The next milestone to watch: when battery-backed solar becomes cheaper than gas peakers for evening demand across most of Europe. We might be closer than people think.
The next milestone to watch: when battery-backed solar becomes cheaper than gas peakers for evening demand across most of Europe. We might be closer than people think.
Throwing batteries at it is a kind of blunt and uninteresting solution (I guess the market will prefer that one!).
I pay low energy prices during night than day, that's normal, but I'm still not gonna do laundry at 9 pm, I'd rather pay the 10/20 cents more during the day.
I'd like to appeal to you to evolve that frame of mind. To help avoid first world problems (I can't wash a dish by hand, I need it now) devolving into third-world ones (power cuts, crop failures, torrid tropical nights on mid latitudes, mountains disintegrated).
Sometimes its important to remind we're on a generational mission, and it's not maximising Netflix time.
Get that into the society's rules and then we'll talk.
I like to think I'm modest and sensible but I'm not bending over backwards while my neighbours get to do what I perceive as ridiculous things.
I used to live in a two bedroom unit, conserving things for the environment and next generation. But next door the neighbour in his huge house, 5 SUV's, heated pool streaming heat into the air all winter can just pay for it with money.
My actions are shaped to societies rules and monetary incentives. I'm not going out of my way to "roll coal" or anything stupid. But I'm not wasting my time either.
Sadly, that's pretty much the extent of your control, unfortunately (that, and maybe voting for people to change the laws, which would indirectly change the rules of society - although, usually, the relation goes the other way.)
In this case, if it's even in people best interest to change the "timing of dishwashing" to align on cheap hours - I trust people will do.
The trick is to not overpolitize it - my mum has always launched her dishwasher during "heures creuses", not caring a damn about why the electricity is cheaper at this time. If the cheapest hours end up being earlier, lots of people will just adapt to save a few bucks - it may be smarter to NOT mention solar power, or environment, or whatnot.
When we are serious about this issue, we'll price it all in. The only way to affect change for most humans is incentive based decisions right in your face.
1. In my area 96% of energy is gas-based. I live in Rome, Italy. It's written in my energy bill. I ain't got no solar. Night or day it's mostly a matter of relatively small changes of demand.
2. If you want to do something real for the environment change your diet! I'm sick of this neverending focus on energy when the biggest impact you can have is by eating way less meat, cattle in particular. On that I am very sensitive. And me deciding to have less burgers and steaks across an year has magnitude of order more impact than your silly dishwasher. Do the math. As I am on transport where instead of pretending to be green by buying 3 tonnes electric SUVs on a lease from US lunatics I use public transport and use my old beaten car sparely in the weekends.
Spare me your nonsense because I ain't gonna be thinking about running a noisy dishwasher in my living room at 9 pm, the only moment of relax and peace for my family because of negligible-to-nonexistent impact on the environment.
And just to add, I don't even own AC, and I can assure you it gets 40C/100+ Fahrenheit, with high humidity in Rome at summer. That's how sensitive I am to the topic.
You know nothing about the people you interact with.
This addition doesn't really add anything. Your tone says it much clearly. You don't like advice, do you? I'm sorry, but I can't help myself. I'd recommend you to try to lower your sensitivity.
But really I can't understand you. You've said:
> I ain't gonna use the dishwasher when the system wants me to, but when I can or want.
I need a bit of a guesswork to understand what you are implying, but still... I think you are sure that system will do no better than you from an effectiveness standpoint, while making things less comfortable to you. So you are enraged from mere proposition of such a system. It seems to me like a hyper sensitivity.
You see, if such a system would work as proposed and your allocation of resources is close to an optimum, then the system will do the same or something close to it. Nothing to be enraged of.
Also, I like how you combined:
> If you want to do something real for the environment change your diet!
with
> You know nothing about the people you interact with.
There was nothing about their diet but you kinda guessed it just by looking at their writing?
In this case, they said they live in Rome. Concrete, heavy machinery to make it livable, trash movement, maintaining their public transit, household goods, electricity via nat gas, etc. Sounds like they're making a good effort, though, and in terms of just the discretionary part, they might be right.
By comparison, driving a pair of gasoline cars their average of 10k miles/yr is something like 16% of the average American family's yearly emissions, or 3x the beef.
Switching from heating with natural gas to a heat pump would also make a bigger dent for the average American family, let alone if they're living somewhere that gets properly cold, like New England. Or just spending $2,000 on air sealing and a layer of fiberglass, for those living in a leaky house - more impactful than not eating beef.
