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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.
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.
The original commenter’s (OC’s) point has nothing to do with renewables’ reliability.
It is entirely to do with generation vs demand. Grid operators could ask other generators like coal, nuclear, hydro, etc. plants to curtail so inverter-based renewables can export power, but that’s not likely because those producers can’t ramp generation up and down as easily.
Grid stability is a problem when you have overcrowding of generation without enough demand on given feeders. This is moreso an issue with the utilities anyways and how they plan their transmission and substation upgrades.
The issue is those coal, nuclear, hydro plants are what produce power when the sun isn’t out. If you consistently shut them down for solar, they will go out of business and there will be no way to provide electricity when solar doesn’t.
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!
What options do we have to stabilize a renewable energy system and make it long term viable?
Well, I set myself up for this, didn’t I… 😅 Actually I was kind of hoping for a more specific question, as I would need to respond with a wall of text - and I would like to avoid that as it is kinda rude to force people to read so much and it makes discussion difficult.
So maybe 3 options:
- Wall of text
- You have a more specific question in mind to rephrase
- I try to summarize my wall of text, but I might not get the point across
Lol yes you walked right into that one… Well let me try to meet you half way with some open-ended questions:
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What does “stabilize” mean in this context, and are the challenges there different than the challenges with non-renewables like fossil fuels?
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What are the biggest bottlenecks for stabilizing renewables, and how surmountable are they? For example, I’ve heard lots of talk about how large-scale battery networks(…?) are important to smooth out capacity for swingy energy sources like solar and wind (i.e. you gotta make sure the power doesn’t go out at night!), but the materials for batteries (e.g. extractable lithium?) are scarce… Or similar concerns about photovoltaic cells. Is there any merit to those concerns? Or are the bottlenecks elsewhere? Or is there no bottleneck at all but Big Oil is conspiring to keep us on hydrocarbons?
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Piggybacking on your grid stability point, another issue I don’t see getting addressed here is ramp rate.
If we install enough solar where 100% of our daytime load is served by solar, that’s great. But what about when the solar starts to drop off later in the day?
A/Cs are still running while the sun is setting, the outside air is still hot. People are also getting home from work, and turning on their A/Cs to cool off the house, flipping on their lights, turning on the oven, etc.
Most grids have their peak power usage after solar has completely dropped off.
The issue then becomes: how can we serve that load? And you could say “just turn on some gas-fired units, at least most of the day was 100% renewable.”
But some gas units take literal hours to turn on. And if you’re 100% renewable during the day, you can’t have those gas units already online.
Grid operators have to leave their gas units online, running as low as they can, while the sun is out. So that when the peak hits, they can ramp up their grid to peak output, without any help from solar.
There are definitely some interesting solutions to this problem, energy storage, load shifting, and energy efficiency, but these are still in development.
People expect the lights to turn on when they flip the switch, and wouldn’t be very happy if that wasn’t the case. Grid operators are unable to provide that currently without dispatchable units.
If we install enough solar where 100% of our daytime load is served by solar, that’s great. But what about when the solar starts to drop off later in the day?
Store the surprus of energy from the solar panels and use that as a buffer with batteries or gravity
But some gas units take literal hours to turn on. And if you’re 100% renewable during the day, you can’t have those gas units already online.
Why not? Just time it and start it hours before, wind energy could help in that too
Gravity energy storage doesn’t scale well. I’ve replied to other comments with more detail on this.
There are more feasible energy storage technologies out there, but these are super cutting edge and are not ready for grid-level deployment yet.
The future of grid level energy storage is almost certainly not going to be gravity based. At least not on a large scale.
You can’t have 100% of load be renewable/solar and have gas units online on top of that. That’s over generation. You have to match the supply exactly with the demand. If you mismatch, you destabilize the grid. Undersupply causes blackouts, oversupply melts power lines.
If a unit takes 10 hours to start, solar hours are from 6am to 6pm, and peak load is at 7pm with 0% solar; when do you recommend we start this unit? At the minimum, we’d have to order it on at 7am. Units have to run at a minimum load, let’s say 100MW for this unit. So now you can’t 100% solar from 7am to 6pm, you have to leave 100MW of room for this base loaded unit.
This doesn’t even factor in regulatory requirements like flex, spinning reserve, and other balancing and reliability requirements. Grids are required to have emergency units available at an instant to prevent mass destabilization if parts of the grid fail.
10hours to start oof, i though it was less, maybe individual batteries in house, like we have with water?, that wouldn’t be cheap for industry tho
To be fair 10 hours is either a pretty old or pretty massive unit. 2 hours might be a little more reflective of modern gas turbines. Especially combined cycles. But depending on how big the peak is, you need every available unit, both old and new.
Ultimately the issue is it’s very hard to meet that peak when all of your gas units have to go from 0 to 100% output. Much easier (and more reliable) to take them from 10% to 100%. Which is what grid operators do currently.
Yea an affordable battery in every home would be a slam dunk. This is kinda already happening with vehicle2grid (v2g) electric car protocols. But not everyone has an EV yet. And operators are still working out the kinks using this in the grid.
Plus the lithium batteries in cars have their own supply/recycling issues.
One solution to what you’re describing is to expand the grid. If your grid stretches half the planet, when the East starts to experience night, the West still experiences day and can ship electricity from renewables to the East to make up for their self curtailment. The same goes for wind where if one location on the planet doesn’t experience wind, odds are another location does and the power can be shuffled around.
Another option is to build out more battery storage such that any clipped energy from solar or wind - that is, the energy that can be generated from your solar or wind resource but that can’t be exported because it would overload your inverters or transformers or exceed your PPA agreement with your utility - is stored and can be exported for 2-4 hours as the sun goes down or wind dies out.
Not a lot of renewables sites are colocated with battery storage, but more and more are.
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.
Thanks that’s helpful.
But right…?
Solar plants can be reduced to rationalize supply.
To my understanding. The bigger issue is you can’t as effectively do this with other non-renewables like coal/gas… so this not a solar problem but a problem of legacy power plants.
So stupid. The narrative as well.
Yea, more control over the panels will help with the overgeneration issue.
But there’s other issues like ramping supply to meet peak demand and general generation during non-solar hours that still have to be addressed.
Each have interesting proposals on how to solve them, but they haven’t been developed to the point that they’re ready to be put onto the grid at a large scale.
I’m in solar/BESS, and I mean more and more DER sites are making use of string inverters which break out arrays into greater chunks than with central inverters. With those, you have more granularity of control where you can drop entire blocks/strings at a time to fall to your curtailed export rate.
You might ask yourself though why DERs can’t just ramp inverter outputs up or down to match curtailment automatically across a whole site. You can absolutely do that, but what happens is your solar or wind resource stays high on the DC or low frequency (LF) AC side, respectively, while power frequency AC is low on the other side of the inverters. This is referred to as DC:AC ratio in the biz, and the higher that ratio, the more losses your inverters experience and less efficient they are. This also puts a huge strain on your inverters and can lessen their operational lifetime.
But really, DERs tie into the grid at distribution level and so they don’t fall under the regulations of FERC & NERC (at least in North America). This means that smaller producers don’t have the same requirements for control as do utility-scale players, so the incentive to control these string inverters at that granular level isn’t there. It’s much easier to just trip the main breaker and wait until the utility gives you the go ahead to turn back on.
I suspect that at lot of producers may want to look into greater control capabilities in the future, but this also depends on inverter OEMs too allowing that control.
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.
It doesn’t matter how much solar you build; without storage you’ve got zero power available at night.
The issue with overbuilding solar is that you drive daytime electricity prices to zero so that everyone is losing money on all these solar plants. Furthermore, base load plants such as nuclear plants also start losing money and they have no ability to shut down during peak hours. So you end up driving the base load plants out of business and they shut down permanently. Now you have even less capacity available at night! This causes nighttime power to become extremely unreliable, potentially leading to rolling blackouts and skyrocketing nighttime energy prices.
