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This reminds me of a quote (that probably isn’t real) from Westinghouse to Tesla in regard to wireless energy transmission he was trying to create.
“This is wonderful, but where would we put the meter!?”
A case of the quiet part being spoken outloud. That’s my beef with nuclear energy as well - why? Solar power clearly work, and best of all, it isn’t centralized. Same with wind power. It even works in circumstances you might have to shut down nuclear power plants due to excessive heat. You even have to worry about the increasing load on the grid because they are easier to distribute. It needs energy storage, and there’s no shortage of means for energy storage.
Nuclear power plants are going to be charging you the same as coal plants for energy as long as they are owned by market tycoons. Nuclear power plants make the best sense in an ideal world where society matters and there aren’t people gaming the market. We do not live in an ideal world.
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If only there were some way to take energy made from sunshine and store it in some form for later. Like in a battery. Or as heat. Or in a flywheel. Or just use the energy for something we’d really like to do as cheaply as possible. Like sequester CO2. Or desalinate water. Or run industries that would otherwise use natural gas.
What is this “Battery” you speak of? The only Battery I know of is the Powder Battery on a warship.
In that case it would even fix their negative price cost “problem”
Or use it to generate hydrogen for simpler, cheaper, more reliable, sustainable hydrogen powered cars.
We don’t even have enough lithium to replace the average country’s existing cars, let alone all of them, or literally anything else that requires lithium.
There are a lot more ways to store energy other than lithium and hydrogen.
Pumped storage, vanadium redox battery, sodium battery, … I’d even say they are most suited for grid-level energy storage.
Not sure where our good buddy @Hypx@fedia.io went, but let me assure you. As of right now, 100% of available hydrogen stocks are fossil fuels derived.
Hydrogen vehicles being green is a fantasy pedaled by fossil fuel companies to not have to move away from natural gas. While it is possible to generate hydrogen through electrolysis, functionally, none actually is. It’s far far cheaper to do so from natural gas, and probably always will be.
Promoting hydrogen as a “solution” is basically promoting fossil fuels green washing.
And I’m not sure where you are getting you information on lithium, but it’s probably the best short and medium term option. Beyond that, gravity storage (pump water up hills, and maybe some kind of hydrogen system that doesn’t require transporting the stuff where it can be made and stored in place when solar or wind energy is abundant.
Hydrogen is a pain to deal with. It requires excessively thick walled containers to store etc.
A better solution is to do what plants do. Pin it to a carbon atom. Synthetic hydrocarbons would also be a lot easier to integrate into existing supply chains.
Pin it to a carbon atom.
Where’s the carbon going to come from? If it’s anywhere but the CO2 in the atmosphere (or at least sequestered on its way to the atmosphere), your energy solution isn’t carbon neutral anymore. And if it is from the atmosphere, then there are efficiency challenges there at concentrating CO2 to be useful for synthetic processes.
Most syngas today comes from biological and fossil feedstocks, so it’s not really a solution to atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Isn’t one the issues with hydrogen motors that they are a bit explodey? Genuine question, haven’t looked into it in a long time.
Pure hydrogen doesn’t explode. It’s only if you mix it with oxygen. The Hindenberg glowed red not blue
Good thing there’s no oxygen around then. Petrol doesn’t burn without oxygen either, but it’s still dangerous. Additionally typical fuel cell hydrogen cars, store the hydrogen in tanks up to 10,000 psi, which is where the explosion part happens.
Another huge expensive problem is transporting it is not easy. At room at atmospheric pressure and temperature, it takes up like 2-3 grams per gallon of space, making it super inefficient to transport.
You could pressurize it, but that makes it insanely flammable and a risk of it leaks. You could also cryo-freeze it, but that is also very expensive to transport, it require a lot of energy to freeze it, maintain it during long transports, and to unfreeze it at it’s destination.
Building a hydrogen delivery infrastructure is probably the best way to overcome this, but that would also take years and billions.
I’m no expert on the field, but I’d imagine a lot of energy departments would rather do that cost and effort towards building new green energy plants that can deliver power to grids rather than only help cars. Car-wise, most things are transitioning to hybrid or electric anyways, so they also benefit from a green power plant.
The only way I’ve seen hydrogen make sense is where it’s made and stored on site for later grid level generation. Transporting it makes very little sense for all the reasons you mentioned. Salt concerns and ammonia have both been discussed as potential storage options. But you wouldn’t move it around. Store it in a fixed location and generate the electricity on site. If you don’t have to move it, hydrogen might make some sense.
I have doubts that hydrogen will ever work in any industry, but it definitely won’t work for cars. The storage and distribution challenges are never going to make it cost competitive with just regular lithium batteries on a marginal per-joule basis. Even if the energy itself is free, the other stuff will still be more expensive than just charging car batteries off the existing grid.
