It depends on what you mean by "harming". But to answer your question, yeah, most of them. I've been preparing my home to switch to time of use energy pricing, where power is less expensive at night when there's lower demand. It's pretty painless to put things on timers or set schedules in configuration. The trivial cost of setting this up will pay for itself within about two months.
Deferring workloads for when it's sunny is almost the exact opposite: using more power during the day rather than at night. That's probably better for most consumers, since people tend to use more power when they're awake by default.
That's one thing that's maybe an inconvenience for me now! I'll have to run my heat pumps in the early morning to lower (or raise) the temperature of the house before the cost of power goes up. Though maybe also more efficient in the summer, since I suspect it's less energy intensive to cool the house when it's cooler outside.
Bitcoin mining can, with little notice and any time of day.
Solar is pretty predictable and there are a lot of workloads that can follow solar output. Vehicle charging, water heating, water chilling/freezing, and industrial heat batteries. Depending on the capital cost of the plant, desalination and hydrogen splitting make sense too.
I don’t like Bitcoins, they seem like a ridiculous way of burning extra electricity. That said, because they can consume energy on tap, they do seem like a funny way of providing a return on extra renewable energy, promoting the over-building of renewables, which would mean that we have to turn on the wasteful peaking generators less often. Have to give them credit here.
For example water heating can be done and stored for 12 hours. In some houses, this is the main energy consumption for a family. The night hours are tipically cheaper due to low demand, so water heaters are programmed to work at night. But if solar panels are the energy source, you can move the heating to the middle of the day.
Same goes to electric cars, but in that case there are batteries storing, so I'm not sure it counts.
What do you mean by harm? Appliances could be made smarter—think fridges, water heaters, pool pumps, air conditioners, dishwashers—the grid just needs to communicate price info, and the electricity needs to be priced in line with production capacity. It would be extremely easy but there’s no incentive to do it.
I mean, flip it around. Those of us who can plan ahead are being harmed by the fact that we’re paying for a system that caters to those who can’t.
Heating and/or cooling can be shifted by hours, depending on the thermal time constant of the building. The better the insulation, the longer it can be shifted. Texas had a problem because so many older buildings there are very poorly insulated.
Thermal energy in general is very cheap to store. This is also true industrially, where thermal storage has long been used for regenerative recovery of waste heat, for example in various places in steelmaking. Thermal storage of heat derived from electrical power is now being proposed as a way to soak up zero or negative price electricity. There's a company based on work at MIT that's doing this, using moderately electrically conductive refractory ceramic bricks as combined storage and heating elements.
That might be true, but in places like North Texas where multiday blackouts are becoming common during the winter, it might make sense to invest in storage if you have the option. Not going to help much with heating, but at least your fridge / freezer can stay running.
I’m not sure if Texas qualifies, but yes. When it gets too hot or too cold the Texas grid tends to fall over. Mostly because Texas aggressively deregulated their power grid allowing producers to cheap out of weatherization.
If you live in Texas rooftop solar and a battery are highly recommended.
For what I read about Texas, the root if the problem is that they opted to disconnect from the interstate grid, IIRC to avoid Federal regulations. If anything goes bad, they can't lean on neighbor states to provide, so they blackout.
People are exaggerating a bit here. Texas ran out of power in 2021, and before that in 2011. These were totally unacceptable events to be sure, but I'm not sure once every 10 years qualifies as "common".
People might be confused a bit because there are usually several close calls over the year where supply is projected to outstrip demand, but the problem usually resolves when they go bribe some bitcoin mines to turn off. (Ugh.)
And I never said a single thing about "running out of power," because that wasn't the issue in most areas. The power infrastructure was physically damaged. The state is on its own grid, refuses to winterize, and people also carried on in their households as if it were a normal day, which overloaded local transformers.
It took me a week to regain power in 2021 because the transformer blew behind my house on Valentine's Day and Oncor would keep sending trucks with technicians who didn't realize they had access to the transformer via the giant vacant lot behind it. Instead of doing the intelligent thing and calling to ask for a frame of reference, they would cancel the report. They did this for days while the temperatures were near zero.
Dallas had a week-long blackout in some areas a week ago. We had an almost day's long power outage in January in some areas. This is becoming a common occurrence in the area due to severe weather.
True, a few workloads can be time-shifted (like filtering your pool) but the majority of grid load is at least somewhat time-dependent.
