> When there’s enough surplus energy supply from renewables, prices can even go negative. That's great news for consumers - who get paid to use energy - but it's bad news for renewable generators.
That isn't correct, it is just bad news for everyone. Sure if there was a sustainable deal that offered negative prices that'd be good, but in this case it just means the prices when positive will have to go up to cover the overall profits of the energy producers. Negative prices represent waste and it is quite unusual for waste to be good for consumers.
Although this is a minor point. The solar revolution is pretty exciting.
I disagree that it’s bad news. It gives additional incentives for consumers to get battery systems to go with their solar.
I live in the UK where prices go negative during periods of high wind/low demand.
There are also times where demand is so high that the electricity companies will pay a big premium for consumers who cut their consumption for a couple of hours, or who sell back to the grid, to avoid having to start up reserve coal-fired power stations.
I got batteries for my solar without any thought of them being very useful in winter, but in fact they are. I automatically force-charge when prices go negative and when the grid announces there is going to be an emergency need for power (usually a few hours notice), I’ll force charge and then force discharge during the time of need.
There's a whole industrial technology -- bulk resistive heat storage -- that's popping up to deal with intermittent low or negative power prices. Temperatures as high as 1800 C can be stored in resistively heated refractory materials, then used to displace fossil fuel combustion in various industrial processes. The stored energy/mass and energy/cost in such materials can be very high.
Yeah if you're calcining concrete clinker you'll happily use resistive heating if electricity is cheaper than nat gas.
I like to bitch about people that think the free market solves everything but oh noes the price of electricity is negative is one thing I think the free market can totally solve.
It's bad news for anyone who wants to buy a solar panel, because they'll be joining the thundering herd of people generating energy when the energy price is negative and there's too much generation in the grid already, and that is a complete waste.
It's great news for someone who wants to buy a battery and actually reduce that waste by consuming it and making good use of it later.
I have thought for a few years now that solar panels are no longer the best thing to expand - it's batteries instead now, and all the better if they are situated right next to the solar panels.
Having said that, if you're on a fixed price domestic electricity supply, then yes it would make sense to install solar panels without batteries to match your peak power usage during the day, but that is going to be a very small installation in most cases. If you expand beyond that, then you're exporting to the grid and getting paid next to nothing for it.
One of the problems is that storage inefficiency is already built-in to most new PV installations. Well over half of new installations are based on grid-phase-sync microinverters. Adding storage to the system involves adding rectification and re-inversion losses.
If solar installers would default to building out DC -> primary inverter systems, then adding storage would be much less lossy. But as it is, economics drives the industry to strongly prefer microinverters.
I don't have solar panels on my house, and have no intent to get them. I'll be happy if modest sized PV arrays pop up on unused land in my area and if I can tap that energy from the grid. The cost/W of such installations will be much below what I could get for my roof.
If we get dynamic pricing, I very well may get home batteries though, especially if these could double as backup in case of grid outage.
> I'll be happy if modest sized PV arrays pop up on unused land in my area and if I can tap that energy from the grid. The cost/W of such installations will be much below what I could get for my roof.
Not sure what state you're in, but community solar is very popular in several states, and if it is not in your state, I would encourage you to advocate for it. It is a reasonable alternative for those who do not want to install rooftop solar (or cannot, for whatever reason).
Negative pricing will lead to people building storage which can make use of it to charge, and then sell back when prices are positive again. It's an excellent signal of opportunity.
There is a sustainable deal that can work with negative prices. Charge EVs when price is negative and pay the carowners. For this, car owners have to be always plugged in (except the 20m - 1hour) that they drive. When demand peaks, the cars can supply power back to the grid and make even more money! Households can put solar panels, provide the entire energy infrastructure: production and storage.
More storage and Virtual Power Plants are a big part of the answer!
By aggregating and networking more energy consuming resources, we can make load dispatchable to deal with intermittent renewables, and respond better to price signals. Cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable energy has the opportunity to be good for everyone. I wrote a book on this!
No it doesnt mean either of those things. It means you built too much solar and made the grid more unstable given the physics constraints on short term supply and demand. Its not waste, it is not good.