Another issue that people rarely discuss is the quality of power on the grid. All the grids in the world operate on 50/60 Hz AC which must be carefully maintained at an accurate frequency and synchronized with the grid. The main base load turbines are the source of this waveform which is carefully monitored and adjusted to remain stable.
Solar panels produce DC power which needs to be converted into AC with an inverter and synchronized with the grid. The problem is that if all the base load turbines are taken off the grid then there is nothing for the solar inverters to synchronize with! Turbines are nice and stable because they’re literally an enormous, massive spinning flywheel. Without them you’ll have an extremely unstable system where all of the solar plants are trying to adjust their frequencies and phases to match each other and the whole thing wanders all over the place.
It’s two sided.
Yes you waste money by not exporting the electricity-transformed version of your resource (wind, sun, chemical potential, etc.).
But on the flip side if you export lower across your whole site, this means more losses at the inverters which can shorten operational lifetimes and lead to quickened inverter failures and needs for replacement. Those maintenance costs eat into your profit as well.
As someone in the industry, I’d imagine that inverter-based producers really just react to the rate structures of whatever grid and utility they hook up to. If the incentives of that utility favor one mode of operation during supply-demand mismatches - such as complete site curtailment - then that is what generators will do. If the incentives favor partial generation where only certain blocks of your solar or wind or BESS plant are switched off while others remain on, then we could see more producers do that.
Ultimately though you need to have a way to operate your site in those conditions to help balance out operation and nonoperation. If whenever a curtailment signal comes to your site, and in response you always shut off Block B while leaving Block A on, then Block A will experience accelerated lifetime degradation over Block B. Inverters, transformers, cables, panels will fail faster in Block A than Block B. But if you could rotate your curtailment/demand response such that certain blocks/strings are used sequentially and that lifetimes are averaged out, this might solve the problem. Think about how farmers rotate which crops they plant in which of their fields to avoid famine and soil degradation.
I think demand response is taking off in the utilization markets like in buildings and industrial settings, but really I think the principles we’ve learned from that should be carried over to generation markets as well. It’s only a matter of time as the industry matures and smart technology penetrates the grid and generation markets.
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.
Thats just not what this post is about. Obviously storing is the way but until then yiu just gotta turn em off
I don’t think you realize the work involved in integrating a new unreliable power source into the grid. Its a delicate dance to anticipate demand to keep power always available. Having more power than you need is bad for the grid, which is why the costs go negative: power companies want it off the grid ASAP.
Conventional power stations can stay on all the time & that’s awesome for the grid stability. There is no power gap renewables are filling. So to turn solar on we need to turn off a coal powered plant. If this new source cannot match the reliability it hinders to grid than help. So there’s no question of “turn it off when you don’t need it”.
We need to turn off fossil fuel power generation for more renewables, sure, but it doesn’t alleviate their problems right now.
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.
That’s fair. They’re certainly imperfect, but a large improvement over electrolytic cells for large scale storage.
I think a more feasible potential technology for the grid are flow batteries.
They work through some kind of ion-exchange. Where they have two liquids, one charged and one not. By running power through a catalyzer, they move charges into one tank. Then you can apply a load across the catalyzer, and remove the charge as power.
I’m by no means an expert, but these are already pretty popular in Japan, and have started to make their way into the US.
Still definitely an expensive technology, but I’m hopeful that scale and investment can drive the cost down.
One of their biggest advantages over other technologies like Li-Ion is that their duration is independent of their capacity. Because the duration is only determined by the size of your tanks and the amount of liquid you have.
Meaning that you can take an existing 50MW, 4 hour plant and upgrade it to an 8 hour plant by doubling the size of the tanks and filling them up with the electrolyte. All without having to upgrade the catalyzer.
Edit: also worth mentioning they don’t have the same supply/environmental/recyclability concerns that lithium batteries do. I believe the electrolyte is relatively inert and does not degrade over time.
You can do more with them too actually. You can ramp down the AC power production incrementally to meet curtailment requirements, in theory. When you do that though you subject your inverters to greater strain/losses and less efficiency which shortens your lifetime.
If inverter-based producers in solar, wind, and/or BESS want their sites to last for 30-40 years so that ROI is achieved via operation, then it is in their interest to protect their equipment and operate as much as possible at rated conditions or de-energized conditions.
You might think that it would make sense to have more of a slider control between ON and OFF to save everyone, from producers to grids to consumers, but my guess from being in the industry is that grids don’t really supply incentives for that kind of operation. If they did, maybe you’d see more variable control at utility- and community-scale levels.
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.
I think they’re taking about battery chickens; just don’t tell the vegans that’s how we store electricity!
Makes me wonder how many chicks per second (CPS) factory farms use.
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Seriously if it was free for me to run a hot tub I would be a more relaxed person…but somehow these negative power prices never seem to trickle down to the consumer 🤔.
It still costs real money to maintain the infrastructure; so even if the power was always free; you would still have to pay something to cover the maintenance costs.
I’m thinking in the next several years the electric companies will only be maintaining electric lines as generation decentralizes
Lines, network transformers, insulators, surge arresters, reactors, sectionalizers, etc.
But yes
Yep, PG&E charges me a connection fee, a maintenance fee, and delivery fee. However the dynamic rates for electricity never go below $0.40 (and go up to $.70 with more price hikes in the works) even at the cheapest times when the state electricity market is at negative rates. Funny how that works.
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In that case it would even fix their negative price cost “problem”
This is what gets me. Relative efficiency of stuff is pretty much nullified when the energy used is free. Total power use still matters because it will determine the total size of the array of solar panels to generate the power needed.
But this is near and dear to my heart. I like hydrogen as energy storage. If you burn it, you get water. Natural gas is just CH4, so the output of burning it is 1CO2 + 2H2O. But a lot of natural gas stuff can also use hydrogen with little modification, so we don’t have to upend entire industries to adapt. Machines can be updated to use the new fuel type with little expense and we’re not throwing out entire production lines to replace them with ones based on electricity.
Why hydrogen? Simple, hydrolysis. Using power generated for free from the sun, you can split water into its base components. Hydrogen and oxygen. With some fancy knowledge, you can capture pretty much all of the hydrogen and none of the oxygen, and store it for use.
It’s inefficient compared to some other technologies, in that it takes a lot of power compared to how much hydrogen/oxygen you get, but bluntly, if it’s coming from solar, who cares? Not like we’re paying for the power anyways.
I keep thinking about this in the form of industry. Say a factory uses natural gas in boilers to make something hot. Whatever the material, whatever the reason, that’s what they’re doing. With little modification, the system can be adapted to hydrogen, and the company can build a hydrogen hydrolysis reactor on site using either city water, rain water, lake or river water… Even an underground well. The reactor runs all day and generates hydrogen, stored in a large, high pressure tank, also on site, then pipelines run it to the machines, boilers, whatever, to run the production lines. It’s free to run, and only requires a single capital investment.
Hydrogen, also, can be stored indefinitely and not “lose charge” unlike other, battery-based storage systems (or heat, or flywheels). So hydrogen is ideal for long term energy storage. Fuel cells are still the most efficient way to convert hydrogen to electricity, and yeah, you lose a lot of potential energy in the electrolysis/fuel cell conversions, but the energy input is free in the first place, so who cares?
I’m not saying we should go all in on hydrogen. I’m just saying that it’s worth continuing to develop the technology for it. Batteries, capacitors, storage via heat or flywheels, they all have their place in the energy future. At least until fusion makes them all obsolete (once we find a way to make that self fueling or use materials that are not extremely limited. IMO, we’re making good progress but we’re decades, if not centuries away from something practical, given our currently known planetary resources).
