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Here’s the article this is responding to if anyone wants to read it. Here’s the study it’s reporting on.
I’d say the tweet is at least a little bit disingenuous because the article is not arguing against the adoption of solar power, rather the focus is on what the challenges to California’s solar goals are and what possible solutions might be. The tone is “economic constraints might slow down solar, how can that be addressed?” This is all from 2021, and it looks like since then the slowdown in solar capacity increase it cites as a concern has not materialized, still lots of consistent growth since then. I haven’t read enough to know whether this is because the study was wrong somehow, or that it’s premise that solar installation costs might not continue to drop just didn’t pan out, or that the increased subsidies it suggested came through, but it’s an interesting topic.
There are two parts of this problem:
- If you are connected to the grid and using it you need to pay for it somehow. This is not a capitalisim thing this is a maintenance issue. Deploying lots of rooftop solar reduces the amount people are paying the grid operators for the same infrastructure as before while they are still using it. This could be solved by making the grid operators public utilities again and charging taxes instead of billing electric rates. Either way rooftop solar owners are going to need to pay grid fees unless they are entirely disconnected from the grid (this is rarely ever the case).
- It creates issues where generation may outstrip load as well as transmission and storage capacity. A lot of this can be solved with more investment but if you are earning less of power sales and still need to maintain everything this can be financially challenging.
There is also a third problem where home solar isn’t centrally planned resulting in cases where utilities need to delay homeowners’ solar installations while they figure out grid capacity.
How about just decoupling grid fees from electricity costs? As in a base fee and in turn a cheaper price on electricity used
This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there’s a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
There are of course solutions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an engineering challenge to implement.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.
You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
we figured out this problem centuries ago it is called capacitors. long term it is called batteries
The problem we have to solve is that the energy storage that’s built into the grid was built before widespread home solar adoption. We need new energy dumps, and those cost money. Of course the obvious answer is taxes, but good luck convincing Americans to pay for vital infrastructure
Of course. Like I said, we know how to do it, but it’s still an engineering feat to get it done.
That relies on them not already being full and enough of them existing
shit like this burns power fast if you need to clear capacity. just ground it. i’m not that smart of an engineer and this is not that hard of a problem. the hard part is the grid, the interconnectedness, the load balancing, and that’s already done.
That would actually be sci-fi as fuck, and I’m now 100% for it. I want power plants to have constantly zapping Tesla coils
Peak energy production would be a good time to train the damn llms instead of building natural gas power plant I guess.
Yes but that would be woke soy and gay. You dont want to get gay woke soy in your ai. Thats against like the entire point of the thing!
Sorry, but Johnny Oil with a shotgun to my head disagrees with your math. and while I never looked at the numbers myself, I am inclined to agree with him that such a plan would be disturbingly “unprofitable”.
-anyone around western spheres of influence in the vicinity of any sort of lever of power to authorize such changes in infrastructure investment
Given the price of RAM and graphics cards, it is obvious that running LLM is at least somewhat limited by the amount of hardware available. So having that hardware sitting idle, except when there is too much solar power, is obviously not economically viable.
Power and grid infrastructure is a limitation that can exceed hardware availability in some regions. Musk has a datacenter with 20-something methane gas generators running throughout the day to power his mini-me sycophantic AI, Grok.
At the cost of a cultural deficit, solar could provide an environmental benefit there during the day.
Then you use taxation to change the viability. Make the non renewable energy so expensive for that usage that they’re better just to shutdown.
Gotta admit, didn’t think about that. Maybe the solution was a few guillotines all along. (This solution has its own problem tho, see the Robespierre gambit)
You can cover them with a sheet You can pump water. You can do desalination. You can overcool houses during summer so the house is pleasantly chilly when you get home. Plenty of industrial processes already set the machines in-phase. You can do cool displays arcing it through the fucking air.
Youre inventing problems so your stonks stay valuable.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy
So what you’re saying is that if it’s distributed enough (say, on the roofs of houses, sized to serve the needs of the occupants) it’s not a problem.
Distributed vs centralized has no impact here. It’s all about excess power across the entire grid.
Sure, the solar system I own generates a few kilowatts and if I’m home cooking or running AC, I use almost all of it. But if I’m not home, my AC is off, fridge isn’t running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid. My neighbor’s down the street do the same thing, their next door neighbor, the houses all in my neighborhood, and across the entire city, we’re all doing this. A hundred or thousand homes generating excess few kilowatts adds up to megawatts
Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it’s still payment. I’m not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power
But if I’m not home, my AC is off, fridge isn’t running at that moment, all of that power gets dumped onto the grid.
And if it couldn’t do that, your solar panels would warm up a little bit and nothing else of consequence would happen. Ditto for your neighbors’ solar panels, and everybody else’s. Whoop-de-do.
