“Struggling”
We have so much solar power that we can no longer efficiently profit off of it. We would either need to reduce the margins we make on electricity or destroy our stock of solar capital to reinflate the price of energy.
What to do… what to do…
Not really struggling
All they need to do is subsidise batteries and problem solved
Figuring out grid scale storage isn’t easy, but the good thing about it is that you can figure out storage at slightly smaller scales to alleviate the problem somewhat, and build on that success to try to get to daily storage to meet nighttime demand, then up to weekly storage to handle fluctuations in weather, and maybe even seasonal storage to deal with seasonal variation in both supply and demand.
But storage doesn’t have to just be chemical batteries, either. Some can be demand shifting, like desalination or water pumping based on excess power supply. Maybe even intermittently powering direct air capture of CO2 if there’s so much excess energy they don’t know what to do with it. Some can be storage of heat, whether really hot like molten salt that can run turbines for dispatchable electricity, or just at the residential scale with a bunch of distributed hot water tanks, or everything in between. There are also some storage technologies relying on gravity (pumped hydro if the geography supports it), compressed air, flywheels (could be important for maintaining grid inertia for stability).
And there’s always curtailment, where you just don’t generate the power, and turn off some the panels in the middle of the day.
Australia has too many electricity distributors shipping profits overseas instead of upgrading the grid
H₂?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this feels like a good place for Hydrogen power to step in.
One of the oft repeated concerns is that generating hydrogen to power vehicles the takes a lot of energy, which often comes from dirty sources.
One of the oft repeated issues for solar (or wind etc) is that it’s available at certain times and not in and of itself storable or transportable, so excess is lost.
So, take the excess solar energy, produce hydrogen and store for off-peak times or to distribute.
Seems like a win to me.
So, take the excess solar energy, produce hydrogen and store for off-peak times or to distribute.
Storing hydrogen is difficult and expensive. Not even to say it can’t be done, but it would require the energy companies to invest money in capital, and they hate doing that.
And this involves only driving in summer when there is excess energy? Or getting through winter by storing enough hydrogen to make the Beirut explosion look like a firecracker in comparison?
Just ship the hydrogen to the other hemisphere.
That sounds fun. Not only are we already losing ton of energy to create the hydrogen, we can now lose even more and make it more expensive by trying to liquefy/compress it to make it somewhat transportable. [1]
Also, almost 90% of humans living in the northen hemisphere will surely not cause any issues to this plan. [2]
You’re not LOSING anything if it’s capturing already excess energy, which would by its nature be lost if not used at the time of generation
Neither solar panels, nor hydrogen generators are free. If you need to build extra panels and hydrogen generators, you are making the infrastructure more expensive, consequently raising electricity prices. Or hydrogen prices if you use it as fuel instead of power storage.
Just ship the humans to the other hemisphere.
🤣
That’s funny, but modern solar panel power plants don’t care that it’s winter. The panels rotate and an arid area isn’t getting that much more cloud cover.
The article says the ones it talks about do. Also, rotating panels can’t stop days from being shorter during winter.
I’m not saying it’s not lower. I’m saying it’s not nearly as big of a deal as people say it is.
So what are you saying exactly? With what issue would using hydrogen help?
I’m just talking about winter vs summer capacity in desert solar installations.
Night? Longer periods of cloudy days or storms?
So we are not using it for cars, but to make electricity at night? Just even less efficiently than hydro pumped power? Ok…
Subsidise home battery systems so that the excess is stored locally instead of going back into the grid.
Which also has the additional benefit for homeowners of local backup power in the case of a blackout :)
How else will they be able to continue justify pulling coal out of the ground if they have a robust power grid based on renewables
No such thing as too much solar to anyone but an oil man
Not currently, no. But it’s easy to envision a future where we have to do something with solar production in excess of power needs when all forms of energy capture are exhausted.
Desalination, aluminum recycling, ad infinitum. Anyone who says excess solar is an insurmountable problem is manipulating you.
Hydrogen/electro chemistry is another use of too much batteries.
Speaking of too much battery, an EV range is often 3-5 times daily use (60km average per day is vehicle average, but many use less). It’s not a big deal to have several days worth of fuel in your tank, and so V2G is a good way to have too much batteries, and let consumers profit from their vehicle. This is the app that exterminates oil and other FFs. Hydrogen or your listed apps are good ways to drain having too much battery charge for the next day.
