Comment by toomuchtodo
4 days ago
The world is, roughly, deploying 1TW/solar PV a year at current rates. It took a while to get here, it won’t take as long to get to 100%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
4 days ago
The world is, roughly, deploying 1TW/solar PV a year at current rates. It took a while to get here, it won’t take as long to get to 100%.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Storage is the issue. You still need to supply base load (well, all load) at night.
LFPs are cheap and safe, with very good cycle counts.
Sodium seems to be actually hitting real commercial production volumes (ex - GM just announced a sodium ramp up days ago, CATL has been producing them for a while). I expect we'll see sodium mature a good bit over the next decade (right now - it's just not quite as good as LFP, but it has a lot of promise in temperature extremes and cheap input materials)
So sure - storage is an issue. But it's not THE issue anymore. It costs surprisingly little to get enough LFP storage to cover an entire house at modest usage for days at a time (ex - under 10k for 42.9KWh of storage, UL approved https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-wallmount-all-weather-lithium...)
So yes - storage remains something to consider. But I think pretending that storage is a constraint that should stop PV rollout is... cough... bullshit cough...
Let industry that needs it pull from existing generation at night, convert residential to solar as fast as possible. Subsidize residential battery rollout the same way we do for insulation and other efficiency improving home improvements (which to be clear - we were doing prior to the current admin).
China isn't fucking around on the solar front, and the continued excuses in US from entrenched interests tangled up in the oil industry are criminal.
I suspect sodium is better than lithium today. The win is that sodium is much more forgiving of high temperatures so they can be run without cooling fans/pumps. Lithium battery installations are actually loud owing to all of their cooling infrastructure.
No cooling means the sodium batteries are easier/cheaper to maintain (no mechanical failures). Maybe not as energy dense, but you could still come out ahead long term when accounting for Capex+Opex.
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I think it's your last point that's actually the strongest.
There's always gaps between theoretical and practical, but to see China investing so hard in the future while the US digs in it's heels is infuriating.
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I read some interesting things about crazy sounding technologies like vanadium flow and iron batteries. I think we're at most 10 years away from storage being not fully solved, but becoming an enabler more than a bottleneck.
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No, storage (and transmission) are, in fact, THE issue. They always were. Solar is cheap and easy to install. Balancing a net zero grid without storage and with the pitiful transmission we have now is simply not possible. See: california.
The entire CAISO is a power laundering scheme to allow california to have publicly have huge amounts of solar power that overproduces enormously (including strongly negative power prices for a good chink of day) and still import dirty base load power quietly.
If storage was simple to solve, it would be solved. Chemical storage simply doesn't exist at the required scale and we don't like to build the one thing that we could, right this second - pumped storage.
We are already massively overbuilding solar. We would be well serv d to stop building panels and start building pump storage and transmission lines to distribute the stuff we've already got, but nobody makes a political career announcing a new transmission line.
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Contrary to popular belief, solar panels don't generate zero power on cloudy days.
They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.
We don't need solar panels everywhere to get even close to ~100% renewables (with nuclear, wind, new geothermal, and hydro). The areas where you put them are distributed enough that it would be exceptionally rare to ever encounter a meaningful need to ration.
So, storage is an issue, but not as big of an issue as most people think, and we do not generate anywhere near enough solar energy for it to be a reasonable concern yet...
There's also more solutions than just conventional batteries. There's pumped hydro, etc...
> They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy.
If you're at higher latitudes, this is notably less of a drop-off than you see between high/low season.
My friends with residential solar see <10% overall output in January vs July. (~60% drop from fewer sunshine hours, ~80% drop from decreased solar irradiance.)
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But they do generate zero power at night.
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The main load is during the day when the sun shines anyway, and then the seasonally changing periods before and after, basically ramping when people are getting up, then dropping off while people are going to bed. On the west side of a continent, the power for the ramp can come from the east because the sun shines earlier there; on the west the sun shines later and the east can get power. At night, there are still nuclear and other plants, and it is very foreseeable that installations of ground battery technology will have been in place well before twentieth century plants are retired.
High load in the day during sunlight is mostly true for summer heat, but in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage, combined with solar angle/efficiency being worse in the winter.
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Not quite, current nighttime load is largely a function of cheaper nighttime rates. People don’t set their EV’s to charge from 11-5AM because that’s the only time their cars are plugged in. If rates crater at noon on Sunday, there’s many an EV happy to suck up power then.
So yes batteries are going to continue to grow rapidly, but it’s a smaller role than it might seem.
Great, so now not only is power production nondeterministic, your cars tank also is. It was too expensive and the algorithm decided to wait charging, so no spontaneous road trip for you, sorry.
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The whole point about modern gas/coal plants is that it's relatively cheap to shut them down and start them up again. They are backup power, not for providing inflexible base load. Batteries + renewables are taking a lot of market share and flexible backup power is much more important than baseload (inflexible power like nuclear)
Gas is faster to respond, coal, not so much.
From the Goog:
Starting up a coal-fired power station depends heavily on the plant's current temperature, taking anywhere from 2 to 48 hours to reach full operational capacity. Because of massive metal boilers and turbines, the heating process must be slow to prevent severe thermal fatigue and equipment damage. [1, 2] The startup time is broken down by the plant's previous state:
To explore how these heavy thermal operations impact the broader electricity supply, you can review the U.S. Energy Information Administration's grid reliability data or dive deeper into the technical challenges via the Environmental Protection Agency's Coal Startup Report. [6] If you are interested in the broader power market, let me know:
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-its-not-that-easy-to-start-operati...
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-a-thermal-po...
[3] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-11/documents/ma...
[4] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-minimum-time-required-by-s...
[5] https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/inflexible-fossil-fuels/
[6] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956
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These days I think "at night" is mostly covered or at least could be mostly covered both by wind and batteries.
The "base load" question may still be appropriate for deep winter, high (or low) latitudes, etc, but renewables are getting there pretty fast.
The fossil fuel lobbies want us to believe it is a way bigger problem than it is.
The people who echo that sentiment without educating themselves are giving them a helping hand.
True, but battery advancements are ongoing at a rapid pace. Sodium-ion is now viable and will be a mainstay in grid storage. Ignoring ideology, this path is plain cheaper than anything else.
Grid batteries are being deployed everywhere every day and the cost including storage is now lower than fossil fuels.
It's not, grid-scale batteries are being deployed all over the world, and newer batteries keep getting better and cheaper. Storage hasn't been the issue for years.
To be fair, it depends if you were looking at "price/unit" or "sum of factory output".
The former, even a few years ago, I agree. The latter, people were arguing about a year or two ago. (Though your point remains as the trend was clear).
It turns out battery prices have dropped so much that this isn't difficult anymore either.