Australia Struggling With Oversupply of Solar Power (abc.net.au) 164
Mirnotoriety writes: Amid the growing warmth and increasingly volatile weather of an approaching summer, Australia passed a remarkable milestone this week. The number of homes and businesses with a solar installation clicked past 4 million -- barely 20 years since there was practically none anywhere in the country. It is a love affair that shows few signs of stopping.
And it's a technology that is having ever greater effects, not just on the bills of its household users but on the very energy system itself. At no time of the year is that effect more obvious than spring, when solar output soars as the days grow longer and sunnier but demand remains subdued as mild temperatures mean people leave their air conditioners switched off.
Such has been the extraordinary production of solar in Australia this spring, the entire state of South Australia has -- at various times -- met all of its electricity needs from the technology.
[...] [T]here is, at times, too much solar power in Australia's electricity systems to handle.
And it's a technology that is having ever greater effects, not just on the bills of its household users but on the very energy system itself. At no time of the year is that effect more obvious than spring, when solar output soars as the days grow longer and sunnier but demand remains subdued as mild temperatures mean people leave their air conditioners switched off.
Such has been the extraordinary production of solar in Australia this spring, the entire state of South Australia has -- at various times -- met all of its electricity needs from the technology.
[...] [T]here is, at times, too much solar power in Australia's electricity systems to handle.
Negative Pricing and the Spot Price (Score:3)
Re:Negative Pricing and the Spot Price (Score:4, Funny)
You can just not put energy into the grid, you don't have to pay... Assuming you can turn your generation off at the flip of a switch, like solar can.
What a disaster, eh? All this abundant, low cost, clean energy. It's not like it can be transported or use opportunistically.
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Assuming you can turn your generation off at the flip of a switch, like solar can.
A typical solar panel turns 15-20% of incident sunlight into electricity.
If turned off, that incident sunlight turns into heat instead, and the panel gets significantly hotter, shortening its lifespan.
It might be better to send power to the grid even if you have to pay to do so.
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At the moment people usually get paid regardless of the negative pricing, although in the UK we do have the option to use a feed-in tariff that tracks half hour energy pricing.
So it's more of an issue for the grid to solve at the moment. Individuals could help, e.g. by having air conditioning turn on and drop the temperature while they are at work, so it's cool in the evening when they get home. Hot water heating is another good one. The issue is the lack of incentives and often also IT systems that aren't
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If it becomes a serious problem, a 3kW electric heater is something like £25 from a retailer you can just walk into and pick one up right now. The TL;DR of that is that electrical loads are incredibly cheap: basically some nichrome wire and ceramic. Placed outside to send the heat away obviously :) If you really wanted to take that 15% of power away from your solar panels, this will not be an expensive thing to set up, or for someone to make a device for so you don't have to.
However, I doubt it
Re: Negative Pricing and the Spot Price (Score:2)
Set up a humidifier and a dehumidifier in the same room and sink power there.
Ultimately all excess power becomes heat, though.
Power-intensive but cheap to construct processes could be good sinks. Some variation of carbon sequestration? Desalination? Mining sea water for gold?
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With the cost of solar panels you couldn't be more wrong. Yeah the life is shortened by temperature but it's not shortened by a factor of 90% which is what would need to happen for it to make more sense to pay for grid export.
In any case you're missing an obvious alternative: localised battery storage.
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In any case you're missing an obvious alternative: localised battery storage.
If excess power happens everyday, then sure, batteries make sense.
If it happens two or three days per year, then no, batteries make no sense.
TFA makes it sound like it's only an occasional problem.
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If turned off, that incident sunlight turns into heat instead
Seems like there's an opportunity here, to create solar panel cooling devices, so one problem solves the other. At the expense of additional hardware, of course, so you'd have to weigh that cost against the cost of reduced solar panel life. My guess is that the reduction in solar panel life is negligible, and increasingly so as solar panel costs continue to drop.