It wouldn’t even cause a net increase in the urban heat island effect, because if that energy weren’t hitting solar panels it would just be heating up people’s roofs instead.
Sure, the energy company pays a pittance for the energy I put onto the grid, but it’s still payment. I’m not gonna put a dummy load on my house to not export power
You’re conflating an economic problem with an economic one. The only reason you claim my proposal wouldn’t work is because you don’t want it to because it cuts into your profit.
Batteries? Boil water? Anything?
Use excess to boil water for steam turbines. Solved. Big oil has INSANE propaganda.
I have played factorio so im an expert. Just boil billions of gallons of water and store the steam for as long as you need with zero loss of enegry.
Bam
You just took the excess energy to generate more energy with it?!?
Batteries are usually to expensive to have standing by on this scale.
Is it more expensive than excess production harming the grid or the economic impact of recurring blackouts?
You can dump megawatts. But there is no need for that. It’s not like solar panel inverters will just keep increasing voltage until they can push the power into the grid. They have an upper limit.
Basically I don’t see your point
Maybe I don’t know enough about electricity at large scale, but at small scale you can just cut the circuit. Electricity isn’t like water that just sits in the pipe when you close a valve, right?
It is a lot more like water than you think. The solution of “just cut the circuit” is like solving the problem of overflowing storm drains by “just plug the pipe”.
The power has to go somewhere. If you don’t do anything about it, the voltage in the cables will rise until things start to fry. Real world power balancing involves adjusting the output of power plants (e.g. how much fuel to burn) in response to changes, and in some cases, dumping power into the ground as safely as possible. This problem gets complicated when power grids span vast distances and involve many different power plants that all need to be in sync or things catch on fire.
In the case of solar power, this is part of why improved large-scale battery technology is so important. It lets you absorb the excess power at peak generation times, and then release that power at night.
Can’t you cut the power at each individual solar panel? I assume that the amount of electricity out there is low enough to not cause that kind of problems?
You’re pretty much describing what hybrid inverters do for home solar panels. They can disconnect and not export to the grid when you don’t need it and just power your house and charge your batteries.
But hybrid inverters are quite a bit more expensive than standard grid-tied inverters that are always pumping into the grid.
For instance, I just had to replace my home inverter that died and I got a cheap 6 kilowatt inverter for about $1,300. A hybrid inverter would be at minimum 3 or 4k.
Another point of failure, another cost… do you retrofit old panels? There are challenges with this at scale
It’s not only possible but also required already. The system needs to be able to shut itself off to protect the grid.
Solar panels need an aperture.
Again, though, using gravity batteries or pumped hydro is a great way to manage excess juice, though these are expensive options.
You can store it in batteries, what are you on about?
We don’t have that many batteries (yet).
Oh no, I have too many megawatts, and somehow no batteries, turbines or any other shit, what could I possibly send it to
The humble ground:
That is not how it works.
When you short something to ground, it’s everything in between that needs to dissipate the heat. Think about what “sending it to ground” means—it means you connect the hot to the ground. But with what do you connect the two? A wire? Sure, but you better hope that wire can dissipate all that power, because that’s what it’ll try to do.
You can’t just “dump power on the ground.” That’s not how it works.
a giant flywheel for every town!
Pumped Hydro is a pretty safe storage method using preexisting technology if you have hills in the area.
i don’t want safe, i want DANGER!
Store it as compared air in steel tanks buried underneath your home. No protective coating.
why not hydrogen?
Already done and he hasn’t blown himself up yet.
sounds like he’s not even trying then
Giant flywheels are also safe. Great for smoothing out energy generation from a fickle source as well.
not if you leave them uncovered!
Like any hydroelectrics it has large environment impact and dam failures tend to be the deadliest industrial disasters when they happen. Also most good locations have already been used. You cannot just build it wherever (without insane costs). Pumped hydro is hardly a solution here.
Pumped hydro isn’t the same as a hydroelectric dam. Because both reservoirs are engineered and you don’t have the concrete wall as the signal point of failure, you don’t have the same risks involved. Pump Hydro can be whatever size you want and spread out to distribute the grid load.
Also, are damn failures worse then Climate Change or are they just more dramatic?
Apparently you can do something similar with sand if you live in a desert.
Thermal sand batteries are a thing, I think?
That was some solution talked about on Undecided.
Gravity Batteries? They’re much, much easier using water compared to solid masses.
You could store solar energy as heat in sand and use turbines(if you have water) or Sterling Engines(if you don’t) to spine a generator. Peltiers are a solid state method to convert heat to electricity, but they aren’t very efficient.
Rules are made up, as are property rights. Any idea that you have a right to, or that nobody can, own the sunshine, is you being foolish. There was once a sunshine tax on windows. If they want your money, or someone wants ownership, they’ll just write the rules that way and enforce it through violence, as usual. Never underestimate how truly cruel and greedy the wealthy and powerful are.
