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This gets posted regularly on Lemmy, and while the economic take is tone-deaf at best, there's a real issue with generating more power than you can use. You can't just dump grid power
it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.
There are of course solutions, but that doesn't mean it's not an engineering challenge to implement.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy, but figuring out what to do with megawatts, at the drop of a hat, is substantially harder.
Figuring out what to do with kilowatts is easy
So what you're saying is that if it's distributed enough (say, on the roofs of houses, sized to serve the needs of the occupants) it's not a problem.
Peak energy production would be a good time to train the damn llms instead of building natural gas power plant I guess.
Given the price of RAM and graphics cards, it is obvious that running LLM is at least somewhat limited by the amount of hardware available. So having that hardware sitting idle, except when there is too much solar power, is obviously not economically viable.
Gotta admit, didn't think about that. Maybe the solution was a few guillotines all along. (This solution has its own problem tho, see the Robespierre gambit)
Sorry, but Johnny Oil with a shotgun to my head disagrees with your math. and while I never looked at the numbers myself, I am inclined to agree with him that such a plan would be disturbingly “unprofitable”.
-anyone around western spheres of influence in the vicinity of any sort of lever of power to authorize such changes in infrastructure investment
You can dump megawatts. But there is no need for that. It's not like solar panel inverters will just keep increasing voltage until they can push the power into the grid. They have an upper limit.
Basically I don't see your point
Batteries? Boil water? Anything?
Use excess to boil water for steam turbines. Solved. Big oil has INSANE propaganda.
I have played factorio so im an expert. Just boil billions of gallons of water and store the steam for as long as you need with zero loss of enegry.
You just took the excess energy to generate more energy with it?!?
Batteries are usually to expensive to have standing by on this scale.
Maybe I don't know enough about electricity at large scale, but at small scale you can just cut the circuit. Electricity isn't like water that just sits in the pipe when you close a valve, right?
It is a lot more like water than you think. The solution of “just cut the circuit” is like solving the problem of overflowing storm drains by “just plug the pipe”.
The power has to go somewhere. If you don’t do anything about it, the voltage in the cables will rise until things start to fry. Real world power balancing involves adjusting the output of power plants (e.g. how much fuel to burn) in response to changes, and in some cases, dumping power into the ground as safely as possible. This problem gets complicated when power grids span vast distances and involve many different power plants that all need to be in sync or things catch on fire.
In the case of solar power, this is part of why improved large-scale battery technology is so important. It lets you absorb the excess power at peak generation times, and then release that power at night.
Can't you cut the power at each individual solar panel? I assume that the amount of electricity out there is low enough to not cause that kind of problems?
Another point of failure, another cost… do you retrofit old panels? There are challenges with this at scale
It's not only possible but also required already. The system needs to be able to shut itself off to protect the grid.
Solar panels need an aperture.
Again, though, using gravity batteries or pumped hydro is a great way to manage excess juice, though these are expensive options.
You can store it in batteries, what are you on about?
We don't have that many batteries (yet).
a giant flywheel for every town!
Pumped Hydro is a pretty safe storage method using preexisting technology if you have hills in the area.
i don't want safe, i want DANGER!
Store it as compared air in steel tanks buried underneath your home. No protective coating.
Giant flywheels are also safe. Great for smoothing out energy generation from a fickle source as well.
not if you leave them uncovered!
Like any hydroelectrics it has large environment impact and dam failures tend to be the deadliest industrial disasters when they happen. Also most good locations have already been used. You cannot just build it wherever (without insane costs). Pumped hydro is hardly a solution here.
Pumped hydro isn't the same as a hydroelectric dam. Because both reservoirs are engineered and you don't have the concrete wall as the signal point of failure, you don't have the same risks involved. Pump Hydro can be whatever size you want and spread out to distribute the grid load.
Also, are damn failures worse then Climate Change or are they just more dramatic?
Apparently you can do something similar with sand if you live in a desert.
Gravity Batteries? They're much, much easier using water compared to solid masses.
You could store solar energy as heat in sand and use turbines(if you have water) or Sterling Engines(if you don't) to spine a generator. Peltiers are a solid state method to convert heat to electricity, but they aren't very efficient.
Thermal sand batteries are a thing, I think?
That was some solution talked about on Undecided.
I wish there was a place where smart people could gather to solve problems like this. You know, maybe invent a device that takes the electricity when it is cheap (when the invisible hand of the free market wants it) and gives it back to the grid when the price has risen because there is no longer that much sunshine.
There have been a zillion science/tech articles over the last 10 years, about possible ways to store power at scale. Because wind and solar has been creating this problem for a long time. There is not yet a silver bullet.
Well the problem isn't a werewolf, so all the regular bullet solutions, when used together, are enough to deal with it.
I don't know nearly enough about electrical engineering to consider what precautions must be taken when there is too much power flowing through the grid. I've seen enough fried motherboards that I can take a wild guess, but those were edge cases.
I'd think that in the event of a day being especially clear, cold, and sunny, there'd be a ground-fault circuit that would take the surge instead of the house.
that’s not what this means. Surge protection in a solar setup is more about protecting you from the grid, which generally is far more susceptible to surges and issues with inclement weather.