It's ironic that this is what the carbon industry used to preach back when solar and wind were very expensive and people believed it.
Now, the carbon and nuclear industry preaches the opposite - that the market absolutely cannot handle this "problem" and we need the government to give them money instead.
It was a lie both times, and it was widely believed both times.
During the 2022 energy crisis, it was the citizens of practically every country in EU that declared in unions that the market had failed and that government had to step it to fix it. Multiple elections around that time was defined by political discussion around who was willing to pay more of citizens energy bills and save companies that would have gone bankrupt. Estimated €200 billions in a single year went towards that single purpose of fixing what the market failed to do.
It was demonstrated beyond doubt that if governments let the market forces deal with instability in energy prices, then the citizens will vote to kick those politicians out and replace them with someone else.
Yeah. The way market forces will deal with it is some energy sink will be figured out for the mid-day peak, and prices will stop going negative.
But when that happens the average price of power generated from solar panels will probably drop (because less of the power generated by a panel is wasted, so the capital cost/power generated ratio improves) and consumers will be better off. I expect. These market effects are complicated.
It is the opposite of what happened in, say, Germany. They started seeing negative power prices on the wholesale market then they ended up with average electricity prices that were among the most expensive in the world.
The EEG subsidy program is a joke. The government guarantees a minimum price on your feed-in tariff. This means if the price is negative 8 cents and the feed-in tariff is positive 8 cents (numbers are for illustration purposes), the government pays 16 cents.
It's no different from what the central bank does with its zero lower bound guarantee on interest rates. The market rate on capital is negative? Gotta subsidize private capital holders with infinite QE. The guaranteed minimum price floor is zero, the interest rate is say -3%, the central bank essentially pays 3% interest to keep the house of cards from collapsing. Since negative interest rates cannot be represented in the current system, we have inflation as the band aid.
The thing is, negative prices or interest rates aren't evil or bad on their own, they become dysfunctional the moment there is a guaranteed price floor. It's no different than a price ceiling. The only difference is shortage vs oversupply.
First of all, this isn't true.
In case the prices drop negative, the solar plant will be disconnected from the grid remotely and the solar plant owner will get what he had gotten if the solar plant had not been disconnected from the grid.
Second, subsidizing once expensive but mostly cleanenergy production technology, allowed renewable energy to thrive to the number 1 energy source worldwide, theoretically allowing to ditch fossil energy production completely by 2050 and stay within low risk climate warming - without significant degrowth, which otherwise would have been required for a certainty.
So no, EEG isn't a joke, but a huge win for humanity.
It was a huge win for humanity, kickstarting the rapid decline in PV cost over the last 15 years, but don't pretend there wasn't a cost to Germany. Acknowledge this remarkable act of global altruism.
Are we talking about a specific policy or the whole transition?
The Wikipedia page on the EEG suggests that it's globally recognised as a success, and even when political pressure was being applied to reduce solar PV feed in tariffs faster than the original plan called for due to better than expected uptake, the merit order effect introduced in the same legislation was reducing the spot price of electricity by more than the cost.
Solar PV is probably the technology best suited to avoiding negative grid prices, if that is your goal.
It's sad that this scientific/engineering fact has been lost in the race to make dramatic headlines and climate denial propaganda.
Here we see it repeated by someone who seems genuinely positive about solar PV.
Basically, you need to shut off energy supply quickly and efficiently when demand drops. Anything with a giant spinning mass involved fails this test. If they have to keep steam hot they fail it even more. (Not to go on a tangent but this fast response is what the initial grid batteries have been getting paid for)
Of course, demand response systems have for decades paid people to shift demand towards the periods of cheap and/or clean energy because it is financially beneficial to the system. Any need that is met slightly earlier or later does not need to be met with more expensive and/or dirtier fuels. A simple system optimisation.
Apply that to a predictable supply of cheap clean energy in a market based system and suddenly you have the "problem" of people being incentivised with money to use energy when it is available.
What a tragedy, who will save us from this cheap clean energy that is going to destroy the grid with the evil magic of negative numbers.
If you wanted to use solar PV as an energy sink, which you don't, that would also work.