Sure we can we just don’t have the technology for a Dyson Sphere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
Didn’t China have a community use lots of solar and they ended up with such a glut of excess power that they didn’t know what to do with it?
All communities should have that. Electricity should be free and it would be plausible to make it free. Except for maintenance costs, but that would be peanuts compared to what we pay now.
Call me stupid, but why don’t they just charge enough to cover costs and a bit of profit? The current pricing model is broken if you can’t run a solar plant profitably.
why don’t they just charge enough
Because who would pay 10 cents per kilowatt hour when there’s someone else who will pay someone to take that energy off their hands?
The problem is caused when the market clearing price is lower than the cost it took to produce it, and some of those costs are in the past.
It’s like getting a boat and going fishing. If you pay $10,000 for the cost of the trip, and bring back $8,000 worth of fish, you can’t just force people buy them from you for a 25% markup.
The horror…the horror…
… Yet
That’s not what they were saying, they were saying that it’s not economical to have an abundance of electricity when people need it the least, and little or no electricity when people need it the most. It would be one thing if utilities could sell solar electricity at peak demand hours for a higher price, to make up the difference, but that’s just when solar generation is slowly down significantly or stopped entirely.
And, yes, I know that battery storage could theoretically solve this, but battery technology is not currently capable of providing electricity for the entirety of the time we need it. New technologies are being developed right now with the goal of achieving long term grid storage, but they are still in the R&D phase. I’m confident a suitable storage technology, or multiple technologies, will eventually come to market, but it’s going to take a while.
Regardless, it is likely we will always need some kind of on-demand power generation to supplement renewables and maintain grid stability, and I think nuclear is the best option.
But we shouldn’t act like the problem is that utilities are just greedy. Many utilities aren’t even for-profit companies, as many are either not-for-profit cooperatives or public entities. Sure, there are also many for-profit power utilities as well, maybe even some with connections to the fossil fuel industry, but generally power utilities are not some great villain.
I really like your response. Right behind you about energy storage.
Whoever cracks that nut is an instant billionaire in my opinion. The first cheap, effective, and practical storage technology is going to change the world. But we’re not there just yet.
I’m curious on your statement about nuclear. While I do think nuclear is a great energy source, I’m not sure I agree on the on-demand part.
Our current nuclear plants take hours or even days to start up and wouldn’t provide enough reactivity for a highly renewable grid. Are you referring to a future Small Modular Reactor technology? One with a significantly faster startup and ramp rate?
A thing you can use which gets forgotten often in the conversation is “natural” / physical batteries, or better put stores of latent energy. Essentially, “push heavy thing up hill, make it come down later”.
I know little about it, but you can release the kinetic energy stored in heavy objects at higher altitudes basically whenever, using say a dynamo on the wheels of a wagon of heavy rocks you previously pushed uphill.
There have been proposals for technology like this. Putting a motor above an abandoned mineshaft and suspending a weight. Charged by raising the weight, discharges by lowering against a load.
The issues is the capacity ends up being pretty tiny, not really at a grid level.
You’d need a TON of motors to get to something a grid could actually use to stabilize, and by then the economics don’t work out. Let alone the actual space requirements of that many motors
Additionally, a lot of the advantages of batteries come from local storage, where you don’t need to transmit the energy long distances anymore, and these “natural” batteries tend to take up a lot of space.
A better and more accessible form of “natural” energy storage are already in most homes. Heat pump water heaters in homes could do things like make the water extra hot during solar hours, when power is cheap, so they can make it until the next morning without turning back on.
Or with better building envelopes (insulation) we could run more cooling during solar, maybe even make a ton of ice. Then later in the day, when solar drops and the grid load peaks, you can still cool the building with ice.
For the longest time I thought people who had solar panels had a battery on their property somewhere, they’re panels would charge battery and they would only switch to the grid if their battery ran out.
I don’t know much about it, but this seems like a pretty viable solution and I still can’t believe this isn’t how it works.
Yeah you can do that. Not everyone does
abundance of electricity when people need it the least
Isn’t peak consumption around middle of the day for most countries?
it’s not economical
Mfw electricity being cheap to generate is not economical
No, peak generation in most countries is in the late afternoon when people come home from work, the ac kicks on, people start to cook + do other things around the house. You typically see a double- peak, one in the morning and one in the evening, although it varies based on the seasons. I’m an engineer who works in renewable energy and the stated problem is real- solar generation doesn’t line up very well with grid demand. You can work around this with energy storage but that is an expensive solution
Isn’t peak consumption around middle of the day for most countries?