Some loads are slightly time-dependent because you can shift them with minor inconvenience such as pre-cooling your home or refrigerator (using it as a thermal battery) or scheduling when your car charges (using its battery as a battery).
Others are entirely time-dependent. Waiting until it's sunny to process an online order, take MRI images, run an assembly line, or use your TV to watch a sporting game incurs substantial additional cost and/or inconvenience.
I don’t think we really know what percentage of loads are time-dependent because we mostly don’t have demand response pricing in the US. A hospital probably needs a backup battery (or a guaranteed slice of the grid’s battery capacity). Everything which could be shifted with minor inconvenience—we don’t have any incentive to try and automate that inconvenience away, so who knows? Perhaps we could see a resurgence in more efficient designs, like chest freezers.
> we mostly don’t have demand response pricing in the US
What makes you say that? Do you know of a region that does not have DR (demand response) options?
Every US utility I am aware of has had DR programs for commercial and industrial customers for many years. Back when I worked in electricity markets a decade ago only a few had DR programs for residential customers but since then many have added residential DR or have started pilots as they upgrade their residential infrastructure.
TVP (time-variable pricing) is also very common, though moreso with commercial/industrial customers. I'm honestly not sure how many residential customers have the option to pick a provider with TVP/TOU pricing.
Some crazy ISOs (looking at you ERCOT) even allow residential customers to pay rates pegged to RTP (real-time pricing) which is gloriously insane and very Texas.
> A hospital probably needs a backup battery (or a guaranteed slice of the grid’s battery capacity).
Yes. Hospitals often have special utility contracts and get priority when there are brownouts or blackouts. (One benefit of living next to a hospital is that you'll get power back more quickly after a blackout!) But most hospitals still have backup generators, and special circuits so that they only need to power critical equipment.
> we don’t have any incentive to try and automate that inconvenience away, so who knows? Perhaps we could see a resurgence in more efficient designs, like chest freezers.
This is already very common with commercial/industrial customers, but hopefully you're right that as residential customers get more exposure to things like dynamic pricing and home solar generation that more of them will alter their behavior and appliances.
You should tell that to California which has such an excess glut of solar during the sunniest part of the day that they're sometimes _paying_ to export their energy.
While the idea of deferring load to eliminate the need for batteries might seem straightforward, it raises significant practical challenges. Forcing billions of people and businesses to change their consumption habits is not only unrealistic but also fraught with potential issues.
Consider the global perspective. In developing countries, where resources and infrastructure are already limited, expecting such flexibility is impractical. These regions often lack the luxury of choice and are more vulnerable to disruptions.
Moreover, the goal of decarbonization isn't just about ideological preferences for renewable energy. It requires a pragmatic approach that incorporates a mix of technologies: solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, batteries, and more. Each technology has its strengths and plays a crucial role in the overall strategy.
Cherry-picking preferred technologies without considering the broader context can delay our progress by decades. To effectively combat climate change, we need to embrace a comprehensive and inclusive approach that leverages all available solutions.
> While the idea of deferring load to eliminate the need for batteries might seem straightforward, it raises significant practical challenges.
This is pretty vague. Practical challenges such as?
> Forcing billions of people and businesses to change their consumption habits is not only unrealistic but also fraught with potential issues.
Potential issues such as?
> Consider the global perspective. In developing countries, where resources and infrastructure are already limited, expecting such flexibility is impractical. These regions often lack the luxury of choice and are more vulnerable to disruptions.
I’m under the impression that brownouts or blackouts are a little more common in developing countries, so if we’re going to have to deal with intermittent supplies we probably should be asking them for advice.
I think we’d have to look, probably case-by-case, at what the issues are in less electrified areas, to see how renewables and load shifting would affect things. If the grid is less robust and parts become disconnected from time to time, then renewables are great, because they tend to be more disperse. If there are times where there isn’t enough generation capacity (not enough power plants or fuel) then great, whatever communication scheme is used to communicate information about renewables can also be used for fossil fuel.
> Moreover, the goal of decarbonization isn't just about ideological preferences for renewable energy. It requires a pragmatic approach that incorporates a mix of technologies: solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, batteries, and more. Each technology has its strengths and plays a crucial role in the overall strategy.
