Comment by dominicrose
21 hours ago
Electricity is cheaper at night but only 20% of my consumption is at night, so I wouldn't mind if the situation was reversed.
I guess using electricity to heat during the night could be an issue, but we could also accept to let the temperature drop.
Around here late morning to mid afternoon (11 am to 4 pm) is now off-peak, alongside the old 10pm to 6 am.
With enough renewables the cost peaks are in the morning and evening when the sun is rising/setting and people are at home cooking.
There's also, like... winter. I'm fairly sure there's a calculation somewhere you could determine the number of deaths this will cause with pretty good accuracy.
Solar is never gonna be a complete solution. At the end of the day, we could do it more efficiently by just building suns here on earth for the panels, but of course then you've achieved fusion and you're already generating more than solar could ever hope to. We shouldn't hinge our future on half of a technology.
There's still sun during the winter; you just need more solar panels for the same amount of energy. Also, there tends to be more wind during the winter, so wind power makes a good complement to solar.
In lower latitudes, yes. Where I live December has an average of 4 hours of sunlight (yes, the entire month).
So the winter, by definition, will always generate less? or we're just like... covering up a bunch for half the year or something? I don't get your point.
My larger point is that solar is only ever going to be a piece of the puzzle at best. In space it might be quite nice, but otherwise it's kinda goofy to invest too much in.
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Fusion, I hate to say it, is a pipe dream. Why? Because any fusion reactor loses a ton of energy to fast neutrons, which have the added negative of destroying the reactor. So-called aneutronic fusion (eg using He3) isn't zero neutrons. It's just fewer neutrons.
Stars don't have this problem because they're very large so there's only so far neutrons can go.
This is such a weird thing to assume is just impossible in physics, I don't quite know how to respond other than "yes, there are many unsolved problems in every energy sector, which is why it's an open question where we go from here"
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