PV panels are LEDs run in reverse. I believe part of the QA process for some panels is to run them in reverse and take an IR photograph of the output to check for defects.
Where I live, the major consumer of power is cooling. I want to build an underground pool, that each day, during solar peak, I use the excess energy to freeze the water. Then during the evening, use that ice block to cool my house - with only grid power (or battery) required to pump the coolant. It seems like this would be a much cheaper solution than tesla power packs, but doesn’t appear that I can buy this system off the shelf.
Because coal plants need x amount of time to ramp down and low carbon energy sources have priority to reduce emissions. It's technically not the solar power producers that are feeding in electricity, they are being paid to wait.
So how are we going to get to that lovely dream when the power companies are now charging you to deliver your power bank. It's nice buying batteries, but if you are not making savings with solar then there's not a lot of money left over to spend even more on batteries. Likely then, there will be some new tax that the government doesn't curve.
In the Netherlands, they have a law that means that what you generate has to be offset against what you produce (In high level), but the energy companies simply started charging for delivering back, which is in effect simply bypassing the law. The obvious response from this would be to ban it because it's an obvious flaunting of the law. But no, the politicians allow it.
And then we have that Belgium politician a few years ago who, despite the urgency from global warming, thought it would be smart to put extra taxes on buying solar from China. What did he achieve? At best a little more destruction for the planet.
Optimistic articles like this makes gives me a bit of hope that maybe we can start cutting down on current trend of increased total subsidies for the energy sector. Taking a European perspective like the article, subsidies are around €200 billions per year, and €400 billions in 2022 if we account for interventions during the energy crisis of that year. As much as the trend of solar prices is going downwards, the trend of subsidies are pointing upwards with an alarming speed and consistency.
An other big part of government funded energy sector is the reserve energy strategy, generally made by paying natural gas power plants to be on stand-by. A major part of "connection grid" taxes goes directly to pay for those fossil fueled power plants. Rather than expanding the capacity and building new such fossil fueled thermal power plants, existing ones should be under planned obsolescence and be demolished when they reach their end of life. The increased dependency on natural gas is also having an impossible to ignore effect on the geopolitical climate in Europe.
In all its excitement this post just glosses over one major point that grid operators know very well: demand == supply for every 50th or 60th of each second of every day.
Renewables like solar that can not be modulated are a PITA for grid safety as those plants that instead can, such as coal and gas, then need to scale for solar suddenly dumping energy into the grid.
It's through a smart inverter, of course it can be modulated.
Now, random consumer solar can't easily be modulated - yet. But nor can random consumer demand. If you've got a big solar farm then not only can you precisely control the output, you can also control the phase response of the output.
(if you turn the inverter off, what happens is the panel voltage floats up to the breakdown voltage of the photodiode that is the solar cell, and the energy vanishes into electron/hole recombination and slightly warmer panels)
Solar can absolutely be modulated; in fact, it's perhaps the easiest grid-scale power source to modulate since this can be done solid-state: just tune the MPPT to operate off-peak if needed.
How can solar production not be modulated technically (in practice they won't as long as there's fossil power in the grid which solarhas priority over)?
You can easily disconnect solar plants from the grid - even remotely if the situation requires it (technically even gradually if it is supported by the specific plant).
This is required by law in e.g. Germany: the higher the peak power the higher the requirements in flexibility generally speaking
> On–off keying (OOK) denotes the simplest form of amplitude-shift keying (ASK) modulation that represents digital data as the presence or absence of a carrier wave.
Non-dispatchable renewables like wind and solar can only be curtailed when their supply is not wanted.
Solar panel farms with advanced inverters in some markets actually make a significant portion of their revenue from the frequency control ancillary services, and Solar+storage is extremely dispatchable.
I'd like to know how much space all these battery and solar farms are going to take up. Where I live in SE England they seem to be trying to take productive agricultural fields out of use to cover them with solar panels.
How does space usage compare against nuclear plants?
[And yes I realise some portion of solar will be domestic, but that's not always allowed if your house is listed].
