Now where is that politician that was so passionately talking about coal the other time...?
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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"Struggling"
We have so much solar power that we can no longer efficiently profit off of it. We would either need to reduce the margins we make on electricity or destroy our stock of solar capital to reinflate the price of energy.
What to do... what to do...
H₂?
Not really struggling
All they need to do is subsidise batteries and problem solved
Figuring out grid scale storage isn't easy, but the good thing about it is that you can figure out storage at slightly smaller scales to alleviate the problem somewhat, and build on that success to try to get to daily storage to meet nighttime demand, then up to weekly storage to handle fluctuations in weather, and maybe even seasonal storage to deal with seasonal variation in both supply and demand.
But storage doesn't have to just be chemical batteries, either. Some can be demand shifting, like desalination or water pumping based on excess power supply. Maybe even intermittently powering direct air capture of CO2 if there's so much excess energy they don't know what to do with it. Some can be storage of heat, whether really hot like molten salt that can run turbines for dispatchable electricity, or just at the residential scale with a bunch of distributed hot water tanks, or everything in between. There are also some storage technologies relying on gravity (pumped hydro if the geography supports it), compressed air, flywheels (could be important for maintaining grid inertia for stability).
And there's always curtailment, where you just don't generate the power, and turn off some the panels in the middle of the day.
Mining bitcoin with the excess power and then subsidizing the cost to generate power could work too.
Australia has too many electricity distributors shipping profits overseas instead of upgrading the grid
V2G and V2H is here, so you'll be able to store there and draw down overnight in a suitable ecar.
A large pumped hydro in Qld has been cancelled by the new Lib government, so won't be able to store it there. Snowy Hydro pumped storage is way behind schedule and locally Redflow went backrupt, so huge Zinc Flow storage batteries arent available to rollout to store excess energy and Lithuim is a shitty choice for large grid batteries.
Subsidise home battery systems so that the excess is stored locally instead of going back into the grid.
Which also has the additional benefit for homeowners of local backup power in the case of a blackout :)
I've said it before and I'll say it again, this feels like a good place for Hydrogen power to step in.
One of the oft repeated concerns is that generating hydrogen to power vehicles the takes a lot of energy, which often comes from dirty sources.
One of the oft repeated issues for solar (or wind etc) is that it's available at certain times and not in and of itself storable or transportable, so excess is lost.
So, take the excess solar energy, produce hydrogen and store for off-peak times or to distribute.
Seems like a win to me.
So, take the excess solar energy, produce hydrogen and store for off-peak times or to distribute.
Storing hydrogen is difficult and expensive. Not even to say it can't be done, but it would require the energy companies to invest money in capital, and they hate doing that.
And this involves only driving in summer when there is excess energy? Or getting through winter by storing enough hydrogen to make the Beirut explosion look like a firecracker in comparison?
Just ship the hydrogen to the other hemisphere.
That sounds fun. Not only are we already losing ton of energy to create the hydrogen, we can now lose even more and make it more expensive by trying to liquefy/compress it to make it somewhat transportable. [1]
Also, almost 90% of humans living in the northen hemisphere will surely not cause any issues to this plan. [2]
You're not LOSING anything if it's capturing already excess energy, which would by its nature be lost if not used at the time of generation
Neither solar panels, nor hydrogen generators are free. If you need to build extra panels and hydrogen generators, you are making the infrastructure more expensive, consequently raising electricity prices. Or hydrogen prices if you use it as fuel instead of power storage.
Just ship the humans to the other hemisphere.
🤣
That's funny, but modern solar panel power plants don't care that it's winter. The panels rotate and an arid area isn't getting that much more cloud cover.
The article says the ones it talks about do. Also, rotating panels can't stop days from being shorter during winter.
I'm not saying it's not lower. I'm saying it's not nearly as big of a deal as people say it is.
So what are you saying exactly? With what issue would using hydrogen help?
I'm just talking about winter vs summer capacity in desert solar installations.
Night? Longer periods of cloudy days or storms?
So we are not using it for cars, but to make electricity at night? Just even less efficiently than hydro pumped power? Ok...
Hydroelectric is great where it is available, but it's again limited by landscape and other factors in use
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