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Mini-grids may be the part the EU is missing. Selling your surplus ev power to grid is a huge waste, charging your neighbours car is a better use.
by postepowanieadm 2y ago
Mini-grids may be the part the EU is missing. Selling your surplus ev power to grid is a huge waste, charging your neighbours car is a better use.
- shawabawa3 2y agoBut with mini grids you'll just end up with over supply during sunshine/wind with nobody at all to sell the excess to
- rssoconnor 2y agoCan you use the spare electricity to stockpile some sodium hydroxide or something?
- adrianN 2y agoIn the near future most cars could be happy to accept a charge
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago> you'll just end up with over supply during sunshine/wind You will only need enough storage to cover 12-24 hours to reduce that a lot: Much of the surplus power can be put into vehicles when they're resting at home overnight, or for evening and next morning peak. For the rest, well, so what? Temporary "oversupply" on days when there's lots of sun and no vehicle to charge up is not the worst problem to have - it won't kill anyone. The worst that you can say about it is that it's a misallocation of resources to sometimes have the power supply that you can't use or sell. But solar panels and batteries are becoming cheap. So the upside of having occasional surplus remains, the downside diminishes.
- bpfrh 2y agoThe problem is not necessarily day/night but summer with solar+and possible wind and winter with less solar and possible no wind. So you need to store energy for more than a few hours or generate it from something else. You then have the choice to use batteries(costly for megwatts as of now), things like hydrostorage, fossil fuels(gas/coal/oil) or hydrogen generated from renewable sources. If you need big energy storages anyway, it makes more sense that communities pool their money together and invest in something like hydrostorage, but then you need a grid to connect the communities and if you do that, you might as well connect everything in the country so the grid is better at balancing.
- marcosdumay 2y ago> The problem is not necessarily day/night but summer with solar+and possible wind and winter with less solar and possible no wind. So they have to buy some 30% more panels.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y agoYes, that's exactly why you would over-provision. So the upside of having occasional surplus is that in other times such as winter with less solar, you are more likely to still have enough capacity.
- hgomersall 2y agoAnd you'll be churning out hydrogen all summer.
- bpfrh 2y agosorry my bad for formulating it badly: less solar and now wind means days or even weeks with no solar and no wind aka "dunkelflaute" In germany a week long dukelflaute occurs every 2 years.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y agoSure, power on for 24/7/365 from Solar + Wind + Battery alone is hard; and 99% uptime is more expensive than 95% because of the batteries needed. However when talking about rural communities that might not have power at all, or run a diesel generator in the evenings, that 95% from clean sources is a good start.
- bpfrh 2y agoThe problem of rural communities having no power is, I think mostly a non issue across most of europe. Having most of the electrical grid already it makes no sense to scale it back or not connect the few not connected communities I'm not arguing against renewable I'm arguing against the idea that in most of europe it would be better to use small grids instead of an european wide big grid. Hydrostorage is cheap if it provides enough energy for more than one small community, having the ability to balance energy production and needs across europe is easier than being at the mercy of local weather. A good example for that is austria, where the grid has a problem where a better connection between east and west is not finished/buid because of discussions about environmental impact. This leads to overproduction in one place which can't be transferred to places that need electricity. https://kommunal.at/wir-haben-ein-strom-problem https://kommunal.at/wir-haben-ein-strom-problem
- manmal 2y agoThat’s a problem big grids also share. It‘s probably easier to buffer power for a small neighborhood, than for a city.
- 7952 2y agoPerhaps easier but less versatile. A large storage site connected to a national high voltage grid can take electricity from a much wider variety of sources and send it to a wider variety of consumers.
- dehrmann 2y ago> Selling your surplus ev power to grid is a huge waste, charging your neighbours car is a better use. Electricity is fungible (ignoring transmission losses), so what's the difference?
- victorbjorklund 2y agotaxes and fees. But yea it would not be allowed on a real scale without new taxes and fees and then that benefit is removed.
- Etheryte 2y agoI think transmission losses are exactly the point? Locally, the losses are practically zero, the further you need to push it, the more significant various losses become. If you could line up someone's production to someone else nearby who needs to consume, as a whole the system would incur considerably less losses, no?
- dehrmann 2y agoUS grid transmission losses are estimated to be 5%. You'd come out ahead pretty quickly if your neighbors can't use your surplus.
- marcosdumay 2y ago> I think transmission losses are exactly the point? That can't be, your panel is charging up your neighbor's car in exactly the same way independently of you being connected to outside of your neighborhood.
- _zoltan_ 2y agoinstead of innovation or investment the only thing the EU does is legislation and policy. it's really sad. :(
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]