> Where I live in SE England they seem to be trying to take productive agricultural fields out of use
I think this is an unfair characterisation. Many farmers in the UK _want_ to build solar installations on their fields as it is a fantastic way to get guaranteed income while keeping other land for agriculture. Additionally, you can graze animals with solar panels. And also the solar panel installations are usually temporary (land is leased for x amount of years), they can be removed and used as farmland after.
> how much space all these battery and solar farms
Chris Hewett, head of Solar Energy UK says this:
"We need less than half a percent of UK land, for a fully decarbonised energy grid. That is the amount of land we use for golf courses – and less than we use for airports."
Generally the worst case scenarios for covering all our energy needs with renewables end up with using around 1% of a country's land area. Which is already a small fraction of the land we use for farms. But compared to the worst case scenario there are many reasons to think it will be far less: solar power and farms can use the same land in a synergistic way. It's called agrovoltaics. Solar can cover water reservoirs and canals which reduces water evaporation. Commercial rooftops and parking lots can also be covered. In practice wind power occupies a fraction of the land it does on paper, and can often be placed in between farm fields. And then there's geothermal which could cut land area use as well, especially for winter demand if you build district heating.
Off-shore wind is growing rapidly. Even floating off-shore is gaining traction. These could eventually be co-located with the growing of seaweed for food, animal feed and bio-matter. The ocean out there is basically a desert, not much is growing there, and creating structures where things can grow will essentially act like a "greening" of the ocean, turning more of it into a CO2-sink.
> How does space usage compare against nuclear plants?
Obviously nuclear power plants use significantly less. How much depends if you include uranium mining, which generally happens in other countries.
But nuclear power plants just isn't renewable, and their growth is fundamentally unsustainable. Thermal power plants also contribute to global warming by direct heating. It's not going to take more than a 10x increase in power production with thermal power plants before that becomes a significant concern. With renewables there is at least a theoretical path to full sustainability. All we have to do is to recycle the materials used to build them.
The pinnacle of solar power sustainability is projects like the one to build huge solar power plants in Morocco and transfer the power to UK. You absorb solar energy from a place that has too much of it, and plenty of arid land, providing shade and cooling for a significant area where you could then potentially do agrovoltaics to grow food. Win-win.
Not that I oppose nuclear. We should build what we can, as long as it's economically feasible. It's just that it gets way more attention online than it deserves. It's just not going to be as important as people think.
I was in SE England 2 weeks ago in Knepp Estate, and the current owners farmed it for 17 years and only made a profit 2 of those. If a farm is losing money is it productive? AIUI you need very good soil to run a profitable farm
Many don't understand how little value is created per unit of land per year on a farm. The value of generated power from PV on the land would generally be much higher.
Solar can even help regain space, since it can be put on roofs and replace 30 times more space-inefficient Biogas electricity production.
Further solar plants can be combined with efforts to give nature back some space, since solar farms produce energy without agricultural use of the land, perhaps even the use of pesticides and other poisons.
You don't even have to mowe really, since the modules are usually further in the air than natural grass.
Though you probably have to prevent trees and bushes to grow in areas which used to be forest (hundreds of years ago before humans made farmland out of everything)
We can import food, and we kind of have to anyway, but we can't import electricity. Well, not on quite the same scale; total interconnector capacity is a few percent of demand, and often used for export.
At some point we'll see more agrivoltaics; there's nothing stopping people from planting between/under panels, and for some crops the partial shade actually increases yield.
Nuclear plants of course consume way less space, but cost way more and encounter way more planning objections and cost overruns. I take a "you can have your dessert when you finish your vegetables" policy on this: UK can start another nuclear plant if it wants once Hinkley Point C is actually finished and working.
At some point we're also going to have to have the "listed building mafia vs. energy efficiency" argument, too. I think the most egregious example was someone trying to block a grid connection for offshore renewables using the presence of "grade 2 listed concrete anti-tank cubes".
> I'd like to know how much space all these battery and solar farms are going to take up.
With any luck they’ll be built o top of all the AI data centers and there’ll be enough leftover energy to power your meek human needs. Only half joking, half cynical :(
This is where superconductors come into play, i.e. materials that allow you to move electricity at no loss due to electrical resistance. The problem with those (traditionally, at least) has been that they usually operate at very low temperatures, which of course again require energy to be maintained.