Looking into it a bit for Italian families, it looks like cattle might a larger proportion, partly because their overall carbon footprint is lower. But it's still a relatively small proportion (<15%).
Pretty sure if landowners weren't raising cattle, the alternative isn't going to be letting it return to nature and lowering the value of their land, without big government programs that essentially pay them to do that, so that whole thing seems kind of moot.
The diswasher will by full after dinner, so I close it and press "start". It has to be done at the latest by next dinner. Does it run immediately, during the night, or during the day? Irrelevant, let the damn thing pick the best (cheapest) time.
Same with laundry. On average I run less than one load a day, so I'm happy if it finishes either when I wake up, when I get home from work, or when I am about to go to bed.
Recent dishwashers can open by themselves and dry the dishes, washing machines need a (awaken) human to remove the wet clothes when they finish their cycle.
Don't knock small gains like this. Even a couple of percentage difference is worth having; all the marginal gains add up to make large scale gains.
Your car is. And honestly, you'd rather charge the car at night so that you don't blow a fuse when you're running the dishwasher, microwave, dryer, oven, induction stove and charging your car :)
I have never blown a fuse being getting an EV, and so far still only once.
But charging at night is preferable for that reason, and I couldn't care so long as it's ready by 7am.
Load shifting EVs is easy, and this moves a lot of load. It was never about moving all load.
Compressing humid air releases heat which marginally increases the temperature of the condensing compartment, and marginally cools the evaporating compartment with the wet clothes; thus the heat pipe will quickly equilibrate the 2 compartments.
That way lies madness, although I suppose there might be one or two family members I would want to lock out of the dishwasher.
Plus, such a system would provide even more ways for nefarious actors to sabotage the grid, by influencing the demand side. For example, setting every appliance to run its load at the same time. The grid would be fucked.
1. Electricity moves for 5/10 min clearing intervals with defined caps at either end (currently in Western Australia it's simply 2 intervals, peak & off-peak). 2. Expose the pricing/market data via API 3. Develop existing home automation frameworks/tools/device IOTs/routers to access that. 4. End user grants permission/configures it on their smart phone when they set their dishwasher and washing machine on set up ("would you like to enable this smart-go button by connecting to Wi-Fi? It could save you $150 per year").
No control ceded to third parties to turn on equipment whenever they want, just allows the end user to cue jobs for when the PowerCo anticipates lowest prices.
PowerCo not any more of a honeypot for attack, at least not more than they are now with control over critical generation/tx/dx infra.
The problem is its often very cloudy in the winter. In the UK in winter we regularly have periods of 5 cloudy days in a row where solar output is virtually zero.
I don't know what the answer to that is. In a calm cloudy winter week all renewables and battery storage are totally screwed. Space based solar is a scam. Maybe we just have to live with it until fusion works (if it ever does).
(But it's still academic at the moment because we're still far from the point where building more renewables is a bad idea.)
It's not net zero, but nearly zero will probably do fine?
Politicians like to say net zero, but when we are 90% there will we maybe not stop caring and find other more pressing problems?
The real issue is the cost of keeping gas peaker stations around that are mostly idle and fire up only a few days a year, but that's an economic issue, not an engineering one.
In the longer term, you could even run them off net-zero renewable syngas that you make the rest of the year using low-cost electrical power at peak solar generation times; you only need to store a relatively small amount of it, and old fossil fuel reservoirs are ideal for this.
Baseload nuclear is entirely feckless as a backup for a renewable grid. You either go with a long term storage technology (and then don't need nuclear), or you go to an entirely nuclear grid. Wind/solar and nuclear don't mix well.
Everyone who’s tried it suddenly realises that anything you put in the ocean is almost immediately covered in marine growth, or destroyed by the ocean itself.
And that wave / tidal energy is very diffuse, or that where it isn’t diffuse it’s also extremely destructive.
Page 7 of https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-09/LDES%20... lists the technology types of the project applications. The majority are Li-Ion BESS, but there are also other battery chemistries and Liquid/Compress Air Storage
1. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/press-release/super-battery-project...
Government picking winners?
When did that ever work out well?
The floor is a minimum revenue guarantee, to protect investors at times when the wholesale price is low and the cap is a maximum revenue limit to protect consumers when the wholesasle price is high.
It seems like these limits haven't been set yet, so I don't know what the potential impacts on energy prices will be.
When was the last time a new dam and hydro electric power plant was built in your country?
Either all of the favourable geography has already been dammed, or good luck getting environmental approval.
Use the excess power in summer for some kind of industrial use.
