All I’m hearing is excuses not to invest in battery storage at the grid level.
I wish we could. That capacity is already booked. The batteries we are deploying needs to be used as local storage. And this is before the EU mandate on solarpanels on all roof tops has taken effect. The grid can’t expand at that rate, unfortunately.
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.
- Pumped hydro
- Charging grid-tied batteries and EVs
- Air heating/conditioning (especially when used with physical heat storage)
- Water heating/cooling for residential use
- Water heating for pools
- Reverse osmosis
- Furnaces in glass/metal/aluminum factories, crematoriums etc.
- Computation-heavy tasks (AI training, simulations, rendering, crypto mining…)
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.
I fear for induced demand. If electricity is cheap, why build more efficiently? Why not do bitcoin mining or AI training?
It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t plenty of places around the world that could desperately use solar panels, that are building fossil fuel infrastructure instead. Climate change is a global problem, so the obsession with getting your individual emissions down to zero is selfish and sometimes even detrimental to the climate if “your emissions” don’t include the cost of manufacturing and limited availability.
We should be sending solar panels to the developing world as fast as humanly possible, not making electricity so cheap in California that multinationals can open up a couple more data centers.
Just export the power to the next timezone over.
Already happening in Northern California. PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric), which is a FOR-PROFIT utility, reduced the price it pays individuals for selling extra power to the grid. The reason cited was there is too much power being sold at the wrong time of day.
Take a look at California ISO to see real-time graphs of electricity generation and usage.
Solar is currently generating about 50% of total electricity. A percentage of that is going to batteries.