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It's also a long term capital investment problem. Power generation is hugely capital intensive, and there are disincentives for investing in such a volatile ma

by brc 12y ago

It's also a long term capital investment problem. Power generation is hugely capital intensive, and there are disincentives for investing in such a volatile market. However, the demand is nowhere near as volatile as the supply can be, and you can't keep power as inventory, so it's anyones guess how this all plays out. Certainly we can't become reliant on solar/wind supply as this would be disastrous. One thing is for sure, we need to level the playing field and remove all subsidies and regulations so that cost effective power can be reliably created. I fear the direction we are going right now is in the complete opposite of how things should be going.

D_Alex 12y ago
>you can't keep power as inventory Well, you can, you need batteries or suchlike. One of the most interesting effects of adoption of electric cars could be that their batteries could be used as energy banks, charging when power is cheap and feeding power back to shave peaks off the demand. Also... Let's build a battery gigafactory in Australia!!
- waps 12y ago
  Batteries are ~30% efficient. Sending power to end users is ~85-90% efficient (though less, of course, if there's overcapacity, and then it drops very fast). So let's say you'd get 30% * 85% ^ 2 ~= 20% efficiency out of it. If you're talking Australia. Outside of CBDs, why would you so much as bother with a grid connection at all ? Solar panels + a solar boiler + in-house batteries will probably be about as reliable as grid power in Australia. Plus it'd be truly distributed. What we need is a Solarcity company in Australia. (Or, Australia has uranium mines ... why not go nuclear ? Fuel is free)
  - D_Alex 12y ago
    >Batteries are ~30% efficient Citation needed. Lowest claim I recall is "better than 85%". Also, I support nuclear power for Australia. It makes so much sense in a politically and geologically stable location, with plenty of empty spaces. Own fuel supply is icing on cake.
    - spacefight 12y ago
      "politically and geologically" That might not be the case for the runtime of the nuclear power plant. Think 40y ahead. I can't.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
If you removed all subsidies, the situation would change less than you might think. The biggest difference would be nuclear going out of the game. Solar right now is competitive on retail price of electricity, which is all you need for rooftop solar to make sense.
eikenberry 12y ago
> you can't keep power as inventory Sure you can. Using compressed air, springs, pumped water and other such simple techniques. It just takes additional investments that haven't been worth it. Maybe this is changing.
- PeterisP 12y ago
  None of these things work at a reasonable enough scale. You can't put a gigawatthour in compressed air or springs; pumped hydro is a possibility if you have a huge enough suitable reservoir. If we'd want to have all our energy coming from renewable resources, then you'd need stations a hundred times bigger (or a hundred times more) than the current pumped hydro reservoirs, and creating them would be an ecological nightmare, most likely requiring a destruction of a major river or lake for each such station.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Tianhuangping Pumped Storage Power Station has a 13GW/h storage capacity and about 2GW generating capacity, using two 6.8 million m^3 reservoirs - one artificial, and one built on the Daxi Creek, separated by about 900m of pipes (but I believe the vertical drop is about 600m). (if you're curious, that adds up to about 1/7500th of the worldwide average usage in 2008) If you assume 50m high structures (the lower dam is actually 72m), the area required for each reservoir is "only" 136,000 m^2. With only 20m tall structures, you need about 340,000 m^2 That's within range of the largest buildings (e.g. Boeing's largest factory has a surface area of about 400,000 m^2, and a volume of 13,3 million m^3; Tesla's factory covers an area of about 510,000 m^2). Of course this is assuming you can find somewhere suitable to give you a 600m drop, or water volume required grows quickly. But the system could be mostly closed to reduce the need to be straight on a major river. And in Japan there's pumped storage plant with a 250,000m^3 pool 500m below ground, so clearly it does not need to be a matter of building one of the reservoirs 600m up a mountain side like with Tianhuangping. To the extent the ecological risk is massive, it's because it's presumably far cheaper to pick a suitable river and dam it than having to build two fully artificial reservoirs.
  - ZeroGravitas 12y ago
crdoconnor 12y ago
>Power generation is hugely capital intensive, and there are disincentives for investing in such a volatile market. Only nuclear power is outrageously capital intensive. Solar and wind are much, much less capital intensive. >Certainly we can't become reliant on solar/wind supply as this would be disastrous. Oh yea, running fully on renewable energy would be terrible :/
- vixin 12y ago
  It's terrible at night when there's no wind and during the day when there's cloud cover and no wind. So you run the capital intensive parallel generators - and that's called running fully on renewable, is it?
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    >It's terrible at night when there's no wind Maybe you could look up the last date when there was no wind across the whole of the continental US at the same time? >when there's cloud cover One of the biggest myths about solar panels is that they do not work when it is cloudy. They still produce power under clouds - not as much as a sunny day, but a LOT more than you'd expect. http://pureenergies.com/us/home-solar/solar-basics/solar-myths/ http://pureenergies.com/us/home-solar/solar-basics/solar-myt... >So you run the capital intensive parallel generators - and that's called running fully on renewable, is it? Renewable energy already is transported between countries to handle different levels of load / production (Germany already exports it to France pretty frequently when it's sunny in Germany). I assume this would continue to handle the different levels of sun, wind and load in various locations both nationally, across state borders and internationally. Who knows though, maybe one day the whole world will go dark and windless at the same time?
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > Only nuclear power is outrageously capital intensive. Solar and wind are much, much less capital intensive. The way to look at capital in this respect is to look at $/W of installed power. So even if in absolute numbers you don't require a huge amount of $ to put a solar plant into production versus putting a (small) nuclear plant into production the capital costs are still considerable when you compare apples with apples. Also, nuclear scales better in this respect than solar. So capital costs are not per-se the best way to compare solar, wind and nuclear. Endless volumes have been written about this, one of the biggest benefits in my opinion is that solar and wind put fewer apples into many more baskets which should - if properly implemented, which currently they are not - in theory result in a more resilient power infrastructure.
asgard1024 12y ago
> However, the demand is nowhere near as volatile as the supply can be, and you can't keep power as inventory, so it's anyones guess how this all plays out. Certainly we can't become reliant on solar/wind supply as this would be disastrous. This is bullshit. Our civilization has done this for thousands of years, in a different area - food. This is just a return to different mode of operation with regards to energy, but it's not really economically impossible.