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Australia has a spot price on electricty. Too much rooftop has reduced the input credit to the point where it is at times negative i.e. you pay to put power into the grid so unless you buy a battery to store the excess.
Is this something Australian consumers are subject to? Every system I have heard of which had solar and spot prices (you can get 15 minute, but not 5 minute spot prices on UK home smart meters I believe) allows you switch off generation and/or dump to a battery (at your choice) if the price is lower than you want.
Solar may not be the cost saving item in the near future for Australian home. https://www.energycouncil.com.... [energycouncil.com.au]
If there's already a much solar as the grid can usefully use, is there much point in persuading people to install more solar without batteries? This seems to me to be one of the cases where a marke
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Spot pricing in Australia is only for the wholesale market. Currently Australian retail rates are still incredibly expensive. Solar power would pay for itself very quickly in Australia even if grid export is banned / charged for.
I actually hope something like this happens. If you want a stable grid based on roof based solar then you should open the people with solar panels to market based incentives to install batteries. We're slowly trending in that way, most of Australia has already abolished net-metering
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Australia has a spot price on electricty. Too much rooftop has reduced the input credit to the point where it is at times negative i.e. you pay to put power into the grid so unless you buy a battery to store the excess. Solar may not be the cost saving item in the near future for Australian home. https://www.energycouncil.com.... [energycouncil.com.au]
Some Australian states used to have a feed in tariff, this was reduced and then stopped a few years ago IIRC.
The problem is, many Australian states privatised their power companies years ago, so a rooftop solar grid threatens their profits. Australian politicians will happily roll over for them.
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Feed in tarrifs have not stopped in Australia, though they are lower than they were. I currently get 8c/kwh.
Wasted? Whut?! (Score:4, Insightful)
It needs to accept that much of this solar will have to be wasted — or spilled — sometimes.
What a stupid idea. What sort of deranged lunatic thinks like this?
Re:Wasted? Whut?! (Score:5, Insightful)
a capitalist
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No, the morons in most states sold off the electricity assets years ago, promising cheaper power, gas and water. Of course that was always a lie, we now have much higher costs, and much worse service.
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If there are no consumption, then overproduction will be lost.
Again with the "lost" nonsense. It isn't "lost" or "wasted". It's solar. Nothing is "wasted". It's just unused. What garbage is this? If this were power from fossil fuel generation then yes - it's wasted - you're note going to recoup the inputs. Solar is effectively infinite until the sun engulfs this planet and brings about the end times.
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No no, you're wrong. Until we have a Dyson sphere around the sun, inside the Earth's orbit, capturing all the sunlight and making sure that every last photon is converted into electricity, Humanity can never rest. I sure hope they never find out about the nearby blackholes and the energy pollution they create.
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It's still "wasted" from the sense that capital expenditures to purchase equipment were made to turn the unused solar power into power that could normally be useful if it could be stored or time shifted effectively. I don't think it's entirely wrong to consider this "wasted" to some degree when wastage can in a broad sense be defined as a useful resource that can't effectively be used, or in this case, maybe even an overcapacity problem until other solutions are found since the capacity produces waste elec
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You're unable to
Your message is unimportant to us. We will not be responding.
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If this were power from fossil fuel generation then yes - it's wasted - you're note going to recoup the inputs.
Why do you think that capital expenditure does not need to be recouped? They spent money to build a solar plant. They are not getting any ROI when the plant is idling. Moreover they still need to pay some maintenance workers even when the plant is idling. My point is: if you think that energy from a fossil fuel plant can be wasted then also energy from a solar plant can be wasted.
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It's just an inevitable fact. If the system has more supply than people need, and the network does Not have a producer or middleman with storage capacity to consume the excess quantity during that period of time, then the excess is inevitably wasted.
Wasted just like the sunlight that hits the ground without landing on a solar panel.
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the excess is inevitably wasted.
Nope. It's just unused.
