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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 | 2 comments | 26 Mar 21 20:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.421s | 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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1. netflixandkill ◴[27 Mar 21 02:57 UTC] No.26599508[source]▶
It's not cynicism, it's understanding capacity factors and how difficult large scale storage is. If solar panels have a capacity factor of around .25, which is what we're seeing in real installations worldwide, then it is necessary to overproduce by at least 4x and store it somewhere for off-peak solar production hours.

It's even worse if there is not other dispatchable generation available unless people are willing to accept periodic blackouts.

We're in the process of building out a combined solar and battery installations in Guam, which is about the ideal case with predictable weather, predictable load, little heavy industry and low potential for load growth. It'll enable them to retire all their old fuel oil generators, but they'll be keeping the diesel/LNG plant for at least the next 30 years even if they only run it a few days worth of time every month.

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2. toomuchtodo ◴[29 Mar 21 02:07 UTC] No.26616994[source]▶
That Guam use case would be perfect to trial combined desal and hydrogen production and storage for production troughs instead of keeping the diesel genny. Saltwater and renewables goes in, clean water and hydrogen come out.