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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

Not just grid scale. It can be the difference of panels on your roof generating enough electricity to barely meet your needs to having so much excess you can not only supply your home needs, but also charge multiple EVs at home.

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I feel like that's a uniquely North American need. Most countries don't have the single family / multi car ownership structure. Still a real need. But implications of a country where large% of people can meet their own energy needs is interesting.

The implication would likely be that the share of population that can't afford it won't be able to pay for the grid alone either.

We have examples of this kind of situation in poor countries where the grid wasn't developed in the first place, and rich people use generators.

Incentivize car chargers at every workplace. Tap in with your personal card, and it could even be directly combined with your residential power bill so you're essentially charging using your own solar at a distance.

This still doesn’t address the duck curve aspect, or overnight usage. It is fundamentally impossible to use PV to directly power your wonderful super efficient heat pump to warm your home at night. You will still need batteries!

And? You can buy a rack of lifepo4 batteries for less than $10k and it will be enough power to supply you running your A/C or heat the entire night.

Well, my original point at the top of this thread was specifically about how battery mfg/infra/costs/dispatch (especially at grid scale) and so on seem like the limiting factors/primary challenges still being worked on, not PV efficiency, so I think we are agreeing?

There are heat accumulators.

Yep, those are just forms of batteries though so I think my point stands? There is lots of cool stuff you can do with PV+TES without even needing true thermal batteries, just using smart electric hot water heaters and dispatch, and even cooler things if you set up a peer-to-peer network of them! But again, that just goes to the point that other challenges have overtaken solar efficiency in urgency (which is a great thing to reflect on!)

Excess panels completely address the duck curve.

How? There’s a significant portion of the world/year where duck curve evening peak is after sunset and PV alone is never feasible and so batteries/wind/etc are necessary.

I was considering "duck curve" and "overnight" to be separate categories. Were you not? Then I will rephrase to say that excess panels solve the part of the duck curve that does not overlap "overnight", so the problem is reduced to just "overnight".

I do consider them separate, but the duck curve peaking is in the 6-8pm range typically before falling off to overnight baseload. 6-8pm is frequently after sunset. That’s what excess panels does not help, and is still separate from what is typically meant by “overnight” in my experience.

grid-scale batteries have already almost entirely eliminated the duck curve in California, and the costs of batteries continue to fall

Is it supposed to? Says who?

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