This is true. But I don’t really see any ideology in the idea of load shifting though. It is actually a practical answer. Renewable generation capacity that isn’t backed by batteries is always cheaper than that which is, unless batteries somehow become free. So, the pragmatic answer is to combine the two. Batteries are a cost, strategies to avoid them should be taken. That doesn’t mean 0 energy storage, though.
> Cherry-picking preferred technologies without considering the broader context can delay our progress by decades. To effectively combat climate change, we need to embrace a comprehensive and inclusive approach that leverages all available solutions.
Accounting for the price of batteries is often brought up as an argument against renewables. We should implement dynamic pricing now. It could even provide a market incentive to build more batteries. There’s no cherry picking here. Load shifting goes in the basket of solutions.
> This is pretty vague. Practical challenges such as?
The practical challenges of deferring load to eliminate the need for batteries include significant disruptions to daily life and economic activities. Changing consumption habits on such a large scale would increase living and labor costs, thereby impacting the economy. Asking millions, if not billions, of people to change their habits is unrealistic, especially on a long-term basis. The discontent experienced during COVID-19 restrictions illustrates how difficult it is to enforce such changes, and doing so permanently would be even more challenging. Additionally, in democratic societies, politicians proposing such drastic measures would likely face significant opposition.
> I’m under the impression that brownouts or blackouts are a little more common in developing countries, so if we’re going to have to deal with intermittent supplies we probably should be asking them for advice.
While developing countries do have experience dealing with intermittent supplies due to frequent brownouts and blackouts, implementing advanced load-shifting strategies without substantial support and investment remains challenging. Economic implications are just one part of the issue. Many people in developed countries already struggle with stability, and further destabilizing their energy supply could lead to large-scale social and economic disasters.
> This is true. But I don’t really see any ideology in the idea of load shifting though. It is actually a practical answer. Renewable generation capacity that isn’t backed by batteries is always cheaper than that which is unless batteries somehow become free. So, the pragmatic answer is to combine the two. Batteries are a cost, and strategies to avoid them should be taken. That doesn’t mean 0 energy storage, though.
The most feasible and cost-effective solution to minimize battery use and costs is to use nuclear power as a baseload. This approach is pragmatic and unideological, focusing on what we can realistically achieve. Unrealistic proposals often overlook the practical implications of their implementation. The economic and social impacts of load-shifting strategies are substantial, and most electric infrastructure cannot support such changes without significant upgrades. Smart grids are not yet widespread, and the amount of rare earth elements required for battery production is a critical concern.
In Italy, a research institute found that a 100% renewable future using batteries would demand 70 times the world's annual lithium production. Even if we reduce this demand by 99%, it remains impractically high for just one country. Given these challenges, it is more sensible to prioritize solutions that are already proven effective, such as the renewable and nuclear combination. This approach requires less effort relative to what you propose and avoids the significant economic and social disruptions associated with large-scale load shifting.
In conclusion, I do not want to rule out that your proposal could be a solution in some areas of the world, for some parts of the population. And I hope it could help in decarbonization. But what I would like to hear, is a realistic comparison with the solutions we already have.
And before certain proposals can become a real solution, you have to accept and consider the huge implementation limitations in order to have pragmatic solutions.
"Peak Carbon" is a phrase that's been in use for quite a while now, because we're out of atmosphere to dump extra burnt fossil fuels into if we want to keep climate change relatively mitigated.
It depends who the "we" is; many of the people who dismissed the fear of Peak Oil, did so on the grounds that low supply would drive the price up high enough to encourage the development of alternatives — phrases such as "the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones" and similar.
My main worry in 2010 was that it is very difficult to balance an exponential increase in demand for a thing that is a big employer (such as oil) with some convenient replacement that employs a similar number of people at a similar cost.
The economics of the transition to PV and wind are much smoother than I expected, because I am not an economist and did not have a remotely realistic model for how any of this would work in practice. (Hopefully my similar concern about the upcoming economic transition due to AI automation is misplaced for exactly the same reasons).
Automation has been annihilating jobs since before my grandmother was born, and many social upheavals resulting from them.
Even narrow AI is more of the same — one that can drive, would rapidly put millions of drivers out of work, but not much else. That's a huge one-off transition to manage, but not inherently radical.
