Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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HVDC or interconnects (losses are tolerable with enough renewables generation, considering existing curtailment), battery storage, and renewables generated ammonia for on demand combustion (chemical storage) will meet these needs. "Build, Baby, Build", with my apologies to Sarah Palin.

Edit: with 1200GW of renewables capacity, the US has produced 20% of its energy from renewables this year, more than nuclear. Based on the interconnect queue, extrapolate future generation mix accordingly.

https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/renewables-do...

> There was a total of 1,400 gigawatts (GW) of capacity in interconnection queues across the country as of year-end 2021, of which 1,300 GW was solar, wind and energy storge capacity, according to the report, Queued Up: Characteristics of Power Plants Seeking Transmission Interconnection. The installed capacity of the United States is 1,200 GW.

> Although not all the projects are likely to reach fruition, the total still represents a milestone. “The sheer volume of clean energy capacity in the queues is remarkable,” Joseph Rand, a senior scientific engineering associate at LBNL, said in a statement. “It suggests that a huge transition is underway, with solar and storage taking a lead role.”

https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/queued_up_2021_04-13...

If the $ per Wh cost from PV is extremely low it's also possible to use electrical heating elements to store heat in tanks of something that melts and stays hot for long periods of time (for building heating purposes).

Or to use cheap mid day electric power when the sun is up to generate gigantic blocks of ice that can then be used with cooling loops to air condition buildings.

Absolutely. California alone is curtailing enormous amounts of renewables, hundreds of thousands of MWh/month (depending on the season). That is literally clean energy being thrown away (which, depending on system design, is variably tolerable; you're balancing cost, transmission congestion, and renewables offsetting fossil combustion). More transmission, more batteries, more storage, more load shifting (both temporal and geographic)? All of the above.

https://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/ManagingOversupply.aspx

California's oversupply problem is caused by, allow me to guess, fixed 24/7 electricity rates. These fixed rates remove all incentive for load shifting.

Make electricity cheap when the sun shines, and expensive at night, and the market will shift demand. There are lots of cheap and easy ways to shift demand, I've outlined several on HN.

In most of California (served by PG&E) it's really expensive during the day, blisteringly expensive in the evening, and really expensive at night.

> really expensive during the day

Doesn't really seem to fit with having surplus power.

I blame the CPUC for basically everything regarding the crappiness of being a grid customer in California. PG&E is exactly the result you'd expect to get in our regulatory environment.

Our regulators rubber stamp every tariff plan the company puts forth, and lets them get a larger profit margin on capex vs opex. So of course the optimal strategy is to run all equipment to failure and replace it with maximally expensive everything as frequently as possible.

Torching the state is the business plan.

PG&E also has to pay for occasionally burning half the state.

Can confirm. Rates are 64% higher than the US average and 100% higher than a lot of states. I wonder what they do with all this money.

US average kWh is 14.77 cents while PG&E TOU-C starts at 37.460 and goes up to 48.902. So it's worse than you list.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...

At that price of 37.4 cente per kWh and up I'm quite serious when I say that if I suddenly found myself owning a California house, I'd buy enough solar to meet my load needs, install a shitload of telecom grade 4000 cycle rated lifepo4 batteries (4.9kWh is about $1700 per module), charging setup, inverters etc and go off grid.

Maybe keep the grid link attached to a meter and 100A panel hooked up to nothing if needed for municipal compliance reasons.

That's pretty much what I'm doing, and for that reason.

I don't have a great explanation for why it isn't happening faster, but I predict a substantial exodus from the California grid. Especially so in places with gas bans or among folks who electrify of their own accord.

Oh wow. Of course I can’t login to PG&E and confirm that because “Your Account is currently unavailable due to planned maintenance”. Bunch of thieves.

Edit:

$385.06/1033kW = $0.37/kWh

A couple of servers really screws over the electric bill.

I'm more likely to be dubious about the free markets supposedly unique ability to solve problems than not.

But buying electricity at $50/mwhr at noon and reselling it at $200 mwh six hours later.

Solar power gets expensive at night.

Yeah that's the source of the arbitrage.

One of my favorite high(ish)-concept energy storage proposals takes the "store heat in tanks of something that melts and stays hot for long periods of time" is the "sun in a box"[0] idea: use excess electricity to heat silicon up to an incandescent 4500 deg F. Later, when you want to extract the store energy, just shine some of that incandescent light into some super efficient multi-junction solar panels!

Sounds pretty wild but apparently scales up very well thanks the to square cube law.

[0] - https://news.mit.edu/2018/liquid-silicon-store-renewable-ene...

Isn't this just a variant of what is already being done with molten salt solar towers?

I think those don't actually have any PV in them. I.e. concentrated solar to thermal then turbines for electricity.

Cool concept! Any efficiency numbers available? I couldn't see any in the linked press release.

You would better pump in heat, and sell the cold.

A sand battery prototype in Finland is recently in the news. Has a lot of appealing features for local energy systems. https://interestingengineering.com/worlds-first-sand-battery

> electrical heating elements

Very inefficient compared to heat pumps or even peltiers for that matter.

> store heat in tanks

Oh I already do something similar at home for sub-ambient cooling but I wouldn’t call it cheap.

> If the $ per Wh cost from PV is extremely low

IMO this is roughly equivalent to saying “assume that you could clone dinosaurs, and that you could fill a park with these dinosaurs, and that you could get a ticket to this ‘Jurassic Park,’ and that you could stroll throughout this park without getting eaten, clawed, or otherwise quantum entangled with a macroscopic dinosaur particle”: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thisworldofo...

>> If the $ per Wh cost from PV is extremely low

> IMO this is roughly equivalent to saying “assume that you could clone dinosaurs, and that you could fill a park with these dinosaurs, and that you could get a ticket to this ‘Jurassic Park,’ and that you could stroll throughout this park without getting eaten, clawed, or otherwise quantum entangled with a macroscopic dinosaur particle”

The premise of the article is that the $/Wh cost from PV will become extremely low, faster than most people think. Do you have a reason to believe this is inaccurate?

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