Comment on Anon questions our energy sector
iii@mander.xyz 16 hours agoAssuming that 12 hours of sun, you just need 2Gw solar production and 12Gw of battery to supply 1Gw during the day of solar, and 1Gw during the night of solar,
Again, I think you might not understand the difference between W and Wh. The SI unit for Wh is joules.
When describing a battery, you need to specify both W and Wh. It makes no sense, to build a 12GW battery, if you only ever need 1GW of output.
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 16 hours ago
You can quibble about battery engineering or focus on your original question, which is : can solar + battery tech do what nuclear does today, but faster and cheaper?
That is a clear yes.
If you want more exact details about the batteries that array used, click on the link in my comment
iii@mander.xyz 16 hours ago
How many days a year does that occur? How much additional storage and production do you need add, to be able to bridge dunkelflautes, as is currently happening in germany, for example (1)?
That’s why I mentioned the 90%, 99%, etc. If you want a balanced grid, you don’t need to just build for the average day (in production and consumption), you need to build for the worst case in both production and consumption.
The worst case production in case for renewables, is close to zero for days on end. Meaning you need to size storage appropriatelly.
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
So you agree that solar + battery resolves 90-99% of power needs now at a drastically reduced cost and build time than nuclear today?
I expect that 10% will get much closer to 1% in the next decade with all the versatile battery/solar tech coming onboard, but to compensate for solar fluctuations, you use wind, you use hydro, and you use the new “dig anywhere” steady state geothermal that is also being brought online today. We can run more HVDC lines to connect various parts of the country. We are working on some now, but not enough. With a robust transmission system, solar gets 3hrs of “free” storage across our time zones.
Worst case? You burn green hydrogen you made with your excess solar capacity in retrofitted natgas plants.
iii@mander.xyz 13 hours ago
I’m saying you can get to 90% yes.
But, as often happens, the last 10% is as hard or harder as the first 90%. The law of diminishing returns.
I’m aware of and have studied them. But general public seems to greatly underestimate the scale of storage that’s needed.
Pumped storage, if geology allows for it, seems like the only possible technology for sufficient storage.
Demand side reduction is possible as well, but that’s simply a controlled gray out. The implications for a society are huge. Ask any cuban or south african.
Others, like lithium ion batteries, green hydrogen, salt batteries, ammonium generation, … have been promised for decades now. Whilst the theory is there, they do store power, it simply does not scale to grid scaled needs.
The sad part is that it sets a trap, like we in EU have fallen into. You get far along the way, but as you can’t bridge the last gap, your reliance on fossil fuels, and total emissions, increases.