Again, if this energy were from fossil or nuke, then yes - you have lost something in the chain. This is something that actually happens in power generation. It isn't ciruclated anywhere. Once you've pushed it out from generation onto grid, anything not consumed from the grid is lost. The process is not reversible so you have wasted fuel by powering nothing. In some cases we push this excess into gravity systems for storage and re-use. In most cases it is just dropped.
This does *not* hold true for solar. In any way.
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The reference in the story is actually a great one-- even if poorly phrased on a technical level. Solar curtailment isn't a bad thing, but it is often hard to get over that.
Next year I will have close to double the PV needed to be net-zero, but my design consideration is to have my home self-consume about 95% of my own power. The last 5% just wasn't practical, as it would double the system cost again. In the end, I will export about 13MWh to the grid per year, and import about 1MWh. Curtailment is harder to
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Heat
Cool
Cook (I know that's technically heating, but in practice)
Charge car(s)
Lighting (obvs much reduced as you say)
Gadgets (each one much less power, but many more of them)
White goods
I think those are all the big common categories
Charging is new, cooking and heating are both much bigger esp when moving from gas to induction cooking and heat pumps
Domestic electricity loads are likely to go up in the years ahead thanks to this shift to electrification, even as each item becomes much more efficient
Re:Wasted? Whut?! (Score:4, Insightful)
What a stupid idea. What sort of deranged lunatic thinks like this?
It's only stupid if you don't understand how intermittent non-dispatchable supply works. By necessity if you want to build a system based entirely on renewables you *need* waste. It needs to be built in due to the dynamic differences of generation between seasons. If you want to get through the winter, you're going to need to waste capacity in the summer. This is a far FAR more ideal situation than building so many batteries to level power across seasons.
As for "stupid" idea, and "deranged lunatics", what you're talking about is electrical engineers who understand what it takes to manage the grid. Everything looks crazy when you don't know how it works.
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Everything looks crazy when you don't know how it works.
Yet understanding perfectly how it works, it's still an absolutely ridiculous claim. Nothing is lost or wasted. The primary consumer is all good. The excess went where all excess goes - nowhere - absent the actual loss of fuel.
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What a stupid idea. What sort of deranged lunatic thinks like this?
A realist. I know that's seen as a kind of derangement by most people these days, but you have to take account of the actual situation and not just work on hopes and prayers.
Eventually the excess will spawn some industry which can make use of some of it, and then less will be wasted.
Yes, the fossil fuel plants can be spun up and down faster than nuclear, but it's still a hassle and doesn't happen instantly for most designs. So even in the best case there will need to be some overproduction to maintain grid
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He build it to because one or two extreme events would pay the thing back. The Australian grid had ridiculous arbitrage opportunity if you could get access to it, that was the point of the PR campaign.
Getting the market to pay for batteries if ROI is below 10% a year will be a lot harder.
No problem with incoming batteries (Score:3)
Until now, batteries has being expensive, so any battery installation needs to be used a lot to make a fast amortization. Not for balancing prices with small difference between day and night.
But with upcoming batteries, sodium-ion, in next five years, the price will plummet and even a simple 30$ of difference between night and day price is enough to justify to add a battery.
So the total batteries will be easily the equivalent of six hours multiplied by the total country consumption. A LOT OF STORAGE.
And the excess will be reduced greatly.
Yes... That takes time. For some years, a small number of hours at 0$ price will be expected.
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batteries are expensive
They also present a significant disposal/refurbishment problem in the future.