I expect to eventually see a lot of storage as long term investment, especially gravity, flywheel, and molten salt due to cheap safety.
Batteries are getting cheaper, and have high charge/discharge rates. Flywheels can maybe double as AC/DC conversion, but their role is closer to a capacitor than a battery.
What distinguishes H2 is that it is transportable/exportable energy, that also has alternate chemical uses. It is ideal aviation fuel. Sure making it has some expense/loss, but storing it is $1/kwh electric (also contains heat energy that when used in a fuel cell matches the typical domestic hot water energy fraction). Transporting H2 energy by truck is cheaper than electricity by wire. Because H2 can be produced at convenience (solar surplus), and made available for user convenience later, it can be cheaper energy overall, and improve the total utilization of renewable+battery/static storage systems.
Ai training is a great one that the product isn’t hard to move so you can smack it wherever the grid has too much power.
There are real issues to solve first.
V2G and V2H is here, so you’ll be able to store there and draw down overnight in a suitable ecar.
A large pumped hydro in Qld has been cancelled by the new Lib government, so won’t be able to store it there. Snowy Hydro pumped storage is way behind schedule and locally Redflow went backrupt, so huge Zinc Flow storage batteries arent available to rollout to store excess energy and Lithuim is a shitty choice for large grid batteries.
Just read the same article about CA last week; too much solar to be used so the excess solar generated, get this, was sold-often at a loss–to Arizona(the fact AZ can’t make it’s own sufficient solar shows the willful neglect, economic and political nature of energy!) and it lowered AZ bills but not CA. We’re back to energy traders and Enron price manipulations in the US after 20 years.
Batteries will fix much of it but until the grid has proper storage consumers getting fucked by businesses per usual.
CA has a for-profit energy sector so that’s not surprising. They aren’t lowering bills there for anything short of the apocalypse.
What’s also interesting to me is that we here in Utah used to (and maybe still do?) sell dirty electricity to CA (we produce a lot from coal and gas), because they didn’t have sufficient base supply.
CA really needs effective base power supply, whether that’s batteries or some other clean-ish energy source/storage solution. Meanwhile, electricity here in Utah is quite cheap at $0.12/kWh-ish, which is nice, and something like 1/3 of what CA charges.
Every smart person told them, “update the grids before adding solar.”
But did they listen? No. Because updating the grids was an expensive and difficult endeavour and they just wanted to lower their costs first.
Personally, I said fuck the grid and built my own solar power without it. I have separate grid power too.
Obama tried to push grid upgrades for years, kept getting shot down. His plans would all be done by now. Throw in the fuel economy requirements of 54.5 mpg requirements for cars and light trucks and we would have seen billions of barrels of oil not being needed. (Lower gas prices as well). Granted it wasn’t everything, but it was what we needed to start doing. Now 13, 14 years later after Trump rolled back those fuel efficiency policies as much as he could because it cost manufacturers more money in research, we are much closer to a rock we can’t live on and haven’t advanced nearly enough. So we voted in Drill Baby Drill to finish off the rock.
Oh no they did that research. The manufacturers complained because the US was the last great dumping ground for old inefficient engines. They put those highly efficient engines in European cars and used the US to empty their warehouses of old engines.
Sometimes the best way to get things done is to wedge your way in and cause a problem. It sucks, but humans be humaning
Which is so odd to me, because electricity just a couple states over is about 1/3 the cost vs CA. I pay $0.12/kWh in UT, whereas CA pays more like $0.32/kWh.
If we look at solar generation, we’re doing pretty well here in Utah vs other states in the US (source). Taking a rough average of that data, here’s what the numbers look like:
- California - 8500 MWh, or ~217 MWh per million people
- Utah - 650 MWh, or ~203 MWh per million people
- Texas - 4800 MWh, or about 160 MWh per million people
- Arizona - 1700 MWh, or about 242 MWh per million people
I just don’t understand why California electricity prices are so high. It’s not like they’re generating a ton more than other states in the area or anything.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the figures, but the source I quoted didn’t say anything about per-capita production, so I think it’s total for the state.
California’s energy regulator is fully captured by the private companies that “operate” the actual grid companies. Every time someone brings up prices the regulatory board agrees to raise them and let the owners walk away with the extra profit.
