I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this feels like a good place for Hydrogen power to step in.
One of the oft repeated concerns is that generating hydrogen to power vehicles the takes a lot of energy, which often comes from dirty sources.
One of the oft repeated issues for solar (or wind etc) is that it’s available at certain times and not in and of itself storable or transportable, so excess is lost.
So, take the excess solar energy, produce hydrogen and store for off-peak times or to distribute.
Seems like a win to me.
So, take the excess solar energy, produce hydrogen and store for off-peak times or to distribute.
Storing hydrogen is difficult and expensive. Not even to say it can’t be done, but it would require the energy companies to invest money in capital, and they hate doing that.
Good for them! Theoretically that should attract industries that need a lot of electricity and everything balances out cost and demand wise.
So, bitcoin miners
Steel, aluminium and battery production can also make good use of lots of cheap renewable energy.
Fuck bitcoin. It should be allocated to desalinisation so less water is pulled from the rivers of the driest continent on Earth. The ecology around waterways is already in the shitter, and global warming is going to 10x that clusterfuck.
That is a good option too. How long does it take to spool up or ramp down desalination? I mentioned Bitcoin mining because it’s super fast to come online or go offline depending on the energy requirements at the moment.
I doubt that would be terribly relevant. The lions share of the surplus energy should be predictable based on recent grid data + 24 hour weather forecasts.
Based on nothing but wikipedia the primary methods for desalination are distillation (boiling) and membrane; neither of which sound like ramp up time would matter.
Yeah, if time to come online and time to go offline doesn’t matter, then that definitely works.
Or things like aluminium smelting/electrolysis.
On crypto, if it’s green energy and there is enough of it, what’s wrong? (It’s not great, and a waste of hardware, but not as awful)
It’s a waste of hardware, and a waste of energy that could be doing something useful.
V2G and V2H is here, so you’ll be able to store there and draw down overnight in a suitable ecar.
A large pumped hydro in Qld has been cancelled by the new Lib government, so won’t be able to store it there. Snowy Hydro pumped storage is way behind schedule and locally Redflow went backrupt, so huge Zinc Flow storage batteries arent available to rollout to store excess energy and Lithuim is a shitty choice for large grid batteries.
Subsidise home battery systems so that the excess is stored locally instead of going back into the grid.
How else will they be able to continue justify pulling coal out of the ground if they have a robust power grid based on renewables
H₂?
“Struggling”
We have so much solar power that we can no longer efficiently profit off of it. We would either need to reduce the margins we make on electricity or destroy our stock of solar capital to reinflate the price of energy.
What to do… what to do…
That’s what hydrogen production from water electrolysis is for.
Ohh, you gave me an idea! Given that it also happens in CA, maybe we should use the excess for freshwater production from seawater.
How about investing in grid energy storage, to cope with intermittent production?
What about high energy use industry running only during excess supply. Making aluminum, desalination, even training AI models. There are a lot of energy guzzlers that don’t NEED to run 24/7. Why can’t they be a sink for excess power?
As a part of grid balancing, we are already doing that to some extent. For the most part, the idea is that you can increase or decrease the load if you see the frequency of the grid beginning to drift off target. These types of frequency containment reserves can usually react very quickly, which means that most industrial processes don’t qualify.
However, since the duck curve is fairly predictable, we could (and should) extend this idea to slower processes too, such as the ones you mentioned. I don’t know if that sort of power reserve is actually being implemented, but it certainly would make a lot of sense.
It’s just that most industries prefer to operate 24/7. Having your reverse osmosis, electorlysis, electrowinning, arc furnace etc. running only during sunny hours is nice for the employees but bad for business. The investors of such factories prefer to see profits sooner rather than later, and restricting operating hours isn’t helping.
Cheaper electricity would obviously result in lower operating expenses, so I can definitely see some potential in this idea. You would just need to find some environmentally minded investors. They would also need to tolerate the risk that comes with a fluctuating power supply, which could be a tall order.
If the fluctuations of the local energy market are dominated by solar power, that means more work during the day and none during the night. If there’s lots of wind in the mix too, that could mean lots of night shifts during windy seasons and none during others, which isn’t great for the employees.
They are. Modeling has shown that getting Australia to 98.8% renewable is highly achievable.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/energy/grid-renewable-electricity-simulation/
It is possible that new battery chemistries or compressed air storage may prove cheap enough to use for long term storage.
There are plenty of options to choose from, but only few are actually industrial grade at the moment. So many promising ones are still in pilot stage, and I’m really looking forward to seeing which ones actually prove to be viable.
Traditional lithium based batteries clearly aren’t it, but LFP looks ok though.
Austrailia is one of the best places in the world to do that, but it should be pointed out that the article you linked wants 120GWh of batteries (costing ~12 billion USD at current Li-ion prices) as well as building more than 38GW of wind power and 30GW of solar power in order to meet ~25GW of average demand and that still needs pumped hydro on top and more than 9GW of fossil fuel power to make up the gaps.
It’s just about feasible in Australia with excess sun and wind, plenty of empy space, low population density and terrain amenable to hydro storage. But it isnt realy generalisable to most other places.
30GW of solar is not much. Germany built 13GW this year.
Germany has more than 3 times the population of Australia, and the article linked needed to be able to generate 30GW peak so likely required more installed capacity, and solar is only 1 element out of 5 required in that scenario.
Again it does seem to be feasible to get renewable only in Australia (or close to) but I dont think that tells you much about elsewhere
30GW of solar is not much. Germany built 13GW this year.