And yes, battery EVs are a good thing. Hydrogen electric vehicles… Let’s just say “too soon”, and leave it at that. Batteries for daily charge/discharge for home use, absolutely. Larger scale heat/flywheel storage, absolutely. But longer term than days to months, hydrogen may be the better option. It’s certainly a good option for industry that currently relies almost exclusively on natural gas.
Hydrogen is troublesome as an energy storage. The roundtrip efficiency (electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity) is just… very not worthwhile compared to batteries. Then beyond efficiency there is still the question of “how do we store hydrogen safely?”
Storing energy indefinitely is not a problem for electricity storage, since we are pretty much guaranteed to use the stored energy up in a single day.
Yep. When you’re using the energy quickly, within days or weeks, then hydrogen is extremely impractical.
The merits of hydrogen are in long term storage and cycles. A well built storage tank can last a lifetime. To be fair, a poorly built one might not last a year… So it’s very dependent on the external factors involved.
Batteries have their flaws, which I think we all know by now. Weight (regardless of state of charge), volume (energy density), charging speed, cycle life, etc.
It’s all about the application. Is the energy storage method going to be efficient for the desired outcomes.
Regardless of what other outcomes are in play, one that should be constant is to preserve the environment. Lithium technologies have reached a high level of development in recycling, so, for the most part, the environmental impact of end-of-life batteries is effectively mitigated to a large extent. This is a great thing that we have developed.
We need to do the same with solar PV panels, and mitigate as much of the environmental impact as we can from that as well. I know that’s something that’s being worked on, but we’re not at the same level of efficiency as we are with batteries, probably due to the comparatively long life of PV panels, vs the comparatively short lifetime of lithium cells. We’ve simply had a lot more lithium to deal with and find ways to recycle, so far. I’m sure PV panels recycling will come along as more early adopters upgrade to something newer, and more panels get into the stage where they need to be recycled. I haven’t checked in on PV panel recycling in a while so I’m not sure how outdated my information is.
To be clear, I am not, have not, and would never suggest that we move all our efforts into any technology, including, but not limited to, lithium, solar, wind, hydrogen, or anything else that’s been discussed. IMO, we need to leverage several technologies to achieve our long-term goal of global net zero, while meeting the energy demands of everyone.
I just feel like hydrogen is treated like a dead end technology, and I can’t blame the public for thinking so. A lot of the information about it as an energy storage solution is either very old, or still in its infancy. From electrolysis, which is a very old idea, to hydrogen fuel cells, which are extremely new by comparison. IMO, there’s a lot of work that can be done here, and we need to keep looking into it. Maybe it goes nowhere, maybe it becomes so practical that other solutions seem like shit by comparison. I don’t think either of those is likely, we’ll probably land somewhere in the middle of those extremes. I don’t know, and I’m not a scientist, so I’m just hoping we, as a society of people, keep working on it.
One thing I’m particularly excited for in this field is solid state batteries. But that’s also in its infancy. I know a lot of work is being done on them, so we’ll see what happens.
My point, if I have any point at all, is that we need to keep researching varied technologies for it. While solid state might be the right answer for EVs, and cellphones and most consumer electronics, they might not be the best solution for other applications. We need answers to energy demands of all sorts and giving up on something like hydrogen when there’s still research to be done, isn’t a great idea. We don’t know what researching a technology could uncover. Maybe an air battery that’s hyper efficient and has a high energy density, better than solid state technologies could hope to achieve. Maybe a lot of things. We just don’t know.
Let’s try everything and figure out what works for what application.
I agree that H2 can have certain applications as a bridge technology in some industries, but there is a very important parameter missing in your premise.
Even if solar power seems “free” at first glance it really isn’t. It needs infrastructure, e.g. Photovoltaic Panels and lots of it. So just having H2 instead of a battery for an application means, it needs thrice the PV capacity or even more and with it the grid capacity. Now add to that, we aren’t just talking about replacing electricity from fossil fuel plants by PV, but about primary energy as a whole, which makes the endeavor even more massive. Also H2 will not magically become much more energetically efficient in its production, transport, storage and usage, because there are physical limits. (Maybe with bacteria for production) The tech could and should get better concerning longevity of the electrodes for example. Also as the smallest molecule out there, storage will never be completely without losses. And long term storage requires even more energy and/or material.
All this is to say, that efficiency is still paramount to future energy supply, since also the material is limited or just simply because of costs of infrastructure and its implications on the biosphere. Therefore such inefficient energy carriers as H2 or what people call “e-fuels” should be used only where the enormous power and/or energy density is critical. H2 cars should therefore never be a thing. H2 or e-fuel planes, construction machines or tractors on the other hand could be more appropriate uses.
There’s certainly costs involved with solar. Even the act of cleaning the panels is going to increase maintenance costs. More panels to clean, more cost. More space needed for the panels, more cost. It might not be much per panel, but it’s still a cost. The wear of the panels is more cost, they only last so long before they degrade, and replacements are not free, so if the panels degrade without doing a lot of “work” (aka the outcome of having them) vs the cost of installing and maintaining them, was it worth it? These are all economic questions that also need to be considered.
Yes, it’s not free, but it’s the closest thing to “free” power we have. Literally pennies for gigawatt hours of output. If that power isn’t consumed, then it wasn’t useful to produce. Whether that generated power goes into batteries, homes, or hydrogen production, that’s going to be something we have to solve for.
I see a hydrogen reactor + fuel cell “generator” as a secondary storage system to batteries. When production is unusually high, push the power into hydrogen. It’s not nearly as efficient, but it can be stored for much longer without losing any. It can be stored far more densely than what can be accomplished by batteries. If the batteries are full and your PV plant is still pouring out unused watts, rather then let that energy go to waste, pushing it into hydrogen storage is a better option. If you don’t need it for 6 months, a year, two years? No big deal. When production is low and your batteries are almost out, just fire up the fuel cell and recharge from the excess energy you couldn’t put in the batteries. It’s inefficient, yes, but bluntly, it’s better than letting any of the excess production go to waste.
There’s other competing technologies for the same purpose. I see hydrogen as the second stage of storage. It’s not as good as the first stage, but it’s better than turning to fossil fuels to generate power.
I don’t know if that’s the right answer to the problem. I don’t know if it’s even a good idea. All I know is that it is possible. IMO, it’s not a bad idea.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if I’m saying anything at all here, it’s that we need to keep researching everything. I don’t want anyone to drop research on another technology to dedicate to hydrogen, just as I wouldn’t want anyone to drop hydrogen to research something else. We need to keep looking into this stuff.
There’s no single solution to our energy needs, as of right now. I don’t see one emerging in our lifetimes. The only goal I want to see pursued, if not obtained, is net zero for climate change. Stop the destruction of the environment, especially, but not limited to, our energy needs. Whatever gets us there, whether hydrogen, nuclear, fusion, solid state, flywheel, heat storage, thermoelectric, geothermal, hydroelectric, or whatever… I’m game. I feel like hydrogen still has a lot of discoveries that can be made, and I really don’t want to see it abandoned because of a lack of popularity in the consumer space. It’s there, it’s green, it’s got potential, let’s keep trying to get it to a place where it can be beneficial, just like with everything else in that market segment.
It is not only economic cost though. As I’ve mentioned, materials are also limited (on the same level as: There isn’t enough copper to wire all motors needed to replace all cars today with EVs). And it needs alot of surface area compared to the concentrated power plants of the past, which means an even bigger impact on the biosphere (especially if not done on rooftops in cities but in mountain ranges or fields, etc.). Don’t get me wrong; solar energy, if done right, is the only source that doesn’t interfere with natural cycles and does not increase entropy of the planet (which makes it actually sustainable). Using it inefficiently though, means inefficient use of other resources which are limited. (Not only economic. But on that note: Public infrastructure is always built with costs in mind, because we shouldn’t waste tax money, so we can do a better and more comprehensive job with what we have.)
