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Yeah Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance

Yeah Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance It's the same kind of thing we see with self driving cars. They can navigate sunny California streets so "self driving" must be so close! But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff

Aurornis 1y ago
> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance There are many place that get a lot of sun. As solar panels come down in price, it becomes even easier to compensate for deficits with additional panels. It’s common practice to install more solar panel capacity than inverter capacity because panels are rarely operating at peak output anyway. If you’re installing 100kW of inverters, you might install 120kW of panels. The panel array wouldn’t exceed 100kW most of the time anyway. In a location with suboptimal sun, you might install an even higher ratio of panels to inverter and battery capacity. Some people get bothered by this because they feel like some of the solar power is wasted at peak capacity, but you have to consider that the inverter and battery capacity is also wasted when you’re not sending enough from the panel array. It’s a balancing act. You also have to consider that the same sunlight that makes California good for solar also creates additional demand for air conditioning. A location with less sun would have less solar heat gain, which is easier to serve for many reasons.
pshirshov 1y ago
I have negative energy bills and high net export with my moderate system in Ireland which is definitely not considered a good solar country.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Most power generation is not used for peoples homes, though
  - pshirshov 1y ago
    What exactly changes at larger scale?
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      It's a completely different ballgame Houses don't tend to have consistent electricity usage. Think of the electricity usage for a suburb. Chances are it's almost 0 most days. People get home and turn on the stove, the washer, the TV, etc. Big demand spikes at certain times of day, low demand for the rest Commercial usage goes the opposite direction. Higher during the day when stores and offices are open, lower overnight Industrial usages tend to be more consistent, but constant. Factories don't shut down overnight, but they have high constant requirements But as a power company you are supplying all of this. You have to supply a consistent load that satisfies all of these usecases. It's all one grid after all, outside of some very unusual cases And if you oversupply too much you break the grid. If you undersupply then stuff that relies on you shuts down and breaks It's very much a goldilocks problem, which is non-trivial to optimize or automate
      - pshirshov 1y ago
        These are questions of getting the storage capacity to a certain level.
colechristensen 1y ago
Germany is famous for being cloudy and is much further north, much of it is north of the primary US-Canada border. It is one of the leading solar adopters. Not being ideal for solar just means you need to install more area, and there's plenty available space. Solar is already the cheapest (if not it's competitive with the cheapest wind power) power source. Also having to, say, double the panel area in lower solar irradiance requires less than double the non-panel costs (you don't need double the inverters or power transmission). California is leading because the politics/economy/irradiance are the best combination, you would expect a place like that to lead first. It does not follow that other places are unsuitable for solar, it will just cost marginally more. It's a strange but persistent pattern where success in ideal conditions will draw out a litany of reasons why that success is actually a sign of failure when instead the early success is just a sign of ideal conditions. Why wouldn't something promising succeed first in the place with the best conditions for success?
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > Germany is famous for being cloudy and is much further north, much of it is north of the primary US-Canada border. It is one of the leading solar adopters Looks like it's about 12 cents (in USD) more expensive on average per kwh in Germany than Cali So maybe Germany isn't exactly a great example of energy production if it's that much more expensive
  - acdha 1y ago
    That’s both moving the goalposts and also leaving out the true cost comparison. Solving climate change should be worth a lot more than $0.12/kWh and viability in countries like Germany suggests that fossil fuel advocates saying that it would be economically ruinous are not making a good-faith argument.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      For what it's worth I'm a nuclear advocate not a fossil fuel advocate
hopelite 1y ago
Not to mention that combining batteries, i.e., storage, with generation is not exactly accurate or even honest. It is merely an offsetting and also a compensation for the deficiencies of “renewable” energy, which are always mitigated by that type of intentional muddling of classifications.
- hopelite 1y ago
  [flagged]
PicassoCTs 1y ago
But those conditions are not globally unique- why not convert solar to a transportable media (ammonia) and ship it around the globe?
- awjlogan 1y ago
  Because conversion to chemical storage and then back is very inefficient. Also ammonia, specifically, is highly toxic and nasty to handle.
bryanlarsen 1y ago
> fog, or even just grey skies So San Francisco?
- haiku2077 1y ago
  Electricity can be moved long distances over wires.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    For some definition of "long distances" sure. At a certain point it basically becomes more economical to charge batteries and ship them by truck than to build wires :/
