this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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This is a real problem for renewables.
You don't get paid when the sun shines, and you don't get paid for when it does not.
You had to pay for building the solar panels and maintaining them. Corporate greed aside none sane would like their tax money either to be spent on producing electricity when it's not needed.
Next step for renewables must be storage that is cheap enough for it to beat having fossil fuel on standby.
I feel like energy storage has been the challenge since I learned what a computer is, it really is the 3rd wheel of the cab
If you passively produce more energy than what you actually need, that excess energy can be stored. And even if the stored energy won't be 100% efficient, it's still passively produced and can offset the peak hours consumption as needed.
We have a lot of energy storage solutions l, let's stop the fossi fuels subsidies and spend them on scaling power storage.
You have to build and maintain the storage.
Even if the electricity is free you'll have to replace your battery once in a while and at current prices that is ludicrously expensive.
It's cheaper to pay an already built fossil fuel plant to idle with spare capacity.
Give it a few years for battery technology and it may look different.
The problem is that the planet is burning right now, but we only talk in terms of profits.
Yeah the fossil fuels industry is "cheaper" because it has a shit ton of subsidies and does not include the environmental cost.
We have solutions that work right now that we could start to build and maintain while reducing/eliminating the most polluting sources of energy.
The solutions don't have to be perfect, they have to be better. And if your only argument is money, then fuck off.
I agree with you on this sentiment, but it is still an obstacle we have to work around because a huge chunk of the world is going to make decisions based on money. But that’s what things like government subsidies are for.
It sounds like mummy still pays your bills. Troll grade: C-.
This is trollception I guess.
You need to set the corporate greed aside in your own mind, too (not saying you're greedy, saying you've been indoctrinated to only see life in capitalist terms). Stop thinking in "cost" or "profit", start thinking in "benefit" and "use". Producing electricity when it isn't needed is only a problem when someone is looking to make money off of it.
Producing electricity when it isn't being used is problematic for the grid. So is producing too little.
I never said it should be. There are plenty of ways to regulate electricity production, storage, and even usage, they just aren't considered "profitable" so are dismissed, overlooked, and or deliberately smeared and destroyed because they threaten those whose profits they would hurt.
Yes, but we already have many solutions ti store energy. Let's spend the fossil fuel industry subsidies on scaling these storage method instead.
Changing the words does not change the meaning.
It’s valid to think in terms of cost IMO even when trying to drive the concept of profit out of the discussion. It’s just a matter of using limited resources in efficient way that leads to more benefit.
The cost units don’t need to be dollars or euros. It could be in tons of a natural resource or some other thing that’s more tangible than money. But as long as those resources are limited in some way, it would be great to get more MW or MWh for the same resources put in.
The sick corporate greed part affects which costs get ignored though, like the externalities. They think “sure I’m poisoning our food supply and killing people every day, but nobody takes money out of MY bank account because of it.”
You get paid when people on your grid demand the electricity your plant produces. That's true whether the electricity comes from the sun or fossilized trees.
A/C usage peaks during the day and wanes at night. Laborers in virtually every field tend to work during daylight hours and sleep at night. We use more electricity when the sun is shining.
Even before you get into battery power, we have ample opportunity to grow solar inputs into the grid before we get to the point where its being wasted. At peak capacity, we're using far more electricity than current renewables provide.
Batteries are a late stage solution to a marginal problem.
Storage needs both supply and demand. Demand is easy. However storage would be even less likely without an excess of solar supply to feed it
To be honest, at grid scale, I don't see why the answer to this today isn't that the government/energy companies just build a shit load of gravity batteries and use the basically free power times to build grid supply for when the sun's gone down.
Paying billions for mega projects to save millions on cheap electricity makes no sense.
Napkin math gravity battery Last figures I found are from 2022 the costs storing 1GW 24 hours is $150 per installed kWh
My apartment has an estimated electricity consumption annually of 2000kWh, I'll need to store half that for $150 per kWh in a structure that lasts 100 years without maintenance, then crumbles into dust and needs to be rebuilt. It would average out to $1500 per year.
My current electricity bill is about $600 per year.
I think your calculations are way off based on what I've just checked.
Firstly the average UK house (which is on average a fair bit smaller than American houses, for example), which typically doesn't use AC and electric heating/cooking uses 2,700kWh (and around 10,000kWh of gas). I imagine that most other countries that don't typically use gas and have AC, have a significantly higher average.
Secondly I'm seeing several sources saying <$0.20/kWh is what pumped hydro battery storage costs, which is roughly 2/3 of the price of grid electricity in my country.
Finally, we spend billions on power plants—why not power storage too? It's necessary infrastructure spending whichever way you go about it.
I don't live in the US either.
I think the actual value on my bill is 2300kwh. But we can use 2700.