So if there is a more efficient way to store energy for long periods, then it should take precedence over a very inefficient one. This will get complex since it is very much dependent on the local conditions such as sunshine, water sources and precipitation, landscape, temperatures, grid infrastructure and much more. As an engineer, I would throw in though, that if you need this secondary storage, that is not much cheaper, doesn’t have some very essential advantage, or doesn’t mitigate some specific risk, but is much more inefficient over your primary storage, then the system’s design is… sub-optimal to put it mildly.
For the argument of exploring everything: We simply can’t. More precisely we could, but it would need much more time, money and resources to arrive at the goal. And since climate catastrophe is already upon us, we don’t have that time and need to prioritize. Therefore a technology that has a physical, not human-made, efficiency limit loses priority as a main solution. That doesn’t mean, that H2 should not be looked into (for specific purposes, where it is essential or the reuse of existing infrastructure is the better option), but that we have to prioritize different avenues, with which we can take faster strides towards true carbon neutrality.
P.S. it doesn’t help, that today’s H2 is almost exclusively derived from natural gas.
H2 from natural gas is more efficient, but obviously creates pollution. Because of the relative efficiency and the prevalence of natural gas in society, most companies have gone to natural gas conversion to hydrogen, as it’s easier to implement, not because it’s greener.
To touch on it, when I’m discussing economics, I’m talking about the discipline of economics, not specifically the economy. The money economy is only concerned with the dollars and cents of everything, economics as a discipline, considers all factors, both in and out, and the adverse effects of everything, both financial and sometimes not financial (since nonfinancial effects can affect the future financial viability of a system).
I’ll be clear, storage isn’t the debate on hydrogen being inefficient. Hydrogen storage is more efficient than most other storage systems. The materials are minimal, a pressure tank with the appropriate seals and safeguards, and the tank can output 100% of the hydrogen that goes into it. There’s no concern with cycle life, as the system can cycle infinitely as long as the structure of the container isn’t compromised. The waste produced when a storage vessel is no longer suitable, is essentially metals that can be fully recycled or otherwise reconstituted into other items without any degradation in the quality of those items, with few exceptions.
The discussion is entirely around how hydrogen is created, and how it is converted back to whatever energy format that is desirable, such as electricity. Coming from electricity, electrolysis is about 70-82% efficient, with 1kg of hydrogen, which has a specific energy density of 143 MJ/kg needing about 50-55 kWh of electricity to create. The most inefficient part of the system is conversation back from hydrogen to electricity, where internal combustion style generators are common (basically a slightly modified natural gas generator), but less efficient than fuel cells. Fuel cells generally have 40-60% efficiency.
Batteries on the other hand have much higher efficiency, but never 100%. Since they’re generally not self regulating, systems for battery management are required. Charge controllers and voltage conversion (or inverters) reduce efficiency further, but generally battery systems are considered to be better than 90% efficient. The downside with battery systems is the relatively short life of the battery and the large amount of waste produced, in comparison with something like hydrogen.
Hydrogen can achieve much higher energy density and the container weighs next to nothing when empty, while batteries weigh approximately the same whether charged or not.
My main argument for hydrogen surrounds the fact that we’re pretty close. 80% efficiency in hydrolysis and 60% on fuel cells, with storage being significantly cheaper on materials and significantly better with cycles, with much less to recycle when the system is replaced or otherwise decommissioned. You can pack a lot more energy in the same volume of space using hydrogen compared to batteries because it can be significantly pressurized to several atmospheres.
There are benefits here that batteries simply cannot match. If we can get the fuel cells and electrolysis to a level that’s comparable to batteries with efficiency, then hydrogen would really become the better option.
With over 8.2 billion people on the planet, we certainly can research all of these options at the same time. Only a very small fraction is even doing the work right now. That number can increase a lot, but we choose to pursue what is financially profitable rather than purely looking towards scientific discovery. Capitalism at work.
If companies can’t sell it, they don’t care. So it doesn’t get done. We should do it anyways because there’s potential here.
There’s two problems with your last post which have to do with physics.
- Fuel Cells and the process of hydrolysis have a limit on their efficiency. Just like with ICEs there isn’t much potential there.
- Between Hydrolysis and the Fuel Cell, there are other lossy processes. Usually the tanks contain pressurized H2 and depending on the usecase even liquid H2. Modern automobile cases use 700-800 bars of pressure. That process is again at around 85% efficiency in a good case. Cooling applications further deteriorate the efficiency and need more energy for storage and/or losses during storage. There are other technologies in research right now, like metal hydride storage, where we’ll have to see what exactly they can do (right now we’re at the stage where we are promised an all-purpose hype, but mostly through the media and not the ones doing the work)
I’m not disputing that capitalism has it’s thumb on the scale; as you’ve written, the synergy to use H2 derived from natural gas is one effect, but it doesn’t stop them from advertising it as green. The physical limits though, one cannot argue with. Their effects would mean a lot more infrastructure that is necessary, with it more materials, which are limited too. Even if possible, we have limited construction capacity, which means that it would take us longer to reach the goal, when time is of the essence. Which leads me to the same conclusion, that where the advantages like power density isn’t absolutely necessary or other solutions are not available, use a better solution.
When speaking to the overall system, there are always inefficiencies with all forms due to the conservation of energy laws.
Similar arguments can be made regarding batteries, as resistance in the wires that connect the cells in a pack together waste power as heat. While overall this may be minimal, the physics provide hard limits here. Unless a superconducting material is made commercially viable without needing to be super cooled, these limits will always be nontrivial.
My entire point is, battery tech has reached a high level of development and there is significantly more we’re trying to achieve with the technology (whether solid state or otherwise), meanwhile, I would argue that hydrogen hasn’t even reached the same level of development as battery technology, yet everyone seems to think it’s a dead end.
It’s hard to argue with the energy density per kg of hydrogen as a material. It’s possibly one of the highest specific potentials of existing technology. What we should be doing is trying to create power from that with as few losses as possible. Fuel cell technology was, in my mind, the first real push in that direction, when it didn’t immediately pay off, we gave up. Meanwhile, alkaline and cadmium based batteries were much worse, but we used them, and continued using them for decades before lithium based batteries became more commercially viable.
I see battery research as looking for the last, most efficient type of battery, while hydrogen isn’t even half way through the possible research we could do on it. Forgetting hydrogen, while it’s in the infancy of the research, for batteries that are very nearly as efficient as physics allows for, to me, is doing ourselves a disservice as a society.
I have no idea what further research into hydrogen will yield. Maybe you’re right and it’s going to go nowhere, maybe not. We don’t know unless we keep trying, same with batteries, same with kinetic storage (flywheel/gravity systems), same with thermal storage… There’s just a lot of material science we can experiment with that wasn’t really something that was possible before now.
I still think it’s worthwhile, clearly you disagree. I appreciate the discussion either way.
Have a good day.
Or as heat.
We already have too much of that.
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.
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.
Most battery chemistries are moving away from rare earth metals like lithium. Solid state batteries are the next step, and they use things like sodium cloride, I.E salt, as their base.
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.
Agreed. Petrol cars are also explodey. As are EVs. In fact most energy dense objects are explodey.
The issue with the 10000 psi tanks are the size and weight. Not the explodeyness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Literal free goddamn energy from the sky and these greedy fucks are going to burn the world down because they can’t flip it for a buck
It sounds dumb, but because you can’t turn off solar power, if it produces more then you need, you have to use it somehow or it can damage equipment. Hence the driving prices into negative territory. It’s a technical problem more than it is a financial one.
It is a financial problem. Technically you can just cover the solar panels. But that’s not good financially.
Your “technically you can” is actually a huge logistical nightmare to implement.
Having electricity rates go really low is intended to incentivize people or companies to sink the excess energy to wherever they can. And also to discourage producers to produce more at that hour, if they are able to.
