I changed the title, because I felt it was a bit misleading. Still, it's very good news that the infrastructure can outproduce the demand during the day. Solar especially is the play of the game....
I changed the title, because I felt it was a bit misleading. Still, it's very good news that the infrastructure can outproduce the demand during the day. Solar especially is the play of the game.
Also, California seems to be doing a lot of work regarding climate change. I shared another article some months ago, about its cooperation with China for climate change. I think it's important to share these good news as well, because it shows people it's doable and how.
Edit: If anyone was at first confused by the bottom graph like me, don't forget to check the Y axis label :)
I see headlines all of the time about placing using renewables having more electricity than they need. I guess the potentially increased demand for electricity from A.I. and more electric cars...
I see headlines all of the time about placing using renewables having more electricity than they need.
I guess the potentially increased demand for electricity from A.I. and more electric cars will be an issue.
Regardless, it makes you wonder if more nuclear fission plants are needed.
There is still a ton of fossil fuel in California's energy grid that will need to be replaced, and it's probably wise to keep your energy mix diverse and not all dependent on weather or batteries....
There is still a ton of fossil fuel in California's energy grid that will need to be replaced, and it's probably wise to keep your energy mix diverse and not all dependent on weather or batteries. I think nuclear power is still a good choice for replacing coal and gas. Especially with the federal government finally easing up on the costs for building advanced reactors.
A liquid sodium cooled fast reactor just broke ground in Wyoming. It's a shame we weren't building these 30 years ago, but I guess late progress is better than no progress.
I'm not a fan of nuclear power. Mostly because of nuclear waste. Then the danger of incompetence, mistakes, and sadly terrorism. You can't take the sun and the wind away. On shady and windless...
I'm not a fan of nuclear power. Mostly because of nuclear waste. Then the danger of incompetence, mistakes, and sadly terrorism. You can't take the sun and the wind away. On shady and windless days there is energy storage and potentially improved energy storage in the future.
I agree that the fossil fuels need to go. Until that is possible I wonder if there is technology that could reduce emissions that isn't being used.
We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago and The government let me kiss nuclear waste. Despite disasters like Chernobyl, the number of deaths per terawatt of electricity generated with nuclear power is...
Despite disasters like Chernobyl, the number of deaths per terawatt of electricity generated with nuclear power is an infinitesimal fraction of that of fossil fuels. Any coal plant operating today is probably responsible for more radioactive material making it into the environment than all operational nuclear power plants combined.
On top of that, the goal of advanced reactors is to make meltdowns even more unlikely, or even physically impossible. They also produce less waste because they use up much more fissile material and fissile byproducts in their fuel cycles.
There are other options that could offer the benefits of nuclear, each with their own associated costs. Hydropower provides the same kind of benefit as nuclear, stable synchronous inertial power....
There are other options that could offer the benefits of nuclear, each with their own associated costs.
Hydropower provides the same kind of benefit as nuclear, stable synchronous inertial power. But there are geological limits to how much we can take advantage of a given hydro source. Back during Bernie Sanders 2016 run he advocated for a plan by Mark Jacobson of Stanford that intended to supplement wind and solar with hydro expansions, but afterwards other researchers responded to that proposal by saying the projected capacity expansions wouldnt be feasible at the level he had proposed.
Pumped hydro is more a storage technology than energy production, but it could be useful for dealing with long duration demand changes like seasonal variance.
Geothermal power is another option which has been making advancements in "enhanced geothermal", where you use pressurized water to make sites workable as geothermal sources when they otherwise wouldnt be. If geothermal power becomes the kind of thing that you can deploy anywhere, rather than only in certain areas, that would be a good source.
My personal long term energy solution would be fusion energy, but in my experience people are even less likely to support fusion than fission, so if youre not into that I understand.
Concentrated solar power is interesting, I dont think itd be as cheap or easy to install as photovoltaic, but its potentially a way to get high temperature process heat without burning fossil fuels.
The "enhanced geothermal" research work I've seen is extremely exciting. Essentially allowing you to create your own geothermal plant even if there's no superheated ground water to tap so long as...
The "enhanced geothermal" research work I've seen is extremely exciting. Essentially allowing you to create your own geothermal plant even if there's no superheated ground water to tap so long as the dirt geology is a good fit. I think Google even has a data center pilot project where they built an enhanced geothermal well which fully powers the site. I think that's a technology to be extremely excited for.