    - bjourne 1y ago
      HVDC losses are roughly 3.5% per 1000 km.
      - bryanlarsen 1y ago
        I think referring to the costs of 1 - 3 million per GW-mile.
  - bityard 1y ago
    Easy to say, hard to do. The cost per mile rises non-linearly.
    - CyberDildonics 1y ago
      No it doesn't.
    - reverendjames 1y ago
      That's not correct. It's basically cost per distance, unless you're talking huge power over huge distances.
  - 1y ago
supplied_demand 1y ago
==California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff== It also represents 12% of the country's population, which makes it a better benchmark than just being 1 of 50 states.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  It's also not too dissimilar from Texas, Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, and Utah - which together are a much larger part of the US - and not too far from being able to ship power not too expensively to even more areas. Florida and Colorado are not much farther below California in total solar radiation per year per sq meter, either. Ditto for even Idaho and Oklahoma.
  - pchristensen 1y ago
    For reference, those states cover 4.5x more land but only 20% more population (50M vs 40M) compared to California.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
      Texas consumes almost 2x as much electricity as California [1], and is almost 1/8th the entire US consumption, so population is not the most important factor. [1] https://ksdata.ku.edu/ksdata/ksah/energy/18ener7.pdf https://ksdata.ku.edu/ksdata/ksah/energy/18ener7.pdf
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      More land with fewer people makes them even better for solar, though.
sealeck 1y ago
> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance We can also build power lines! Between different places! Such as the places with lots of sun, and the places without lots of sun!!!
- Aurornis 1y ago
  The great thing about solar is that you can put it nearly everywhere. Avoid the transmission losses and put the panels close to the load, even if it’s not as ideal as one state over. It’s easy to put extra solar panels into a system to make up for reduced average sunlight. It’s standard practice to have a ratio of PV capacity to inverter capacity of something like 1.2:1. In a low sun location you could bump that up to 1.5:1 or higher.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  It consumes a lot of power to transmit over long distances. From what I understand it's basically always preferable to generate power as close to where you are using it as possible.
  - hvb2 1y ago
    Absolutely, but besides rooftop solar we don't have a single power source currently that does that. Traditional power generation was always centralized big plants. Most people wouldn't want to live next to them and from a health perspective you probably shouldn't. So "close" has always been within air quotes.
    - acdha 1y ago
      Also small-scale fossil fuel, hydropower, wind, geothermal, etc. What solar does differently than those is be directly usable and not have significant negatives which made it undesirable to have near non-industrial users because it doesn’t make noise, air, or water pollution.
      - 1y ago
pinkmuffinere 1y ago
I think it has been a good benchmark during early development, but you’re right that it becomes less useful now that Solar is further along. Maybe some Midwestern place would be a good benchmark now? Or like England?
- hvb2 1y ago
  The Midwestern places probably lack the demand. Because solar isn't energy dense, you will probably be told that you picked an area with low land cost to make it look better. For England you can replace the word solar with wind and the same would probably apply
- JimDabell 1y ago
  The white paper being discussed includes Birmingham, UK and several other cities around the world.
JimDabell 1y ago
The white paper they are discussing [0] includes multiple cities around the world: > Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply and Muscat in Oman – 99%, using 6 GW solar panels and 17 GWh battery. Even cloudier cities like Birmingham [UK] can get 62% of the way to a constant supply every hour of every day across the year. [0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-every-hour-of-every-day-is-here-and-it-changes-everything/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  62% is a long way from 97% I'm all for not letting perfect being the enemy of good, and I used to work in solar. I'm very in favor of it. I just really think people need to be realistic about this stuff
  - hvb2 1y ago
    I think the real way to read it is: Renewables are at a point where, combined with battery storage, they can supply 100% if we chose to while being competitive on cost. The Birmingham case is a perfect example where solar might not be the source, wind is
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      Yeah I do think that the batteries side of the equation is handwaved away too much though Batteries at this scale are going to be awful for the environment once we start to have to decommission and dispose of them There are no perfect solutions unfortunately
      - hvb2 1y ago
        Batteries can be recycled though as the degradation is mostly on the kathode anode pair AFAIK
        bluefirebrand 1y ago
icelancer 1y ago
Western Washington is a great contrast. We get a decent amount of sun (despite the reputation), however, our electricity prices are insanely low due to close-proximity hydroelectric power. As a result, solar is rarely cost effective even with subsidies, and basically never without them. Doesn't mean people don't install it for various other reasons, but it serves as a good contrast to California despite similar political landscapes.
- hvb2 1y ago
