I await our idiotic governments taxing it heavily to support dying petroleum industries next.
Storage methods need tens of trillions of investment to reach that capacity and power prices would have to increase 10 to 100 fold to cover those investments.
Solar is not a solution for an industrial civilization.
I have very much looked at what the prices are doing and the answer is "making my employer filthy rich and making the grid unsustainable over the next decade".
Solar and batteries are eating the profit from base load and peak generators. Yet are unable to provide the sustained power requirements to keep the grid going on a day that gets over 35C.
If you like having power in hospitals at all hours you can't let solar and battery storage invade the grid without regulating it such that the grid survives.
Nationalization of the grid assets and a massive nuclear building spree is the only solution if we want children to grow up in a world where brownouts are the exception.
Turns out telling businesses what they can and can't do just means they hire smarter people to do what they want in more convoluted ways.
If you have time, I’d suggest reading the following, and — if you feel like it — rephrasing your argument: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Inferential_distance
Unfortunately you tick neither box.
If you're interested my hourly rate for this type of work is $300, you're welcome to commission a report on the country of your choice.
I totally understand the sentiment; thing is, this isn’t a quant forum, it’s mostly tech, and even then more software than hardware — either you should take the downvotes as a hint to simplify, or as a hint to not bother with that topic here.
Again, I really do sympathise with your frustration: no matter how I try, I can’t get non-programmers to understand even the basics of cryptography and why police master-keys/backdoors are a bad idea.
> Nationalization of the grid assets and a massive nuclear building spree is the only solution
I'm not sure even you know what you want.
Only in America could the two be conflated.
A market does not work for a natural monopoly.
Usage and production are two different things. You can produce more energy than you need and have a stable grid by just throwing money at the problem. In 2016, you had EEX spot prices around 2-3 ct/kWh, below the production cost of any technology. This signals waste and it's also a major reason why renewables rollouts stalled in Europe.
Not just storage but we need to work on energy efficiency as well. We just smoke a huge amount of our generated energy.
Being told that "we have locked in enough climate change already that by 2100 industrial civilization will be impossible anywhere and by 2200 so will agriculture." is not something anyone wants to hear.
If we were serious about climate change we would be spending the next 20 years under martial law building nothing but nuclear powered CO2 scrubbers and producing enough food to keep us alive. Anything else is superfluous.
Or you can vote for Biden and get a vague promise that by 2050 we will be emitting as much CO2 as we were in 2000. And the less said about Trump the better.
The difference in policy options in the US is like the difference between jumping out of a plane and jumping out of a plane tied to an anvil.
It still saves you money, because the fuel costs more than the solar power. It also reduces CO2 emissions in the period the sun shines.
I guess your counter argument is “but it doesn’t remove ALL the CO2!!”
But why should it? That is a long term goal. First we remove all CO2 emitted when the sun shines. We still got plenty of work to do there. Only when that has been done all do we need to think about storage. By that time storage solutions will be cheap.
Yes it literally does. My employer has shuttered three out of their fleet of nine gas power stations because they are no longer peak competitive with batteries. And base load designs aren't competitive with solar since they are more expensive and will only be turned on during extreme events, like a snow storm, or an extremely hot night.
Sucks to be us when we need electricity during an extreme event though.
> Storage methods need tens of trillions of investment to reach that capacity and power prices would have to increase 10 to 100 fold to cover those investments.
This sounds like you’re claiming your employer made electricity 10 to 100 times more expensive.
Yes, producing electricity when it's needed is more expensive to producing it when it's easy.
I’d still disagree (PV in the right places can be so cheap that it can already make sense to get through winter by putting down x3 as many panels as you need for summer), but it would be clearer.
That’s adding x7 over the “cheapest electricity in history” solar and x2.5 for the relatively expensive solar in Europe and the USA, definitely not x100.
And even that’s assuming you have to store all the energy before it gets used. Before I left the U.K., I had two different rates for energy depending on the time of day — cheaper at night because demand was lower.