The cost of solar panels is plummeting, and this will flood the power grid with cheap electricity. But that’s just Act 1. We won’t stop building solar at the limits of the grid - we’ll build a lot more.
This post explains why we'll keep building more,
There is a lot of operations that aren’t timing-critical (their work is cumulative) and can be made cheaper by only using excess energy in daytime.
Solar can be built wherever there’s demand for any of these, right? Also, more customers should adopt a real-time energy pricing model.
I will say, from my time being a process engineer in metals:
-Everything runs 24/7 cuz the equipment is so expensive and there’s always too much demand
-furnaces are gas, probably too hot to reach in a reasonable space with electricity
Totally agree with storing temperature/water locally as a battery, especially at home levels
I believe the electric funaces are called "Arc furnaces" and you heat by making electricy jump between conductors.
One of the advantages over blust furnaces is that production can be varied more easily as there isn’t a whole lot of ancillary parts of the furnance which all need to get up to temperature. So only running them on excess energy might be more practical.
Oh I wasn’t even thinking of it, but for secondary in iron that is probably perfect. Still not gonna be able to continuously anneal or anything due to the massive amount of thermal mass needed, but for the “spot” stuff that sounds perfect
I also have no idea about titanium production and it could easily be useful there
That’s true. If there’s lots of flexibility in the energy consumption, then it would be easy to keep adding lots of renewable. And there’s lot of potential for demand flexibility.
In reality there’s limited flexibility, in part due to laziness and inertia. So adding more solar is giving diminishing returns. Which means adding solar gets harder to do economically as the share of renewable increase.
There need to be better incentives for flexibility in demand (ie push consumer to shift energy usage) and for storage (ie give energy producers bonuses depending on the amount of energy storage they have available).
Factories often kinda have to run 24/7 so only firing up the furnaces/other electricity intensive machines when electricity is cheap isn’t feasible in most cases
I’m not saying factories should be forced to switch machinery like with ripple control systems in Soviet countries (contactors in households and industry switching based on signals superimposed on the 50Hz grid), there should just be an appropriate economic incentive in doing so. If it’s not enough to offset equipment cost, the factories can ignore it.