How can this problem be solved with our existing knowledge and resources?
I am excited to hear what you think and want to have a good discussion with smart people.
Thank you!
So, storage is an issue. If no storage/grid tie is possible, utilizing the full output of the panels to heat or cool a mass for night/cloudy days could be helpful in a home situation.
Stupid people.
(Also the biggest problem with everything else. It's almost, but not quite, the only problem.)
> How can this problem be solved with our existing knowledge and resources?
Well we can't throw all the stupid people into a volcano. Let's get that out of the way right off.
Instead, we distract and hypnotize them with the Farnsworth device (Philo, not Hubert). We miniaturize it and make it portable. Then we can plug them into virtual Skinner Boxes and hopefully modify their behavior to make them less destructive.
We have to maintain tight operational security. If they ever find out what we're doing to them they will attempt to destroy us, or, failing that, to destroy themselves to spite us (that's how goddamned stupid they are!)
(However, it turns out you can talk about the plan in public with complete candor as long as you pretend you're joking. The only risk is that some of the stupid people will get confused. But since they are confused anyway it's usually moot.)
It's unpleasant to treat the bulk of humanity as ignorant and insane children who shit in camp, but the evidence is undeniable, the real question is how do we manage the stupid people?
In the Tao Te Ching (book of wisdom, thousands of years old) it says:
With the best kind of leader
When the work is finished
The people all say
"We did it ourselves."> 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world,[a] in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
I afraid I don't get what you're saying?
I mean, idolatry is wrong, and we should know and love God, of course.
- - - -
> book of wisdom, also thousands of years old
It's not a contest.
We have abundant salt water of course. I imagine that generator turbines don't love salt water very much.
ideally, every green energy farm would have a gravity well storage system nearby (like pumped storage) for the purposes of keeping discharge steady. Energy would be transferred into and out of this system pretty quickly, and stored in a more cost/size efficient storage option that could act as the true "battery" on dark days / longer periods of energy production downtime
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/switze...
For some applications you can store heat. For instance you can have an electric heater with a lot of bricks inside an insulator box in your house and move heat out of it convectively with a fan.
Invest in Lithium mines.
If we covering 100% of our needs when the sun does shine, I would get it. But we are nowhere near there right ?
Imagine there is a car that costs $10,000 and works every day, or there is a car that costs $3000 but works only every other day. But you need to drive every day.
Does it make sense to buy both cars and drive the cheaper one on sunny days? No, economically you only buy the reliable car and you don't buy the unreliable car at all. Notice the discontinuity -- until the reliability problem is solved, it makes no economic sense to deploy any solar. This is the economics of fixed costs.
Whereas what you are thinking of are variable costs. So say the unreliable car can be fueled for $1 a day and the reliable one costs $2 dollars a day. In the world of variable costs, it makes sense to use solar up to 100% of sunny capacity.
Whenever there is a battle between fixed and variable costs, what determines the winner is the interest rate. With low enough interest rates, you get to 100% solar on cloudy days. But with high interest rates, you don't go with solar at all because it is too expensive to keep all those fixed assets on standby and pay for twice the capacity you need just because your solar system goes offline.
So it is the relationship between interest rates and energy prices that determine when it makes sense to max out the cheap, unreliable producer and pay the reliable producer to be on standby, or when you only go with the reliable producer.
And interest rates and energy prices differ over time and in different places. There are many individual producers making these binary choices and in aggregate they never end up using 100% of one option or 0% of the other, it is usually something in between. But just because you see that there is something in between doesn't mean that lack of storage capacity is inhibiting the adoption of solar. It is the only thing inhibiting it. On the other hand, if you solve the storage problem, you can go way past 100% usage on sunny days, you can go to 100% total usage.
So because of fixed costs, it's totally wrong to focus on what happens just on sunny days. What prevents the adoption of solar is affordable storage -- and that is inhibiting the adoption of solar right now.
The unwillingness of people to deal with the storage problem, how they handwave it away or just pretend that it's not a blocker in the present is one of the most frustrating aspects of energy discussions. It is all about storage. That is 100% of the problem. Whether renewables succeed or fail is solely determined by the affordability of storage. The storage problem dwarfs every other consideration by a mile.
But, your comparisons are about building new stuff. My understanding is that the gas / coal capacity is already there - so it's not a question of adding more, right ? So we don't have those fixed costs - they are already paid. We already have 100% of coverage with those, so adding solar, even without storage, will indeed decrease those variable costs.
Economically speaking, if we say solar is cheaper than gas / coal - what's preventing a rational actor from installing more capacity ? Until we get to 100% solar on sunny days, he is sure to sell 100% of his production if it's cheaper gas / coal no ?