I can’t speak to other countries, but in the US peak electricity demand generally occurs in the early evening.
Mfw electricity being cheap to generate is not economical
Cheap electricity is great for consumers, but not necessarily for producers. Some people might say, “well, screw producers,” but even if you take profit out of the equation, electric utilities need to be able to at least cover their expenses, and you can’t do that if the amount of electricity you’re generating relative to the demand is so high the price actually goes negative (meaning the utility is actually paying the consumer). Again, that’s good for consumers, but I’m sure you can see how that’s not a sustainable business model. And, like I mentioned before, it would be one thing if utilities could make up for this by selling for a higher price during peak, but by that point the sun is either setting or already set, depending on the time of year, so there’s just no solar electricity to sell, at any price.
Cheap electricity is great for consumers, but not necessarily for producers. Some people might say, “well, screw producers,” but even if you take profit out of the equation, electric utilities need to be able to at least cover their expenses, and you can’t do that if the amount of electricity you’re generating relative to the demand is so high the price actually goes negative (meaning the utility is actually paying the consumer). Again, that’s good for consumers, but I’m sure you can see how that’s not a sustainable business model.
Fully agreed: let’s eliminate business from the issue, and create national, for-service electric grids, that produce the cheapest renewables at all possible times in the most efficient way possible, disregarding hourly profit and taking into account exclusively the cost in €/kWh produced over the lifetime of each energy source.
Suddenly it’s obvious that the problem isn’t with renewables, but with organising the electric grid as a market
Public utilities still need to cover their expenses, and they’re not going to be able to do that if they’re charging negative rates in the middle of the day and have no electricity to sell once the sun goes down.
Do I really need to explain the concepts of taxes, subsidies, or fixed prices regardless of demand, to an adult?
I’m not sure what you mean. Are you saying that public utilities should be funded from taxes instead of charging for service? I don’t think having tax payers pay public utilities to overproduce electricity is going to fix the problem, especially since no amount of tax dollar funding can allow utilities to produce solar electricity when the sun isn’t shining.
The solution is obviously not exclusively from pricing models, we need other energy sources than renewables for the time being, that doesn’t mean we need to have market-based electricity pricing.
Imagine the state installing as many solar panels as society, guided by experts, democratically decides it wants, basically deciding as a society the energy mix instead of hoping that companies will install enough if we bribe them enough with taxes to do so, and if it’s profitable. Then, it decides a pricing model based on a mixture of subsidy and incentivising consumption during production hours.
Problem solved, innit?
I mean, “economy” fundamentally is the allocation of limited resources, if something is limited at a point when it’s needed, then economical doesn’t sound like the wrong word to use? (I’m aware economical means cheap, BTW)
Build big batteries on the grid get the solar in the middle of the day and release the engery back into it a 17:00 when everyone gets home and puts on the shower and kettle at the same time
Yup that’s the free market , if someone can see a business case in operating a big battery by taking money to use the excess power and then again taking money to sell it back when needed everyone will be happy. Of course doing that will reduce the price difference
Sounds like Communism to me. That system killed 100 gorillion people.
Dr Seuss made that??
Here’s 390 of his political cartoons:
https://calisphere.org/collections/26157/Edit: the one that was posted is from 2024-07-10
Or put the batteries in your home, charge it during the day on solar or whenever electricity is cheap, and use it whenever.
It can even be less dense batteries that you don’t need to put in cars.
I live love life England so not worth the squeeze for me to get solar
I was tempted by the outrageous electricity prices a year or two ago.
But then I swapped to Agile Octopus which pretty much halved my bills and made it not really worth doing. I work from home most of the time anyway, so my usage is spread over the day.
With the economic damage resulting from covid lockdowns, you’d think this “somebody think of the stock market” narrative would go away.
The economy is something everyone relies on, not just rich people.
Covid was great for rich people though, all the richest people got so much richer during covid.
President Rufas: hold my Midgar, I’m goin in
In this thread: a bunch of armchair energy scientists who think they’ve solved the energy storage problem all on their own.
Theres tons of ways that people with even a little brains could figure out, the problem is often cost or feasability.
A big burried water tank in my yard could be heated during the day and used to warm the house via underfloor heating at night, could do the reverse with chilled water in the middle of summer plumbed to an air recirculator with a heat exchanger. Its really simple engineering but expensive to implement.
I think an awful lot of people just dont understand the sheer scale of a lot of these problems, not the fundamentals.
an awful lot of people just dont understand the sheer scale of a lot of these problems
Sheer scale is why we’re in this mess to begin with. Coal power for a population of 50M people living on either side of the Atlantic isn’t what caused climate change. It’s the scale up to provide power for 8B people that’s broiling the planet.
