We also have this thing called night, as well as weather and seasons.
I understand convenience, laziness and inertia (resisting change) but I also think changing the times when we click "power on" is a simpler solution than mining millions of tons of more lithium, no?
You would have to completely rebuild most of the manufacturing industry, as many plants have startup times measured in hours or days.
It'd be cheaper to just build nuclear.
Smart demand-response may yet become a thing, but it's not yet a commodity product. You need a system to send out "turn off" notifications, and a system for measuring that in realtime, and a system for paying people. Some grids _do_ have this, but only for very large consumers.
All power hungry devices should at least have that capability (maybe other than the kettle, lol). This is literally a cost of $20 hardware in many cases.
I like to heat my home during winter. We have a (modern, highly efficient) heat pump, so we need most electricity during January, just when the least amount of solar insolation is available [1] and when it sometimes stays cloudy and below 0°C continuously for days. But I guess we'll just have to be more flexible and turn off heating, light, and electricity in general for a week, no big deal.
[1] I wonder if there's a causal relation between cold weather and low solar insolation?
Including other comments on this exact thread where people did exactly that.
That's already the case – the actual heat pump only runs intermittently, on demand. This happens quasi-randomly, so you automatically get some load balancing across a city.
The problem is that this is intra-day load balancing, which doesn't help one bit if there are several days of low supply (windless winter days).
It also isn't synced to supply, instead most people have it set to different temperatures based on when they are home. It would be better to cool or heat the house based on supply. You want the house between 21 and 24c, you don't care when the system is on.
So yes, we could survive without power at night. We just have to rebuild every building.
As a long-term ideal I don't disagree with you. We should be building for resilience. But that's not a solution to climate change.
When there's no sun, then other countries probably have sun. When there's no sun, there's hydro. When there's no hydro there's wind. When there's no wind, there's tidal. When there's no tidal there's geothermal. And when there's none of those, there's stored energy in batteries.
And if for some reason all of those combined can't satisfy the demand, then there's nuclear as a last resort.
And if there's none of any of those at all, then we've probably got bigger problems anyway
Lack of power either way certainly won’t help!
If by design nuclear is offline, fossil fuels are offline, and battery capacity (or other storage) is insufficient for known (but infrequent) weather events, then we’re designing an inevitable and destructive catastrophe as we have no Plan B for when realtime production is insufficient.
And that will happen some day, regardless of how much capacity we build. It’s currently the norm on many days.
One that will kill a lot of people, especially the physically weaker ones, and be very destructive economically.
One that will also play out randomly based on weather, and for which we’ll have no real Plan B.
Being flippant about it seems rather macabre.
Wind suffers the same problem as the sun in that sometimes there is no wind anyplace close, and it is even less predictable. While tide power is predictable and consistent, I don't live anywhere close to the ocean so we still need 2000km of wire to get it to me. Geothermo is useful when lava is close to the surface, but I don't live in such an area.
Note that my power is 80% wind, but it was done via several decades of building wind turbines, and I live in Des Moines which nobody would call a big city, if you live in a big city you have even more work to build it (you are both way behind us in building wind, and have a lot more to build)
Sure you don't have to have a single wire from one side of the planet to the other, but that's the point in a power grid. Even connecting two solar farms to the grid a time zone apart provides an extra hour of power to each of those time zones and reduces the risk of a single cloud bringing the country down
And as for the rest, you know what the electricity grid is right? Cables already run around the country, and if anything this reduces the strain on single connection as there are lots of smaller generators dotted around the country rather than a huge point of failure connected to a single power plant
On the contrary, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas are all wide enough that they can do plenty of solar trading during the daytime. Of course that does not provide energy in the night and that's OK.
I can imagine some sort of orbital parabolic mirror setup that keeps a few acres at 2000C in the dead of winter and vaporizes any birds that fly over the power plant site.
We're nowhere near the point where that would make sense, but it could let us harness more than the earth's surface area of sunlight for energy production.
It will probably have to wait until after we plunge ourselves into some a perpetual winter trying to mitigate climate change. Of course, a ring world or dyson sphere would make it obsolete.