When an infinite growth mindset meets nearly infinite growth potential, capitalists complains about sustainability.
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It’s so efficient that I can’t fit my money cog into the machine!
That’s why we need a way to store the power overnight, this is a well known and obvious problem, and there are solutions. Batteries, flywheels, sand bins, etc. Solutions which should also raise the price of the electrons produced, just to make the fuckers happier.
Not everyone who writes under the banner of MIT is sincere.
I wish there was a place where smart people could gather to solve problems like this. You know, maybe invent a device that takes the electricity when it is cheap (when the invisible hand of the free market wants it) and gives it back to the grid when the price has risen because there is no longer that much sunshine.
There have been a zillion science/tech articles over the last 10 years, about possible ways to store power at scale. Because wind and solar has been creating this problem for a long time. There is not yet a silver bullet.
Well the problem isn’t a werewolf, so all the regular bullet solutions, when used together, are enough to deal with it.
I mean yes, but what’s genuinely problematic is the variability of the sun. Since it doesn’t shine at night, you have to store the energy generated during the day somehow. What about winter, especially in parts of the world where it lasts a very long time? How can we transfer the energy generated in, say, the Sahara desert to Svalbard? Solar is great for generating electricity, but storage and transport of said energy is not completely resolved, yet.
For most parts of the world, the only reason why the problem with the variability isn’t solved yet, is because governments don’t want to invest in the electricity grid. We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money. And it’s unrealistic to say that energy needs to be trabsported from the Sahara to nordic countries. Finland already needs to cut its nuclear reactors, because the renewables in Finland produce so much energy. Only the furthest regions north can’t use solar.
We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money.
When discussing large public projects whose scale is larger than anything before seen, the money is mainly an accounting placeholder for the real resources that need to be expended.
Grid scale storage has been expanding at an exponential pace, but the sheer magnitude of the materials and engineering work that needs to be done to make a dent is pretty huge.
Bloomberg projects that total cumulative installed capacity should hit 2 Terawatt hours by 2035, noting that would represent 8x the number for 2025. But when you compare those numbers to just how much electricity is produced or consumed, with 22,000 TWh per year, we’re talking about demand periods measured in minutes, not even hours, much less days.
At scales large enough to make enough of a dent to show up in global energy stats, we need to recognize that even infinite money would run into the real resource constraints of how much capacity we as a species have for pulling minerals out of the ground, processing them into useful materials, and engineering them to be useful energy storage solutions (whether pumped hydro or other gravitational systems, compressed air, flywheels, or whatever battery or fuel cell chemistries can store energy in an efficient way).
We have some technologies, but need things to improve significantly before storage can actually meet the needs for power that meets demand at any given moment in time. In the meantime, matching supply and demand in real time is a true engineering challenge, not just a monetary challenge.
we need to recognize that even infinite money would run into the real resource constraints of how much capacity we as a species have for pulling minerals out of the ground
You can store electricity by stacking rocks. You can store it by moving large volumes of liquid. You can store it with sand. If we are in danger of exhausting these resources I think problems have gotten bad enough that energy storage is no longer a going concern.
A gravity storage system that stores about 100 MWh and outputs about 25 MW is much, much larger than the 65 battery containers they’d replace. It stores basically 4 hours worth of energy in what appears to be a large steel and concrete structure 150 m tall (the equivalent height as a 30-40 story building) on a 100m x 100m footprint.
If we’re talking about storing a terawatt hour, then we’d be talking about about 10,000 of these gravity storage systems needing to be built. That’s what I mean by existing technology not really meeting the scale requirements of the problem.
Gravity storage systems all basically suffer from this problem. Water-based solutions need to be sited on favorable geography to have large scale (otherwise water itself isn’t dense enough to compete with concrete and stone and sand).
Meanwhile, storing the same 100 MWh of energy in containerized lithium batteries would basically require a 4x6 stack of 40-foot shipping containers that each can store 4MWh.
We can get there on storage, but we’re talking about decades of planning and implementation, across all technologies, before we can even credibly reach storage representing one whole day’s electricity usage. How many man hours of labor does that engineering and planning and building represent? How much steel, energy, and machinery would these projects use up?
Anyone who talks about this stuff without recognizing the scale involved is basically not serious about solving it. It’s an engineering problem that exists independently of money (and it’s also a money problem, but that part will probably pay for itself because of how valuable a solution to this problem would be).
already needs to cut its nuclear reactors, because the renewables in Finland produce so much energy.
sounds actually good. And also Finland could use other renewables like Wind, Geothermal and Tides.
I’m not saying it has to be transported, but it’s well-known that we could theoretically cover the world’s electricity needs by placing some solar panels in the middle of a desert, if only that energy could be transported. At the same time you would avoid all the NIMBYs etc. Of course it’s not realistic, that’s why other forms of electricity are used, like wind and geothermal.