Logistical problems are still financial problems though. That’s my point. Hire enough people/develop the appropriate automation and the issue is no more.
We have the technology to solve this, the problem is the money.
In fact, you could just buy enough batteries and the problem will also go away. Still a financial problem, not a technology one.
EDIT: just to clarify, if at some point energy prices go negative, it means that it is cheaper to buy energy usage than a solution. Unless the energy company is dumb enough to just lose money for the lazyness of considering other options.
You could spend the money, but you also need to consider whether that money is well spent. Batteries do not last forever. Maybe that money is better spent on R&D to develop better batteries first. Also natural resources and environmental impact needs to be considered. Batteries take natural resources to build and also occupies a lot of space.
20 years ago, we also have the technology to run AI workloads. Except we probably had to deploy billions of CPUs to match the capability of today’s GPUs. We have the technology then, but it is not practical. And that money was much better spent in the R&D that lead to today’s GPUs. So similarly our batteries probably needs to be a few magnitude better than what we have today before it is practical to use.
Really? I’m seriously asking, because I thought solar farms already had automated ways of cleaning off the panels, surely an automated way to cover the panels wouldn’t be any more complex than that. It would add maintenance costs for sure, but calling it a logistical nightmare seems like an exaggeration.
Most use a horizontal single axis configuration and could just tilt the panels away from the sun.
The real question that we should be asking, is why nobody can think of what to do with free energy?
Desalination? Mine Bitcoin? Giant space laser?
It’s not a question of ideas, it’s a question of money. Building things to use excess power costs a lot of money.
In some markets, the power price actually goes negative and consumers can be paid to use energy.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/20/energy/three-mile-island-microsoft-ai/index.html
I think there’s plenty of money out there to use excess power, someone just has to connect the dots…
Or in a pinch: just run big-ass space heaters. Seriously. It’s a stupid way to burn off excess power, but it’s dirt simple and cheap. Just have a big array of resistive heaters out in an empty field somewhere with a high fence around it. Need to burn off an extra GW? Run it through massive heating elements and burn burn it off. It’s a stupid waste of good energy, but as an emergency backup, it’s not a bad option. It’s trivially easy to dispose of huge amounts of excess electricity if you just run the mother-of-all space heaters. Run your stupid giant resistive heater at the bottom of a lake for even better effect.
You need to consider more than just solar farms. There are many roof top solar systems on people’s houses. That’s what I’m referring to regarding logistical nightmare.
Second, if we are just going to cover up solar panels, then it really defeats the purpose of having it. A better way is to come up with ways to store this excess energy to use when there is low production and not have to depend on fossil fuels at night.
Yeah I understand storing and using the energy is obviously a better solution than to stop producing the energy. But in the short term, in the context of large solar arrays, until we have storage solutions or ways to use* the excess, covering the panels up or turning them to face the ground for a bit doesn’t seem like a very big logisticical hurdle.
There are many roof top solar systems on people’s houses. That’s what I’m referring to regarding logistical nightmare.
Are there really enough residential rooftop panels for this to even be a problem? And couldn’t it be solved just by installing a battery for your home to store the excess? Again, if you could explain how this would be a logistical nightmare for my ignorant self, I’d appreciate it.
Afaik photovoltaics are fine running open circuit, i.e., disconnecting them. Thermal solar, and wind, are (I think) much trickier (but covering things for solar thermal, like you suggest, is perhaps feasible).
“Damaging equipment” is just nonsense. I’ve got an off-grid solar system. When the battery is fully charged the solar panels simply stops producing. It has potential (voltage) but no current until you draw power. Just like a battery is full of energy but it just sits there until you draw power from it.
All solar systems could have smart switches to intelligently disconnect from the grid as needed, some inverter already do this automatically. So it’s not a technical problem. It’s a political problem.
This can cause degradation of the PN junction on the panel shortening life. The plans I’ve seen all have a resistive heater some place to dump the excess when full. Smart equipment does help mitigate most issues like moving the resistance point on the panel for lower efficiency when signaled to do so but less is not the same as none.
How does it damage the PN junction of the panel is open circuit or barely loaded? It doesn’t seem logical that this would damage the panel, but I’m open to being proven wrong.
There are all kinds of follow up questions to ask as well, but I think the main one is how big an effect are we talking?
Not a huge effect now with smart systems but if you leave solar panel disconnected from everything and out in the sun for weeks at a time you will damage the panel. Open circuit voltage is higher than operating voltage and higher voltage will break down insulation. PN depends on the insulating properties of a doped layer. If I remember correctly electron tunneling causes damage by making the band gap smaller
Concentrated solar and wind are a bit different though?
It is a technical problem of how can you convince electrical companies to overcome a problem they have no financial incentive to solve.
that’s not a technical problem. that’s a weakness of the people’s resolve problem. we can, at any time, force them to do the right thing.
I’m aware its not a technical problem, I was using the word ironically to point out the person I was responding to was wrong to say it…
Also saying we can at any time fix a problem is just being ignorant of the many near impossible steps needed to fix the problem. In this case the problem is capitalism. We could come up with ways to end capitalism or make capitalism work in the interest of humanity, but will it realistically ever happen? No it wont, private money won, look at the topics discussed for presidential debate, never a mention of doing something about private capital owning Washington. Just super effective wedge issues.
You’re being too broad. We don’t need to undo all of capitalism here. Nationalising the electric grid is a reasonable solution to this particular problem.
What incentive does a politician have to support nationalizing the power grid? It wont be a super splashy issue to tackle so it isnt worth doing it for the credit, and the different power companies of the world will just put their money into buying opposition to your effort anyways.
That’s the problem with capitalism is that any single thing you would want to do that would impact some cocksuckers capital, and the threat alone makes it a necessity to pay to win in congress. Usually the only way stuff like this happens is because there is new capital entering the market that can afford to donate against the old capital to overtake them. Its just rich assholes all the way down.
If the government seizes control of a major industry, that’s a lot of power and opportunity for politicians. It’s already been done in some local areas, and it had the broad support of the people because “the electric company is gouging us, the gov should take it over” is an easy sell.
Factorio players: hold my beer
Can they not route excess electricity into the ground?
No, unfortunately, you can’t.
Ground doesn’t typically dissipate power, rather, power is dissipated in the circuit/load — so if you just hook a wire to ground, you’re dumping gobs of power into the wire. If you do this in your home (DON’T), best case it will trip the breaker, worst case it will melt and catch something on fire.
It’s easy enough to burn a kilowatt — just boil some water. But it’s entirely something else to burn megawatt, or yikes, gigawatt scale power.
It seems braindead simple to me to work some controls into an industrial scale solar array to manage its output by regulating its input. Like, rotating the panels to put them out of their optimal alignment with the sun or mechanically partially covering them with shutters.
Simple but extremely expensive.
Didnt Nikola Tesla try to sell Westinghouse on providing free unmetered electricity to everyone on earth and got laughed out of the room?
Yes, because Westinghouse was running a business.
you know we could just put our collective foot down and take the power away from them.
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.
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.
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.
The sand silo heating projects that I’ve read about are used to feed the excess energy from electricity to central heating. The heat can be stored for months, but converting it back to electricity wouldn’t be very efficient. It’s “only” viable in places with district heating.
There are other power-to-x technologies out there, like splitting water to hydrogen and oxygen, and these are all good ways to use excess energy, but they won’t help on stabilizing the electricity production. Hopefully these technologies can create enough demand for electricity that the prices will always be worth it for the producers, so they can begin (over)producing enough renewable energy to cover the baseload at all times.
The gas production in early 1900s sort of did the same. The gas was produced for heating and light, but the byproducts of gas production lead to all kinds of other very cheap chemicals and products. Similarly we need to think of excess electricity as a very cheap byproduct and invent uses for it, instead of attempting to “balance” it.