General-purpose AI? Depends on the details. Let's say it's got the all the capabilities and limitations of an exactly average human, with a 24/7 equivalent power requirement of 17.2 kW — that will cost around $15.1k/year to run: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=17.2+kW+*+1+year+*+%240...
This means it's economically neutral to pick an average human or a machine for those roles and with that assumption about electricity cost… provided that humans are willing to accept minimum wages for that role.
This lowers the wages for the average human to minimum wages.
This suggests that prices may rise rapidly, at least before the AI can be put to work guiding robots to install solar power systems (there's a startup on Y Combinator dedicated to exactly this).
How much might prices rise? To whatever level where the AI can still be a neutral replacement for human labour. If the median capacity human earns $45k, then that assumption for power requirement would raise electricity prices to $0.30/kWh. If the AI is as energy efficient as a human brain, and uses 30 watts, then it doesn't have any impact on prices because the US doesn't run out of power in the first place; if the AI needs megawatts, then the effect is also reduced, because 1 MW * 1 y * $0.1/kWh = $876,000 and therefore it isn't economically sensible to displace even one worker.
So what I'm worried about is the transition, the time between now and the steady-state long-term future where the robots can put in as much PV as they need. Do we have a risky period where robots could use all the available electrical power and might be able to out-bid the average human on both sides of the equation, the income side by being as cheap as it's legally possible for a human to be, and the expenses because now the human isn't earning any money and can't pay for electricity?
Or does this dynamically fix itself because I'm doing an over-simplified toy model in my head and I've missed a critical part? (Probably).
This is why I called it a political problem. You are hand waving about using all our energy for abstract productivity as of we would do that instead of lighting our homes.
I guess of you really think robots are gonna bid up electricity, residential solar makes even more sense.
> You are hand waving about using all our energy for abstract productivity as of we would do that instead of lighting our homes.
I may be simply wrong, but I can assure you it's definitely not a hand-wave.
You may think it absurd that an economic choice would be made over a human value, but that kind of behaviour is exactly what happened in the Irish potato famine — there it was exporting food while starving to death.
I am also planning to get domestic PV as soon as possible precisely because I anticipate this dynamic.
It is important to note that utility scale Solar+Storage is still more expensive than combined cycle gas, at $60/MWh versus $45/MWh.
This is close enough on a purely economic aspect that a carbon tax to allocate costs for the externalities of carbon or more stringent emissions requirements may make it cheaper overall for Solar + Storage!
I'm curious how those numbers are calculated. My brother works for a company that installs and supports operations for microgrids and renewable power generation.
At the moment, solar is slowing down, because private equity is turning to cobbling together quotes from residential installers as a bargaining tactic to get lower quotes from my brothers company.
It's a profoundly bad idea, but if they can get something together and flip it to naive buyers in a few years, they can get away with it.
All of that is to say, there's lots of bad cost estimation out there for commercial solar, and I know it'll happen sooner or later, but I'm still skeptical that solar+storage is going to beat carbon in the "sooner" range.
I am not familiar enough with the topic to comment on the numbers, but do the costs you quoted for renewables factor in externalities associated with reaponsibly recycling dead solar panels?
That’s an unnecessary task because the externality is near 0. Modern landfills are cheap, plentiful, and relatively benign to the environment. CO2 emissions are a real problem, landfills are largely an imaginary one.
If solar panels are dumpstered at the end of their life cycle but save CO2 emissions, it’s a non-factor.
And in any case, they’re made largely of aluminum which is profitable to recycle (which means it will actually happen if its own accord) and a solved problem.
Any real negative externalities come in manufacture or installation.
this is such a strange talking point. Do we factor in recycling all the materials a gas plant is made out of?
Who cares about panel recycling? bury them if we have to, they're non toxic, and would be an infinitesimally small % of total annual landfill. Such an irrelevant "gotcha" i wonder why people keep repeating it?
It wasn't a talking point, but a genuine question.
This link from the EPA suggested that EoL solar panels could be considered hazardous waste under RCRA due to heavy metal leaching, which is an "externality" like CO2, and the very reason I asked the question.
So, if you believe the EPA, they are not "non-toxic" and could add up to "up to 10 million tonnes" of panels that need to be safely disposed.
Solar panels have such a long service life that recycling them is the next generation's issue. You can't really predict costs for things 20 or 30 years down the road, given how fast the technology is evolving. In fact if some calculation claims they take into account the costs of recycling solar panels, that would make me extremely suspicious of their results because I do not trust their prediction of recycling costs. You can also look at predictions of solar panel manufacturing costs from 20 years ago and see how wildly wrong these predictions were.
