Comment by Rover222
2 days ago
We have cheap fusion. A giant reactor in the sky. Solar should be massively scaled, along with battery capacity and pumped storage. China is crushing in this.
2 days ago
We have cheap fusion. A giant reactor in the sky. Solar should be massively scaled, along with battery capacity and pumped storage. China is crushing in this.
Hard agree on pumped hydro and other forms of grid-scale storage, but can you understand concerns around batteries? There are environmental ones on the mining/metals side, but producing and disposing of them in a clean manner is often hard. Getting them from anywhere save mostly china is hard (if you want large, dense, affordable, and grid-scale options) and depending on somebody who's nobody's geopolitical friend is probably a bad idea.
Ditto for the panels themselves.
> but can you understand concerns around batteries?
No I can't. Just recycle the batteries, and you've solved both concerns in one go. Lead acid batteries have a >99% recycling rate, the economics for recycling EV & grid storage batteries are even better.
"Just Recycle the batteries" is a massive understatement of the effort involved. The economics of Recycling ev batteries is autrocious. (They're glued into the frame of the car (differently for each model), needing manual dissasembly to not risk fire)
It took 20 years of standardisation and effort to raise lead acid batteries to 99%, and they're as simple as batteries get. Large scale recycle of litium batteries (including the cobalt and nickel) requires changes in how batteries are made to be (either or both) less energy dense and more expensive.
Pumped hydro is the best bet for gridscale. And i'm hoping sodium batteries roll out for EVs within the near future.
Sand batteries provide a very nice scalable solution IMO. https://polarnightenergy.com/sand-battery/
Sand batteries aren't batteries - they output heat instead of electricity. You could use them to feed a steam turbine, but then you're paying for the steam turbine.
That said, sand batteries are amazing for the heat users who can use them - just plug em into some off-grid solar/wind (and/or on-grid, and make money by buying electricity when the prices go negative) and you get 24/7 heat for the price of intermittent renewables.
Hydro is a great complement for solar, you can decrease flow when the sun is shining, and increase it when it isn't.
Very situational on where it can be used, and requires some very careful cost calculations.
Ignoring the local effects of their construction, a damb breach is one of the worst man-made disasters possible. Mantinence and error margin must be very very carefully accounted for. There is a reason the world bank stopped funding them, and it wasnt purely enviromental. (Some badly managed projects led to expensive and dangerous situations)
So when relevant it's most powerful energy source avalible. But the list of preconditions and caveats is massive.
Yep, and if you can pump water back into the lake with excess solar power when the sun in shining, you now have a giant storage battery as well.
Consistent rainfall in certain areas seems to be an issue with climate change , does your mega damn rely on snowmelt for topping up, that may start to be a problem?
The sun doesn’t have this issue. It's ubiquitous.
During the day. We still need storage.
Batteries and nuclear my man.