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> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted." This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that elec
by PlunderBunny 2y ago
> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted."
This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that electricity, is it really a waste? It's like saying that the overflow from my water tank that collects rain water off the roof is 'wasting' water.
It could be argued that it's a waste in the sense that the generated electricity could have gone to someone else if there was a grid, but if the grid operator isn't allowing excess to be put back into the grid (e.g. because there's no demand at that time because it's sunny and everyone is using solar), then the grid operator needs to solve that with some form of energy storage (e.g. batteries).
- m3kw9 2y agoYep, we’ve been wasting the suns energy for billions of years
- YurgenJurgensen 2y agoIt’s even worse than that. We’re wasting all the energy of every star in the Universe every second we spend not building Dyson spheres around them.
- Ekaros 2y agoNo, Dyson spheres is short term thinking. What we really should be doing is breaking up the stars and storing they hydrogen for future use. Just allowing fusion to happen and radiating the energy away is inefficient and wasteful.
- YurgenJurgensen 2y agoSolar panels use energy to create, and have a finite lifespan. If energy is generated but not used, it makes the average lifetime efficiency decrease. This does result in wasted energy.
- bb88 2y agoDo you know the mechanism behind this?
- Vecr 2y agoThe electricity is switched off. If the system is fancy, maybe it's on a lower duty cycle. The panels just sit there, rotting, wasting their embodied energy.
- bb88 2y agoI thought OP was saying there was actual damage to the solar cell if voltage is being generated but current isn't flowing causing lower efficiency. This is like saying, "I bought a car and don't drive it." -- which people do.
- Marsymars 2y ago> This is like saying, "I bought a car and don't drive it." -- which people do. Well, it is, but in the same sense, if you own a car for a long time and don't drive much, your per-km costs end up high (due to car components wearing out from age rather than mileage) and your essentially fixed costs (insurance, etc.) end up proportionally greater compared to truly variable (gasoline, etc.) costs. And if you really don't drive much, you get additional problems; the typical recommendation is to drive a car a minimum of a continuous 20 minutes every couple weeks.
- alamortsubite 2y agoThermal cycling.
- PlunderBunny 2y ago
- daedrdev 2y agoThe other grid operators have to lower their production during the day. That itself can be expensive, but more importantly they run their same equipment to power fewer hours of the day; when solar is not available, which is expensive since they have significant fixed costs. Batteries are not a grid scale solution any time soon, but maybe one day.
- sanderjd 2y agoI guess you could say "batteries are not a grid scale solution" as long as you ignore ERCOT and CAISO...
- zekrioca 2y agoIn 2010, someone sticked some battery shortcoming knowledge (e.g., not grid scale) into their head, but it takes double the amount of energy to update it today.
- LorenPechtel 2y agoBatteries are not a grid scale solution. What we see at grid scale are batteries being used for quick response power while other generators are being spun up. The thing is the grid very much doesn't like it when demand exceeds supply. Systems shut down to protect themselves and you either dump loads very quickly or suffer a cascade failure (see the 1965 blackout--and note that that only stopped growing when the operators were able to dump enough load.) Since this is in disaster territory the utilities obviously try to avoid it and ensure there's always enough to cope with any surges--which means they must have more stuff spinning than they actually need. Enter facilities like the big batteries: keeping them hot costs almost nothing and they have a very fast response when called upon. This buys the utilities time in which to spin up other generators and thus allows them to operate with less waste.
- sanderjd 2y ago... you started your comment with "batteries are not a grid scale solution" and then you described one of the primary reasons batteries are useful at grid scale. I don't get it, did you put an extra "not" in your opening sentence?
- L-four 2y agoThey likely mean wasting the embodied energy and materials.
- smadge 2y agoAnd opportunity cost of having unused capacity in one location and unmet demand in another location.
- snailmailstare 2y agoIt was an infrastructure investment with the idea that it returns an expected amount of energy over an expected life and an assumption that that energy has a value that makes it pay for itself in X years.. If its not worth using a lot of that energy that's a first slide.. A much further slide is when the energy to produce it is never paid back in what it produces, which can be considered true for the enormously over provisioned.
- zekrioca 2y agoOne just needs to align supply with demand. But since the centralized model doesn’t like such a “decentralized” idea, they cast the problem as something impossible to be solved, which is very funny I have to say.
- r00fus 2y agoThe hubris in this article is unreal: it's posing that privately owned utilities are a good thing and that bypassing them is some crime that's done by ratepayers. I hope that business model dies in a fire. Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage. Places like China do fine with promoting residential solar where nearly half the solar was on residential rooftops (2023) [1]. [1] https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-lead-the-world-in-wind-and-solar-with-twice-as-much-capacity-under-construction-as-the-rest-of-the-world-combined https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-le...
- nielsbot 2y agoI mean it is "The Economist".
- mordae 2y agoExactly! Why is it not advocating for being economical?
- Dylan16807 2y ago> Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage I don't think that moving the generation around is really an "instead", because the problem at hand is that distribution is expensive and someone has to pay for it if you want a grid. And most of that cost is the local stuff. So how do you get everyone connected that wants to be, without it costing them a ton of money? You might have to make the grid cost into a mandatory tax. Whether the electric company is private or state-owned is mostly a separate issue.