by brc 12y ago

D_Alex 12y ago

>you can't keep power as inventory Well, you can, you need batteries or suchlike. One of the most interesting effects of adoption of electric cars could be that their batteries could be used as energy banks, charging when power is cheap and feeding power back to shave peaks off the demand. Also... Let's build a battery gigafactory in Australia!!

waps 12y ago
Batteries are ~30% efficient. Sending power to end users is ~85-90% efficient (though less, of course, if there's overcapacity, and then it drops very fast). So let's say you'd get 30% * 85% ^ 2 ~= 20% efficiency out of it. If you're talking Australia. Outside of CBDs, why would you so much as bother with a grid connection at all ? Solar panels + a solar boiler + in-house batteries will probably be about as reliable as grid power in Australia. Plus it'd be truly distributed. What we need is a Solarcity company in Australia. (Or, Australia has uranium mines ... why not go nuclear ? Fuel is free)
- D_Alex 12y ago
  >Batteries are ~30% efficient Citation needed. Lowest claim I recall is "better than 85%". Also, I support nuclear power for Australia. It makes so much sense in a politically and geologically stable location, with plenty of empty spaces. Own fuel supply is icing on cake.
  - spacefight 12y ago
    "politically and geologically" That might not be the case for the runtime of the nuclear power plant. Think 40y ahead. I can't.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

If you removed all subsidies, the situation would change less than you might think. The biggest difference would be nuclear going out of the game. Solar right now is competitive on retail price of electricity, which is all you need for rooftop solar to make sense.

eikenberry 12y ago

> you can't keep power as inventory Sure you can. Using compressed air, springs, pumped water and other such simple techniques. It just takes additional investments that haven't been worth it. Maybe this is changing.