I don't inherently disagree that an industrial use like desalination could be a good use for excess generation. I'm curious though, why do you feel that's better than storing the energy and using...
I don't inherently disagree that an industrial use like desalination could be a good use for excess generation. I'm curious though, why do you feel that's better than storing the energy and using it for existing loads later? My understanding is storage is the absolute best use for excess generation since it helps spread smooth the supply available. Why create new loads when we're going to need the energy at a different time or can export it to a neighboring grid interconnection that needs it (though I understand theres higher energy losses the longer the electricity has to transmit from the source, so I'm sure there's diminishing returns here).
Building infrastructure that only gets used part-time is rather inefficient, so it only makes sense if it’s cheap. Batteries seem likely to drop in cost faster.
Building infrastructure that only gets used part-time is rather inefficient, so it only makes sense if it’s cheap. Batteries seem likely to drop in cost faster.
Batteries are also only infrastructure that gets used part-time, aren't they? Most batteries seem to degrade over time and if you don't have excess power they are going to be empty anyways.
Batteries are also only infrastructure that gets used part-time, aren't they? Most batteries seem to degrade over time and if you don't have excess power they are going to be empty anyways.
Any infrastructure could be used part-time in theory, it's just that it doesn't usually make economic sense. The idea I was responding to is to have a desalination plant that uses "excess" energy,...
Any infrastructure could be used part-time in theory, it's just that it doesn't usually make economic sense.
The idea I was responding to is to have a desalination plant that uses "excess" energy, which isn't there all the time, meaning that the plant is only run part-time. So, they're both part-time and the question is, which one is cheaper?
Battery storage is intermittent too, but I think its cost is going down, and I'm not sure you could say the same thing for the cost of building a desalination plant? That's a fairly expensive plant, so it probably doesn't make sense to build it to use part-time. The bonds would take longer to pay off.
Why do capital costs matter more for part-time operation? Because it takes longer for it to pay for itself. For an artificial example, let's say there are two apartments that cost the same to build and are rented out for the same price, but one is seasonal housing that only rents out during the high season. The seasonal housing is going to earn less money than the apartment that's rented out all year round.
I’m not necessarily anti-battery or pro-desalination for these purposes. I just wish we could find a productive use for the excess energy. I picked desalination because energy seems to be one of...
I’m not necessarily anti-battery or pro-desalination for these purposes. I just wish we could find a productive use for the excess energy. I picked desalination because energy seems to be one of the larger cost factors in doing that.
Sunlight to fuels. Use the excess energy for hydrogen production or (better yet) liquid hydrocarbons with air capture of CO2 would allow for long term storage and production of carbon-neutral...
Sunlight to fuels. Use the excess energy for hydrogen production or (better yet) liquid hydrocarbons with air capture of CO2 would allow for long term storage and production of carbon-neutral transportation fuels.
Internal combustion engines are very good at what they do and liquid hydrocarbons offer high volumetric energy and power densities with low-cost high-reliability storage (a gas can). Keeping what we can of ICE applications and powering them with carbon neutral fuels... seems like a good idea.
ICE's are actually kind of terrible at what they do, with ~70% of the energy being put into them getting wasted as noise and heat. The remaining 30% is what actually makes your car move forward....
ICE's are actually kind of terrible at what they do, with ~70% of the energy being put into them getting wasted as noise and heat. The remaining 30% is what actually makes your car move forward.
But if the fuel is carbon neutral and renewable, that isn't such a big deal.
There's always going to be conversion losses though (not sure what your background is so I'll avoid going off on a thermo tangent but happy to get into that more if that's interesting). When it...
There's always going to be conversion losses though (not sure what your background is so I'll avoid going off on a thermo tangent but happy to get into that more if that's interesting). When it comes to converting chemical energy into electrical or mechanical power, ICEs are compact, tolerant of a wide range of operating conditions, have long lifetimes, and have high power to weight ratios. Fuel cells are certainly a more efficient way to convert that power, but a fuel cell power system is still going to have a maximum theoretical system efficiency limit of maybe around 60% (which keep in mind this would be a large, heavy, pressurized power generation system rather than something as small as a car engine).