But people are fairly localized to places where there's land. To pick a somewhat extreme example, the pacific ocean doesn't have a lot of places to put solar panels to sell energy to Europe at night.
How many megatons of copper would be needed to be mined to make that happen? What would the line loseses look like? where on the planet are there six to eight tine zones next to each other with equal enough demand to make the excess build out work?There is a good reason we dont have this yet
We're still flaring off gas at the well. The cost of gas is as close to zero as it will get.
Force storage and usage of that gas (and burning it at the well is better than letting it be a greenhouse gas on its own). Curtailing the waste will change the costs and economics drastically.
CC with CO2 emitted will have to go, so the CO2 cost will be set high enough to force that. The question is whether the replacement will be renewables or natural gas with CO2 sequestration (like Allam cycle).
We wouldn’t have a single new gas plant if solar was so overwhelmingly better. There are tradeoffs. On some aspects it’s cheaper, on others more expensive. You can’t have solar when the sun isn’t shining so now you need grid scale storage or some sort of backup power plant.
Made me think of Factorio (game in which you bootstrap automated factories on an alien planet) where all the robot arms run at reduced speed when power demand exceeds supply.
The article presents a misleading analysis of renewable energy costs, which needs correction for a rational discussion on energy and decarbonization.
The LCOE measures overall production costs but overlooks availability and reliability. This is problematic for intermittent sources like solar and wind, which can't ensure continuous production. For instance, solar energy isn't feasible at night, necessitating backup sources like gas, coal, or nuclear. It's worth considering the immense lithium required for a 100% solar-powered country.
If renewables were the most cost-effective, private investors would already favor them. Yet, investments continue in gas and coal due to their reliability and continuous output, essential for economic stability.
Countries like Germany have replaced nuclear reactors with coal plants, despite their decarbonization goals, and India relies on fossil fuels for economic growth.
Misleading articles hinder decarbonization efforts. It's crucial that energy discussions are grounded in concrete data and rational analysis to advance towards a sustainable future.
The capital heavy industries are still set to destroy the planet, because we have not forcibly destroyed their capital investments. The capital light industries won't help us if the mega capital still exists and needs to be leveraged. Lucky, things are stark enough to catalyze action. Namely, if we remain too wimpy to implement revolutionary climate justice and destroy the mega capital, then we are all going to die.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadThen you compare the cost of a gas peaker plant to the cost of a battery and make your decision off that.
Deferring workloads for when it's sunny is almost the exact opposite: using more power during the day rather than at night. That's probably better for most consumers, since people tend to use more power when they're awake by default.
Solar is pretty predictable and there are a lot of workloads that can follow solar output. Vehicle charging, water heating, water chilling/freezing, and industrial heat batteries. Depending on the capital cost of the plant, desalination and hydrogen splitting make sense too.
Same goes to electric cars, but in that case there are batteries storing, so I'm not sure it counts.
I mean, flip it around. Those of us who can plan ahead are being harmed by the fact that we’re paying for a system that caters to those who can’t.
Thermal energy in general is very cheap to store. This is also true industrially, where thermal storage has long been used for regenerative recovery of waste heat, for example in various places in steelmaking. Thermal storage of heat derived from electrical power is now being proposed as a way to soak up zero or negative price electricity. There's a company based on work at MIT that's doing this, using moderately electrically conductive refractory ceramic bricks as combined storage and heating elements.
If you live in Texas rooftop solar and a battery are highly recommended.
People might be confused a bit because there are usually several close calls over the year where supply is projected to outstrip demand, but the problem usually resolves when they go bribe some bitcoin mines to turn off. (Ugh.)
(I live in Austin, TX.)
And I never said a single thing about "running out of power," because that wasn't the issue in most areas. The power infrastructure was physically damaged. The state is on its own grid, refuses to winterize, and people also carried on in their households as if it were a normal day, which overloaded local transformers.
It took me a week to regain power in 2021 because the transformer blew behind my house on Valentine's Day and Oncor would keep sending trucks with technicians who didn't realize they had access to the transformer via the giant vacant lot behind it. Instead of doing the intelligent thing and calling to ask for a frame of reference, they would cancel the report. They did this for days while the temperatures were near zero.
