>more cost-effective to use solar panels, batteries, and large scale reverse osmosis systems
I can't imagine why you'd use batteries at all. Storing fresh water efficiently is cheap, storing power efficiently is not.
I can't imagine why you'd use batteries at all. Storing fresh water efficiently is cheap, storing power efficiently is not.
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I’ve heard on the grapevine that facilities are now being designed which work at under 100% capacity in order to soak up excess/cheap power.
I believe this is coming about because: 1) the high cost of power and presence of sporadically cheap power makes it economically viable, and 2) designing equipment with lower duty cycles can actually provide substantial cost savings. Ie a facility which only runs 50% of the time is much cheaper to build & run than once which runs 100% of the time.
Sorry I cannot cite sources right now.
Imagine doing shift planning at such a site though. Eight days from now, there's a 60% chance of wind in excess of 5m/s between 22.00 and 06.00. But labour costs would be 130% higher than 06.00 to 14.00 on that day. On that morning shift there's a 50% chance of clear skies ...
This means that you just staff it at a consistent level and plan the work around the energy levels.
You either have losses in:
* Underutilized solar generation
* Underutilized plant capacity
* Overhead of energy storage
Design your system to minimize that cost. Engineering systems of all sorts are full of this kind of optimization problem: "Should I add a subsystem to recover loss x?" There is always more you can do to recover losses, but each extra system you add suffers diminishing returns a little more.