Single speed engines have the potential to be a little bit more than 30% efficient (there's efficiency loss for car ICEs in part because they can run at multiple speeds). So while contained explosions aren't an elegant way of converting energy, we really have gotten pretty good at squeezing a remarkable efficiency out of modern internal combustion engines. Especially when the thermodynamic limit for a heat engine isn't that much higher than 30% anyway. There's a pretty thoughtful discussion on the approximate limit here if that's interesting to you.. It's easy to look at an engine and go "that's so inefficient! 70% of the energy is waste heat!" But that's not really fair because thermodynamic's imposes limits on how much more energy you can get out of the fuel even for a fuel cell. There will always be waste heat. It's just the cost of converting energy.
So just on the front of reconverting synthetic fuel back into power, ICEs aren't that ridiculous of an option.
Electric motors are dramatically more efficient at converting electrical energy into kinetic energy, and have much wider power bands. This is why you can see electric cars getting 100 MPG...
Electric motors are dramatically more efficient at converting electrical energy into kinetic energy, and have much wider power bands. This is why you can see electric cars getting 100 MPG equivalent and don't even need a transmission to manage the power band. The significant reduction in moving parts also means they can last even longer with even less maintenance than an ICE.
That's absolutely true, and don't get me wrong, I'm a strong advocate for EVs. The electric energy for that EV has to come from somewhere though and the source for those electrons is not as cut...
That's absolutely true, and don't get me wrong, I'm a strong advocate for EVs. The electric energy for that EV has to come from somewhere though and the source for those electrons is not as cut and dry depending on the region. Obviously without cost, supply, and political constraints solar, wind, and water based power generation is ideal. The hydrocarbons we've been burning indirectly came from the sun anyway, we've just learned to cut out the middle man and harness that power now.
When it comes to storing that power for later use, I think there's a good case for using synthetic hydrocarbon fuel for seasonal energy storage and for hard to electrify transportation (planes and industrial vehicles). Obviously that comes with the caveat that the carbon should be atmospheric carbon rather than captured CO2 from existing coal or gas infrastructure and that it should be recaptured and recycled. The added cost to close the carbon stream for the plant definitely adds cost and complexity. But it's not an outrageous plan either.
And who knows, battery tech is improving fast, so the power to weight ratio for a battery and motor could dramatically shift in favor of a fully electric system in a decade or two. I'm optimistic batteries will continue to become cheaper and more energy dense, but I'm not sure how close to the energy density limit we're coming. So I think synthetic fuels with ICEs and turbines are still important to consider as backup.
Cars have been powered electrically for over 100 years, so the utility of electric motors for cars is well demonstrated, and now practical with improving battery technology. I think the ICE will...
Cars have been powered electrically for over 100 years, so the utility of electric motors for cars is well demonstrated, and now practical with improving battery technology. I think the ICE will still be the practical solution for aviation and remote power.
An ICE has the ability to get its oxidizer from the air around it and it similarly unloads its oxidized fuel once complete. Not so with battery storage, which must carry both its oxidizer and spent fuel. This makes it strong case for aviation, where weight matters. Also, a team that is, say, clearing branches around power lines in remote areas will have a much easier time with gas powered 2-stroke engines than electric ones simply because the amount of energy needed is large and the infrastructure to support electric power delivery in remote locations is nonexistent.
I changed the title, because I felt it was a bit misleading. Still, it's very good news that the infrastructure can outproduce the demand during the day. Solar especially is the play of the game.
Also, California seems to be doing a lot of work regarding climate change. I shared another article some months ago, about its cooperation with China for climate change. I think it's important to share these good news as well, because it shows people it's doable and how.
Edit: If anyone was at first confused by the bottom graph like me, don't forget to check the Y axis label :)
If you want to look at the charts for California, try GridStatus.io.
I think you need to create an account to look at history, but it’s free.
I see headlines all of the time about placing using renewables having more electricity than they need.
I guess the potentially increased demand for electricity from A.I. and more electric cars will be an issue.
Regardless, it makes you wonder if more nuclear fission plants are needed.
There is still a ton of fossil fuel in California's energy grid that will need to be replaced, and it's probably wise to keep your energy mix diverse and not all dependent on weather or batteries. I think nuclear power is still a good choice for replacing coal and gas. Especially with the federal government finally easing up on the costs for building advanced reactors.