But yes, resistively heated ultra low capex thermal storage ("hot dirt") is very attractive.
I just checked our stats. Average consumption 16kWh/day. Sunny summer day we get 30-40kWh. Sunny winter day 10-20kWh. Cloudy winter day it's 0.5-2kWh.
Also that's without a heat pump... Which you mainly use in the winter.
And without an electric car but I doubt they're as big of an issue because you can charge them from cheap overnight power anyway.
Lowest possible fixed costs, high operating costs.
To see the effect of including such, go to https://model.energy
Using a long term storage technology (in addition to wind/solar/batteries) can cut the cost in half at high latitudes.
It’s a lot easier to store and transport than hydrogen and the capital items already exist.
Curtailment fees should be replaced with purchases of green LNG.
Another option is ammonia, which is quite nasty to deal with.
True, but then for the UK solar power isn't the right thing for winter, hence why we need a massive mix of other stuff.
Also we have the advantage that france isn't that far away.
In the UK battery is about grid stabilisation, as in making sure that it hums at 50hz rather than 49.
> the focus of energy storage has shifted from frequency services to energy arbitrage. Due to market saturation, the share of frequency services in the revenue stack has significantly declined, from 80% in 2022 to just 20% in 2024. Looking ahead to 2030, we expect energy arbitrage to dominate the revenue stack, with most revenue coming from participation in the balancing mechanism.
As more renewables come on stream and the grid gets more complex, batteries are going to plug holes.
Energy Arbitrage is usually a good thing, so long as its regulated to for the customer, not the battery people. the point is that battery capacity is being deployed to even out the 5-9pm peak, which means that we are much much less dependent on gas turbine generators (which means less price pressure linked to LNG prices, if you're not into the co2 aspect)
No it doesn’t.
The arbitration is only possible because the battery storage providers can ever so slightly undercut the gas peakers.
The price pressure is still linked to the LNG price.
I think you underestimate the cost of running a grid battery, you need to be able to undercut significantly to make profit.
Its not like you can practically keep the battery at 98% for 7 days waiting for the right time to discharge, its not that simple.
The aim is to make as much money, but the markets you can join are regulated (in the UK)
You can be a grid stabilisation service (paid to be at % percent battery and turn on/off in milliseconds to keep the frequency from going too high or low)
You can be intra day, or day ahead. but you're not likley to be dayahead because you're rated at x Mw for n hours. The stuff that I know about in iberia is ~100-300Mw for 3 hours. Again spain is a special case because the market is peer to peer through PPA.
I digress.
The point is sure last year there wasn't really enough battery to affect peak price(in the UK), but now there is 19 gwhr. assuming its all rated for 3 hours, that around 18 % of total generating capacity for 5-8pm.
Now as there is a mix of cfd and other financial things that actually affect price, it doesn't quite work like that in the UK.
Good, we agree the solution is: Nuclear!.
It's not a scam, it's a weapon. The same proliferation arguments that have been used against nuclear also apply to space-based solar.
However, as seen above, there are lots and lots of ways to store (or equivalent) power over long periods, it's just the economic incentive to build them that is needed - and is now on the way. Renewable-gas low-duty-cycle gas peakers, Carnot batteries, and sodium-ion batteries are top candidates, with the first being the low-hanging fruit because they already exist.
Lol give over. Who told you that - solar panel companies? Companies selling holidays to the UK?
You ever been to England?
It really doesn't. Clouds absolutely kill solar. In the winter we get 10-20kWh/day on sunny days and 0.5-2kWh/day on cloudy days.
I dunno where you got that info but it's dead wrong.
What’s wild to me is how the US is leaving itself in the dust. How the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper than we can is a wonder in itself
They are currently getting lobbied by oil executives, who are trying to maximize short-term profit while they still can. The wider industry doesn't have the long-term vision to preemptively outlobby them, so the GOP is doing what oil wants.
Dealing with competition in a post-oil world is a problem left for the next generation: the current GOP will be long-dead by then and will have enjoyed the fruits of accepting decades of oil bribes.
By forcing oil prices to get 10x cheaper, at the barrel of a gun. See: Venezuela and Iran. Will it work? I would not bet on it.
I almost paid < $1USD/gal gas a couple months ago ($1.20 89 octane). My electric is ~ $.12USD/kwh. Gas is just as inexpensive.
Where in the EU can I get energy for 10x cheaper?
https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/europe-has-solid-basis-batt...
That does not make the investment any better. Private capital can be misallocated too.
Our economics may not match Canadian or US ones.