PeterisP 12y ago
None of these things work at a reasonable enough scale. You can't put a gigawatthour in compressed air or springs; pumped hydro is a possibility if you have a huge enough suitable reservoir. If we'd want to have all our energy coming from renewable resources, then you'd need stations a hundred times bigger (or a hundred times more) than the current pumped hydro reservoirs, and creating them would be an ecological nightmare, most likely requiring a destruction of a major river or lake for each such station.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Tianhuangping Pumped Storage Power Station has a 13GW/h storage capacity and about 2GW generating capacity, using two 6.8 million m^3 reservoirs - one artificial, and one built on the Daxi Creek, separated by about 900m of pipes (but I believe the vertical drop is about 600m). (if you're curious, that adds up to about 1/7500th of the worldwide average usage in 2008) If you assume 50m high structures (the lower dam is actually 72m), the area required for each reservoir is "only" 136,000 m^2. With only 20m tall structures, you need about 340,000 m^2 That's within range of the largest buildings (e.g. Boeing's largest factory has a surface area of about 400,000 m^2, and a volume of 13,3 million m^3; Tesla's factory covers an area of about 510,000 m^2). Of course this is assuming you can find somewhere suitable to give you a 600m drop, or water volume required grows quickly. But the system could be mostly closed to reduce the need to be straight on a major river. And in Japan there's pumped storage plant with a 250,000m^3 pool 500m below ground, so clearly it does not need to be a matter of building one of the reservoirs 600m up a mountain side like with Tianhuangping. To the extent the ecological risk is massive, it's because it's presumably far cheaper to pick a suitable river and dam it than having to build two fully artificial reservoirs.
- ZeroGravitas 12y ago

crdoconnor 12y ago

>Power generation is hugely capital intensive, and there are disincentives for investing in such a volatile market. Only nuclear power is outrageously capital intensive. Solar and wind are much, much less capital intensive. >Certainly we can't become reliant on solar/wind supply as this would be disastrous. Oh yea, running fully on renewable energy would be terrible :/

vixin 12y ago
It's terrible at night when there's no wind and during the day when there's cloud cover and no wind. So you run the capital intensive parallel generators - and that's called running fully on renewable, is it?
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  >It's terrible at night when there's no wind Maybe you could look up the last date when there was no wind across the whole of the continental US at the same time? >when there's cloud cover One of the biggest myths about solar panels is that they do not work when it is cloudy. They still produce power under clouds - not as much as a sunny day, but a LOT more than you'd expect. http://pureenergies.com/us/home-solar/solar-basics/solar-myths/ http://pureenergies.com/us/home-solar/solar-basics/solar-myt... >So you run the capital intensive parallel generators - and that's called running fully on renewable, is it? Renewable energy already is transported between countries to handle different levels of load / production (Germany already exports it to France pretty frequently when it's sunny in Germany). I assume this would continue to handle the different levels of sun, wind and load in various locations both nationally, across state borders and internationally. Who knows though, maybe one day the whole world will go dark and windless at the same time?
jacquesm 12y ago
> Only nuclear power is outrageously capital intensive. Solar and wind are much, much less capital intensive. The way to look at capital in this respect is to look at $/W of installed power. So even if in absolute numbers you don't require a huge amount of $ to put a solar plant into production versus putting a (small) nuclear plant into production the capital costs are still considerable when you compare apples with apples. Also, nuclear scales better in this respect than solar. So capital costs are not per-se the best way to compare solar, wind and nuclear. Endless volumes have been written about this, one of the biggest benefits in my opinion is that solar and wind put fewer apples into many more baskets which should - if properly implemented, which currently they are not - in theory result in a more resilient power infrastructure.

asgard1024 12y ago

> However, the demand is nowhere near as volatile as the supply can be, and you can't keep power as inventory, so it's anyones guess how this all plays out. Certainly we can't become reliant on solar/wind supply as this would be disastrous. This is bullshit. Our civilization has done this for thousands of years, in a different area - food. This is just a return to different mode of operation with regards to energy, but it's not really economically impossible.