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Comment by epistasis

5 hours ago

Also true for California for quite some time.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/california-solar-...

What's going to happen in the future is that May will be a month of extreme electricity abundance, with a good chunk of the electricity just not being collected at all because the grid doesn't need it, and it will be cheaper to have unused electricity in May than to have too little solar in December.

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epistasis

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rsynnott  2 hours ago

> What's going to happen in the future is that May will be a month of extreme electricity abundance, with a good chunk of the electricity just not being collected at all because the grid doesn't need it

This is already a thing in some places. Or, sometimes, because the grid can't _take_ it. Here's a dashboard for Irish energy production: https://www.smartgriddashboard.com/all/solar/?duration=month - on the wind and solar you'll notice that on big days, actual production is usually way below forecast production. This is sometimes due to actual mis-forecast, or due to renewable production being high enough that it meets total demand. But usually it's that the _grid_ can't take it; there is demand, but no way to get it there.

It's a chicken-egg problem, of course; you're not going to build excess grid capacity in the hopes that someone one day builds a wind farm, so in practice grid upgrades trail renewable sources.

mekdoonggi  5 hours ago

And eventually that arbitrage will be big enough to justify a pumped hydro/gravity/iron-air storage.

  • epistasis  5 hours ago

    Doubtful, the tradeoff is solar cost versus storage cost. Pumped hydro and gravity are waaaaaaaay too expensive compared to excess solar panels. Pumped hydro takes massive construction projects, which are very very expensive these days. Gravity storage (non-water, meaning non-hydro) never made any sense at all, the material costs are just way too high.

    Iron-air storage is still being proven out, but it still requires so much material that only getting 1-2 cycles per year just won't justify it, because electricity is going to be so cheap.

    It's hard to overstate how cheap solar panels are these days. Even in the US, which has costs 3x-5x the rest of the world because of failed protective tariffs.

  • kansface  5 hours ago

    Or possibly the return of some heavy industry?

    • ljf  5 hours ago

      I always wondered that - but will it be economical to have the plants not working in the months of the year that the energy isn't free?

      2 replies →

    • epistasis  5 hours ago

      I think the challenges for heavy industry aren't as much the cost of energy, as it is the capital cost, and a workforce that has lots of options for higher paying jobs.

      Heavy industries are usually pretty low on the value chain in economies. They do not provide much return on capital, compared to the high tech options and service options that are available in the US, but not available anywhere else in the world.

      The rest of the (non-European) world dreams of the economic opportunities that are possible in the US, from Silicon Valley tech, to biotech, to the financial opportunities. China has been trying to climb up the value chain ladder for decades, and is slowly getting there.

      It's mystifying to me why people are fantasizing about climbing down the value chain in the US, to being poorer, and allocating capital to things with lower return on investment. I just don't get it! What's the appeal?

      9 replies →

  • s1artibartfast  5 hours ago

    Pumped storage utility is tied to duty cycle. You want one cycle per day with some overage, not one cycle per year. A lot of the cost scales with storage volume.

    If you look at the pumped storage projects built and under construction in China, they are all daily focused.

    • epistasis  4 hours ago

      To play devil's advocate: there are also some limited opportunities to retrofit large reservoirs with some amount of back-pump, when there's a sufficient reservoir at the bottom site. Not a ton, but a bit. However even those opportunities, that already have massive dams, may not be economically feasible because solar panels are just so damn cheap.

      Solar's zero marginal cost generation, with cheap capital costs, requires rethinking a lot of the economics of electricity generation. Not paying for fuel changes so much, and it will take a while for people to internalize this.

  • Rover222  5 hours ago

    Large-scale battery storage is already expanding rapidly, and is way cheaper than pumped storage.

    • bryanlarsen  5 hours ago

      pumped storage is still significantly cheaper for seasonal storage. The cut off is about 2 weeks now -- if you need to pull from storage more than twice a month batteries are cheaper. If you need to pull from storage less than twice a month pumped storage is cheaper.

      11 replies →

  • dylan604  5 hours ago

    Except the water is in short supply, so where's that magically coming from? The Great Salt Lake is shrinking and specific to Utah. Just look at Lake Meade and Hoover Dam as an example.

    • bryanlarsen  5 hours ago

      The water requirements for pumped hydro for seasonal storage is a lot less than for generation.

      - pumped hydro reuses the water in a loop rather than sending it downstream like generation

      - pumped hydro only needs to produce power a few times a year rather than 24/7/365 like generation.

      4 replies →

    • s1artibartfast  4 hours ago

      moreover, If you built a pumped storage facility on lake Meade, it would have greater height and power from release the lower the lake was

testing22321  1 hour ago

Not the future, now.

Most Australians now get free power for three hours a day because there is simply so much.

This is the way.