  Which is perfectly fine? You're just using what's abundant to you? And even better, hydro has the ability to control how much it generates. You have a surplus? Let less water flow through the turbines. So it can regulate, something solar can't do, it needs batteries to do that. The one big upside that I haven't seen mentioned is that rooftop solar is local. So what I overproduce doesn't go on the big grid, it's probably consumed by my neighbor or someone in my street. All those big power plants, and big consumers of electricity (because they're switching from their current source), will lead to net congestion where you need to decide if you want to increase net capacity... Which is slow and $$$
  - icelancer 1y ago
    If I go solar, which seems likely, I will definitely not be sending it back to the grid since I don't think that's something that scales well (8-bit guy talks about it on YouTube and it's persuasive). I'll be using a local / non-grid-tied system with Ecoflow batteries and a smart panel or transfer switch of some sort. IMO this is the best way to go when solar is non-competitive in terms of selling electricity back - also significantly more robust against disasters, since grid-tied systems do not work when the grid is down (something consumers tend to gloss over or be ignorant of) due to safety regulations.
destitude 1y ago
> But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily I have winter basically 5 months of the year where I am and have no issues being fully off grid with only solar and batteries as energy sources. You do have to compensate for winter by having more panels and more batteries but easily doable.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  "You have to compensate for winter by having more panels and more batteries" is exactly the point I was making :/
trunnell 1y ago
Respectfully disagree -- solar isn't the big story here. One could argue that batteries will have a bigger impact than solar. Batteries obviously let you decouple power generation and consumption, shifting anytime production to peak-time demand. Less obvious is that local demand can fluctuate 2x. It usually dips mid-day and peaks 5-9pm (see the charts at www.caiso.com) when people come home and turn on their lights, oven, appliances, etc. This pattern happens throughout the year. So forget solar for a moment; the ability to shift energy that was produced mid-day (even by a natural gas plant) to the evening would allow you to build fewer power plants. Nuclear + batteries might also be a good combination. Batteries get you closer to being able to solve for "average demand" rather than "peak demand." This has nothing to do w/ California. California is just on the leading edge of battery installation. Solar just exacerbates the issue of the peak-to-trough ratio (evening vs. mid-day demand) due to mid-day solar "overproduction" causing it to be uneconomical to run gas plants mid-day. But solving for "peak demand" is still a problem in the absence of solar. Still: most of the complaints about solar are answered when paired with large battery systems.
- Yoric 1y ago
  I seem to recall that one of the main reasons to doubt batteries was that they relied on minerals that are just too rare on Earth to consider scaling them up to the entire grid. Was my understanding incorrect? Or perhaps have new technologies emerged that work around this limitation?
  - jdlshore 1y ago
    The linked article addresses that. Modern batteries are lithium-iron, without the rare cobalt and nickel. Sodium batteries are also in development, but lithium is turning out to be so cheap and abundant that investment in the sodium batteries isn’t economical.
    - defrost 1y ago
      Grid storage batteries don't have the same weight constraint as vehicle batteries which opens the door to many other combinations that have a lower energy density but are cheaper per GW despite weighing more per GW.
cptskippy 1y ago
> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. California is representative of more than 25% of the United States in terms of solar intensity. People really need to get away from the idea that if a solution doesn't work for 100% of use cases then it's nonviable.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  This is not what I'm saying at all What I am saying is "it works in California, it must be ready to roll out globally immediately" is silly It works in California means "it is ready to roll out in areas with very optimal conditions but long-term it still likely has a lot of speedbumps so temper your timelines accordingly" That's all. I'm just tired of people thinking timelines are short when stuff performs under super ideal conditions
  - acdha 1y ago
    How about “it works in California, it’s ready to roll out in most places between, say, 45° north or south where most of the human population lives”? It’s not universally solving every problem but pulling the gigawatts of power demand it _can_ solve out of the mix buys time for us to decarbonize harder problems.
  - supplied_demand 1y ago
    ==I'm just tired of people thinking timelines are short when stuff performs under super ideal conditions== This feels like a strawman. We just started doing this in one place with ideal conditions. The next step could be other places with even more ideal conditions New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada (all have more sunshine than "ideal" California). [0] We need to start investing immediately to begin overcoming the speed-bumps you mention. California has gotten to this point in about 5 years. Spend the next 5 years on the states I mentioned above. Then move on to Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Utah, South Carolina, and Kansas. [0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/sunniest-states https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/sunniest-st...
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago