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Batteries are slowly getting there. A few years ago, if you wanted a lithium battery that was 100Ah, you would pay around $USD 1000. Now, USD $200 buys one a decent battery of that side with LiFePO4 chemistry, and if one wants to go crazy with a spot welder and soldering iron, they can buy a BMS or two, and build a battery for relatively cheap using cells from AliExpress that would be fairly reliable. With lithium batteries as cheap as flooded lead-acid batteries, it is helping things, because lithium ba
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Yes, you might not have the Holy Grail of cell technology anytime soon in your
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1. I think it needs to last a little bit *longer* than the longest yearly intermittency, for safety
2. Agree re reliable, cheap and scalable
3. But intermittency is of course not binary (100% need, 0% need), and that means we can make use of other variables so we don't need to replace spinning plants 100% like-for-like. Specifically: demand flex, over-capacity (build extra solar to deliver 3x of minimum output instead of 1x, for example), interconnectors, mixed power sources (wind and solar are roughly out of
Ignore the headline, the article itself is great (Score:5, Interesting)
Turns out to be a really great article with a fair amount of practical detail (momentum, system strength) about curtailment, the rising role of battery storage, flexing demand up, and the tradeoffs between building out new solar and new storage.
I think the reasonable conclusion is that Australia is faced with a really good problem to have -- it has the ability to provide most of its power needs through the cheapest form of power gen of all, solar, and a mix of curtailment, storage and demand flex will increase the percentage of power that can be supplied from solar even more.
As I've argued repeatedly, burning fossil fuels is like hitting yourself in the ballsack with a hammer. You want to do it as little as possible. If you used to do it daily, and now it's weekly, that's better. If you can do it only monthly, better yet. Once a year, much better. Etc.
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They could become a huge exporter of electricity as well. They seem to be having political issues getting the undersea cables installed, but if they could sort that out they have plenty of space for solar, and decent wind resources.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
1200km HVDC line, 2000 MW, 2.5 billion euros. Unfinished. Just to give a scale of the effort...
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I raise you the North Sea Link. 2bn Euro, 1,400MW, 720km, on time and on budget. Included a tunnel for part of it.
I'm not saying it's easy, but we can do it.
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unfinished doesn't mean late, or anything negative. That's why I linked: it's supposed to be finished in 2027.
Just count ballpark a billion euros per 500km. Which your example confirms.
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Thanks, I jumped the gun a bit. Yes, it's looking promising.
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You say that with real confidence, and I'd like to understand your rationale for saying that a 3000km high-transmission undersea cable is inherently very expensive. I can think of lots of reasons why that might be the case, eg the shielding required for undersea operations, the maintenance costs for working at depth with high power, even insurance costs to protect against sabotage. But we obviously know how to lay very long underseas cables for data, and we know how to build HVDC lines, and we have short HV
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No cheap power comes out of the other side of a 3000km long high transmission system... 3000km power transmission systems are useful if there is town with decades long power needs every 300km along the path...
This is one of the most ridiculous things I've read on /. for a long time. So, you're suggesting building (and isolating) 10 high voltage step-down transformers, and 10 high voltage step-up transformers - pretty much the most expensive part of the system - in order to save money, or to generate sufficient return on investment?
roflmao!
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You *read* the article? Who are you, and what are you doing on Slashdot???
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Haha! I'm an old fart, farting around on here...
Perfectly normal (Score:3)
There will always be some oversupply.
If it will be too large - the batteries will become more profitable.
It if will be too small - the panels will be more profitable.
If only someone said more storage was needed (Score:2)
more pumped hydro is coming (Score:2)
It's behind schedule and over-budget, but there is more pumped hydro under construction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Funny thing, perspective. (Score:2)
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Re:Funny thing, perspective. (Score:4, Insightful)
Aussie should... (Score:2)
stop mining coal, and start mining bitcoin.
But they aren't being nice to the minors, they are banning them from social media.
I'm not surprised (Score:2)
> It is a love affair that shows few signs of stopping
Not surprised. Over there they can do it right. You can literaly run your house off the grid during a power cut!
Unlike in the UK where being allowed to isolate yourself from the grid and run off the roof panels along while the grid gets back on its feet is prevented.
Export it to Asia (Score:2)
The real scam here (Score:2)
Quote a TCO that crushes nuclear
Buy underperforming Chinese crap with low reliability
Ooooops, we forgot that solar needs batteries and that wasn't in the original quote
More money plz?
