US Dept of Interior denies canceling largest solar project after axing review
utilitydive.com
utilitydive.com
If they deny doing it, what blocks the project from continuing?
Effectively the project required the exemption that allows them to group things together because regulation that some environmentalists lobbied for that is supported by the majority of environmentalists in America is used by some environmentalists to block all projects. Consequently, the cost for the projects is high and the certainty of their completion is low.
These make the projects risky. The federal government revoked this exemption so that the projects have to go through the same environmental review as every other project, because that is what many environmentalists have argued for and the most powerful environmentalists have won.
Therefore many things are simultaneously true:
* the dept of the interior did not cancel the projects
* they returned them to normal conditions
* normal conditions make the projects hard to do
* they de-facto canceled them by making them hard to do
Maybe someone's gathering up identical packs, eg a specific generations of Tesla Model 3 packs, and turning just those into power walls or grid storage.
That said, methinks since battery recycling tech has scaled up ahead of demand, it's cheaper and faster to extract the misc minerals and make new, much much better, batteries (for grid storage).
I'm noob, so really wouldn't know. I guess we'll see.
Also, recent CATL PR releases about sodium ion only mention 'future cost savings' rather than anything about a 90% reduction in prices.
Anger is incredibly viral. In a country on social media, that means cutting opposition spreads faster than support. (Most elements of support, for this reason, scaffold themselves along opposition to something else. Even if that something is a manufactured totem.)
All of the above has a slight advantage, policywise. But it has, by sharing all its components’ weaknesses, a larger cross section than any one alone. Thus you’ll see all-the-above picked apart by the anti-renewable lobby at the same time as the anti-nuke and anti-gas greenies.
(Comprehensive energy policy articles on HN typically have a top-voted commentating the stupidity of a random component.)
We will need to retire them in future where renewables are everywhere. Maybe wind is good enough to fill the hole at night. Maybe new battery chemistry is cheap. Maybe some other storage tech works out. Maybe they can be converted to hydrogen for long term storage.
Transition clients usage to variable and intermittent energy. Much of our current industrial stack assumes continuous energy. Like smelting. So develop techniques for quick starting and ramping up processes when energy is cheapest.
Time shift usage. Like HVAC pre-cooling buildings, pre-heat water, etc.
One benefit is increased resiliency.
Another is reducing peak usage.
Our current stack (generation, distribution, etc) is over built in order to accommodate the worst case scenario. IIRC, that's < 1% of the time. Adding batteries (strategically) to handle those peaks, instead of peaker gas generators, will be hugely impactful. And open up a lot of our currently built capacity to handle more demand.
I know you know these things. I'm just compelled to reiterate, for our viewing audience.