Aurornis 1y ago

> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance There are many place that get a lot of sun. As solar panels come down in price, it becomes even easier to compensate for deficits with additional panels. It’s common practice to install more solar panel capacity than inverter capacity because panels are rarely operating at peak output anyway. If you’re installing 100kW of inverters, you might install 120kW of panels. The panel array wouldn’t exceed 100kW most of the time anyway. In a location with suboptimal sun, you might install an even higher ratio of panels to inverter and battery capacity. Some people get bothered by this because they feel like some of the solar power is wasted at peak capacity, but you have to consider that the inverter and battery capacity is also wasted when you’re not sending enough from the panel array. It’s a balancing act. You also have to consider that the same sunlight that makes California good for solar also creates additional demand for air conditioning. A location with less sun would have less solar heat gain, which is easier to serve for many reasons.

pshirshov 1y ago

I have negative energy bills and high net export with my moderate system in Ireland which is definitely not considered a good solar country.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
Most power generation is not used for peoples homes, though
- pshirshov 1y ago
  What exactly changes at larger scale?
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    It's a completely different ballgame Houses don't tend to have consistent electricity usage. Think of the electricity usage for a suburb. Chances are it's almost 0 most days. People get home and turn on the stove, the washer, the TV, etc. Big demand spikes at certain times of day, low demand for the rest Commercial usage goes the opposite direction. Higher during the day when stores and offices are open, lower overnight Industrial usages tend to be more consistent, but constant. Factories don't shut down overnight, but they have high constant requirements But as a power company you are supplying all of this. You have to supply a consistent load that satisfies all of these usecases. It's all one grid after all, outside of some very unusual cases And if you oversupply too much you break the grid. If you undersupply then stuff that relies on you shuts down and breaks It's very much a goldilocks problem, which is non-trivial to optimize or automate
    - pshirshov 1y ago
      These are questions of getting the storage capacity to a certain level.

colechristensen 1y ago

Germany is famous for being cloudy and is much further north, much of it is north of the primary US-Canada border. It is one of the leading solar adopters. Not being ideal for solar just means you need to install more area, and there's plenty available space. Solar is already the cheapest (if not it's competitive with the cheapest wind power) power source. Also having to, say, double the panel area in lower solar irradiance requires less than double the non-panel costs (you don't need double the inverters or power transmission). California is leading because the politics/economy/irradiance are the best combination, you would expect a place like that to lead first. It does not follow that other places are unsuitable for solar, it will just cost marginally more. It's a strange but persistent pattern where success in ideal conditions will draw out a litany of reasons why that success is actually a sign of failure when instead the early success is just a sign of ideal conditions. Why wouldn't something promising succeed first in the place with the best conditions for success?

bluefirebrand 1y ago
> Germany is famous for being cloudy and is much further north, much of it is north of the primary US-Canada border. It is one of the leading solar adopters Looks like it's about 12 cents (in USD) more expensive on average per kwh in Germany than Cali So maybe Germany isn't exactly a great example of energy production if it's that much more expensive
- acdha 1y ago
  That’s both moving the goalposts and also leaving out the true cost comparison. Solving climate change should be worth a lot more than $0.12/kWh and viability in countries like Germany suggests that fossil fuel advocates saying that it would be economically ruinous are not making a good-faith argument.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    For what it's worth I'm a nuclear advocate not a fossil fuel advocate

hopelite 1y ago

Not to mention that combining batteries, i.e., storage, with generation is not exactly accurate or even honest. It is merely an offsetting and also a compensation for the deficiencies of “renewable” energy, which are always mitigated by that type of intentional muddling of classifications.

hopelite 1y ago
[flagged]

PicassoCTs 1y ago

But those conditions are not globally unique- why not convert solar to a transportable media (ammonia) and ship it around the globe?

awjlogan 1y ago
Because conversion to chemical storage and then back is very inefficient. Also ammonia, specifically, is highly toxic and nasty to handle.

bryanlarsen 1y ago

> fog, or even just grey skies So San Francisco?

haiku2077 1y ago
Electricity can be moved long distances over wires.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  For some definition of "long distances" sure. At a certain point it basically becomes more economical to charge batteries and ship them by truck than to build wires :/
  - bjourne 1y ago
    HVDC losses are roughly 3.5% per 1000 km.
    - bryanlarsen 1y ago
      I think referring to the costs of 1 - 3 million per GW-mile.
- bityard 1y ago
  Easy to say, hard to do. The cost per mile rises non-linearly.
  - CyberDildonics 1y ago
    No it doesn't.
  - reverendjames 1y ago
    That's not correct. It's basically cost per distance, unless you're talking huge power over huge distances.
- 1y ago

supplied_demand 1y ago

==California represents the easy 80% side of the Pareto curve for a lot of this stuff== It also represents 12% of the country's population, which makes it a better benchmark than just being 1 of 50 states.