A liquid sodium cooled fast reactor just broke ground in Wyoming. It's a shame we weren't building these 30 years ago, but I guess late progress is better than no progress.
I'm not a fan of nuclear power. Mostly because of nuclear waste. Then the danger of incompetence, mistakes, and sadly terrorism. You can't take the sun and the wind away. On shady and windless days there is energy storage and potentially improved energy storage in the future.
I agree that the fossil fuels need to go. Until that is possible I wonder if there is technology that could reduce emissions that isn't being used.
We Solved Nuclear Waste Decades Ago and The government let me kiss nuclear waste.
Despite disasters like Chernobyl, the number of deaths per terawatt of electricity generated with nuclear power is an infinitesimal fraction of that of fossil fuels. Any coal plant operating today is probably responsible for more radioactive material making it into the environment than all operational nuclear power plants combined.
On top of that, the goal of advanced reactors is to make meltdowns even more unlikely, or even physically impossible. They also produce less waste because they use up much more fissile material and fissile byproducts in their fuel cycles.
There are other options that could offer the benefits of nuclear, each with their own associated costs.
Hydropower provides the same kind of benefit as nuclear, stable synchronous inertial power. But there are geological limits to how much we can take advantage of a given hydro source. Back during Bernie Sanders 2016 run he advocated for a plan by Mark Jacobson of Stanford that intended to supplement wind and solar with hydro expansions, but afterwards other researchers responded to that proposal by saying the projected capacity expansions wouldnt be feasible at the level he had proposed.
Pumped hydro is more a storage technology than energy production, but it could be useful for dealing with long duration demand changes like seasonal variance.
Geothermal power is another option which has been making advancements in "enhanced geothermal", where you use pressurized water to make sites workable as geothermal sources when they otherwise wouldnt be. If geothermal power becomes the kind of thing that you can deploy anywhere, rather than only in certain areas, that would be a good source.
My personal long term energy solution would be fusion energy, but in my experience people are even less likely to support fusion than fission, so if youre not into that I understand.
Concentrated solar power is interesting, I dont think itd be as cheap or easy to install as photovoltaic, but its potentially a way to get high temperature process heat without burning fossil fuels.
The "enhanced geothermal" research work I've seen is extremely exciting. Essentially allowing you to create your own geothermal plant even if there's no superheated ground water to tap so long as the dirt geology is a good fit. I think Google even has a data center pilot project where they built an enhanced geothermal well which fully powers the site. I think that's a technology to be extremely excited for.
It would be nice if we could find good industrial uses for excess energy beyond just storage. Desalination?
I don't inherently disagree that an industrial use like desalination could be a good use for excess generation. I'm curious though, why do you feel that's better than storing the energy and using it for existing loads later? My understanding is storage is the absolute best use for excess generation since it helps spread smooth the supply available. Why create new loads when we're going to need the energy at a different time or can export it to a neighboring grid interconnection that needs it (though I understand theres higher energy losses the longer the electricity has to transmit from the source, so I'm sure there's diminishing returns here).
Building infrastructure that only gets used part-time is rather inefficient, so it only makes sense if it’s cheap. Batteries seem likely to drop in cost faster.
Batteries are also only infrastructure that gets used part-time, aren't they? Most batteries seem to degrade over time and if you don't have excess power they are going to be empty anyways.
Any infrastructure could be used part-time in theory, it's just that it doesn't usually make economic sense.
The idea I was responding to is to have a desalination plant that uses "excess" energy, which isn't there all the time, meaning that the plant is only run part-time. So, they're both part-time and the question is, which one is cheaper?
Battery storage is intermittent too, but I think its cost is going down, and I'm not sure you could say the same thing for the cost of building a desalination plant? That's a fairly expensive plant, so it probably doesn't make sense to build it to use part-time. The bonds would take longer to pay off.
Why do capital costs matter more for part-time operation? Because it takes longer for it to pay for itself. For an artificial example, let's say there are two apartments that cost the same to build and are rented out for the same price, but one is seasonal housing that only rents out during the high season. The seasonal housing is going to earn less money than the apartment that's rented out all year round.
