US solar installations expected to be a record 32 GW in 2023
electrek.co
electrek.co
> Solar deployment is now happening at a roughly $500B annualized rate.
Which technology deployments were larger than this? The US's aircraft production during WWII seems to have peaked at maybe $400B (inflation-adjusted). Global datacenter construction appears to be maybe $200B/year.
More here: https://about.bnef.com/blog/renewable-energy-investment-hits...
China leads in steepest trend, but US is second (though much lower down)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-electricity-per-cap...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-electricity-per-cap...
It is a bit funny how Germany seems to be floundering thanks to the Energiewende. In hindsight it looks like a clear mistake to have gone in so hard without waiting until it made economic sense.
Good thing they were thinking ahead and shut down all nuclear plants they had. Fricking unbelievable
It doesn't average out on an intraday basis, but neither does consumption, which has its peaks during the day.
I know someone working at an energy provider heavy on renewables, there they use gas turbines (=biomass) for compensating heavy fluctuations, because those are online in a few minutes.
For seasonal storage, pumped storage and chemical (power to gas) are the more likely solutions. However, if might turn out that simply overbuilding solar is more cost effective than a lot of seasonal storage.
And yes, you will always need backup generation capacity based on gas.
But those plants can be inefficient and cheaply built, since they won’t run many hours in the year.
Always is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I would disagree on the longer term. Deep geothermal for one technology has the capacity to stop us needing gas for such use, and given enough storage, I think the whole system of operation will change.
Heat pumps are pretty awesome.
The seasonal energy storage problem is one that humanity (and, really, life in general) has always faced. Many of our traditional food products are methods of preserving energy from the good times to tide us over in the bad times. We have traditionally adapted our activities for the season. I would imagine that part of the solution will be re-introducing seasonality to industry (e.g. making aluminium mostly in the summer).
Also consider the workforce differences too, since presumably this would also need to be on leave for a portion of the year.
Today natural gas peaked at 16GW. Batteries at the same time were delivering 3.8GW. During the day renewables which is mostly but not all solar peaked at 18.5GW.
So currently shifting my guess about 2 percent of the daily power generation. So not huge. But that didn't even exist three tears ago.
For simple math you need to lift/drop 1 tonne a 367 km to store 1 MWh of energy.
https://www.energyvault.com/project-cn-rudong
Apparently you can use multiple weights in parallel ...
9.8 * 30000 * 100 * 0.000278 * 0.0001 = 0.81732 kilowatt hours per 30 ton brick.
They claim they can store 100 mwh of energy. So, that's 100000 / 0.81732 = about 122,351 bricks.
From the top of the building it looks like it stores about 22x24 cubes per level, assuming the parts that aren't following the grid pattern are the lifts. So, 528 cubes per level. That would mean they need 231 levels of upper cube storage at an average height of 100 meters above the lower cube storage area, and it looks like they've only got about 29 total so far.
The math seems suspicious, but maybe my assumptions are wrong, or I made a calculation error. The structure might continue underground quite some distance, or the 30 ton cubes in the video aren't what they're using on the actual structure, or what looks like a single cube in the images are actually 8 or 27 cubes stacked into a bigger cube.
I'd be curious how this compares to the cost of LFP batteries, which are somewhere around $100 per kwh or so (in China). My guess is it's probably a lot more expensive than batteries or pumped hydroelectric storage.
9.8 * 30000 * 100 * 0.000278 * 0.0001 = 0.81732 kilowatt hours per 30 ton brick.
should(?) read
9.8 * 30000 * 100 * 0.000278 * 0.001 = 8.1732 kilowatt hours per 30 ton brick.
surely? 0.1 is a tenth, 0.01 is one hundreth, looks like you threw in an extra shift for luck.
> My guess is it's probably a lot more expensive than batteries or pumped hydroelectric storage.
Location, location, location!!
Not everywhere is suitable for pumped hydroelectric - relatively few places have dams or are dam suitable.
This at least fits in with modern city aesthetics and might be integrated and expanded to include dual use electric vehicle parking functionality ... (with vaguely interesting optimal usage algorithms).
I'm still kind of skeptical. I mean, pumped hydroelectric storage is pretty cheap. It's hard to compete with that; but then maybe there are uses for a big gravity battery in a dense urban area where hydroelectric isn't an option and maybe even batteries are a potential public health and safety risk. Maybe I've spent too much time alternating between Kicad and Factorio lately, but the concept of plopping down a bypass capacitor the size of a large building to buffer out "noise" on your power grid seems kind of like a normal thing to do.
Sure but one of the prototypes was based in Switzerland... probably one of the best place on earth for dams.
This particular company has multiple gravity battery designs that it's shopping globally and building the first industrial scale installation in China (checks map) some distance from Switzerland.
So, again, not everywhere is suitable for pumped hydroelectric and (obviously one would have hoped) it's okay to develop products for places that have no dams while living in a place that has dams.
Do you have a point to make?
I think we need to close all the fossil fuel plants eventually, but keeping them online to be used maybe a few days or weeks a year is the most responsible way to use them.
It's really badly uneven.
https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/solar-insolat...
In the Northwest we also have pretty good hydroelectric to handle the cold rainy months. Every region is in its own specific situation.
Alaska would be a rough place for solar. I don't know if they do much hydroelectric or wind, but it seems like they'd be well situated for either.
If nothing else works, there's always nuclear.
32 GW at a capacity factor of about 0.25 (about right for solar, I think) pumps out about 70twh annually. Sounds like a lot but the US consumes about 4000twh per year. So this only represents about 1.7% of its overall energy production. The US is still catching up with other countries that source a larger percentage from solar already (e.g. China, Germany). I think globally it's around 5% currently. But undeniably the IRA is delivering big time in terms of economic stimulation and the bootstrapping of what are no doubt going to be very profitable businesses. And as a side effect, a lot of renewable energy capacity is coming online very rapidly.
Those car batteries could be cycled daily of course. There's will be an order of magnitude more battery on the roads (just in cars) than you can charge with this amount of solar. Of course those cars don't discharge all that much. Mostly they don't drive anywhere near their maximum range on a daily basis and are near fully charged most of the time.
So, that's going to be tens of twh that is ready to be used, in principle. We'll probably never utilize most of that available capacity for grid usage. Not because we can't but because there are more economical forms of storage than car batteries that are also becoming available. In other words, we'll have lots of redundant storage options. Domestic battery, grid battery, truck batteries, buses, ships, cars, etc. Tens, hundreds of twh of capacity.
California has already mandated migrating plans to variable pricing, because there's so much solar. They call it time-of-use plans, and that's where I'm pulling 4-9pm from. Weekend peak hours are also priced lower because more people are home during the day and the peaks are lower.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... Last weekend's lowered peaks are a bit less noticable because of the holiday Monday though.
The real answer; burn something, and enjoy the 8 hours when the sun is shining to get electricity that is cheaper.
Who produce it?
Why other place say sahari or even … global seems an odd word here.
At the same time, I'm not sure if you need any rare element in the manufacturing process that you can source from specific countries only.