How else will they be able to continue justify pulling coal out of the ground if they have a robust power grid based on renewables
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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No such thing as too much solar to anyone but an oil man
Not currently, no. But it’s easy to envision a future where we have to do something with solar production in excess of power needs when all forms of energy capture are exhausted.
Desalination, aluminum recycling, ad infinitum. Anyone who says excess solar is an insurmountable problem is manipulating you.
Hydrogen/electro chemistry is another use of too much batteries.
Speaking of too much battery, an EV range is often 3-5 times daily use (60km average per day is vehicle average, but many use less). It's not a big deal to have several days worth of fuel in your tank, and so V2G is a good way to have too much batteries, and let consumers profit from their vehicle. This is the app that exterminates oil and other FFs. Hydrogen or your listed apps are good ways to drain having too much battery charge for the next day.
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Just read the same article about CA last week; too much solar to be used so the excess solar generated, get this, was sold-often at a loss--to Arizona(the fact AZ can't make it's own sufficient solar shows the willful neglect, economic and political nature of energy!) and it lowered AZ bills but not CA. We're back to energy traders and Enron price manipulations in the US after 20 years.
Batteries will fix much of it but until the grid has proper storage consumers getting fucked by businesses per usual.
What's also interesting to me is that we here in Utah used to (and maybe still do?) sell dirty electricity to CA (we produce a lot from coal and gas), because they didn't have sufficient base supply.
CA really needs effective base power supply, whether that's batteries or some other clean-ish energy source/storage solution. Meanwhile, electricity here in Utah is quite cheap at $0.12/kWh-ish, which is nice, and something like 1/3 of what CA charges.
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That's what hydrogen production from water electrolysis is for.
Ohh, you gave me an idea! Given that it also happens in CA, maybe we should use the excess for freshwater production from seawater.
That still leaves the brine problem. Youve just traded one for another.
Hydrogen wouldn't cause another problem.
Some could be used in molten salt reactors/batteries, no?
I imagine so, but were talking about at best case of a 50% water 50% brine solution with reverse osmosis, and worse if it's a thermal desalination plant. It's a fuck ton of liquid, more than we could ever hope to use in a reactor like that.
Some other ideas are evaporate the brine and use the salt for roads in winter, but again, it's more than we could manage at scale, and salting roads isn't ideal either.
Are you saying that we could make use of sodium metal for batteries of all sorts at reasonable prices due to it's over abundance by just getting more of it using solar power?
I don't know if the output of the desalination is what we actually need or how much refinement it would need, but the salt output would probably still outpace our ability to use it. Sodium is just 1 factor of building these newer batteries.
e.g Tesla has a factory with a 40gwh storage output when fully scaled, and it's taken years to get there. Cells weren't the only factor in that.
Yeah, it is a ton of liquid, and I have no idea what the actual amounts look like vs actual uses for salt, such as water softeners (I use exclusively solar salt in mine). I have a hard time visualizing how much salt that actually is, and I haven't looked up the numbers.
Perhaps there's an opportunity for at least one such facility?
I mean if you pull the hydrogen, and are left with brine when the hydrogen is used it will release water, which effectively will get condensated and come back down as rain. Mostly ending up back in the oceans at the end of the day right? Wouldn't that balance out the water to salt ratio at that point if the salt was just added back into the ocean? (Assuming it is dipersed over a longer area. Maybe even just making hydrogen powered ship motors that release the salt back into the water outflowing from the exhaust. Or is it that the chemicals wouldn't form their original bonds, so you may have essentially drain cleaner left over when you are done with the electrolysis?
These are two separate processes.
You desalinate ocean water to produce fresh water, which you can use for crops, city utilities, etc. That reduces the strain on local aquifers and reservoirs, especially since California tends to overuse their supply of water (especially poignant for us in Utah; we all rely on the Colorado River).
Hydrogen extraction tends to use pure freshwater to prevent corrosion during the electrolysis process. There has been some research around using seawater directly, but I'm guessing there's still a fair amount of work yet to do this at scale, and I certainly don't think we're there yet for ships.
Ah, I missed what you meant, was thinking just use the excess power as fuel for electrolysis to collect hydrogen tanks out at sea, then use that to store it for use in hydrogen based motors on ships or what not, letting the run off water go back into the ocean, hopefully leaving an equal amount of all elements in the water.
But then thought of the bonds
Well ya we could definitely use the excess energy to desalinize and then try and find a use for that one plant that handles over capacity. Millions of people rely on it for clean water, but today we mostly just dump it back into the ocean which causes problems and isn't a long term solution.
It's just not a solution to the problem at scale, more like a band aid. But it could buy enough time to build more batteries.
Ka...booom!
Seen some math on the mountains of salt we would have to move. Very discouraging for desalinization and/or getting hydrogen that way.
We don't have to get the hydrogen from sea water. It really just depends on where the excess is. Maybe that's not great for Australia or California... but for other places it could be.
Brine, eh? Well we do grow lots of cucumbers....
;-)
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Every smart person told them, "update the grids before adding solar."
But did they listen? No. Because updating the grids was an expensive and difficult endeavour and they just wanted to lower their costs first.
Obama tried to push grid upgrades for years, kept getting shot down. His plans would all be done by now. Throw in the fuel economy requirements of 54.5 mpg requirements for cars and light trucks and we would have seen billions of barrels of oil not being needed. (Lower gas prices as well). Granted it wasn't everything, but it was what we needed to start doing. Now 13, 14 years later after Trump rolled back those fuel efficiency policies as much as he could because it cost manufacturers more money in research, we are much closer to a rock we can't live on and haven't advanced nearly enough. So we voted in Drill Baby Drill to finish off the rock.
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Which is so odd to me, because electricity just a couple states over is about 1/3 the cost vs CA. I pay $0.12/kWh in UT, whereas CA pays more like $0.32/kWh.
If we look at solar generation, we're doing pretty well here in Utah vs other states in the US (source). Taking a rough average of that data, here's what the numbers look like:
- California - 8500 MWh, or ~217 MWh per million people
- Utah - 650 MWh, or ~203 MWh per million people
- Texas - 4800 MWh, or about 160 MWh per million people
- Arizona - 1700 MWh, or about 242 MWh per million people
I just don't understand why California electricity prices are so high. It's not like they're generating a ton more than other states in the area or anything.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the figures, but the source I quoted didn't say anything about per-capita production, so I think it's total for the state.
California rates are high because everyone has to pay for forest fires. Everyone except shareholders.
the math aint mathing
What's not mathing?
I pulled population numbers from Wikipedia, so:
- California - 39.1M
- Utah - 3.2M
- Texas - 30.5M
- Arizona 7.1M
I rounded a little here and there, but that shouldn't change the numbers too significantly.
I paid $0.52/kWh in California before I moved out of state
Even more with fees tacked on.
Wow, that's nuts. After all fees, I'm around $0.12-0.13/kWh, and it seems we generate a similar amount of solar.
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Sometimes the best way to get things done is to wedge your way in and cause a problem. It sucks, but humans be humaning
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