Non-grid-tie DC HVAC actually helps the grid (Score:3)
maybe (Score:2)
Maybe they can sell the surplus to neighboring countries.
At other times ... (Score:2)
at other times typically overnight SA has to import 62% of its energy from coal burning states. We need power 24/7. Somebody suggested batteries. Just 16 hours backup for Australia would be 380 GWh of batteries, about 10% of global production in 1 year. This would cost about 50% of the annual federal government budget, so if we spread it over the likely 15 year life of the batteries, that's about 3% per year. So all your taxes would increase by 3%. That's just 16h of backup, most studies say you need weeks
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is a specific technical one. Rooftop solar, which is a significant proportion of Australian solar, does not provide grid forming services. It has to follow something else. And the first generation of grid batteries has the same problem. Batteries are part of the solution, but if they are all that is forming the grid, they can't ever discharge completely or the grid will collapse.
I don't doubt that the technology will be developed and the understanding of how to manage systems with these characteristics. We need to understand how to do this.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is a specific technical one. Rooftop solar, which is a significant proportion of Australian solar, does not provide grid forming services. It has to follow something else. And the first generation of grid batteries has the same problem. Batteries are part of the solution, but if they are all that is forming the grid, they can't ever discharge completely or the grid will collapse.
I don't doubt that the technology will be developed and the understanding of how to manage systems with these characteristics. We need to understand how to do this.
As you say, you simply have to build batteries that include grid forming and have that as their primary service. Given that they already have that, this is basically an article saying "Australia doesn't have a problem that if they did have it could be a problem". The closest the article could come to being sensible would be firstly saying "there isn't enough redundant advanced battery storage in South Australia yet", which is probably arguable and is probably the reason they don't say it. The other useful thing to take from it is: "there's lots and lots of very cheap electricity in South Australia, so if you have a energy intensive process that can run on intermittent electricity and be cost effective then see if you can negotiate to move it away from anywhere that's relying on expensive fossil or nuclear fuels and towards South Australia".
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I think that the article is quite reasonable. It describes what the problem is, that there are solutions to it, and notes that while we need to solve some of it, Australia is likely to end up with an overcapacity for some of the time, that won't be worth capturing. It's nice to see someone covering the engineering challenges facing the world in enough detail to make sense of it.
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I think my real problem is with the headline which says "struggling with" even though the article effectively states that they have it solved. That's the thing that people remember unfortunately. "Australia considering how to distribute bounty from successful rollout" just doesn't attract as many clicks I'd suspect.
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I think my real problem is with the headline which says "struggling with" even though the article effectively states that they have it solved. That's the thing that people remember unfortunately. "Australia considering how to distribute bounty from successful rollout" just doesn't attract as many clicks I'd suspect.
Well, there is a certain group that is much upset about this happening. I won't name them here, but we all know who they are.
But yes, the rollout has been successful, and with surprisingly little effort. Supply and storage. Now that it has been successful enough that it is time for storage to catch up. You need electricity to store, and the installs that produce the electricity to store. And storage is a remarkably trivial "problem" to solve.
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The article doesn’t say it is “solved” it talks about all the potential solutions. As in we don’t need new science, and we probably don’t need new engineering. We need to pick one or more of the potential solutions and spend money to build them. Which on the hierarchy of struggles is pretty low. On the other hand we kind of know how
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The article explicitly mentions that they can solve it by simply not collecting some of the solar energy. It even talks about how this is like water, where you don't worry if some spills over like in a reservoir. That is an immediate solution. They also talk about how new battery systems are able to provide "inertia" which will get rid of the need even to run a few fossil fuel systems. Again, that's a solution and they even have some such battery systems already. Adding more will allow them to get rid of th
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Which is pretty much exactly what the article [abc.net.au] said:
"'Batteries can actually start to provide those services and can help to stabilise the grid. And we are seeing increasing applications of batteries to help to manage the minimum demand challenge. They can firstly absorb a lot of the energy in the middle of the day and then obviously release it at a later time. As a result of that happening, we see an absolute wave of battery projects now coming into the electricity market to fulfill that role'."
