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Comment by AutumnCurtain | Hacker News Reader

So what's the answer to smoothing out supply and demand peaks here? More and better batteries? Wind, hydro, etc? All the above?

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Batteries, hydro, and natural gas (peaker plants) all help directly. Wind isn't really "dispatchable" in the sense that the grid operator can't ask for more wind.

I don't believe nuclear power ramps up very easily, and in any case it has to run as much as possible to pay for high capital costs. Power that's going to be on standby much of the time needs to be cheap to build.

Anything that usually generates power in the evening will help some, though.

Also, the grid operator being able to schedule demand helps too. Things like water heaters and air conditioning can be run in advance and turned off at peak times.

Modern Nuclear ramps up very quickly, in minutes.

The challenge is almost 100 of the cost is up front, so the economics favor using the power all the time, because it is basically free once built.

The point is that ramping up isn't really a thing because it will have already been producing at 100%. But that doesn't mean it isn't useful to address this, because it's still a generation method that generates power during the hours that solar doesn't. You would also then have even more generation during daylight hours, which isn't as valuable, but it still has economic value and can be sold for some smaller but still non-zero price per kWh.

In California the price actually is hitting zero sometimes during the day [1], which means that at that time, it's not economically valuable at all - nobody wants it. Rather, cutting back is valuable. Other kinds of electricity generation are easier to shut down, though, so they go first. This is graphed as "curtailment" [2].

Surplus electricity could hypothetically be put to use, but something would need to built to take advantage. (Perhaps batteries or some other load.)

[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/04/20/driven-by-solar-calif...

[2] https://www.gridstatus.io/datasets/caiso_curtailment

> In California the price actually is hitting zero sometimes during the day

Sure, sure, but these are unusual times and not the common case. And if it was the common case that the price was zero during most daylight hours, it would be solar that goes bankrupt, since that's the only time it's generating. The other generation methods would still have the revenue from generating at night, which was the bulk of their revenue to begin with because of the expected price differential.

> Surplus electricity could hypothetically be put to use, but something would need to built to take advantage. (Perhaps batteries or some other load.)

Charging electric vehicles is an obvious one which will increase with their adoption. It's also likely that the grid will need some kind of storage because even if you have baseload plants to carry most of the nighttime load, the peak load of the day is just after sunset, and picking that up is going to require some kind of storage or peaker plants but the existing peaker plants are fossil fuels.

What baseload plants give you is to only need enough storage to make up the difference between what the baseload plants generate and that peak, and only for that couple of hours instead of the entire night.

Changing evs will become more popular, but is in time conflict with demand. The discharge time is at night, and people don't want to start the day on low, even if you do all your charging at worksites, which is the other challenge.

The average EV on a workday won't need to get even close to below 50% battery if regularly charged on worksite

It's not basically free, the cost of nuclear waste disposal is gigantic and unfortunately mostly ignored.

Same for solar panels and windmill manufacturing and recycling, except you're dealing with thousands of time the amount of waste

Solar panel recycling is a hot topic, that already works for some parts and even if we don't progress at all it will not cost hundreds of billions per country like it does now for nuclear already. Per country is vague but mostly large countries have nuclear now anyway and dozens if not hundreds of reactors. Yeah, "same".

Comparison should be made per kw generated. How much money for reprocessing 1kg of nuclear that produced x amount of energy vs how much money for solar panels that should be recycled and produced the same x amount. There are other options too like building breeding reactors to reduce the costs over time but that's another topic

Let's take Germany as an example. The German nuclear plant operators made a deal with the state in 2017 for it to take responsibility of the waste. They paid 23 billion to wash their hands of their own product, and the estimate is that it will cost over 100 billion. But again, it's the tax payers' problem now. [1]

Let's take Britain as an example. It has a nuclear waste storage facility in Sellafield that costs billions every year to run and the price for the final solution is anyone's guess, again we are talking about hundreds of billions - 263 billion pounds is the latest estimate to be exact. [2]

Let's take Finland as an example, which is a smaller country. It plans to dispose of the waste in a specially built nuclear facility that cost billions. They will then depose 300 caskets there made of thousands of tons of iron and copper, again costing billions.[3]

Now whatever the cost of solar panel disposal will be, I am pretty sure the number will not be 100 billion and it will not be 23 billion either. And it will not be a really big issue what to do with it, and the vast majority of it will likely be recycled.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-d... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/04/sellafield-... [3] https://www.trtworld.com/europe/finland-to-bury-nuclear-wast...

Dynamic pricing! Get a little smartness in front of large consumption appliances and charge much less when there's too much power. The answer will create itself without any need for breakthrough technologies. (I hope)

The current low hanging fruit for demand response would be industrial customers who have some ability to scale up/down power usage.

It seemed like we were inching towards this with smarthome tech, but now we’re losing ground. Nest was pretty revolutionary at the time with their “learning” thermostat, but aiui most smart thermostats don’t bother with real smartness.

Google/nest just spun off their energy team, Ecobee was bought out by a home energy company, so hopefully we’re seeing a new generation of smart energy companies coming.

Exactly, or at least have more tiers of pricing based on the time of day. I visited another state and was pleasantly surprised to see four time windows that shift based on season. In Southern California, there are only 2, and I doubt most customers have even been transitioned to a TOU plan. So dumb.

Can't rely on hydro power in California. In 2021, for example, a serious drought caused water levels to drop so low behind reservoirs they could no longer be used for pumped storage. Batteries are the best solution, quick to charge, high efficiency and can be brought online instantly.

> More and better batteries?

Yes, batteries. From yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39144978

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