“Ah, but you don’t understand! There will be engineering obstacles to upgrading the grid!” is shit you can say when you aren’t spending billions to maintain the existing fossil fuel infrastructure that’s currently in place.
We have the capacity to reorient our economy around a predictable daily regionally glut of solar electricity. We already exploit time variable ecological events to optimize consumption. And we built out a global grid 40 years ago to handle logistics at this scale. You can move electricity from coast to coast and we routinely do. This isn’t an impossible problem, it’s just one that Western financial centers in particular don’t want to invest in solving.
A lot of energy storage solutions do exactly that - use heat as energy. i.e. solar heads rock, sand, salt etc. and then later on that heat is turned back into useful energy - either pumping water around households to heat them, or to drive a steam turbine. The bigger the volume of rock / sand / salt, the more efficient the process is.
I think salt would be easier than water, mostly due to water expansion characteristics, but that’s just my opinion.
Viable solutions with sand or rock have been developed and I expect over the next few decades a large number of such projects will be produced.
Oh yeah,I’m no expert. I can see salt being problematic if the system sprung leaks and contaminated the soil which wouldnt be uncommon once you have tens of thousands of houses rigged up. Im pretty sure most water based systems just use water and antifreeze.
Point is that the fundamentals are simple, when theres excess electricity and nobody is home convert it into stored thermal energy that can be used later when people are home, the devils will be in the details.
From a grid stability point, you can’t produce more than is used, else you get higher frequencies and/or voltages until the automatics shut down. It’s already a somewhat frequent occurence in germany for the grid operator to shut down big solar plants during peak hours because they produce way more power than they can dump (because of low demand or the infrastructure limiting transfer to somewhere else)
Negative prices are the grid operator encouraging more demand so it can balance out the increased production.
As someone with a technical background this is the stupidest problem with solar that I don’t get… just turn off the panels in groups until generation is closer to demand… how have engineers not figured that out. And if they have why does this still get written about.
Someone is an idiot. Maybe it’s me?
I’m adjacent to this problem, so I have a little context, but am not an expert at all.
To my knowledge, we don’t have granular control over panels. So we can shut off legs of a plant, but that’s a lot of power to be moving all at once.
Instead, prices are set to encourage commercial customers to intake more power incrementally. This has a smoother result on the grid, less chance of destabilizing.
A customer like a data center could wait to perform defragmentation or a backup or something until the price of power hits a cheap or negative number.
Well I wasn’t expecting to find THE right answer in the comments already. Kudos!
And to everyone reading through this post: If you have questions, need more explanations or want to learn more about the options that we have to “stabilize” a renewable energy system and make it long term viable, just ask!
Spot on! I hoped this comment would be higher! The main problem isn’t corps not making money, but grid stability due to unreliability of renewables.
To be fair, the original tweet is kinda shit to begin with. They’ve unnecessarily assigned monetary value to a purely engineering (physics?) problem.
But the thing is, you CAN simply turn them off at the press of a button (or an automated script) so its really a complete non issue. As long as big solar installations control systems are accessible by the grid operators, it should be fine.
If you’re spending billions to build a solar plant that has to turn off all the time during peak hours then you’re wasting your money. That seems like a fundamental issue to me, not a non-issue.
Are there any solar plants that cost a billion dollars each?
Secondly, you want to over build solar, so that you have enough capacity during off peak hours. Grid storage is obviously the better solution, but seems not widely available enough yet.
Ok, but what do you do when you’re short of power at night? Keep in mind to turn on conventional power stations it’s expensive & time consuming. Once they startup they need to stay on for a long while to be efficient & cheap.
The real solution is to store excess power in batteries. Lithium ion is too expensive to scale, Sodium ion batteries are economically & capacity viable AFAIK.
I’ve read that gravity batteries and sand batteries are ecologically sound options that work on the scale needed to support large sections of the electrical grid.
I hesitate on
that work on the scale needed to support large sections of electrical grid
That first link is for a 10MW, 8 hour battery. 10MW is on the smaller end of generators, you’d need quite a few of these to start making an impact. For example, a small gas turbine is like 50MW, a large one is over 250MW.
And you could say “just build a lot of them” but the capacity per unit of area tends to be pretty low for these types of technologies.
Building them where we have ample space is okay. But now this power has to be transmitted, and we are already having a lot of problems with transmission line congestion as-is. The real advantage of energy storage is when it’s done local, no need for transmission lines.
Plus there’s permitting/stability issues as well. These wouldn’t work if the area was prone to earthquakes or other natural events.
Thats just not what this post is about. Obviously storing is the way but until then yiu just gotta turn em off