In my opinion, this shows why privatization of electricity production is an obstruction. It would have been easier to transition completely to renewable energy if it was a state monopoly setting a fixed price to enable overproduction without regard to price fluctuations.
Solution: Don’t be fucking greedy. Take what’s you need. Stop taking when you’ve got enough.
Do you think energy company scientists are gonna tell you what’s real, or will they tell you what their boss pays them to say? I’ll take the armchair scientist. YouTuber scientist preferably.
Managing an energy grid is an incredible feat of engineering and the fact that some countries have basically 24/7 constant voltage electricity is nothing short of a miracle.
And yes I will trust the academics and engineers who have spent ages documenting these processes and building the solutions. I studied this for a while at university. Every professor in that field is an environmentalist and guess what they still taught us about the issues with solar and wind instability and energy storage.
most armchair ass comment I read all day lmao
Oohhh, you’re one of them. You’re gonna preach to people that they shouldn’t just get batteries eh? Your economy of scale means nothing while your bosses are charging more than that efficiency does for me. It’s cool to engineer big awesome stuff that’s so capable, but not when it’s a leash. I don’t think you’re incapable. I think your industry is greedy and has leverage that nobody should have and pretty much won’t work anymore.
There’s nothing wrong with getting a battery, especially if you have solar panels. What I’m saying is we can’t cover everybodys needs with them right now, both economically and materially.
What industry are you talking about?
Why not?
the amount of batteries we’d need would require an insane amoint of lithium, plus lithium ion batteries don’t last that long and need to be replaced after a few years of heavy use
No it wouldn’t. They don’t have to be lithium for houses. Houses don’t move.
This is idiotic. The fact is your electricity transmission system operator has to pay a lot of money to keep the grid stable at 50 or 60Hz or your electronics would fry. With wind and especially with solar power, the variable output is always pushing the frequency one way or the other, and that creates a great need for costly balancing services. Negative pricing is an example of such a balancing service. Sounds good, but for how long do you think your electricity company can keep on paying you to consume power?
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!?”
This is a real problem for renewables.
You don’t get paid when the sun shines, and you don’t get paid for when it does not.
You had to pay for building the solar panels and maintaining them. Corporate greed aside none sane would like their tax money either to be spent on producing electricity when it’s not needed.
Next step for renewables must be storage that is cheap enough for it to beat having fossil fuel on standby.
I feel like energy storage has been the challenge since I learned what a computer is, it really is the 3rd wheel of the cab
If you passively produce more energy than what you actually need, that excess energy can be stored. And even if the stored energy won’t be 100% efficient, it’s still passively produced and can offset the peak hours consumption as needed.
We have a lot of energy storage solutions l, let’s stop the fossi fuels subsidies and spend them on scaling power storage.
You have to build and maintain the storage.
Even if the electricity is free you’ll have to replace your battery once in a while and at current prices that is ludicrously expensive.
It’s cheaper to pay an already built fossil fuel plant to idle with spare capacity.
Give it a few years for battery technology and it may look different.
The problem is that the planet is burning right now, but we only talk in terms of profits.
Yeah the fossil fuels industry is “cheaper” because it has a shit ton of subsidies and does not include the environmental cost.
We have solutions that work right now that we could start to build and maintain while reducing/eliminating the most polluting sources of energy.
The solutions don’t have to be perfect, they have to be better. And if your only argument is money, then fuck off.
It sounds like mummy still pays your bills. Troll grade: C-.
This is trollception I guess.
Corporate greed aside none sane would like their tax money either to be spent on producing electricity when it’s not needed.
You need to set the corporate greed aside in your own mind, too (not saying you’re greedy, saying you’ve been indoctrinated to only see life in capitalist terms). Stop thinking in “cost” or “profit”, start thinking in “benefit” and “use”. Producing electricity when it isn’t needed is only a problem when someone is looking to make money off of it.
Producing electricity when it isn’t being used is problematic for the grid. So is producing too little.
Producing electricity when it isn’t needed is only a problem when someone is looking to make money off of it.
I never said it should be. There are plenty of ways to regulate electricity production, storage, and even usage, they just aren’t considered “profitable” so are dismissed, overlooked, and or deliberately smeared and destroyed because they threaten those whose profits they would hurt.
Yes, but we already have many solutions ti store energy. Let’s spend the fossil fuel industry subsidies on scaling these storage method instead.
Changing the words does not change the meaning.
You don’t get paid when the sun shines
You get paid when people on your grid demand the electricity your plant produces. That’s true whether the electricity comes from the sun or fossilized trees.
Corporate greed aside none sane would like their tax money either to be spent on producing electricity when it’s not needed.
A/C usage peaks during the day and wanes at night. Laborers in virtually every field tend to work during daylight hours and sleep at night. We use more electricity when the sun is shining.
Even before you get into battery power, we have ample opportunity to grow solar inputs into the grid before we get to the point where its being wasted. At peak capacity, we’re using far more electricity than current renewables provide.
Batteries are a late stage solution to a marginal problem.
To be honest, at grid scale, I don’t see why the answer to this today isn’t that the government/energy companies just build a shit load of gravity batteries and use the basically free power times to build grid supply for when the sun’s gone down.
Paying billions for mega projects to save millions on cheap electricity makes no sense.
Napkin math gravity battery Last figures I found are from 2022 the costs storing 1GW 24 hours is $150 per installed kWh
My apartment has an estimated electricity consumption annually of 2000kWh, I’ll need to store half that for $150 per kWh in a structure that lasts 100 years without maintenance, then crumbles into dust and needs to be rebuilt. It would average out to $1500 per year.
My current electricity bill is about $600 per year.
I think your calculations are way off based on what I’ve just checked.
Firstly the average UK house (which is on average a fair bit smaller than American houses, for example), which typically doesn’t use AC and electric heating/cooking uses 2,700kWh (and around 10,000kWh of gas). I imagine that most other countries that don’t typically use gas and have AC, have a significantly higher average.
Secondly I’m seeing several sources saying <$0.20/kWh is what pumped hydro battery storage costs, which is roughly 2/3 of the price of grid electricity in my country.
Finally, we spend billions on power plants—why not power storage too? It’s necessary infrastructure spending whichever way you go about it.
I don’t live in the US either.
I think the actual value on my bill is 2300kwh. But we can use 2700.
I can’t find any source for $0.2/kWh. I used https://www.energy.gov/eere/analysis/2022-grid-energy-storage-technology-cost-and-performance-assessment and eyeballed the cheapest gravitational storage. PSH is still above $50. Well let’s assume $0.2 per kWh per year and that half of it can be stored it’s $270 per year in storage fee
My actual price for electricity is much lower than €600 per year, most of it is taxes and fees that does not get benefit from storage. Looking up the invoice from March i paid $0.07 per kWh, September was $0.01. Half of 2700 would be $95 using March price for the entire year.
We are spending billions, we must spend billions, but we have to spend them where it makes sense. Spending 270 to save 95 is insanity.
Wow your electricity prices are insanely cheap to me! I knew it was a bit more expensive here, but not by over 3x or even 30x based on your September estimate! We also have standing charges that amount to something like £250 a year even if you use no electricity whatsoever. My electricity & gas bill is over double yours for two people in a 2 bed house and we basically never use the heating. I think the economy of it makes sense with my situation but it definitely doesn’t for you
If you don’t mind me asking, where is it you live? Does your country have a lot of oil reserves or something?
North Scandinavia.
Most of the electricity here is hydroelectric that has been built many years ago so the power plants are paid off.
The price during summer is very low. In the winter especially the cold months is much higher with Dec-Feb being the peak.
The determining factor is still the capex for storing it. At $50 it makes no sense. At $0.2 it makes sense in some places. I don’t know which assumption is correct, I expect to be wrong in 50% of the cases when I argue on the internet.
2000kwh a YEAR? Do you live in 70° weather year around and have all gas utilities or what?
