this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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If you have a solar farm, invest in LLM and bitcoin server farm. Run it whenever you can't make money selling energy.
Wasting energy isn't the same as investing
Resource inefficiency is inconsequential as long as it generates profit within a capitalistic system.
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But this basically is the reason why no one wants to build a nuclear plant. Such a power plant will basically run at a massive loss during high solar and wind energy supply. A nuclear reactor takes a long time to shutdown once the reaction has started. So it can’t dynamically scale the production based on market demands. A nuclear power plant cost at least $8 billion and 8 years to build and needs to be operating for 50 years to see a return on investment. But during those 50 years wind, solar and battery tech will obviously advance as well. It’s basically a given that a nuclear power plant is never going to make the investment back. Hence why no one wants to build one. And therefore the government should do it.
Uhm, the baseload myth? Build a 100 buffers (be it battery or lakes or heat) for the money one nuclear plant costs. Like you said.
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Needed to double check that I'm actually still on Lemmy as so many of the top comments made sense.
I wouldn't be sure we can't. Just have to find the right "angle":
https://futurism.com/the-byte/startup-space-mirror-sunlight-night
Kinda different like during night time it doesn't really makes sense to buy sunlight to make electricity.
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Scientists: Hi here is a physical, technical, materially real limitation of most renewables that most of you should know about by now.
Shitforbrains shitter leftie: must be capitalism
i mean yeah capitalism is a materially real limitation here ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If the technical limitation is "it drives down prices" then it is about capitalism, yes.
How do you even manage to not get that?
That isn't the limitation though, it's the consequence. The phrasing of the tweet is extremely memable, but thinking about it for 5 seconds should make you realize that negative prices mean they REALLY need to get rid of it. Because having too much energy in the grid is a problem.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't understand it well enough to explain it but I think that this actually is not the issue here. Something about it making the grids unstable?
Though based on their phrasing it 100% sounds like "lol how can be greedy if free"
I know how to store excess energy from kilowatt hours to gigawatt hours without using batteries, and only using cheap, inert materials.
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Negative prices are an opportunity and people will take advantage. This would be the perfect time to change batteries, make hydrogen, send compressed air into an old mine or refill a dam
Ya know what, I'm gonna solar even harder
puts on sunglasses 😎