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
It's also not too dissimilar from Texas, Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, and Utah - which together are a much larger part of the US - and not too far from being able to ship power not too expensively to even more areas. Florida and Colorado are not much farther below California in total solar radiation per year per sq meter, either. Ditto for even Idaho and Oklahoma.
- pchristensen 1y ago
  For reference, those states cover 4.5x more land but only 20% more population (50M vs 40M) compared to California.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
    Texas consumes almost 2x as much electricity as California [1], and is almost 1/8th the entire US consumption, so population is not the most important factor. [1] https://ksdata.ku.edu/ksdata/ksah/energy/18ener7.pdf https://ksdata.ku.edu/ksdata/ksah/energy/18ener7.pdf
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    More land with fewer people makes them even better for solar, though.

sealeck 1y ago

> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. It is as close to ideal for Solar as it gets. Most places are not going to see this kind of performance We can also build power lines! Between different places! Such as the places with lots of sun, and the places without lots of sun!!!

Aurornis 1y ago
The great thing about solar is that you can put it nearly everywhere. Avoid the transmission losses and put the panels close to the load, even if it’s not as ideal as one state over. It’s easy to put extra solar panels into a system to make up for reduced average sunlight. It’s standard practice to have a ratio of PV capacity to inverter capacity of something like 1.2:1. In a low sun location you could bump that up to 1.5:1 or higher.
bluefirebrand 1y ago
It consumes a lot of power to transmit over long distances. From what I understand it's basically always preferable to generate power as close to where you are using it as possible.
- hvb2 1y ago
  Absolutely, but besides rooftop solar we don't have a single power source currently that does that. Traditional power generation was always centralized big plants. Most people wouldn't want to live next to them and from a health perspective you probably shouldn't. So "close" has always been within air quotes.
  - acdha 1y ago
    Also small-scale fossil fuel, hydropower, wind, geothermal, etc. What solar does differently than those is be directly usable and not have significant negatives which made it undesirable to have near non-industrial users because it doesn’t make noise, air, or water pollution.
    - 1y ago

pinkmuffinere 1y ago

I think it has been a good benchmark during early development, but you’re right that it becomes less useful now that Solar is further along. Maybe some Midwestern place would be a good benchmark now? Or like England?

hvb2 1y ago
The Midwestern places probably lack the demand. Because solar isn't energy dense, you will probably be told that you picked an area with low land cost to make it look better. For England you can replace the word solar with wind and the same would probably apply
JimDabell 1y ago
The white paper being discussed includes Birmingham, UK and several other cities around the world.

JimDabell 1y ago

The white paper they are discussing [0] includes multiple cities around the world: > Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply and Muscat in Oman – 99%, using 6 GW solar panels and 17 GWh battery. Even cloudier cities like Birmingham [UK] can get 62% of the way to a constant supply every hour of every day across the year. [0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-every-hour-of-every-day-is-here-and-it-changes-everything/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

bluefirebrand 1y ago
62% is a long way from 97% I'm all for not letting perfect being the enemy of good, and I used to work in solar. I'm very in favor of it. I just really think people need to be realistic about this stuff
- hvb2 1y ago
  I think the real way to read it is: Renewables are at a point where, combined with battery storage, they can supply 100% if we chose to while being competitive on cost. The Birmingham case is a perfect example where solar might not be the source, wind is
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Yeah I do think that the batteries side of the equation is handwaved away too much though Batteries at this scale are going to be awful for the environment once we start to have to decommission and dispose of them There are no perfect solutions unfortunately
    - hvb2 1y ago
      Batteries can be recycled though as the degradation is mostly on the kathode anode pair AFAIK
      - bluefirebrand 1y ago

icelancer 1y ago

Western Washington is a great contrast. We get a decent amount of sun (despite the reputation), however, our electricity prices are insanely low due to close-proximity hydroelectric power. As a result, solar is rarely cost effective even with subsidies, and basically never without them. Doesn't mean people don't install it for various other reasons, but it serves as a good contrast to California despite similar political landscapes.