No, that's generally not how infrastructure is funded. Infrastructure is funded by bonds that are sold and have to be serviced. So the payment for the fixed costs is spread out over time -- ideally over the lifetime of the asset -- and what happens when you add unreliable source that are cheaper -- like solar -- is that they cannibalize the revenue stream used to service the debt and those plants are taken offline right now, or they have to be subsidized somehow by the taxpayer -- which is why regions that make a big push to solar end up paying high energy prices and need to import a lot of energy. They are not paying high energy prices because solar is expensive, but they end up paying high prices to keep their reliable plants online. Or they require subsidies from the taxpayer. California is one example, but you see this often in Europe as well. California just got a billion dollar Federal subsidy to keep diablo online for a few more years, but the reason it was going to go offline was because it needed massive subsidies to remain operational in a market in which it competes with solar. But at the same time, solar can't replace Diablo without blackouts and water shortages - Diablo supplies 10% of California's energy and is used to pump water, so this is something that requires reliability, but it is losing money every year because it's cannibalized by solar. That's the situation of the household that chooses to buy both cars -- that household has to spend a lot more.
Solar has basically made nuclear uneconomical in the U.S. because nuclear has massive fixed costs but almost no variable costs, so it can't exist in a de-regulated market with solar -- the solar just drives it out of business. At the same time, solar is driving greater use of coal because coal plants have the cheapest fixed costs. So Germany was ditching nuclear and using more coal as a result of deploying all the renewables. If you don't pay extra to maintain your reliable capacity, you get blackouts or pay emergency rates to beg for energy from your neighbors (California has to import 20% of its electricity).
Rational actors -- like the household choosing between the two cars who knows they need to drive every day -- are required to plan for sufficient capacity look at this and say "we're not ready to deploy solar at scale" because they want to avoid the blackouts and price spikes. Politicized actors choose a different route, and you get the energy mess that is California, UK, Germany, etc. And all of that is solely because of storage, and it gets worse the more solar you deploy without storage.
Take a look at this EIA webpage [1]. Of all the new installed capacity in 2021, solar constituted 39%, followed by wind with 31%. Natural gas comes at a great distance, with 16%, and the next one is not really a source of electricity. It's batteries, with 11%. Nuclear comes with 3%. So, the only new installed capacity that can produce CO2 emissions is natural gas, with 16%.
EIA does not have the split for 2022 yet, but a quick google returned [2], that shows solar kept its share of 39% through the first half of 2022. It would have been higher, but for the supply constraints. Going forward, it is expected that new solar installation will increase significantly, not in small part due to the Inflation Reduction Act.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416
[2] https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight...
Even today, aerial view of any place shows what a missed opportunity lies below. So many parking lots that could be covered ones with solar panels on their roofs(who invests on adding the panels? If I want to, would I be allowed to?) Same goes to the roofs of several businesses, supermarkets etc. It is not their core business to buy solar panels and invest for the longer term. Many times they are leased places, and the owner is some faceless corporate entity.
If a local politician thinks for the long term instead of what gets him/her elected the next term, they could change the city code to mandate opening up of such rooftops for community solar projects.
Secondly, the power grid needs to be strengthened/modernised to accommodate localised power generation. This ineens heavy investment.
Of course there will be the oil&gas companies that will fight every step of the way to keep the status quo because they are set to lose if people generate their own energy..
https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/renewable-energy/solar-en...
In a sense, fossil fuel has never been needed as energy source. It’s only been needed as a storage vehicle, to be able to move energy around in time and space.
If you factor in all the cycle energy (making, disposing, replacing…), What is the real current total energy balance of solar energy (versus others)?
I'm wondering because solar is very tech intensive. So if you build a 1 billion dollars farm, 10 years later the technology is a lot more efficient. Are you going to replace it all?
To be honest, this is more like a question too: How big of a problem is this , energetically speaking?
Do you know anything about the whole life cycle of solar energy? I would be really interested to know more about it.
Unfortunately, No. And it is indeed a dilemma. If you don’t invest, you don’t grow. However, if you invest early, you may be creating a lot of unnecessary energy use.
This also apply to things like electric cars and batteries. We should always see the bigger picture, but someone has to do the dirty math.
If something like "Astrophage"(from Project Hail Mary) would really solve such problem.
Not an electrical engineer so would love to see opinions on cross-continents grids and challenges with it, because I think that could solve lot of storing energy problem but seems like might introduce new transmission problem !
Sadly not a technical problem that is easily solved.