Dallas had a week-long blackout in some areas a week ago. We had an almost day's long power outage in January in some areas. This is becoming a common occurrence in the area due to severe weather.
I never said that it was completely preventable.
I said that I was considering solar to mitigate the damage to my personal property.
You have a reading comprehension problem.
Some loads are slightly time-dependent because you can shift them with minor inconvenience such as pre-cooling your home or refrigerator (using it as a thermal battery) or scheduling when your car charges (using its battery as a battery).
Others are entirely time-dependent. Waiting until it's sunny to process an online order, take MRI images, run an assembly line, or use your TV to watch a sporting game incurs substantial additional cost and/or inconvenience.
What makes you say that? Do you know of a region that does not have DR (demand response) options?
Every US utility I am aware of has had DR programs for commercial and industrial customers for many years. Back when I worked in electricity markets a decade ago only a few had DR programs for residential customers but since then many have added residential DR or have started pilots as they upgrade their residential infrastructure.
TVP (time-variable pricing) is also very common, though moreso with commercial/industrial customers. I'm honestly not sure how many residential customers have the option to pick a provider with TVP/TOU pricing.
Some crazy ISOs (looking at you ERCOT) even allow residential customers to pay rates pegged to RTP (real-time pricing) which is gloriously insane and very Texas.
> A hospital probably needs a backup battery (or a guaranteed slice of the grid’s battery capacity).
Yes. Hospitals often have special utility contracts and get priority when there are brownouts or blackouts. (One benefit of living next to a hospital is that you'll get power back more quickly after a blackout!) But most hospitals still have backup generators, and special circuits so that they only need to power critical equipment.
> we don’t have any incentive to try and automate that inconvenience away, so who knows? Perhaps we could see a resurgence in more efficient designs, like chest freezers.
This is already very common with commercial/industrial customers, but hopefully you're right that as residential customers get more exposure to things like dynamic pricing and home solar generation that more of them will alter their behavior and appliances.
Consider the global perspective. In developing countries, where resources and infrastructure are already limited, expecting such flexibility is impractical. These regions often lack the luxury of choice and are more vulnerable to disruptions.
Moreover, the goal of decarbonization isn't just about ideological preferences for renewable energy. It requires a pragmatic approach that incorporates a mix of technologies: solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, batteries, and more. Each technology has its strengths and plays a crucial role in the overall strategy.
Cherry-picking preferred technologies without considering the broader context can delay our progress by decades. To effectively combat climate change, we need to embrace a comprehensive and inclusive approach that leverages all available solutions.
This is pretty vague. Practical challenges such as?
> Forcing billions of people and businesses to change their consumption habits is not only unrealistic but also fraught with potential issues.
Potential issues such as?
> Consider the global perspective. In developing countries, where resources and infrastructure are already limited, expecting such flexibility is impractical. These regions often lack the luxury of choice and are more vulnerable to disruptions.
I’m under the impression that brownouts or blackouts are a little more common in developing countries, so if we’re going to have to deal with intermittent supplies we probably should be asking them for advice.
I think we’d have to look, probably case-by-case, at what the issues are in less electrified areas, to see how renewables and load shifting would affect things. If the grid is less robust and parts become disconnected from time to time, then renewables are great, because they tend to be more disperse. If there are times where there isn’t enough generation capacity (not enough power plants or fuel) then great, whatever communication scheme is used to communicate information about renewables can also be used for fossil fuel.
> Moreover, the goal of decarbonization isn't just about ideological preferences for renewable energy. It requires a pragmatic approach that incorporates a mix of technologies: solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, batteries, and more. Each technology has its strengths and plays a crucial role in the overall strategy.
This is true. But I don’t really see any ideology in the idea of load shifting though. It is actually a practical answer. Renewable generation capacity that isn’t backed by batteries is always cheaper than that which is, unless batteries somehow become free. So, the pragmatic answer is to combine the two. Batteries are a cost, strategies to avoid them should be taken. That doesn’t mean 0 energy storage, though.
> Cherry-picking preferred technologies without considering the broader context can delay our progress by decades. To effectively combat climate change, we need to embrace a comprehensive and inclusive approach that leverages all available solutions.
