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Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030

(cleantechnica.com)
131 points mg | 1 comments | 26 Mar 21 20:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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zizee ◴[26 Mar 21 23:02 UTC] No.26598033[source]▶
I think the future will be robust national/international grids, with a mixture of storage options (batteries/pumped hydro) to smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar.

Cynics always talk about the amount of energy storage required for solar as if you need to store 24 hours of energy for solar/wind to be viable.

I'd like to see numbers on having 1 hour of storage for peak demand, a robust national grid, and appropriately provisioned and placed solar and wind, taking the duck curve into consideration.

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flgb ◴[26 Mar 21 23:41 UTC] No.26598329[source]▶
I suspect most of the intermittency of wind and solar will be addressed through super-capacity (500% of peak demand, not 100%) and geographic diversity. Batteries will be used for very short-term local balancing and power regulation ... then for those occasional times when hydro, wind and solar don’t cut it, we’ll still burn a little gas but it will be bio gas or green hydrogen, rather than fossil gas. This gas will be expensive, but these plants will hardly ever run.
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1. zizee ◴[27 Mar 21 01:38 UTC] No.26599063[source]▶
I agree entirely. I chose the 1 hour of storage as a number because I had to say something, and I didn't want to go to low as it would undoubtedly knee jerk responses of "that's not enough, you need X hours".

The main point I was going for is that we shouldn't think of a national network in the same way as we think of a off grid house with solar, where you have to deal with many hours without sunlight, and have storage capacity for several days of rain.

In a similar vein, the intermittency of solar and wind look bad when you look at isolated generation instances, but when you have a continent spanning network, the intermittency is reduced as the wind is always blowing somewhere, and the sun is shining for many more hours than when you look at any single point on map.

Again, I would love to see the numbers if you were plan out a realistic build out of this ideal network. It would probably be a pretty big number, but how would it compare to building out with nuclear, or even just lots of coal power plants from scratch.