hvb2 1y ago
Which is perfectly fine? You're just using what's abundant to you? And even better, hydro has the ability to control how much it generates. You have a surplus? Let less water flow through the turbines. So it can regulate, something solar can't do, it needs batteries to do that. The one big upside that I haven't seen mentioned is that rooftop solar is local. So what I overproduce doesn't go on the big grid, it's probably consumed by my neighbor or someone in my street. All those big power plants, and big consumers of electricity (because they're switching from their current source), will lead to net congestion where you need to decide if you want to increase net capacity... Which is slow and $$$
- icelancer 1y ago
  If I go solar, which seems likely, I will definitely not be sending it back to the grid since I don't think that's something that scales well (8-bit guy talks about it on YouTube and it's persuasive). I'll be using a local / non-grid-tied system with Ecoflow batteries and a smart panel or transfer switch of some sort. IMO this is the best way to go when solar is non-competitive in terms of selling electricity back - also significantly more robust against disasters, since grid-tied systems do not work when the grid is down (something consumers tend to gloss over or be ignorant of) due to safety regulations.

destitude 1y ago

> But put them anywhere with snow, rain, fog, or even just grey skies and they struggle heavily I have winter basically 5 months of the year where I am and have no issues being fully off grid with only solar and batteries as energy sources. You do have to compensate for winter by having more panels and more batteries but easily doable.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
"You have to compensate for winter by having more panels and more batteries" is exactly the point I was making :/

trunnell 1y ago

Respectfully disagree -- solar isn't the big story here. One could argue that batteries will have a bigger impact than solar. Batteries obviously let you decouple power generation and consumption, shifting anytime production to peak-time demand. Less obvious is that local demand can fluctuate 2x. It usually dips mid-day and peaks 5-9pm (see the charts at www.caiso.com) when people come home and turn on their lights, oven, appliances, etc. This pattern happens throughout the year. So forget solar for a moment; the ability to shift energy that was produced mid-day (even by a natural gas plant) to the evening would allow you to build fewer power plants. Nuclear + batteries might also be a good combination. Batteries get you closer to being able to solve for "average demand" rather than "peak demand." This has nothing to do w/ California. California is just on the leading edge of battery installation. Solar just exacerbates the issue of the peak-to-trough ratio (evening vs. mid-day demand) due to mid-day solar "overproduction" causing it to be uneconomical to run gas plants mid-day. But solving for "peak demand" is still a problem in the absence of solar. Still: most of the complaints about solar are answered when paired with large battery systems.

Yoric 1y ago
I seem to recall that one of the main reasons to doubt batteries was that they relied on minerals that are just too rare on Earth to consider scaling them up to the entire grid. Was my understanding incorrect? Or perhaps have new technologies emerged that work around this limitation?
- jdlshore 1y ago
  The linked article addresses that. Modern batteries are lithium-iron, without the rare cobalt and nickel. Sodium batteries are also in development, but lithium is turning out to be so cheap and abundant that investment in the sodium batteries isn’t economical.
  - defrost 1y ago
    Grid storage batteries don't have the same weight constraint as vehicle batteries which opens the door to many other combinations that have a lower energy density but are cheaper per GW despite weighing more per GW.

cptskippy 1y ago

> Unfortunately, California is a terrible benchmark. California is representative of more than 25% of the United States in terms of solar intensity. People really need to get away from the idea that if a solution doesn't work for 100% of use cases then it's nonviable.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
This is not what I'm saying at all What I am saying is "it works in California, it must be ready to roll out globally immediately" is silly It works in California means "it is ready to roll out in areas with very optimal conditions but long-term it still likely has a lot of speedbumps so temper your timelines accordingly" That's all. I'm just tired of people thinking timelines are short when stuff performs under super ideal conditions
- acdha 1y ago
  How about “it works in California, it’s ready to roll out in most places between, say, 45° north or south where most of the human population lives”? It’s not universally solving every problem but pulling the gigawatts of power demand it _can_ solve out of the mix buys time for us to decarbonize harder problems.
- supplied_demand 1y ago
  ==I'm just tired of people thinking timelines are short when stuff performs under super ideal conditions== This feels like a strawman. We just started doing this in one place with ideal conditions. The next step could be other places with even more ideal conditions New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada (all have more sunshine than "ideal" California). [0] We need to start investing immediately to begin overcoming the speed-bumps you mention. California has gotten to this point in about 5 years. Spend the next 5 years on the states I mentioned above. Then move on to Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Utah, South Carolina, and Kansas. [0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/sunniest-states https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/sunniest-st...
- bryanlarsen 1y ago