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Because we have power lines and batteries now, so solar can be where the sun is, and consumption can be where it isn't. I guess I'm envisioning a future where

Because we have power lines and batteries now, so solar can be where the sun is, and consumption can be where it isn't. I guess I'm envisioning a future where there is a lot more solar panels than there is consumption, meaning we can store for later or transmit to places that cannot generate themselves.

eru 2y ago
Storing throughout the day can be done with batteries locally. Storing throughout the seasons is much harder. (But then, you can probably use a cable to give Germany electricity in winter from solar farms in the Sahara or so.)
roenxi 2y ago
> or transmit to places that cannot generate themselves Sticking to the 1812 scenario; that is a substantially harder problem to solve than putting the nuclear plants somewhere extremely remote and moving power to where it is needed. I'm not convinced you're really thinking about the cost-effectiveness of the redundancies you're suggesting here. I wouldn't say impossible, but I would say there is room here for a solar catastrophe to turn out to be worse than a nuclear one. It is hard to overemphasise how mild the nuclear industry has been so far in terms of harm done - even including the catastrophes. Places like Fukushima apparently have exclusion zone limits of 50 millisieversts per year [0]. That is almost a third of what humans left to their own devices live with when left to their own devices with no local panic [1]. We're talking damage done that is right on the threshold of our ability to even detect it. It won't take that many sigmas of a correlated outage for solar panels to do worse than that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#New_definition_of_the_no-entry_zones_introduced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#New... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar%2C_Iran#Radioactivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar%2C_Iran#Radioactivity

eru 2y ago

Storing throughout the day can be done with batteries locally. Storing throughout the seasons is much harder. (But then, you can probably use a cable to give Germany electricity in winter from solar farms in the Sahara or so.)

roenxi 2y ago

> or transmit to places that cannot generate themselves Sticking to the 1812 scenario; that is a substantially harder problem to solve than putting the nuclear plants somewhere extremely remote and moving power to where it is needed. I'm not convinced you're really thinking about the cost-effectiveness of the redundancies you're suggesting here. I wouldn't say impossible, but I would say there is room here for a solar catastrophe to turn out to be worse than a nuclear one. It is hard to overemphasise how mild the nuclear industry has been so far in terms of harm done - even including the catastrophes. Places like Fukushima apparently have exclusion zone limits of 50 millisieversts per year [0]. That is almost a third of what humans left to their own devices live with when left to their own devices with no local panic [1]. We're talking damage done that is right on the threshold of our ability to even detect it. It won't take that many sigmas of a correlated outage for solar panels to do worse than that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#New_definition_of_the_no-entry_zones_introduced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#New... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar%2C_Iran#Radioactivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar%2C_Iran#Radioactivity