Accounting for the price of batteries is often brought up as an argument against renewables. We should implement dynamic pricing now. It could even provide a market incentive to build more batteries. There’s no cherry picking here. Load shifting goes in the basket of solutions.
The practical challenges of deferring load to eliminate the need for batteries include significant disruptions to daily life and economic activities. Changing consumption habits on such a large scale would increase living and labor costs, thereby impacting the economy. Asking millions, if not billions, of people to change their habits is unrealistic, especially on a long-term basis. The discontent experienced during COVID-19 restrictions illustrates how difficult it is to enforce such changes, and doing so permanently would be even more challenging. Additionally, in democratic societies, politicians proposing such drastic measures would likely face significant opposition.
> I’m under the impression that brownouts or blackouts are a little more common in developing countries, so if we’re going to have to deal with intermittent supplies we probably should be asking them for advice.
While developing countries do have experience dealing with intermittent supplies due to frequent brownouts and blackouts, implementing advanced load-shifting strategies without substantial support and investment remains challenging. Economic implications are just one part of the issue. Many people in developed countries already struggle with stability, and further destabilizing their energy supply could lead to large-scale social and economic disasters.
> This is true. But I don’t really see any ideology in the idea of load shifting though. It is actually a practical answer. Renewable generation capacity that isn’t backed by batteries is always cheaper than that which is unless batteries somehow become free. So, the pragmatic answer is to combine the two. Batteries are a cost, and strategies to avoid them should be taken. That doesn’t mean 0 energy storage, though.
The most feasible and cost-effective solution to minimize battery use and costs is to use nuclear power as a baseload. This approach is pragmatic and unideological, focusing on what we can realistically achieve. Unrealistic proposals often overlook the practical implications of their implementation. The economic and social impacts of load-shifting strategies are substantial, and most electric infrastructure cannot support such changes without significant upgrades. Smart grids are not yet widespread, and the amount of rare earth elements required for battery production is a critical concern.
In Italy, a research institute found that a 100% renewable future using batteries would demand 70 times the world's annual lithium production. Even if we reduce this demand by 99%, it remains impractically high for just one country. Given these challenges, it is more sensible to prioritize solutions that are already proven effective, such as the renewable and nuclear combination. This approach requires less effort relative to what you propose and avoids the significant economic and social disruptions associated with large-scale load shifting.
In conclusion, I do not want to rule out that your proposal could be a solution in some areas of the world, for some parts of the population. And I hope it could help in decarbonization. But what I would like to hear, is a realistic comparison with the solutions we already have.
And before certain proposals can become a real solution, you have to accept and consider the huge implementation limitations in order to have pragmatic solutions.
Solar costs are still decreasing.
And fossil fuel costs still do not price in the catastrophic side effects of using them.
My main worry in 2010 was that it is very difficult to balance an exponential increase in demand for a thing that is a big employer (such as oil) with some convenient replacement that employs a similar number of people at a similar cost.
The economics of the transition to PV and wind are much smoother than I expected, because I am not an economist and did not have a remotely realistic model for how any of this would work in practice. (Hopefully my similar concern about the upcoming economic transition due to AI automation is misplaced for exactly the same reasons).
How to deal with that is a political problem, not particularly an economic one.
Even narrow AI is more of the same — one that can drive, would rapidly put millions of drivers out of work, but not much else. That's a huge one-off transition to manage, but not inherently radical.
General-purpose AI? Depends on the details. Let's say it's got the all the capabilities and limitations of an exactly average human, with a 24/7 equivalent power requirement of 17.2 kW — that will cost around $15.1k/year to run: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=17.2+kW+*+1+year+*+%240...
I picked that power requirement to get an annual cost comparable to the USA federal minimum wage: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%247.25+per+hour+*+40+h...
This means it's economically neutral to pick an average human or a machine for those roles and with that assumption about electricity cost… provided that humans are willing to accept minimum wages for that role.
This lowers the wages for the average human to minimum wages.
But! The USA's electricity supply is about 1.3 TW: https://www.publicpower.org/resource/americas-electricity-ge....
This is only 3.8 kW/capita: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.3TW%2Fusa+population+...
This suggests that prices may rise rapidly, at least before the AI can be put to work guiding robots to install solar power systems (there's a startup on Y Combinator dedicated to exactly this).
