That's what storage is about
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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Battery power and transferring power across the entire nation. When is sunny one place it's not sunny elsewhere. As things get connected together this is useful. We can all use cheap as free electricity
Let's make a cheap battery.
Connect pump to body of water. Pump up when electricity is cheap. Let water run thru turbine when electricity is expensive.
Capitalism is the problem, here.
This should be a warning: the rich are going to fight the idea of post-scarcity tooth and nail, because not being able to coerce people woth the threat of homelessness or starvation will remove just about the only lever they have.
The capitalism that has encouraged people to install lots of rooftop solar capacity?
Excess power on the grid is a very real problem though. It's easy enough to shut off photovoltaic solar when not needed (which is probably what should be happening here!), but industrial scale generators cannot all be turned on or off on a whim. Serious damage can result if power production does not match the load.
It's easy to dump a few kW (just boil some water or turn on a heater), but dumping many MW or even GW is not trivial.
It's more that people are confused about what an cost-optimal system looks like — if you're building around renewables, it means there will inherently be periods of excess production, where we're forced to curtail production, and spill sunshine or wind, and the price drops to zero or below. In California, that means the springtime, when there's a lot of sunshine, combined with moderate temperatures. There will also be periods where energy is relatively scarce (nighttime winter heating, hot days with lots of AC running) and the price is high.
We have systems like "gravity batteries." If there is an excess of power then there should be storage systems like running water up a hill/tower, that can be released at times of greater demand.
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Someone should show this to that guy in Texas who was complaining about the 8 minutes of power generation solar loses every few decades during an eclipse.
Oh no! Not an excess of available power! How will the state ever recover from such a catastrophe?
I hope it doesn’t spill into the water, permeate the air, or leave the land uninhabitable for thousands of years.
Yeah, it's not like it can't be saved in the brand new storage facility that happens to be one of the biggest in the world. This article reads like propaganda against solar.
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I’m not familiar with how power grids work, is an excess of power bad for the grid if it isn’t used?
Yeah, various power generation techniques (e.g., big industrial power plants) do not want to run without a load. And switching them off temporarily isn't really feasible (shutting them for good would ultimately be nice, but that's another topic...).
And you can't just "dump" huge amounts of excess of power
it needs to go somewhere.
Kind of, yeah. But excess solar can be turned off almost instantly so it isn't like it's an impossible problem.
Sorry for asking all these questions, but how do you turn off solar? Doesn’t it keep generating while there’s sunlight?
If it's turned off, it's like a battery that isn't connected to anything. You have a voltage across the positive and negative terminals, but power can't actually flow unless there's somewhere for it to go.
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No. They constantly monitor it and keep it in line. The power grid itself is totally fine. Completely.
The only "problem" is they cannot easily turn on or off huge old power plants, so if the sun is blazing, they might have to direct excess old generation power to batteries or other grids.
The only "problem" is the power companies don't get to charge much for simply managing the grid. They charge mostly for power generation, so it ends up costing them money. If they were simply a government paid service, they wouldn't have to care what so ever which direction power is flowing as long as it has somewhere to go.
The main power company in CA (PG&E) has built tons of other things into the bills aside from power generation, so I expect my bill (which has gone up 300% since 2018) to continue to climb despite this.
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They keep it in line by curtailing or switching off generation. The generator typically still gets paid as if it were generating whatever it has available, which is perhaps an issue, but the total generation is reduced to meet the demand.
This is why there is negative pricing, it's cheaper to sell electricity in the negative than to pay a generator to be offline.
They can't direct excess generation to batteries if the batteries aren't there yet. They're being installed, but the overall capacity is still relatively low. Transferring it to other grids also has limits, and in particular if there's an excess of solar in one region the neighbouring regions also probably have an excess, so there really is no other option but to curtail.
Jeeze it almost seems like the 21st century might take some sort of smart grid, and having a bunch of big dumb plants that cannot be turned on and off without great expense should be a relic of the past!
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This is only a problem because of money. Maybe California should install some power storage centers in order to hold the excess for later.
I'm hoping to one day install some solar, and looking forward to setting up non-battery "storage"
e.g., electric water heater that turns on when there's an excess of power, deep freezer that gets as cold as possible when there's excess power, that sort of thing. It seems thermodynamics is the relevant discipline for these sorts of "storage" methods :)
As an aside
while smart devices are much maligned, some rudimentary smart features for matching consumption seems like a pretty good idea. (If I ever get around to this stuff it'll be local control via HomeAssistant.)
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There's already some storage: its the #1 source of electricity during the evening peak, but realistically, we're going to want enough renewables that we sometimes see curtailment
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