No. It’s district heating and not included on the electricity bill. I live north of the Arctic circle and a house from the same year with a heat pump would use an order of magnitude more.
The example was meant to highlight the absurd costs despite ludicrously favorable assumptions.
Interesting. For reference, I use more than that most months, but I live in Texas and it is very very hot.
My apartment has an estimated electricity consumption annually of 2000kWh, I’ll need to store half that
Your electricity usage isn’t equally distributed. You use more power during the day - primarily for cooling your house - than you do at night.
We also get a glut of wind power in the mornings and evenings, during big swings in temperature. Plenty of opportunity to harness cheap energy at the moment it is available.
And even after that, battery prices have been falling for years. Current EV batteries are $133/kWh with expectations of $100/kWh by next year and under $80/kWh by 2030.
That’s before we get into the benefits of High Voltage DC transmissions, which can move large volumes of electricity across regions with minimal loss. Peak production on one coast can offset higher than expected usage on another.
Current EV batteries are
And just like that you’ve shown that gravity batteries aren’t feasible.
Storage is going to be a big part of the solution going forward. But it’s going to be chemical batteries and thermal batteries, not gravity batteries.
Give it a few years and I’ve got my hopes up for batteries.
The calculations showed the absurdity in gravity storage today, not batteries in the future.
Gravity just isn’t a good store of energy relative to chemical and nuclear alternatives.
It’s a simple method for storing energy but not an efficient method. That’s why the human body uses ATP instead of a bunch of pebbles that get lifted to our heads and dropped to our perineum.
But hey, we’ll always have Dams. And tidal generators are gaining momentum. They’re basically gravity batteries.
Because “gravity batteries” is a stupid inefficient concept peddled by techbros to solve a huge problem with “a magic solution”. In reality, they require either digging straight down like a mine shaft, but at huge scale, or a high rise building with all the weight concentrated on its top floor when the batteries are “charged”. Wind would sway that shit left and right, the weight concentration would undermine / damage the building if it even was possible to build at scale.
Well, you can use dams.
The problem is really down to finding places where you can actually build something like a hydroelectric power plant.
You need a large area you can safely flood. (No villages in the area or only villages you can buy out the owners of) or a high up lake.
The area to flood needs to have the geology required to construct a dam safely.
And finally, the area needs to be pretty high up and have an area below you can direct the outgoing water to.
Yeah, but there are already built hydroeletric dams that can be reused like that.
so-called “gravity batteries” is pretty much exactly a dam with a mini-dam/reservoir at the bottom. When there is an excess, you run the motor to reverse the waterflow to pump uphill into a highe-elevation water retention pond/mini-dam.
This also helps reduce the amount of outflow water “lost” due to high-demand. Since you could take almost a day to fill the bottom reservoir and spend “wind”/solar to pump back the “lost” water downstream back into the higher-level reservoir.
Even if things are inefficient wind/solar are “renewable”, so you can keep “wasting” excess to replenish the dam and still make enough money back ( think in-terms of drought, flooding, windy, sunny, cloudy, etc ) you can basically keep the high-output “system” always topped-up with water. And still supply water + electricity as it is needed. There is no “downside”.
Not everyone agrees. So opinions can differ.
With the situation in Ukraine, we really should spend on home scale storage for the resiliency against any disaster, even though it’s not as cost efficient
Storage needs both supply and demand. Demand is easy. However storage would be even less likely without an excess of solar supply to feed it
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.
Would it really be peanuts? Solar panel manufacture isn’t exactly cheap, nor entirely sustainable (see, for instance, the black market for sand; and economics/politics over lithium mining). Solar panels also degrade; new technology replaces old and has to be paid for and made and installed; the infrastructure tying it all together isn’t free either…
I feel like solar power, for all its excellence, is not as simple as upgrade as my rts-/tycoon-/sim-gamer’s mind thinks it should be.
Upgrading is never simple or straightforward. But it is something we need to do otherwise we won’t have a planet to live on.
Agreed, but there’s a real cost involved and a real cost analysis to do. Like with the question of people upgrading to more efficient cars (and scrapping the old) or running the old for longer to minimise car manufacture.
The “problem” of negative energy costs is easy to solve, but quite costly.
Build water desalination/carbon capture and storage/hydrogen generation plants that only run when the price goes below 0; even though these are very energy intensive, they would help stabilize the grid.
Then build more solar; you want to try to have the daytime price stay in the negative as often as possible.
The solution we’re using instead of course, instead of all that environment crap you suggested, is running huge crypto farms only during the hours when the energy is in surplus.
To be fair; this is a valid use case.
If you are a solar power producer; rather than offering your energy at -ve rates; run a crypto farm when the output is too high. This is far better than running the same farm on coal.
But it would be better going into something useful.
I want to pre-empt the argument from the Bitcoin people that while this is a logically sound argument for how Bitcoin mining could potentially help the environment by making renewables more economically feasible, using this argument to describe Bitcoin mining electricity usage is completely invalid—Bitcoin mining as it exists today does not merely use excess renewable energy; it consumes energy even in times of demand when it could be given to residential, commercial, or industrial customers. Without the excess demand from today’s Bitcoin mines, the capacity that is freed up can be used to close fossil fuel power plants.
To be clear, Bitcoin mining will never help the environment. There are ways to reduce it’s negative effects though
CCS would be much better than bitcoin; even though CCS is very inefficient; if the power price is effectively -ve; that means that you are only paying maintenance costs to run your CCS
So if a large region (say europe, or USA + canada) is cloudy and without wind, then all transactions must stop and the remaining countries are susceptible to represent over 50% of the hashing capacity. A perfectly sound system I’m eager to see.
Build water desalination/carbon capture and storage/hydrogen generation plants that only run when the price goes below 0; even though these are very energy intensive, they would help stabilize the grid.
Basically opportunistic energy consumption.
you want to try to have the daytime price stay in the negative as often as possible.
That’s not exactly conducive towards people building more solar.
So what they are saying is that our current financial system is too focused on short term gains to cope with short term losses?
Sigh, when I grew up, I was allways taught to save money so that I have a buffer to fall back on. This concept seems to have completely gone out the window for busniesses lately.
I dislike the talk about how capitalism is bad as a general concept, but when seeing stuff like this I do agree with it in parts.
Ok, so let’s solve the issue.
There is too much electricity, so generating power to transmit to the network will cost us money.
This has an easy solution, just don’t transmit it to the network.
Build a battery facility where you store the power instead, infact if the price of electricity is negative, use the power on the grid and charge your batteries as well, I mean, when the electricity cost is negative, you are being paid to consume power.
Then when the sun goes down, and the electricity price goes up, you sell the charge you have in the batteries.
Depending on your location you could even set up a pumped storage system, where instead of batteries getting charged, you use the cheap excess energy to pump a resarvoir full of water, and release it when you need the power.
This is exactly what we’re gonna see on a large scale in a few years.
I’m very hopeful for flow batteries to improve to a point where they can be very cheaply installed at scale. Seems much better environmentally than lithium ion, and the drawbacks matter less for grid storage.
Flow battery drawbacks aren’t drawbacks for home use, let alone grid scale.
What are the drawbacks?
Too heavy, and too big. This is compared to an automotive battery though. They take up the size of something like a fridge. They are also expensive but prices are bound to come down once production is up. But they have claimed zero capacity degradation for decades they say. And the liquid inside is a fire retardant, so if you puncture a battery that would actually put out the fire.
There are number of videos on YouTube, it’s an interesting technology.
Absolutely. Home use is what got me interested in them in the first place. I love to DIY stuff (recently I’ve been building planar speakers from scratch) and had the crazy idea of building one for my house.
a few years
Snowy Hydro cost overruns would like a word
This is generally the right idea of a solution, but it’s a difficult engineering problem.
It’s not “just an economics problem” despite the headline.
