor is usually about 50%, and with better modelling you could shave some of these absolute margins into more balanced ones, but the problem remains: you've got to charge the batteries, and there's a limited rate you can do it. And it's a problem which gets worse for something like Pumped Hydro, because pumped hydro can have higher energy storage but it has much lower power output as a proportion - meaning it takes longer to charge (it would however be a good backstop for long term storage if we could build enough of it - can we?) There's also some positives - i.e. over time that giant over-sized battery installation is going to get way better cycle life since it's now >1000GWh of storage capacity and we won't actually be using all of it or even a fraction very frequently. We actually have a pretty good buffer over time if we expand the generating capacity further since we could a couple of weeks over no sun without running down our buffer. Of course...current Australian generating capacity for solar in 2023 - nationally - is 32.9 GW.[1] And globally...there's about 300 GWh of LiFePO4 in existence at all. And the deeper you regularly cycle your batteries, the more expensive per unit they become.[3] Which is a problem because I've just proposed installing ~USD$154 billion dollars of batteries (assuming low-end cost per kWh estimated)[4], more then the entire world supply, to be able to adequately guarantee baseload electrical supply for one state of my relatively small country. Or about USD$25 billion per reliable GW, in batteries alone. Which makes the current expensive nuclear power plants look downright cheap and ITER would still be competitive when it's actually done. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/04/australia-solar-power-panel-installation-data-uptake-energy-prices https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/04/australi... [2] https://www.lifepo4-battery.com/News/10-Largest-BATTERY.html https://www.lifepo4-battery.com/News/10-Largest-BATTERY.html [3] https://gwl-power.tumblr.com/post/130701906811/faq-lifepo4-cycle-life-based-on-dod-the-graph https://gwl-power.tumblr.com/post/130701906811/faq-lifepo4-c... [4] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf
lgbr 3y ago
> Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam I don't think it was in the past, it's just becoming obsolete, piece by piece. Each method of more traditional power production has different capabilities for ramping up and down, in descending order: gas, hydro, coal, nuclear. Now we have renewables entering the market, which so far have more or less had to be matched with gas peaker plants for scaling up and down. Batteries are obviously putting downward pressure on peak energy generation. Furthermore, we've had the classic paradigm of electricity demand, where if I put a load onto the grid, like turning on my oven or flipping a light switch, it must function. Now we have electric cars, heat pumps, hot water heaters, and even in parts of Scandinavia washing machines, which schedule themselves to run during off-peak times. Where we find ourselves now is market forces working themselves out, with investors buying into battery storage, and homeowners switching to time-of-use billing for their energy bills to take advantage of cheap electricity at night when charging their cars. In energy politics we obviously still hear the term base load, but it's now nothing more than rhetoric of an outdated era.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  I don't think it was in the past, it's just becoming obsolete, piece by piece. This is what I'm questioning though, 30 years of hand waving about "base load", and all the stories about how renewables aren't sufficient, but then, oh wait, actually, we can probably do it now. Maybe, just maybe the tech wasn't there, but it is convenient that when push comes to shove, we do have the technology. If the investment was there 30 years ago, it feels like we could've made a lot more progress. But the narrative persisted.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Baseload is indeed meaningless unless you put a number on it in gw and gwh actually needed. People wielding the term without doing that (i.e. most of them), are basically insisting on unspecified amounts of energy to be needed for unspecified amounts of time for unspecified calamities that may need said unspecified capacity. It's usually accompanies by some handwavy statements about clouds, weather, and seasonal darkness and the suggestion that we should instead put all our resources into building nuclear plants. This indeed bullshit. Because as soon as you specify these numbers these things, it becomes a simple engineering challenge with some clear economics that you can model for different solutions. Numbers for domestic solar indeed are such that most installations pay back within a few years in most parts of the world. The largest cost these days is not even the hardware but the installation cost and getting the time of the certified experts that can do this. But even factoring in all that, you basically end up earning your money back. If you plop down enough panels and batteries, you won't need anything else.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  it becomes a simple engineering challenge with some clear economics that you can model for different solutions. This 100%, this is exactly how I felt about it too. Now it's a simple engineering and IMO economics challenge, it turns out, it's quite possible.

otherme123 3y ago

I've been in your boots for 15 years, and I barely convinced anyone. Even my thermal panels are viewed with suspiction, and people don't believe me when I told them my hot water come from them with a little help from an electric heater in the winter. They pay themselves once per year, easily. Frustratingly, the more common doubt is "if it's so good, how are there so few people doing it?" At this point I gave up. I enjoy my free electricity, and even earn some money, but quietly. A pending change in households is going 24/48V DC. The inverters are costly, and they feel stupid when you know a lot of appliances have an AC/DC transformer to undo what your $3K inverters are doing 10 meters away, losing maybe 20% in the process.