But the prob
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One interesting option is what Ireland had pioneered - turning old fossil plants into spinning storage. They installed massive flywheels where the generators used to be. Spin them up when there is excess energy, and use them to add inertia and stability to the grid.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
This most likely for load balancing.
Fly wheels can due to earth rotation and Coriolis forces not hold energy very long.
Hm, I think the "pseudo force" is called different, the one that acts when you tilt the wheel of bicycle for instance.
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It's to provide inertia and stability on the grid, like fossil and nuclear powered generators do. As Ireland transitions away from those, it needs inertial mass to replace them.
Some companies do make energy storage flywheels as well, but that's not what they installed. Theirs is to complement wind and solar. They have vast wind energy resources. The plan is basically for on-shore to power the country and export to Europe, while off-shore is mostly generating hydrogen to fuel aircraft. There are quite a few
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
It's called a synchronous condenser. They're designed to stabilise the grid by providing the inertia that spinning (fossil-fueled) generators used to provide. And yes, South Australia already has a few [energymagazine.com.au].
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It is mechanically complex (meaning, not cheap) to put a megawatt-hour flywheel on a gimbal. This is not a bicycle wheel!
The easiest solution is just "deal with the precession forces". The next easiest solution would be "align the flywheel axis with the Earth's rotation".
Useful calculator here, if you want to play with masses: https://www.omnicalculator.com... [omnicalculator.com]
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flywheels are like capacitors. they're great fr grid stabilization and smoothing, but don't have much capacity. Thermal storage (like liquid sodium) is better though I don't know by how much. Pumped storage is probably the best in terms of raw capacity, but requires specific pre-existing infrastructure. (and probably doesn't have a high charge rate) Batteries work really well but are expensive and also somewhat limited in capacity.
Probably the best plan here is having a mix. Solar itself isn't the problem
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That costs money. A lot of money. The argument in the article is that sometimes it costs less to let some of the excess solar generation go to waste unused and unstirred and generate it later via something else (after the existing storage syste
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The one in Ireland was â50m. Not pocket change but on the scale of the grid not huge either. The fact that it enables a reduction in fossil fuel use and an increase in cheaper renewable use means it will pay for itself quickly.
Compressed air [Re:Huh?] (Score:2)
The other is compressing air and then spinning things with it.
Unfortunately, due to heat of compression, there's an unavoidable energy loss in doing this.
(well, not completely unavoidable. It's too low-level heat to be easily recoverable, but you could, in principle, use a mixture of air and helium to avoid this.)
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I made this same argument when discussing solar hot water heating and was roundly chastised for it. People act like getting free hot water from the sky is bad compared to getting electricity from solar panels and then using that to power a water heater.
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We have the other two things. Pay attention in the back.
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I think it will be interesting to see your assertion be tested, as I expect will happen, in countries that lack decent infra today. Pakistan is a good example -- they've deployed a huge amount of solar capacity relative to current (weak) grid capacity in the last few months, largely behind the meter as rooftop. That's happened because solar is both cheaper and more reliable than the grid. Something will evolve out of what happens there -- will it be 80:20 good enough cf Western grids, is the interesting que
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh, what? UL 1741 is a standard for grid-connected inverters, published back in 1999, that was designed to address grid support [windurance.com] in the event of fluctuations. Supplement A (SA) for "smart inverters" was added in 2016 to specifically address grid support functions, including:
Supplement B (SB), testing against IEEE 1547-2018, added a whole raft of enhancements [solarbuildermag.com] for communications with and support of utility grids.