The “cost of power becoming negative” is phrased in an economic way but what it really means is the grid has too much power and that power needs to go somewhere or it will damage infrastructure.
I know that, and to incentivice people to use the power, they pay you to do it.
Yes but there are many solutions already to that problem.
The first one being to shutdown a few stations production when overproducing. The second one being a myriad of storage solutions that already exists and scale them.
It is an economic problem because we already have many ways to skin the cat, but it won’t produce shareholder value in the short term.
“Economic problem” isn’t merely short form for “if we had a socialist system we could solve it with free money.” These solutions require us to dig huge amounts of minerals out of the ground and tear the earth apart in the process. And we’re already doing that at a rate exponentially larger than we ever have in history. Plus these are the same materials we need to build the batteries for EVs, so building them for grid storage competes with the EV transition.
And then you factor in the rapidly increasing electric demand we’re producing by switching over to EVs and that means the demand on the grid is even higher. The grid wasn’t built to be able to source power from everywhere so putting solar panels on everyone’s rooftops is making the situation even worse.
It’s always funny to me that the first argument is always thinking that socialists want free money.
How many billions are we giving away to big corpos for them to do buy backs and pocket the change?
Being socialist means reusing the tax money for the benefits of the citizens, not the corpos. Trickle down economics are a sham and never worked
I agree that it takes resources, but we could finance the extraction of these resources instead of giving subsidies to fossil and fuel industry, or paying for sports stadium for that matter, or giving money to any corpos really.
And let’s not play coy here and think that the fossil industry isn’t destroying the earth.
We have the money, and the solutions right now, but the profits are in the way.
The issue with the green energy transition (renewable energy, grid upgrades, grid scale storage, EVs, and elimination of fossil fuel household heating) is that well over 90% of all the critical minerals we need are mined and/or refined in China. No one wants to move any of this stuff to the US because the environmental damage and refining waste are extremely toxic, far more so than any other resource extraction we do here.
Furthermore, all the end-point usage of these resources (making solar panels, capacitors, semiconductors, printed circuit boards, and finished electronics assemblies) is all done in China as well. So if we mined and refined all the minerals we’d end up shipping them all to China to be used in manufacturing.
So now if you want to avoid all that you’re talking about building the entire electronics supply chain inside western countries. But then you face the further issue that there simply aren’t enough electrical engineers in the west to work at these factories. So now you’ve got to retool the entire education system to train a new generation for this critical work.
At the same time, you’re having to deal with the fact that most Americans don’t want to work in these places. TSMC has been very vocal about their struggles to build these chip foundries in the US and hire Americans at the low wages it actually takes to make this stuff competitive against the obscenely cheap products coming from China. Now consider the fact that TSMC is considered a crème de la crème employer in Taiwan, and the factories in China making capacitors and other bulk commodity components pay far less and have far lower margins, and you can begin to see the issue.
Americans want the green energy revolution but they don’t want to give up even an inch of quality of life to get it. Neither the rightest of the far right Republicans nor the leftest of the far left Democrats has expressed any desire to volunteer to lower their own standard of living. The whole story thing is a big fight to try to force other people to lower theirs.
A lot of the issues you describe are directly linked to money. Yes it takes time and investments, but look at situations like the Covid where pretty much every western countries got caught with their pants down when a vaccine needed to be produced, or PPE were short.
I understand that it takes time, efforts and money to get to a point where we will have a renewable grid, but there’s always people complaining that it’s not the perfect solution, so we should continue on the status quo.
The best time to start was decades ago, the second best time to start is now.
But at this point, this is a political discussion more than a technical one.
We have the means to do it, but not the will.
And yes, our quality of life will definitely be affected, but climate change is already doing that, and the grees that is causing that.
Why are individuals expected to have an emergency fund yet corporations get money from the government?
That’s really not an easy solution at all. It’s simple, conceptually, but it’s a huge series of projects. And expensive.
Early adopters will profit the most, it’s a non-issue.
I know that, but with long term planning its fine.
This has an easy solution, just don’t transmit it to the network.
It’s the base load providers that don’t like this. Coal and nuclear don’t like to ramp down. They can’t shut down easily and their installation keeps costing money but stops bringing in money in that period. They’ll go complain to daddy government how unfair it is.
Until batteries start replacing them by being cheaper.
it’s long past time we took businessman out of control and replaced them with scientists.
In which case they would choose Nuclear over Solar 9/10 times. I’m onboard
They would probably use nuclear for base load, until something better is found. But it won’t “replace” solar.
With AI we will need loads of base load
Nuclear has few advantages over solar.
Solar + batteries.
~$1000/kW vs $6 - 10,000/kW in 2018, it is cheaper today; projected costs to drop to as low as $560/kW in 2050.
Add in the ~$150/kWh of grid scale storage with the associated switchgear to connect it to the grid.
For a 10MW + 20MWh solar system; you are looking at approx $13,000,000 + install costs of probably $2-3,000,000.
I’m on board with whatever the scientists conclude. I’m not a scientist, so if they say nuclear, I’m behind nuclear. If they say solar, I’m behind solar. If they say wind, I’m behind wind. Trust scientists. If you’re trained in science, definitely verify - there’s some bad science out there for sure. But if you have no expertise in the area, just trust the scientific community.
This might not be the case anymore, now that solar is dirt cheap.
But, as another commenter said, I’m onboard with any decision that scientists (including both energy and climate sciences) and engineers come up with working together.
I don’t know a single who would, including myself.
Do you like… have an allergy to good ideas?
The down voters and you should maybe reread my comment and the one I replied to… Sorry to burst your bubble.
I did, it looks like an illogical dislike of nuclear. Not sure if it’s ignorance or just an emotional response but you might want to do some research. A lot of people don’t like things they don’t understand.
No they wouldnt
Source: my ass
Source: worked with scientists for years. Theres a certain irony here when you made your claim without sources. Also you are very rude
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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.
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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.
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
The real issue isn’t the overproduction per se, but that we (globally speaking) don’t have enough cheap scalable responsive distributed storage. I’m writing this from a privileged position since Switzerland has loads of dams and can pump water during such peaks. But it’s clear that’s not the solution everywhere. I hope a good cheap mass producible battery tech with less rare earth metal requirements comes along soon.
The real special bit is that this crap isn’t coming from, say Harvard, who one expects is all about business, but MIT which is supposed to be about Science and Engineering.
The media arm of MIT has been steaming garbage for years and constantly misrepresents the studies from their own researchers for clickbait.
But that aside, even though the engineering work out of MIT is solid, their economic opinions heavily reflect the fact that it’s an institution full of trust fund nepotism.
The grid needs to balance input and output. You can’t just “throw away” power.
It’s a real problem — not the “electric companies are losing money” part, but the “we need to keep the grid balanced” part.
That can indeed be a problem.
It is however not what the MIT guys wrote as being the problem: they quite literally said the problem with too much solar generation at peak times is that it drives prices down.
Also, curiously, the prices being driven down actually helps with the real technical problem that you point out: those consumers who can move their consumption times will tend to move them to those hours when the prices are lowest thus helping solve it. Same thing goes for investors: the more the price is pushed down at peak solar production times, the more appealing it is to invest in things like storage or even solutions with lower efficiency (such as green hydrogen or electricity transportation cables to markets less well served by solar).
The low prices aren’t the problem from a technical point of view, quite the contrary: they’re an incentive to invest in solutions (which is going to employ a lot of techies, so supposedly MIT would be all in favor of it)
Well then there is another way of seeing this: there is an engineering/difficulty with such large power fluctuations that “drive electricity prices negative” because it implies a much more variable demand on existing power infrastructure.
You’re way better at this than the clowns in the MIT press department and you only tried for a few seconds. Which means the people who wrote the headline are either so stupid they can’t tie their own shoes, or they have a malicious agenda. I lean towards the latter.
“For years, mankind has yearned to destroy the Sun.” - CM Burns.