- flgb 2y agoIt’s not 100% “instead”, but equally it’s not 0%. A grid with more distributed generation (and storage and load flexibility) can be smaller and cheaper.
- chironjit 2y agoExactly. This statement quite really does not make sense as this is literally how electricity works with grid too, since you need to have a reserve margin I do find the rest of the article more or less balanced in the discussion of the issue, even though it tries very hard not to actually squarely put blame where it lies
- elif 2y agoI wish I had this problem with my arrays. The solution is obvious and cheap. You don't need powerwalls in 2025 all the major backup battery manufacturers now make $3-4k models which you can wheel around and can take your excess with zero conf off the shelf.
- richardc323 2y agoYou are reading that very narrowly. The paragraph is simply pointing out that solar power is cheaper when built out in a centralised way because of: * economies of scale for construction and maintenance * higher utilisation. They don't spell it out exactly, but it is pretty clear fro m the context that, "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted", is eluding to a wider geographic area needing more panels to satisfy all demand when each house has an independent system, rather than being grid tied.
- PlunderBunny 2y agoFair enough. I think this is true of a lot of things that are 'in our house' (or on our property). A fatuous hypothetical example might be a large central refrigerator shared between multiple properties. The apartment building I live in has large central boilers for the hot water, to save space in the apartments. This benefitted the property developer, and is probably more energy efficient (although, just like our solar power example, transmission loss needs to be accounted for), but has downsides for the apartment residents. A better example is private vehicle ownership, as opposed to public transport. It's a good example of something that has moved from a more centralised control to individual control, with benefits and downsides.
- Symbiote 2y agoWhat's the downside of the central hot water? (Or heating.) I've lived in buildings with this, and others (houses) without, and I much prefer the former. There's nothing I need to maintain, and the 'big' version seems to be more reliable than the single-house-sized heating equipment. The one time I remember the hot water being repaired, the janitor stuck up a note explaining that due to some sort of redundancy we'd still have hot water, but it would be less hot than it was supposed to be.
- PlunderBunny 2y agoThis wouldn’t be true in modern buildings, but in our case the hot water supply isn’t reticulated, and I’m at the ‘end of a (pipe) line’ so if no-one else sharing the same hot water pipe as me has run their hot water taps for a while, it can take 4 minute to get hot water in the shower. This was bought up in a body corporate meeting several years ago. The cavities that the pipes run through are small enough that a reticulated system would be hard to retrofit. The suggested (tongue-in-cheek) solution was to “wait until you hear your neighbour showering before you have your shower.” Haha - thanks.
- jsbisviewtiful 2y ago> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted." Takes like this are why corporations will plunge humanity into a painful end through climate change.
- hedora 2y agoI think the end game is that people that realize they have to live on this planet will disconnect from the grid (because it is cheaper) and use that waste electricity for direct atmospheric carbon capture (because terraforming is our only remaining viable path forward). If that means the grids go bankrupt and default on payments to the fossil fuel industry, then I will try to pretend to be very sad for at least 60 seconds. The group of people that will ultimately benefit from this includes just about everyone except the octogenarian plutocrats that are actively accelerating climate change. Maybe once they die off there will be some financial incentives to help repair the atmosphere (assuming life extension technology doesn’t doom all of us to living with their immortality).
- Gibbon1 2y agoUnlike the economist I know something about accounting. If there is excess power at zero marginal cost someone cunning is already planning on making some coin off it. As it is utilities with excess solar and wind are rapidly adding battery storage. I think there are three stages of renewable development. The first stage renewables partly offset traditional suppliers. The second stage is you actually have excess part of the time. And the third stage you have a lot of season excess. China and Texas are in the first stage but California is in the second stage already.
- Leherenn 2y ago> If there is excess power at zero marginal cost someone cunning is already planning on making some coin off it. I'm not sure it's that simple as evidenced by the ever increasing hours of negative electricity prices. As far as I know, there are so far no good applications for short bursts of negative prices. Everything that would love those is so capital intensive/high fix costs that even 10 or 20% utilisation rates at negative prices are not enough to make it economically viable. Season excess is also a big problem. Batteries to smooth the days/nights cycles are fine, you can use them ~365 times a year. But a battery to smooth out summer/winter cycles can only be used once a year!
- Gibbon1 2y agoI look at California ISO's site https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply The difference between summer and winter for renewables is 20%. In California the difference is driven mostly by solar. This is an interesting page. http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2021/11/world-population-by-latitude.html http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2021/11/world-population-by-lat... Majority of the worlds population lives between 40 north and 10 degrees south. And also some places like Scotland had lots of wind. Definitely winners and losers in the transition.
- wodenokoto 2y agoYes, because the solar cells aren't free. They have an environmental and monetary impact while not lasting forever. If you don't use them, you are wasting them.
- ashoeafoot 2y agocould melt aluminum or heat the ground for winter time, thus waste
- cyanydeez 2y agoThe loss is to capitalism If wed had invested to in socialism,we would build out batteries. What a selfish techno dystopia
- natmaka 2y agoOver-produced electricity can be stored by the private party in a local vehicle/wall battery. Through a grid it may be sent to a plant which will produce green hydrogen, or to a dam (pumped-storage hydroelectricity)... or sent to another region (even quite remote, via some (U)HVDC line) which will use/store it.
- pstuart 2y agoBatteries are getting cheaper and better at a brisk clip.