I’m not necessarily anti-battery or pro-desalination for these purposes. I just wish we could find a productive use for the excess energy. I picked desalination because energy seems to be one of the larger cost factors in doing that.
Sunlight to fuels. Use the excess energy for hydrogen production or (better yet) liquid hydrocarbons with air capture of CO2 would allow for long term storage and production of carbon-neutral transportation fuels.
Internal combustion engines are very good at what they do and liquid hydrocarbons offer high volumetric energy and power densities with low-cost high-reliability storage (a gas can). Keeping what we can of ICE applications and powering them with carbon neutral fuels... seems like a good idea.
ICE's are actually kind of terrible at what they do, with ~70% of the energy being put into them getting wasted as noise and heat. The remaining 30% is what actually makes your car move forward.
But if the fuel is carbon neutral and renewable, that isn't such a big deal.
There's always going to be conversion losses though (not sure what your background is so I'll avoid going off on a thermo tangent but happy to get into that more if that's interesting). When it comes to converting chemical energy into electrical or mechanical power, ICEs are compact, tolerant of a wide range of operating conditions, have long lifetimes, and have high power to weight ratios. Fuel cells are certainly a more efficient way to convert that power, but a fuel cell power system is still going to have a maximum theoretical system efficiency limit of maybe around 60% (which keep in mind this would be a large, heavy, pressurized power generation system rather than something as small as a car engine).
Single speed engines have the potential to be a little bit more than 30% efficient (there's efficiency loss for car ICEs in part because they can run at multiple speeds). So while contained explosions aren't an elegant way of converting energy, we really have gotten pretty good at squeezing a remarkable efficiency out of modern internal combustion engines. Especially when the thermodynamic limit for a heat engine isn't that much higher than 30% anyway. There's a pretty thoughtful discussion on the approximate limit here if that's interesting to you.. It's easy to look at an engine and go "that's so inefficient! 70% of the energy is waste heat!" But that's not really fair because thermodynamic's imposes limits on how much more energy you can get out of the fuel even for a fuel cell. There will always be waste heat. It's just the cost of converting energy.
So just on the front of reconverting synthetic fuel back into power, ICEs aren't that ridiculous of an option.
Electric motors are dramatically more efficient at converting electrical energy into kinetic energy, and have much wider power bands. This is why you can see electric cars getting 100 MPG equivalent and don't even need a transmission to manage the power band. The significant reduction in moving parts also means they can last even longer with even less maintenance than an ICE.
That's absolutely true, and don't get me wrong, I'm a strong advocate for EVs. The electric energy for that EV has to come from somewhere though and the source for those electrons is not as cut and dry depending on the region. Obviously without cost, supply, and political constraints solar, wind, and water based power generation is ideal. The hydrocarbons we've been burning indirectly came from the sun anyway, we've just learned to cut out the middle man and harness that power now.
When it comes to storing that power for later use, I think there's a good case for using synthetic hydrocarbon fuel for seasonal energy storage and for hard to electrify transportation (planes and industrial vehicles). Obviously that comes with the caveat that the carbon should be atmospheric carbon rather than captured CO2 from existing coal or gas infrastructure and that it should be recaptured and recycled. The added cost to close the carbon stream for the plant definitely adds cost and complexity. But it's not an outrageous plan either.
And who knows, battery tech is improving fast, so the power to weight ratio for a battery and motor could dramatically shift in favor of a fully electric system in a decade or two. I'm optimistic batteries will continue to become cheaper and more energy dense, but I'm not sure how close to the energy density limit we're coming. So I think synthetic fuels with ICEs and turbines are still important to consider as backup.
Cars have been powered electrically for over 100 years, so the utility of electric motors for cars is well demonstrated, and now practical with improving battery technology. I think the ICE will still be the practical solution for aviation and remote power.
An ICE has the ability to get its oxidizer from the air around it and it similarly unloads its oxidized fuel once complete. Not so with battery storage, which must carry both its oxidizer and spent fuel. This makes it strong case for aviation, where weight matters. Also, a team that is, say, clearing branches around power lines in remote areas will have a much easier time with gas powered 2-stroke engines than electric ones simply because the amount of energy needed is large and the infrastructure to support electric power delivery in remote locations is nonexistent.
The problem with desalination is what to do with the sludge that is left over.