A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor would be the breakthrough required for doing this at scale. This of course would still require significant infrastructure investment.
A room-temperature, ambient-pressure, non-ceramic superconductor would be the breakthrough, because you need your superconductor cable to be transportable, repairable and not be a kilometer long piece of ceramic with zero tolerance for defects.
There's a project here proposing to transport 1.75GW across 5000km between Australia and Singapore.
The project is reported as costing $30 billion (22.6 billion USD) - but I think that also includes a 12,000 hectare solar farm and a bias battery as well.
A kilometre of a 1GW HVDC ground line costs $0.7-1mln. Double or triple that for sea lines[0].
China has had 2000km+ lines online for years now, so there's precedent. Not for solar specifically, but plainly to connect distant grids.
We have huge fiber optic connectors wrapping the planet, so there's precedent here as well.
Overall a global solar grid is technically feasible and actually not terribly expensive, but we need to solve the political issues preventing it first.
EDIT [0] for comparison highways cost $4mln per kilometre in the US and double to triple that in the EU.
The negative prices also encourage grid- and home-scale storage. Buy low, sell peak. We make a pile of cash more than we spend in summer on energy and really take the edge off winter.
Storage is the only answer to an abundance of solar and wind. We can't just bitch and moan that there's too too much at peak gen because we need all this power. We just sinks to catch up with generation. Install more in-home batteries, more water heaters, and make EV charging omnipresent (and more reflective of wholesale prices). Early adopters get more beneficial rates to offset higher outlays. The market is working as it should.
Is SAF produced from electricity alone is a real thing at all, at any significant scale (say is there enough of it produced worldwide to fuel a single 737 once daily)?
Numbers I found are that global SAF production in 2023 was 6e8 liters, which corresponds to about 4000 transatlantic flights. So not a huge amount but also not nothing.
Edit: ah I missed the "electricity alone" part. That I don't know.
Yeah because that's what those guys are advocating for. I know it is technically possible and appears economically approachable. But i'm afraid of it becoming a thing like cellulosic ethanol 15 years ago: no one doubts the possibility and yet no one seems to be able to do it in practice, on scale.
It's not clear SAF needs to be made from electricity alone. The carbon has to come from somewhere, and waste biomass would seem to be a reasonable place (deliberately grown biomass, probably not). There's more than enough waste biomass to provide for the carbon for current aviation fuel consumption.
One could add energy from electricity to boost the yield per unit of biomass, for example ensuring that all the carbon in it ends up in SAF, with none wasted to CO2 instead.
Direct air capture is quite expensive, and also adds the question: if you can capture CO2 from air, why not just continue to use petroleum-based jet fuel and capture and sequester the CO2?
Objvious difference: no one who's calling the shots, is really worried about climate change or CO2. It's about switching away from non-renewable fuels to enable future economic growth. But because for leftists, "economic growth" sounds like "making the rich even richer" and switching away from non-renewable fuels threatens their sources of inspiration - Putin's Russia and Arab petrostates - they found a way to phrase the same in a manner the leftists will like "hey the Earth is burning, we need to do something about it!".
That's the response: doing as you suggest mitigates global warming, but does nothing to reduce consumption of fossil fuels, which is the actual half-hidden goal of all serious efforts to mitigate global warming. This is also why CCS went nowhere.
A wild thought just hit me: if batteries and solar get cheap enough, could the power grid as we know it become at least partially obsolete?
The power grid is the greatest machine ever built by humans. It's gigantic, elaborate, amazingly reliable, and civilization as we know it would collapse without it. It's so ubiquitous that it's hard to imagine it not being here save in a "Mad Max" or "The Road" type collapse scenario.
It makes me think of this link that was posted here a bit ago:
The analog "POTS" (plain old telephone system) would have seemed like the power grid to me as a kid and a teenager. It seemed that way up until the 2000s when the runaway growth of packet switching digital networks and cellular rendered it completely obsolete. It's been a while since I've even seen a POTS phone line.
Could the power grid be reduced to something you only see in big cities and industrial areas where you have tons of demand? Could it eventually go away entirely, or go away "as we know it" in favor of a bunch of lateral load-sharing links between independent mini power plants?