ChatGTP 3y ago
Frustratingly, the more common doubt is "if it's so good, how are there so few people doing it?" Do you think that 15 years back it was prohibitive from a cost perspective now? Was it always this economically viable? I mean ~ $200 a panel, it's a true no brainer, maybe the initial outlay was a little too much for people way back when? On the other hand, I guess with peaking electricity prices in many parts of the world, it would've easily paid itself off by now for most people.
- otherme123 3y ago
  Yes, it make less sense 15 years ago. I got some help from the government with the loan. IIRC, I calculated the break even in 7-8 years. In fact, I also bought a sun tracker, because at the time it was cheaper than to buy more panels.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Every time I bring up that subject, people get aggravated and point out that lower voltage means larger cables, which is true, but I wonder if the tradeoff of paying more for thicker cables is worth the simplicity it brings.
- XorNot 3y ago
  What simplicity? Houses aren't limited from being off-grid because of 120vac conversion efficiency, and the new hotness in batteries is HVDC which makes chargers cheaper because it aligns battery voltage to common DC MPPT voltages from solar panels. The industry has been literally moving away from low voltage DC recently.
- ssl-3 3y ago
  It might pay for itself eventually. Suppose I'm making toast -- a process that normally uses around 1100W, anywhere in the world. At 120V, that's about 9A, which is fine for a 15A branch circuit running with 14AWG wire (the very cheapest of wire that we ever use for this stuff in the States). At 48V, making toast requires about 22A, and thus needs something more like 10AWG wire, which uses about 2.5x as much copper. But that bigger wire only needs to be purchased and installed one time, while any efficiency gain gets to be kept (presumably) forever. And that efficiency gain (achieved by having fewer, simpler electronics between the sun and the toast in my kitchen) means a smaller solar array, and a smaller battery bank -- stuff that does wear out eventually. So why not do both? Why not stick with high voltage (because it's cheaper), and also switch some things over to DC? Neither the wires in my walls nor the electromechanical bits of my toaster know or care if things are being powered with 120VAC or 120VDC. The toast comes out the same either way. Why must voltage also decrease?
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> my thermal panels How cold is it where you're at? I'm weighing putting in a new tankless boiler system, as well as a rooftop PV, but thermal solar might be a better bet.
- Y-bar 3y ago
  Solar thermal works well even in northern latitudes, for example this municipal bath uses them extensively: https://maps.app.goo.gl/w571B7hTXCUBpN7Q6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/w571B7hTXCUBpN7Q6 Edit: This building is of course a bit exceptional in that it is both well-aligned south-facing and has no trees or other things shading it. Another thing working in it's favour is that reflections from water, ice, and snow also provide a non-negligible boost in captured energy.
- otherme123 3y ago
  Winters average 5-10ºC, summers 15-20ºC (nights included). Winter months average 100 hours/month of sun.

jimbob45 3y ago

There can be extenuating circumstances. Adding panels would void my roof’s warranty and I couldn’t afford a broken roof if something were to happen. I’m good at math. I can see that solar would save me buckets of money for a small investment. It’s just that my hands are tied for other reasons.

ben_w 3y ago

I don't think it's a scam, scams requires malice, and it's sufficient that people don't expect exponential change even when it's happening reliably for ages — after all, even when people do learn about exponential growth, many say things like that it has a "knee" or reaches an "inflection point".

The_Colonel 3y ago
There's a survivor bias, many things do stop growing at some point, but these are harder to notice. You're more likely to perceive the things which did scale exponentially.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Sure — all exponentials eventually turn out to be sigmoids, or some quote to that effect — but I'm unclear why this matters as I'm suggesting most people don't even know what an exponential really is and what to expect from them in even the short term?
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    > it's sufficient that people don't expect exponential change even when it's happening reliably for ages This sort of implied that people should have been expecting exponential change. But even if you know what exponential growth is, you couldn't know in advance with certainty if it would be the case for battery storage, renewables etc.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      For batteries and renewables, the growth had already been exponential for a decade or more prior to the relevant conversations and threads, but people were (even last month on HN) looking at the currently installed capacity and responding as if that was all it could ever be. (At some point the growth will slow, but that's never the criticism given in any replies I remember).

epups 3y ago

The US consumes approximately 4 trillion terawatts/hour of electricity. If this prediction holds true we will have 14 gigawatts of storage this year. You do the math and you tell me whether base load generation is still an issue or not.

