this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
665 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
60090 readers
2085 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And here’s the magic choice …… “time of use metering”. As we electrify everything and add “smart” controls, we can be much more dynamic with time of use metering to adjust the load.
When the sun doesn’t shine at night, already has much lower electrical load than daytime. Early analog efforts at time of use metering tried to shift more load to the night so “base load” wouldn’t have to adjust, and max load wouldn’t be as high
Now we can develop smart time of use metering to shift more load to “when the sun shines”. I’m not aware of anything to quantify this so let me just make shit up: if the load “when the sun doesn’t shine” is half what it is when solar is producing, that’s a crap load of grid storage or base load that magically never has to exist
That is not a solution. People still need to use electricity at night, and if pretty much all power comes from wind and solar, you're really reliant on there being wind, and wind in the right direction.
Energy tariffs that encourage/discourage energy use at certain times is helpful, but it's very far from a silver bullet.
Renewables + nuclear
Renewables + fossil fuels
Renewables + frequent blackouts
The above is all we can achieve in the short-medium term. I know what I'd pick.
The third option wouldn't even work, practically speaking. Any political party that instigates that would not be getting re-elected anytime soon.
So for all practical purposes there's only two options. And I would prefer nuclear over choosing to continue pumping out greenhouse gases and other particulate matter.