Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.
Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.
This is just factually ridiculous.
This isn’t a logical comparison. Here’s an apples to apples: It’s the rainy season - my plants have water … I take excess water and keep it in a rain barrel. An unexpected dry spell occurs: My plants have water.
We’ll return to this in a moment.
Being night I’d imagine that’s a tough fight for solar… I’ll give you that. 🙄
No.
Storage - or a buffer if you will - is simply a requirement of many systems. Electricity is no different. Renewables benefit substantially by having it and would be horribly inefficient without it.
Demand shaping when we’re taking about the grid is largely the result of seasons, the availability of light, and our day to day actions. We turn lights on at night, the heat on when we are cold, and the air on when we are hot. We cook meals before and after work. Demand shaping on the scale that is being suggested requires a positively insane amount of change and has an infinitesimally small chance of occuring.
Now: we have solar during the day and turbines for when it’s windy. This is your production. You cannot shift it. It is raining - my plants are getting water. How then, do you water your plants when it is dry? This answers itself.
Op believes that energy storage shouldn’t be necessary. At all. They have clearly stated elsewhere that their opinion is not based on research and it shows. A grid requires a buffer - or a series of fast acting production which effectively simulates one. Solar / wind without that buffer would be nearly unusuable.
Op is misguided at best and while technically not completely wrong: for them to be right we’d need to live in some utopia with vastly different technologies that we have presently. I like sci-fi too… but I’m not going to lobby congress to get rid of planes in favor of teleporters.
Yes, that is one of the ludicrous arguments that I acknowledged OP is making.
Agreed. As I said: “Yes, we need storage to match the imbalance between generation and demand. But it is far more important that we minimize that imbalance first.”
No. You are describing one type of demand shaping, but it is not the only one, and it is not the type I am referring to. “Time of use” plans are another type that consumers are more aware of. I’m referring to the industrial version of TOU rate plans.
I am saying that these varieties of demand shaping are currently setup to support traditional nuclear/coal baseload generation, rather than solar/wind. They are currently designed to increase the minimum, overnight load on the grid. They are currently used lower peak demand, and raise the trough.
Those TOU plans need to shift to driving consumption to daylight hours: To maximize the amount of power consumed as it is generated, and thus minimizing the need for storage.
Only if we are trying to get every consumer to participate. We don’t actually need to do that.
Dude. We are already doing exactly that. We have grid storage facilities being charged by solar power during the day and discharging overnight. We also have steel mills and aluminum smelters paying lower rates to operate overnight rather than during the day, to meet the needs of baseload generators.
But ultimately, the solar, nuclear/coal, storage, and steel plants are all on the same grid. So we are, effectively, doing exactly what I said: running the steel mills with stored solar power. Yes, there are legitimate reasons for doing it this way, but those reasons are ultimately based on legacy issues.
To continue the shift from traditional coal/nuclear baseload generation to solar/wind, we either need enough storage to run the steel mills overnight, or we need to shift the mills to daytime operation.
Again: Storage is important, yes. But, demand shifting is far more important.