What they’re describing is excess capacity is being generated, eg a sunny day can fill a battery bank enough to not just power your home (making energy costs 0) but send excess capacity to power other people (making costs negative, eg you are now paid by the utility).
It can be an issue in a country like America because if solar occurs at enough scale it could seriously disrupt utilities from a financial standpoint. Then you’ll have people who are affluent and can afford to convert their home to a $20-70,000 solar setup draining funds from the utility. Then the lower SES people that rely on it would be more likely to have disruptions as companies lower budgets and potentially go out of business. This also means those low SES people have a portion of their energy costs funneled into far more wealthy landowners.
This is easily mitigated of course either through government subsidies of the utility or (ideally) having the utility convert to far cheaper green energy so they then maintain the role of the main supply. But the latter requires significant investment - a solar setup for a house as mentioned is tens of thousands and a solar farm is far more. And Americans are historically terrible at subsidies to benefit the lower class as well as green energy initiatives; we’d much rather go “the cost!!” As the world boils
It's so efficient that I can't fit my money cog into the machine!
That's why we need a way to store the power overnight, this is a well known and obvious problem, and there are solutions. Batteries, flywheels, sand bins, etc. Solutions which should also raise the price of the electrons produced, just to make the fuckers happier.
Not everyone who writes under the banner of MIT is sincere.
I mean yes, but what's genuinely problematic is the variability of the sun. Since it doesn't shine at night, you have to store the energy generated during the day somehow. What about winter, especially in parts of the world where it lasts a very long time? How can we transfer the energy generated in, say, the Sahara desert to Svalbard? Solar is great for generating electricity, but storage and transport of said energy is not completely resolved, yet.
For most parts of the world, the only reason why the problem with the variability isn't solved yet, is because governments don't want to invest in the electricity grid. We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money. And it's unrealistic to say that energy needs to be trabsported from the Sahara to nordic countries. Finland already needs to cut its nuclear reactors, because the renewables in Finland produce so much energy. Only the furthest regions north can't use solar.
already needs to cut its nuclear reactors, because the renewables in Finland produce so much energy.
sounds actually good. And also Finland could use other renewables like Wind, Geothermal and Tides.
We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money.
When discussing large public projects whose scale is larger than anything before seen, the money is mainly an accounting placeholder for the real resources that need to be expended.
Grid scale storage has been expanding at an exponential pace, but the sheer magnitude of the materials and engineering work that needs to be done to make a dent is pretty huge.
Bloomberg projects that total cumulative installed capacity should hit 2 Terawatt hours by 2035, noting that would represent 8x the number for 2025. But when you compare those numbers to just how much electricity is produced or consumed, with 22,000 TWh per year, we're talking about demand periods measured in minutes, not even hours, much less days.
At scales large enough to make enough of a dent to show up in global energy stats, we need to recognize that even infinite money would run into the real resource constraints of how much capacity we as a species have for pulling minerals out of the ground, processing them into useful materials, and engineering them to be useful energy storage solutions (whether pumped hydro or other gravitational systems, compressed air, flywheels, or whatever battery or fuel cell chemistries can store energy in an efficient way).
We have some technologies, but need things to improve significantly before storage can actually meet the needs for power that meets demand at any given moment in time. In the meantime, matching supply and demand in real time is a true engineering challenge, not just a monetary challenge.
Giant. Freaking. Lasers.
Hey, I never claimed it was efficient.
There are many ways to store the energy without chemical batteries.
We can use thermal batteries by heating water or other liquids and then release it at night. We can use kinetic batteries like compressing springs and then releasing them at night to turn a generator. Water batteries like hydro dams where you pump the water into a reservoir during the day and then release at night to again power a generator.
That isn't really a problem for where many people live though, nor for very long, so some modest storage medium and transmission lines (which likely already exist to many places dark in the winter) coupled with wind or whatever else makes sense locally would be just fine for those locations where it is a problem. There's no need to transmit from the Sahara to islands at the poles either, there's so much sun to go around, and so many places to gather it.
I addition to what others noted, this can also create an equality issue. Say you are a working class renter in a town of well-off home owners who have solar panels on their houses. They are likely as dependent as you on the grid when the sun isnt shining, but because they can sell back to the grid. They contribute much less to paying for the grid.
The grid that everyone relies on is therefore disproportionately funded by poorer individuals. Its the same problem with all the subsidies on electric cars and solar installations; you have to be decently wealthy to be able to take advantage.
Transitioning to EVs is better for everyone in the long term. Improved technology and greater marketshare among new EVs today means more and better used EV options in the future, with the effect increasing as the economics of scale make budget models more viable.
It's not that we shouldn't subsidize solar and EV, it's that we should also use incentives and regulations to make these options work for renters. We should be requiring rental properties to add outlets to parking spaces. We should be pushing policies aimed at getting solar on apartment buildings for the benefit of the tenants.
Honestly, we should be working towards getting every building to have solar and battery and reducing our dependence on the grid.
At least in my area, solar roofs still have to pay the usual service fee, an extra fee for grid-tie, taxes and fees on all the power they consume, without deduction for power they deliver. I know many utilities buy power at the same rate they sell it, but mine only pays 85% (before taxes). Solar people pay just fine for grid maintenance.