I can't find any source for $0.2/kWh. I used https://www.energy.gov/eere/analysis/2022-grid-energy-storage-technology-cost-and-performance-assessment and eyeballed the cheapest gravitational storage. PSH is still above $50. Well let's assume $0.2 per kWh per year and that half of it can be stored it's $270 per year in storage fee
My actual price for electricity is much lower than €600 per year, most of it is taxes and fees that does not get benefit from storage. Looking up the invoice from March i paid $0.07 per kWh, September was $0.01. Half of 2700 would be $95 using March price for the entire year.
We are spending billions, we must spend billions, but we have to spend them where it makes sense. Spending 270 to save 95 is insanity.
Wow your electricity prices are insanely cheap to me! I knew it was a bit more expensive here, but not by over 3x or even 30x based on your September estimate! We also have standing charges that amount to something like £250 a year even if you use no electricity whatsoever. My electricity & gas bill is over double yours for two people in a 2 bed house and we basically never use the heating. I think the economy of it makes sense with my situation but it definitely doesn't for you
If you don't mind me asking, where is it you live? Does your country have a lot of oil reserves or something?
North Scandinavia.
Most of the electricity here is hydroelectric that has been built many years ago so the power plants are paid off.
The price during summer is very low. In the winter especially the cold months is much higher with Dec-Feb being the peak.
The determining factor is still the capex for storing it. At $50 it makes no sense. At $0.2 it makes sense in some places. I don't know which assumption is correct, I expect to be wrong in 50% of the cases when I argue on the internet.
2000kwh a YEAR? Do you live in 70° weather year around and have all gas utilities or what?
No. It's district heating and not included on the electricity bill. I live north of the Arctic circle and a house from the same year with a heat pump would use an order of magnitude more.
The example was meant to highlight the absurd costs despite ludicrously favorable assumptions.
Interesting. For reference, I use more than that most months, but I live in Texas and it is very very hot.
Your electricity usage isn't equally distributed. You use more power during the day - primarily for cooling your house - than you do at night.
We also get a glut of wind power in the mornings and evenings, during big swings in temperature. Plenty of opportunity to harness cheap energy at the moment it is available.
And even after that, battery prices have been falling for years. Current EV batteries are $133/kWh with expectations of $100/kWh by next year and under $80/kWh by 2030.
That's before we get into the benefits of High Voltage DC transmissions, which can move large volumes of electricity across regions with minimal loss. Peak production on one coast can offset higher than expected usage on another.
And just like that you've shown that gravity batteries aren't feasible.
Storage is going to be a big part of the solution going forward. But it's going to be chemical batteries and thermal batteries, not gravity batteries.
Give it a few years and I've got my hopes up for batteries.
The calculations showed the absurdity in gravity storage today, not batteries in the future.
Gravity just isn't a good store of energy relative to chemical and nuclear alternatives.
It's a simple method for storing energy but not an efficient method. That's why the human body uses ATP instead of a bunch of pebbles that get lifted to our heads and dropped to our perineum.
But hey, we'll always have Dams. And tidal generators are gaining momentum. They're basically gravity batteries.
Because "gravity batteries" is a stupid inefficient concept peddled by techbros to solve a huge problem with "a magic solution". In reality, they require either digging straight down like a mine shaft, but at huge scale, or a high rise building with all the weight concentrated on its top floor when the batteries are "charged". Wind would sway that shit left and right, the weight concentration would undermine / damage the building if it even was possible to build at scale.
Well, you can use dams.
The problem is really down to finding places where you can actually build something like a hydroelectric power plant.
You need a large area you can safely flood. (No villages in the area or only villages you can buy out the owners of) or a high up lake.
The area to flood needs to have the geology required to construct a dam safely.
And finally, the area needs to be pretty high up and have an area below you can direct the outgoing water to.
Yeah, but there are already built hydroeletric dams that can be reused like that.
so-called "gravity batteries" is pretty much exactly a dam with a mini-dam/reservoir at the bottom. When there is an excess, you run the motor to reverse the waterflow to pump uphill into a highe-elevation water retention pond/mini-dam.
This also helps reduce the amount of outflow water "lost" due to high-demand. Since you could take almost a day to fill the bottom reservoir and spend "wind"/solar to pump back the "lost" water downstream back into the higher-level reservoir.
Even if things are inefficient wind/solar are "renewable", so you can keep "wasting" excess to replenish the dam and still make enough money back ( think in-terms of drought, flooding, windy, sunny, cloudy, etc ) you can basically keep the high-output "system" always topped-up with water. And still supply water + electricity as it is needed. There is no "downside".
Not everyone agrees. So opinions can differ.
With the situation in Ukraine, we really should spend on home scale storage for the resiliency against any disaster, even though it’s not as cost efficient