Yes, I know these are all American (and Canadian) standards, and that the subject is Australian. My point is, what you're talking about is essentially a solved problem. Much of the equipment Australia uses for residential solar probably already meets many of these standards. Australia is just late to the game in requiring this stuff and mandating a configuration. They really didn't start until 2019 with CSIP-AUS [www.combined.energy], but there are tons of compatible inverters [cleanenerg...cil.org.au] already.
But that isn't really what the article is talking about. The article is talking about having so much solar available that in addition to replacing peaker loads, that can easily be spun up and down, solar is now cutting into baseload power, which CAN'T easily be adjusted. That electricity has to go somewhere, and there is nowhere for it to go. Solar generation, with grid-interactive inverters, can just be "spilled" on the fly and there is no real physical problem. Does Australia build even more batteries to start removing baseload and replacing it with solar/battery storage? How can local, residential, battery storage help? (See virtual power plants and NEM 3.0 for California for reference.) All of that is expensive right now. Hell, half the article can be summed up simply with "Batteries can do this, but fuck that is expensive!"
And, finally, what happens when Sauron invades and covers all the lands in darkness? Days without sun will leave the batteries drained and Australia without power -- begging for coal and the Smaug it brings.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
What? (Score:2)
The GPSDO I use to clock my frequency counter is incredibly accurate, .1 hz at 30 mhz much more so then the inbuilt OCXO standard in professional test gear.
GPS with poor time accuracy would be hopeless.
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We need to understand how to do this.
Huh? We already know all that we need to know about how to engineer a solution. The only issue left is how to do it economically. This isn't rocket surgery.
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Wealthy person upset there's nothing left to spend money on. What kind of a stupid imaginary problem is this? Talk about first world problems. Buy some frigging batteries!
You should be at insightful, but in the increasing bizzaro world of Slashdot, you are marked Troll.
Batteries now produce "Too much Power!" And this isn't the first article I've seen with upset about that. In a world where not too many years ago, "Batteries will never provide enough power, and "As soon as the sun goes down, solar powered systems won't work!" (that last is still claimed today) Now it is hand wringing over "Solar is producing too much power and it is bad!"
The technical issues of this ar
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Currently censor modded down to -1. Why?
Of course the bigger question is why do sock puppets have the points?
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I've been wondering this myself. Volkswagen/Audi have a plant that can generate gasoline from CO2. If there is a lot of cost-free electricity, and it can be used as a peak resource, why not do that? Or perhaps just use something simple like make and store hydrogen.
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Is there really nothing that can be made profitably with intermittently cost-free electricity? Smelt iron? Desalinate water? Electroplate copper? Grind sand?
The key word here is profitably. And, to an extent, that's going to depend on exactly how intermittent the power source is. Of the propositions you mention, grinding sand probably has the lowest equipment capital costs, and would be the least affected by the power going off (in terms of messing with the flow of product - i.e. intermittent cooling is 'not ideal') but it's not, I would imagine, a high margin business. If, under standard 24/7/365 operating conditions the plant (and financing) has a pay back ti
Re: (Score:2)
Mining crypto is even easier.
Which tells me they don't actually have excess free energy to any quantity.
Many crypto firms have their gear in shipping containers so it can easily be moved when local pricing changes.
If these people had a huge excess problem the miners would already be there to buy it for mutual profit.
At a minimum they can melt salt, heat steel, make methanol from air, etc.
I suspect Gell-Mann amnesia may be at play.
Re: (Score:2)
Rather than, say, selling it to other countries?
Re: (Score:3)
I am aware of transmission losses. I haven't done the math. Perhaps you could comment on the amount of charging losses in the one mentioned below, which I believe was in a previous slashdot story also..
https://worldsteel.org/media/steel-stories/infrastructure/australia-asia-powerlink-solar-worlds-longest-underwater-cable/
Australia and Singapore are 3 hours apart. That is the same difference as we have in the continental US between east and west.
The Australia-Singapore line is 5000km long, which is also simi