this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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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.