That’s not at all what MIT is talking about here. This goes into detail around the challenges tied in rolling out grid scale solar in a way that aligns with supply and demand curves, and how to make sure we’re able to capture overproduction so that we can use it when not enough is being produced. It’s a complex shift to work out in our over 100+ year grid production structure, and has been an ongoing discussion across the energy sector. But you know…memes and shit.
You’re not saying anything contradictory to the criticism, You’re saying the exact same shit with a more expensive vocabulary. I’m also very educated. I also agree the sun is Monty Burns greatest enemy for giving out free light.
Clearly not. The point is that grid scale deployment is not easy. It’s an important discussion to do it right. The criticism is genuinely stupid and just spotlights people who clearly don’t understand how any of this stuff works or what the article is even talking about. You can’t just slap solar panels everywhere and call it a day.
Grid scale redundancies are important. Managing load is important. Energy storage is important. Scaling up renewables and scaling down conventional generation is important. Ensuring those who cannot afford their own BTM generation can access affordable electricity is important. That’s entirely what this conversation is about.
“For years, mankind has yearned to destroy the Sun.” - CM Burns.
of course it’s a furry shitposting about it.
They aren’t wrong though, storage technology is only starting to come to market in significant enough capacity to be beneficial.
And for storage plants to be financially viable energy costs during the day need to be really cheap, so they can raise them at night and make a significant enough profit to break even.
Solar generation is kinda saving our asses here in Ukraine though, and was even more in the summer. So I guess all you need for solar to be viable is to have most of your other power sources to get bombed
2 giant lakes. 1 uphill from the other, or one underground. When there’s excess energy you pump water uphill. When you need more you let it back down
yeah, good luck with that one though. it tends to be ecologically problematic, and very, very hard to find places good for this. It has happened, but you can’t just build these things as demand desires.
This is why battery based and thermal based energy storage is taking quite the aggressive focus on research and development right now. Batteries are more of a side effect, and very easily accessible, and thermal storage is probably a lot less popular than it should be.
Generally you can do a similar thing with traditional hydro anyway, plus it produces a base level of power anyway.
How efficient is making hydrogen? If you don’t need a huge facility, it might be easier to just store it that way, so you don’t need giant lakes everywhere.
ok so funny problem, storing hydrogen is currently the next nobel prize. And uh, generating it while theoretically easy, is very power hungry. (less of a problem here though tbf with cheap solar power)
Also producing power from hydrogen is more complicated than you would think. You could do a hydrogen fuel cell, or possibly burn it directly, but since hydrogen tends to sort be very spicy, it’s a little hard sometimes.
Less efficient than pumped hydro. Appears to be about 40% for green hydrogen in the round trip vs 80% for pumped hydro with a quick google search.
The real issue isn’t the overproduction per se, but that we (globally speaking) don’t have enough cheap scalable responsive distributed storage. I’m writing this from a privileged position since Switzerland has loads of dams and can pump water during such peaks. But it’s clear that’s not the solution everywhere. I hope a good cheap mass producible battery tech with less rare earth metal requirements comes along soon.
Looks like the US has one in Tennessee, place called Raccoon Mountain, in the 1970s. At the time, the power source was to be nuclear. Another large scale project is being built near Seattle, with enough stored energy for 12 hours of electricity for every residence in Seattle. Pretty cool that such a conceptually simple technology can solve these problems.
I applied to a company called Form Energy with a really interesting solution. They use the cheap simple ingredients of iron and water to rust and de-rust iron to store and release energy. It’s less efficient than lithium-ion batteries but the cost is low and scalability is enormous. If it can make it past all of the hurdles and regulations it could be the solution to the energy storage problem for wind and solar.
Before commenting, you should know there are 2 types of solar panels:
- the ones owned by people (which may or may not feed into the grid)
- the ones owned by corporations
The article is probably about the 2nd kind (if you can only sell energy when there is a surplus, your company will fail), while the twitter user makes it seem like the 1st kind was meant. We probably need to built more of both types. Identify what type the other commenters are talking about before getting in any arguments here.
It would be nice if anyone linked the actual article instead of just guessing based off of a screenshot.
Edit: This is the actual Twitter thread… and this is the article referenced. They’re saying that since solar plants all generally generate electricity at the same time, high enough solar adoption would mean prices would been driven down during those hours, which lowers the appeal of creating new solar panels over time. Which has implications for clean energy goals.