And from my understanding, after PG&E was held liable for their electrical lines causing deadly wildfires, they jacked the rates up even higher to cover the settlement costs.
Yup
Our energy provider is private too, though they need to ask the legislature to approve a rate hike.
California rates are high because everyone has to pay for forest fires. Everyone except shareholders.
I paid $0.52/kWh in California before I moved out of state
Even more with fees tacked on.
Wow, that’s nuts. After all fees, I’m around $0.12-0.13/kWh, and it seems we generate a similar amount of solar.
the math aint mathing
What’s not mathing?
I pulled population numbers from Wikipedia, so:
- California - 39.1M
- Utah - 3.2M
- Texas - 30.5M
- Arizona 7.1M
I rounded a little here and there, but that shouldn’t change the numbers too significantly.
We are sick of the arseholes that are running the power companies, and we are sick of the outrageous prices they are charging for electricity.
Simple as that.
10 years ago, my gas bill was $80 a month. Today (and nothing has changed) it is almost $300 a month. Same shit has happened with Electricity and water. They are fucking scum.
They can go fuck themselves. If there was a free version of gas like electricity, I would install it in an instant. (I only use gas for kitchen hob, my BBQ outside - both of which get fuck all use, and my hot water which only really gets used when I wash my balls in the morning.) 300% price hike in 10 years… They can all suck my balls,
Yup it’s the same here in Germany where more and more households have been taking energy production into their own hands. Soon energy companies will only be in charge of distribution and storage, but I doubt this will make things much cheaper for long unless we cut private companies out of the process completely.
Sounds like you should be in the market for an electric boiler and induction cooktop.
Seriously… If he’s spending ~3k a year on gas and even half of that is cooking, an induction stove would pay for itself within a few years.
Same for the water heater. The fossil fuel industry didn’t spend decades promoting gas because it was the most efficient option.
It’s not even all usage, it’s all the other fees they slap on to make more profit.
You could save money on gas by not washing your balls every morning, seeing as you’re planning on getting the energy company execs to suck them anyway.
Some countries (like Sweden) don’t use gas at all for home heating or cooking. We went fully electric in the 70s when we built up our nuclear reactor fleet (sadly, some of now have been closed due to the “nukes are bad” crowd) and that helps a lot now when it comes to relying on renewables.
Check if your state government offers any upgrade incentives. Most of them offer rebates for upgrading appliances, e.g. for upgrades to heat pump water heaters.
I’d get solar if y’know I could afford a property.
That’s what hydrogen production from water electrolysis is for.
Ohh, you gave me an idea! Given that it also happens in CA, maybe we should use the excess for freshwater production from seawater.
That still leaves the brine problem. Youve just traded one for another.
Hydrogen wouldn’t cause another problem.
Build a salt mine next to the desalinator. Tell them the brine will turn into salt faster than seawater would.
Some could be used in molten salt reactors/batteries, no?
I imagine so, but were talking about at best case of a 50% water 50% brine solution with reverse osmosis, and worse if it’s a thermal desalination plant. It’s a fuck ton of liquid, more than we could ever hope to use in a reactor like that.
Some other ideas are evaporate the brine and use the salt for roads in winter, but again, it’s more than we could manage at scale, and salting roads isn’t ideal either.
Are you saying that we could make use of sodium metal for batteries of all sorts at reasonable prices due to it’s over abundance by just getting more of it using solar power?
I don’t know if the output of the desalination is what we actually need or how much refinement it would need, but the salt output would probably still outpace our ability to use it. Sodium is just 1 factor of building these newer batteries.
e.g Tesla has a factory with a 40gwh storage output when fully scaled, and it’s taken years to get there. Cells weren’t the only factor in that.
Yeah, it is a ton of liquid, and I have no idea what the actual amounts look like vs actual uses for salt, such as water softeners (I use exclusively solar salt in mine). I have a hard time visualizing how much salt that actually is, and I haven’t looked up the numbers.
Perhaps there’s an opportunity for at least one such facility?
Well ya we could definitely use the excess energy to desalinize and then try and find a use for that one plant that handles over capacity. Millions of people rely on it for clean water, but today we mostly just dump it back into the ocean which causes problems and isn’t a long term solution.
It’s just not a solution to the problem at scale, more like a band aid. But it could buy enough time to build more batteries.