Microgrids have been making a lot of noise for a few years now.
I think it’ll still be common to get your electricity from the grid in most towns and cities in the future, especially in northern Europe; we just don’t have the levels of insolation to generate all the energy we need from the small plots of land we live on in the UK in winter.
Cities are going to need more power than falls on their own roofs.
The distributed nature of the grid is just too useful. It's like having a computer that's not connected to the Internet: it's certainly possible but inconvenient compared to the default.
And what percentage of those cities is actually rooftops? Looking at a few satellite images, it seems like it’s in the low single digits. Lots of parks, roads, and other uses…
> A wild thought just hit me: if batteries and solar get cheap enough, could the power grid as we know it become at least partially obsolete?
No. Its definitely part of the solution but there are some issues that make it impractical as a full replacement.
In summer my panels make more power than I know what to do with and my batteries are full by about 10am. In winter only about 30% of my power comes from my solar. Heavy cloud cover typically takes my solar down to about 80% of what I get on a sunny day.
Falling battery prices will help to cope with rainy days but the winter drop is hard to avoid and running your own generator is VERY inefficient (i.e expensive) compared to a power station.
Yes - everyone talks about diurnal variation with solar panels, but the seasonal variation is more important, especially at high latitudes. Up here at 56N I get an annual variation that looks very dramatic: https://flatline.org.uk/daystats.html
For that to happen, you would need an order of magnitude better batteries than we already have. I'm not saying it's impossible but it's off the cards with the current technology.
Of course it can and will happen, just like our gargantuan infrastructure to extract, refine and distribute gasoline and diesel in immense quantities.
It's not going to happen in 10 years, but it will slowly happen until the power grid and gas/diesel are relics from the past, much like landline phones and faxes now. They'll still exist, but only used in very odd ball cases for specific reasons. In 100 years they'll be gone, or so small as to be mostly forgotten about.
The copper cables that POTS ran on are still in widespread use, and their replacement is mostly wired cable/fiber, not wireless-only. Power will probably follow a similar pattern: gridless renewables for some use cases, wired power for others.
Until you actually have to pay for someone to install it and connect it to the grid - real prices in a lot of markets haven’t really come down much at all over the past 10 years, the cheaper panel costs are offset by higher labor, interconnect, and other material costs.
Batteries have a technological learning curve similar to semiconductors and solar panels, but with a much bigger time constant. If my memory serves me well, then capacity per price (or was it by density?) is doubling every eight years.
Batteries aren't cheap enough to use as a the sole storage modality, because they suck for very long term storage. Their cost per unit of energy storage capacity is not amortized over enough charge/discharge cycles.
The answer to that is use a different (typically less efficient) way to store energy in that case. Cost savings can be dramatic at scale.
The strawman argument that storage isn't feasible because batteries by themselves don't cut it is regularly seen from nuclear bros. Even MIT came out with a study doing this, a study that very carefully avoided the word "hydrogen".
But money isn't the primary problem. The primary problem in the US and Europe is that NIMBY's can delay the construction of an interconnect by ~10 years. China generally doesn't have this problem.
Most places with high solar insolation values also tend to come with high cooling costs. Arizona and Southern Nevada are perfect for this application, but my first approximate guess is that HVAC would eat all of, if not more than, the benefits.
This isn’t really true. HVAC in a dry hot desert isn’t that bad.
The main reason NV and AZ don’t have significantly larger data center foot prints is mainly just from lack of cheap energy (data centers run 24/7 at a pretty constant load so solar isn’t a good fit).
When I last looked into it, CoLo space in Vegas and Phoenix at small scale has prices competitive with other locations. The biggest downside is distances to major IXPs. So using them is contingent on latency goals.
Good point, though I don't think the non-energy costs of HVAC are that high. And the energy costs of HVAC benefit from the same cheap electricity… I don't have any numbers though :/
A reminder pricing in electricity supply is not a good in itself, its a mechanistic approach based on (in my opinion) flawed economics around the "best" way to deliver a public utility function.
What's amazing about it is that it's many times more efficient than plants' leaves at converting sunlight to usable energy.
