That’s the common thought, but it rests on the assumption that demand cannot be manipulated.
Legacy generation incentivized overnight consumption, when the grid had excess production capacity it needed to unload. With solar, we need to reverse those incentives. If it is harder to produce power overnight, we can drive large industry (like steel mills and aluminum smelters) to switch from overnight operations to daytime consumption.
Overnight storage is something we do need, but it is not efficient, and the need for it should be avoided wherever possible.
Parking garages are usually full during the day, when solar is at its highest generation. In the near future, as EV adoption rises, parking garages need charging stations at every space, sucking up every “excess” watt on the grid.
It’s basically solved. Sodium batteries are cheaper and much more durable than lithium batteries, and are currently being commercialized. Their only downside is that they are heavier, but that does not matter for grid-scale storage.
Being cheaper than Lithium is great, but are they cheaper than nuclear?
The manpower of maintaining all these batteries seems like it would also be a lot, how would you do it for an entire grid, or would you need to have each individual placing a battery on their property to deal with brownouts?
Problem with coal or nuklear is it isn’t cheap.
In Germany it survies only on subsidies. And Nuclear was abolished in Germany, a bit to early. I said we needed it 10 years longer and we could have shutdown our coal.
I guess the biggest bottleneck for renewables is energy storage.
That’s the common thought, but it rests on the assumption that demand cannot be manipulated.
Legacy generation incentivized overnight consumption, when the grid had excess production capacity it needed to unload. With solar, we need to reverse those incentives. If it is harder to produce power overnight, we can drive large industry (like steel mills and aluminum smelters) to switch from overnight operations to daytime consumption.
Overnight storage is something we do need, but it is not efficient, and the need for it should be avoided wherever possible.
Parking garages are usually full during the day, when solar is at its highest generation. In the near future, as EV adoption rises, parking garages need charging stations at every space, sucking up every “excess” watt on the grid.
Pretty much. Once we got that covered there is no excuse anymore.
It’s basically solved. Sodium batteries are cheaper and much more durable than lithium batteries, and are currently being commercialized. Their only downside is that they are heavier, but that does not matter for grid-scale storage.
Being cheaper than Lithium is great, but are they cheaper than nuclear?
The manpower of maintaining all these batteries seems like it would also be a lot, how would you do it for an entire grid, or would you need to have each individual placing a battery on their property to deal with brownouts?
Problem with coal or nuklear is it isn’t cheap. In Germany it survies only on subsidies. And Nuclear was abolished in Germany, a bit to early. I said we needed it 10 years longer and we could have shutdown our coal.
I remember reading about those. Sodium batteries are revolutionary. They don’t need a rare earth mineral… sodium is friggen everywhere.