Toutouxc 3y ago
> The US consumes approximately 4 trillion terawatts/hour of electricity. It's roughly 3800 TWh (Terrawatt-hours) per year, no need to invent new units.
- epups 3y ago
  My bad! So, the issue is that the US needs 3800TW of electricity every hour, and by the end of this year it will have 0.014 TW of battery capacity. It is clear that batteries are not replacing base load generation any time soon.
  - rini17 3y ago
    facepalm Can I see the calculation how did you get from 3800 TWh per year to the same amount per hour?
  - Toutouxc 3y ago
    You're making the same mistake again. The operation in "Terawatt-hour" is multiplication, not division. It's not Terawatt-per-hour, it's Terawatt-for-an-hour. 1 TWh is the amount of electricity you consume when you run a 1 TW machine for 1 hour. Or a 2 TW machine for half an hour. Or a 500 GW machine for two hours. > US needs 3800TW of electricity every hour This alone should give you pause. "3800 TW of electricity" doesn't mean anything. A Watt is a unit of power. It's the flow of electricity, not an amount.
    - epups 3y ago
      I was trying to place everything in the same unit as much as possible so that we could compare, and it appears I failed miserably. However, you seem to be really good at it. Could you tell me which proportion of the US' electricity needs (I didn't want to say power before because then we are including things like oil) can be fulfilled with 14 gigawatts of batteries?

XorNot 3y ago

How much energy storage do you think those 14 gigawatts of batteries represent? How long do they provide 14 gigawatts for? Then go cost out how much it would cost you to deal with say, 3 days of solar under production due to grey skies for your house. In most studies, the capacity factor of a solar plant is about 25% at best, so that 550W panel is worth about 137W over the course of a year, presuming you can store all of it.

ChatGTP 3y ago
In this case , yes, why can't my energy requirements be supplanted with a fully charged battery grid, solar from somewhere else, or gas peaker or something similar? Doesn't seem like a compelling case for running coal power plants 24/7 to be honest.
- XorNot 3y ago
  For the same reason they're not now, and why you currently don't have batteries and are only just now considering solar panels: cost. For example, here's the breakdown of the Australian NSW energy regulators supply and demand dashboard: https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e... See the scale on the right for demand? The bottom is 6,000 MW. That's 24/7, all year round pretty much. My home state never drops below 6 GW of constant, continuous demand. That's baseload. Doesn't matter what it's made of, doesn't matter what it's components are, if you want to avoid brown outs or blackouts, then at all times there must be at least 6 GW of generation available overnight. So, applying the 1:3 rule-of-thumb for LiFePO4 power:energy, overnight we have a period of at least 8 hours where we need at least 48GWh of storage - and we're going to use all of it. Of course, that's a number where you scrape through - because to recharge that storage, you're going to have to supply at least double that amount of energy to support the baseload while you do it. So now you need 96 GWh of generating capacity. But solar doesn't have the capacity factor for it remember - 25% at best, over time. So optimistically we'll need to deploy about 384 GW of solar to charge that system. Only...we can't rely on that either, because 25% is...average over time. And we absolutely have to charge those batteries to make it through the following night. But wait: there's a big mismatch here. We can't just amortize over 384 GW of solar. Because all of that solar might be generating at full power during the day. Or it might be under-performing, or not performing at all. We have this massive surplus we need to have, but our batteries - 48GWh of them - are going to give us maybe 16 GW of power, and likely they'll be able to absorb energy slower then that (i.e. charging would be maybe 90+% efficient). We can't charge them faster then 16 GW: that big array is solely to try and meet an average amount of charge to get us through the next night - provided nothing else goes wrong. And we can't use it efficiently: because we also need the batteries during the day. Clouds over a solar plant kill the output instantly, so the battery has to step in to compensate and retain grid stability. So the actual amount of battery capacity we need, to get us through one night is going to get considerably larger then 48GWh (16 GW). In fact ideally we actually need...pretty much 384 GW of batteries. Because if our arrays perform well, we need to be able to soak all that power up to have enough charge to get through the night, but we also need enough batteries to sustain the arrays going down during the day and needing to run the grid off the storage momentarily...but we can't afford not to be charging, because on average we're only getting 96 GW - but the lows and highs are very far from that number. So from that one bit of analysis - and making no accounting for emergencies, equipment failures, efficiency of individual components (i.e. 90% battery charge efficiency + 10% losses in transmission lines etc.) we're currently at a tally of 384 GW of solar, 384 GW of batteries, and we have no redundancy whatsoever in this system. Because we can't get a reliable 6 GW from solar. Now obviously the picture gets better if you include other things: i.e. wind tends to match solar dips and does work at night, so a combined solar/wind capacity factor is usually about 50%, and with better modelling you could shave some of these absolute margins into more balanced ones, but the problem remains: you've got to charge the batteries, and there's a limited rate you can do it. And it's a problem which gets worse for something like Pumped Hydro, because pumped hydro can have higher energy storage but it has much lower power output as a proportion - meaning it takes longer to charge (it would however be a good backstop for long term storage if we could build enough of it - can we?) There's also some positives - i.e. over time that giant over-sized battery installation is going to get way better cycle life since it's now >1000GWh of storage capacity and we won't actually be using all of it or even a fraction very frequently. We actually have a pretty good buffer over time if we expand the generating capacity further since we could a couple of weeks over no sun without running down our buffer. Of course...current Australian generating capacity for solar in 2023 - nationally - is 32.9 GW.[1] And globally...there's about 300 GWh of LiFePO4 in existence at all. And the deeper you regularly cycle your batteries, the more expensive per unit they become.[3] Which is a problem because I've just proposed installing ~USD$154 billion dollars of batteries (assuming low-end cost per kWh estimated)[4], more then the entire world supply, to be able to adequately guarantee baseload electrical supply for one state of my relatively small country. Or about USD$25 billion per reliable GW, in batteries alone. Which makes the current expensive nuclear power plants look downright cheap and ITER would still be competitive when it's actually done. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/04/australia-solar-power-panel-installation-data-uptake-energy-prices https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/04/australi... [2] https://www.lifepo4-battery.com/News/10-Largest-BATTERY.html https://www.lifepo4-battery.com/News/10-Largest-BATTERY.html [3] https://gwl-power.tumblr.com/post/130701906811/faq-lifepo4-cycle-life-based-on-dod-the-graph https://gwl-power.tumblr.com/post/130701906811/faq-lifepo4-c... [4] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf

lgbr 3y ago

> Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam I don't think it was in the past, it's just becoming obsolete, piece by piece. Each method of more traditional power production has different capabilities for ramping up and down, in descending order: gas, hydro, coal, nuclear. Now we have renewables entering the market, which so far have more or less had to be matched with gas peaker plants for scaling up and down. Batteries are obviously putting downward pressure on peak energy generation. Furthermore, we've had the classic paradigm of electricity demand, where if I put a load onto the grid, like turning on my oven or flipping a light switch, it must function. Now we have electric cars, heat pumps, hot water heaters, and even in parts of Scandinavia washing machines, which schedule themselves to run during off-peak times. Where we find ourselves now is market forces working themselves out, with investors buying into battery storage, and homeowners switching to time-of-use billing for their energy bills to take advantage of cheap electricity at night when charging their cars. In energy politics we obviously still hear the term base load, but it's now nothing more than rhetoric of an outdated era.

ChatGTP 3y ago
I don't think it was in the past, it's just becoming obsolete, piece by piece. This is what I'm questioning though, 30 years of hand waving about "base load", and all the stories about how renewables aren't sufficient, but then, oh wait, actually, we can probably do it now. Maybe, just maybe the tech wasn't there, but it is convenient that when push comes to shove, we do have the technology. If the investment was there 30 years ago, it feels like we could've made a lot more progress. But the narrative persisted.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Baseload is indeed meaningless unless you put a number on it in gw and gwh actually needed. People wielding the term without doing that (i.e. most of them), are basically insisting on unspecified amounts of energy to be needed for unspecified amounts of time for unspecified calamities that may need said unspecified capacity. It's usually accompanies by some handwavy statements about clouds, weather, and seasonal darkness and the suggestion that we should instead put all our resources into building nuclear plants. This indeed bullshit. Because as soon as you specify these numbers these things, it becomes a simple engineering challenge with some clear economics that you can model for different solutions. Numbers for domestic solar indeed are such that most installations pay back within a few years in most parts of the world. The largest cost these days is not even the hardware but the installation cost and getting the time of the certified experts that can do this. But even factoring in all that, you basically end up earning your money back. If you plop down enough panels and batteries, you won't need anything else.

ChatGTP 3y ago
it becomes a simple engineering challenge with some clear economics that you can model for different solutions. This 100%, this is exactly how I felt about it too. Now it's a simple engineering and IMO economics challenge, it turns out, it's quite possible.