I mean if you pull the hydrogen, and are left with brine when the hydrogen is used it will release water, which effectively will get condensated and come back down as rain. Mostly ending up back in the oceans at the end of the day right? Wouldn’t that balance out the water to salt ratio at that point if the salt was just added back into the ocean? (Assuming it is dipersed over a longer area. Maybe even just making hydrogen powered ship motors that release the salt back into the water outflowing from the exhaust. Or is it that the chemicals wouldn’t form their original bonds, so you may have essentially drain cleaner left over when you are done with the electrolysis?
These are two separate processes.
You desalinate ocean water to produce fresh water, which you can use for crops, city utilities, etc. That reduces the strain on local aquifers and reservoirs, especially since California tends to overuse their supply of water (especially poignant for us in Utah; we all rely on the Colorado River).
Hydrogen extraction tends to use pure freshwater to prevent corrosion during the electrolysis process. There has been some research around using seawater directly, but I’m guessing there’s still a fair amount of work yet to do this at scale, and I certainly don’t think we’re there yet for ships.
Brine, eh? Well we do grow lots of cucumbers…
;-)
Seen some math on the mountains of salt we would have to move. Very discouraging for desalinization and/or getting hydrogen that way.
We don’t have to get the hydrogen from sea water. It really just depends on where the excess is. Maybe that’s not great for Australia or California… but for other places it could be.
Ka…booom!
Yeah I’m getting to that point where I’m willing to pay more to install solar, and a battery or two, just so I don’t pay electrical providers as much each quarter.
We’re also contemplating batteries because the amount you get paid to feed solar in isn’t like for like with usage. 25c cost vs 3c feed in.
I couldn’t care less about the ‘profit’ for feed in, it’s just about not relying or paying energy providers. I keep getting told by Solar companies that batteries aren’t cost effective yet.
I reckon energy companies should be responsible for industrial sized storage to make better use of the feed in but I hear you.
Good for them! Theoretically that should attract industries that need a lot of electricity and everything balances out cost and demand wise.
So, bitcoin miners
Fuck bitcoin. It should be allocated to desalinisation so less water is pulled from the rivers of the driest continent on Earth. The ecology around waterways is already in the shitter, and global warming is going to 10x that clusterfuck.
That is a good option too. How long does it take to spool up or ramp down desalination? I mentioned Bitcoin mining because it’s super fast to come online or go offline depending on the energy requirements at the moment.
You wouldn’t cover the cost of the miners if you had to shut turn them off and on like that. The worth of their hashing capabilities is nearly always declining as more and better miners come online.
But using the miners to do something else was always an interesting idea, like using them to heat a building. Maybe you could heat a swimming pool with them.
For home usage my thought would be use it as a hot water heater or a dryer for clothes or maybe even make a switchable 500 watt and 1500 watt version and use it as a space heater for those cold winter nights.
Ya, if you have a miner at home, it will reduce your heating bill. You just gotta find a good use for it when it’s not cold outside, so something like supplementing your water heater as you mentioned would work ya.
I think there’s merit in the idea. Someone makes an electric water heater purpose built for this and they build a miner card you can swap in/out as technology improves the the current one becomes obsolete. Uses the miner for primary heat, and when it’s not enough uses regular electricity to make the heat.
See, that would be awesome as hell, because those appliances need heat. And so, mining with it basically subsidizes the heat that I would otherwise just be using anyway. It may not subsidize it completely, but any subsidy is better than no subsidy at all.
Pretty fast, from my understanding, because you’re pumping water through a membrane, and the pumps can be turned on and off quite fast.
The maintenance costs are also quite high though, from my understanding.
I doubt that would be terribly relevant. The lions share of the surplus energy should be predictable based on recent grid data + 24 hour weather forecasts.
Based on nothing but wikipedia the primary methods for desalination are distillation (boiling) and membrane; neither of which sound like ramp up time would matter.
Yeah, if time to come online and time to go offline doesn’t matter, then that definitely works.
Steel, aluminium and battery production can also make good use of lots of cheap renewable energy.
Or things like aluminium smelting/electrolysis.
On crypto, if it’s green energy and there is enough of it, what’s wrong? (It’s not great, and a waste of hardware, but not as awful)
The opportunity cost.
True
It’s a waste of hardware, and a waste of energy that could be doing something useful.
Wonder when the miners are going to switch over and start running AI models with microtransactions for public API access…