There are many ways to store the energy without chemical batteries.
We can use thermal batteries by heating water or other liquids and then release it at night. We can use kinetic batteries like compressing springs and then releasing them at night to turn a generator. Water batteries like hydro dams where you pump the water into a reservoir during the day and then release at night to again power a generator.
That isn’t really a problem for where many people live though, nor for very long, so some modest storage medium and transmission lines (which likely already exist to many places dark in the winter) coupled with wind or whatever else makes sense locally would be just fine for those locations where it is a problem. There’s no need to transmit from the Sahara to islands at the poles either, there’s so much sun to go around, and so many places to gather it.
Giant. Freaking. Lasers.
Hey, I never claimed it was efficient.
Mirrors in space
Musk is this you?
I don’t know nearly enough about electrical engineering to consider what precautions must be taken when there is too much power flowing through the grid. I’ve seen enough fried motherboards that I can take a wild guess, but those were edge cases.
I’d think that in the event of a day being especially clear, cold, and sunny, there’d be a ground-fault circuit that would take the surge instead of the house.
that’s not what this means. Surge protection in a solar setup is more about protecting you from the grid, which generally is far more susceptible to surges and issues with inclement weather.
What they’re describing is excess capacity is being generated, eg a sunny day can fill a battery bank enough to not just power your home (making energy costs 0) but send excess capacity to power other people (making costs negative, eg you are now paid by the utility).
It can be an issue in a country like America because if solar occurs at enough scale it could seriously disrupt utilities from a financial standpoint. Then you’ll have people who are affluent and can afford to convert their home to a $20-70,000 solar setup draining funds from the utility. Then the lower SES people that rely on it would be more likely to have disruptions as companies lower budgets and potentially go out of business. This also means those low SES people have a portion of their energy costs funneled into far more wealthy landowners.
This is easily mitigated of course either through government subsidies of the utility or (ideally) having the utility convert to far cheaper green energy so they then maintain the role of the main supply. But the latter requires significant investment - a solar setup for a house as mentioned is tens of thousands and a solar farm is far more. And Americans are historically terrible at subsidies to benefit the lower class as well as green energy initiatives; we’d much rather go “the cost!!” As the world boils
I addition to what others noted, this can also create an equality issue. Say you are a working class renter in a town of well-off home owners who have solar panels on their houses. They are likely as dependent as you on the grid when the sun isnt shining, but because they can sell back to the grid. They contribute much less to paying for the grid.
The grid that everyone relies on is therefore disproportionately funded by poorer individuals. Its the same problem with all the subsidies on electric cars and solar installations; you have to be decently wealthy to be able to take advantage.
There are balcony solar panels that renters can just plug into a socket
Not in America, yet, but we are getting there. Unfortunately, that still has the issue of needing to be able to afford it to be able to take advantage. Plus those have a max wattage thats way lower than what a homeowner can do.
I dont think any of these are insurmountable issues, but I also don’t want to just ignore them.
At least in my area, solar roofs still have to pay the usual service fee, an extra fee for grid-tie, taxes and fees on all the power they consume, without deduction for power they deliver. I know many utilities buy power at the same rate they sell it, but mine only pays 85% (before taxes). Solar people pay just fine for grid maintenance.
Is that 85% based on the flat rate, or an actively changing rate? If it’s the flat rate, thats a super good deal. The cost of generation can easily vary by 10x throughout the day, so if the average price is $0.15/kWh, they might be paying you 13 during the times it only costs 1.
I know in some places the meters are smart enough to track when the usage is occurring, though.
Transitioning to EVs is better for everyone in the long term. Improved technology and greater marketshare among new EVs today means more and better used EV options in the future, with the effect increasing as the economics of scale make budget models more viable.
It’s not that we shouldn’t subsidize solar and EV, it’s that we should also use incentives and regulations to make these options work for renters. We should be requiring rental properties to add outlets to parking spaces. We should be pushing policies aimed at getting solar on apartment buildings for the benefit of the tenants.
Honestly, we should be working towards getting every building to have solar and battery and reducing our dependence on the grid.
Transitioning to EVs is better for everyone in the long term.
I dont believe this (but I’m open to being wrong). I think giving the same amount of money invested into EVs to public transit and ebikes instead, we’d be better off.
incentives and regulations to make these options work for renters
Yeah, strongly agreed there. I basically just want my tax dollars to go towards equality and resilience. Instead, it seems that the best the party not 100% controlled by fossil fuels can do is enact policies that still disproportionately benefit the wealthy. I’ve heard a lot of well-off people talking about getting a $7500 dollar rebate on an EV, which seems silly when there’s a lot of people who have never even owned a car worth that much.
