this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
855 points (99.1% liked)

Mildly Interesting

17059 readers
6 users here now

This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.

This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?

Just post some stuff and don't spam.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

It's still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it's pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.

Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] frezik@midwest.social 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

But, it can be very useful for leveling the seasonal variation.

Which isn't actually necessary. Winter has less sunlight, but also more wind.

We can be smart about this. We have weather data for given regions stretching back decades, if not more than a century. We can calculate the mix of power we'd get from both wind and solar. There will be periods where both are in a lull. Looking again at historical data, we can find the maximum lull there ever was and put enough storage capacity to cover that with generous padding.

And then you just don't need nuclear at all. Might as well keep what we have, but no reason to build new ones.

[–] Rivalarrival 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Looking again at historical data, we can find the maximum lull there ever was and put enough storage capacity to cover that with generous padding.

Baseload storage is a pipe dream. The storage and generation capacity necessary to make that work would be about two orders of magnitude more expensive to maintain and operate than the equivalent nuclear capacity, and the environmental impact would be far greater still.

That's not to say that storage is useless; it certainly isn't. But its utility is in leveling spikes and dips, not replacing baseload generation during a "lull".

[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's simply not true. This has been well studied, and a 100% renewable + storage option is quite feasible. It's even easier if you focus on going 95% first (that last 5% gets much, much harder).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1009249541/

[–] Rivalarrival 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Depends on your definition of "feasible".

It is certainly within the capabilities of humanity to do it.

It would cost far more, and have much higher ecological impact than alternatives.

To me, that is not "feasible".

[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 1 month ago

It's feasible and cost effective. The academic research on this has been quite clear, but it isn't the sort of thing that generates headlines. Nuclear just isn't necessary.