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Comment by jackmott42 | Hacker News Reader

As grids reach higher and higher % of renewables you need more and more storage or more and more peaking plants. You could very easily just crank out solar panels but building the storage gets to be apollo program scale projects as % solar gets very high. Just a few tesla mega packs isn't enough if you are over 50%. You need entire lakes. And we should be doing those programs!

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Sure, but the interim solution of "just deploy more panels and turn down/off the existing fossil fuel plants during the day" is working pretty well. I suppose once we start seeing significant periods of negative or zero pricing the storage will start happening.

As noted, that only works in the short term.

Once base load and/or peaker plants become unprofitable, you either lose those or end up paying for them to idle.

Neither outcome is very desirable.

Energy storage is unlikely to come to the rescue in time.

As new safer battery tech like sodium ion gets cheaper. I think we are looking at all homes having batteries that can store and run 24-36 hours rather than large scale batteries. As batteries get cheaper and more solar is added power companies are likely to start offering people better rates for electricity if they are willing to install a grid controlled battery in their garage as the power companies can use the cheaper solar electricity for arbitrage instead of running peaker plants.

Somehow having to thousands or millions of small batteries doesn’t sound like a better idea than having a few large ones.

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