How much might prices rise? To whatever level where the AI can still be a neutral replacement for human labour. If the median capacity human earns $45k, then that assumption for power requirement would raise electricity prices to $0.30/kWh. If the AI is as energy efficient as a human brain, and uses 30 watts, then it doesn't have any impact on prices because the US doesn't run out of power in the first place; if the AI needs megawatts, then the effect is also reduced, because 1 MW * 1 y * $0.1/kWh = $876,000 and therefore it isn't economically sensible to displace even one worker.
So what I'm worried about is the transition, the time between now and the steady-state long-term future where the robots can put in as much PV as they need. Do we have a risky period where robots could use all the available electrical power and might be able to out-bid the average human on both sides of the equation, the income side by being as cheap as it's legally possible for a human to be, and the expenses because now the human isn't earning any money and can't pay for electricity?
Or does this dynamically fix itself because I'm doing an over-simplified toy model in my head and I've missed a critical part? (Probably).
I guess of you really think robots are gonna bid up electricity, residential solar makes even more sense.
I may be simply wrong, but I can assure you it's definitely not a hand-wave.
You may think it absurd that an economic choice would be made over a human value, but that kind of behaviour is exactly what happened in the Irish potato famine — there it was exporting food while starving to death.
I am also planning to get domestic PV as soon as possible precisely because I anticipate this dynamic.
Again, I'm aware I might simply be wrong, but "wrong" and "hand wave" are different things.
> What's driving the infinite demand if humans don't have wages to buy things with?
1) I didn't say infinite demand
2) I did say "out-bid the average human on both sides of the equation".
"Average" human.
Humans are not identical, but rather are a distribution.
The ones who are more economically viable can continue to compete while the rest starve.
This is also what we saw in the Irish potato famine, though "economically viable" had a different meaning.
This is close enough on a purely economic aspect that a carbon tax to allocate costs for the externalities of carbon or more stringent emissions requirements may make it cheaper overall for Solar + Storage!
At the moment, solar is slowing down, because private equity is turning to cobbling together quotes from residential installers as a bargaining tactic to get lower quotes from my brothers company.
It's a profoundly bad idea, but if they can get something together and flip it to naive buyers in a few years, they can get away with it.
All of that is to say, there's lots of bad cost estimation out there for commercial solar, and I know it'll happen sooner or later, but I'm still skeptical that solar+storage is going to beat carbon in the "sooner" range.
If solar panels are dumpstered at the end of their life cycle but save CO2 emissions, it’s a non-factor.
And in any case, they’re made largely of aluminum which is profitable to recycle (which means it will actually happen if its own accord) and a solved problem.
Any real negative externalities come in manufacture or installation.
Who cares about panel recycling? bury them if we have to, they're non toxic, and would be an infinitesimally small % of total annual landfill. Such an irrelevant "gotcha" i wonder why people keep repeating it?
This link from the EPA suggested that EoL solar panels could be considered hazardous waste under RCRA due to heavy metal leaching, which is an "externality" like CO2, and the very reason I asked the question.
So, if you believe the EPA, they are not "non-toxic" and could add up to "up to 10 million tonnes" of panels that need to be safely disposed.
https://www.epa.gov/hw/end-life-solar-panels-regulations-and...
So perhaps you should care about panel recycling?
To illustrate how fast this field is, just this month there have been some new results in recycling them: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solar-panel-recycl...
A lot of research is going into storage. I would say energy storage is THE challenge of our lifetime.
You don't need storage if you can sell your afternoon solar to your neighbor who is at night
Sun's always shining somewhere else
Force storage and usage of that gas (and burning it at the well is better than letting it be a greenhouse gas on its own). Curtailing the waste will change the costs and economics drastically.
The LCOE measures overall production costs but overlooks availability and reliability. This is problematic for intermittent sources like solar and wind, which can't ensure continuous production. For instance, solar energy isn't feasible at night, necessitating backup sources like gas, coal, or nuclear. It's worth considering the immense lithium required for a 100% solar-powered country.
If renewables were the most cost-effective, private investors would already favor them. Yet, investments continue in gas and coal due to their reliability and continuous output, essential for economic stability.
Countries like Germany have replaced nuclear reactors with coal plants, despite their decarbonization goals, and India relies on fossil fuels for economic growth.
Misleading articles hinder decarbonization efforts. It's crucial that energy discussions are grounded in concrete data and rational analysis to advance towards a sustainable future.