Of course it's not really an apples/apples comparison. The form usable energy has to take is different in living organisms, and 100% of a leaf is not dedicated to solar collection. Only the chloroplasts do that. Still it's cool that we "beat nature" here.
Well... hold your horses, when you make solar panel self replicating and self-healing nano-machines that span all over the planet you would have beaten nature.
So far we have beaten nature on the aspect of sheer efficiency
What's amazing is that human and animal muscle power used to be the primary source of mechanical power in human civilization with plants as the energy source. If you were to power an electric generator using a human, you would at most get 200W of sustained power. Today you can buy a tiny solar panel that costs less than such a generator and it will produce power expending zero human effort.
Meanwhile the competing energy source, fossil fuels, is maybe 10 times cheaper than generating fossil fuels directly with the help of solar power, except the former took millions of years to form and will be depleted within a millenium, whereas the latter could, at least in theory, produce the same quantity we consume per day today, every day.
I tried some calculations comparing the amount of work energy you can get out of an acre of solar vs an acre of corn grown for ethanol. I get different numbers depending on data sources but it's around 50 times more.
It's enough it sends my thoughts down the path of what if instead of green ammonia based fertilizer you start talking synthetic amino acids.
My nutter cousin likes to post pictures on facebook of rural solar farms that he claims are destroying the environment. And pictures of farms and cattle ranches that are natural. He lost his house rural house in a fire and now rents.
But yeah plants are 2% efficient or something and most crops require a lot of energy input. And we've got maybe 100 years of topsoil left in a lot of places.
2% is, I believe, the maximum efficiency ever recorded for conversion of sunlight to food calories. The typical yield on a farm is much lower (granted, some of that goes to non-food biomass). The yield for crops grown to produce meat, especially beef, is MUCH lower.
Fun fact: on a perfectly still day, photosynthesis of a corn field will be curtailed because the plants strip all the CO2 out of the available air, and do so remarkably quickly (IIRC in about five minutes in full sun.)
this is why nuclear doesnt add up.. the cheapness of solar power during the day makes the investment in nuvlear just so much more expensive and harder to justify.
In the meantime: France has been having very low carbon electricity for decades while all large industrialized countries trying renewables are still far from reaching the same average gCO2/kWh per year. Still much better than doing nothing though, I hope they manage it someday.
It is hard to tell if you are joking here or not, but in case you are not: if the cost of mining is low, the value of mining is also low. The reason for having 'mining' in Bitcoin is to artificially create scarcity in order to simulate blocks having real-world value.
If you can mine blocks for free, the value of each block plummets.
As long as Bitcoin is unusable for day to day transactions (7 TPS globally isn't even good enough to run a town on), it can't solve any real problems, because its value is just speculative make-believe. And no, Lightning or other L2 networks don't change that, since they don't actually use Bitcoin all that much - they don't actually give Bitcoin's assurances unless you run them at Bitcoin speeds (i.e. close the channel after every transaction, negating any performance advantage).
And if we ever automate every job away, littering could be the solution
There's a hundred other things we can dump energy on before deciding to waste it ; pumping water uphill, gravity batteries, regular batteries, electrolyzing hydrogen to use for later, ...
Why the heck would you use something so difficult/expensive to store & transport like Hydrogen?
If energy is expensive than it's makes more sense to store it in batteries than hydrogen since batteries are about 3X as efficient as the hydrogen cycle.
If energy is cheap it makes more sense to use about twice as much energy to capture and attach carbon molecules to that hydrogen to create a hydrocarbon resulting in something that's easy to store and transport, and that uses existing infrastructure.
You don't have to transport it very far if you generate it onsite straight in the hydrogen powerplant that'll turn it back into electricity with between 40 to 60% efficiency
If we follow your 3rd paragraph and turn the hydrogen into hydrocarbons, not only do you lose efficiency in that process, you make CO2 as a byproduct of combustion again
Nobody is interested in storage that turns your carbon-free green energy back into greenhousing energy
The reason you might want hydrogen instead of batteries is just cost, I guess.
> Nobody is interested in storage that turns your carbon-free green energy back into greenhousing energy
If you make your hydro-carbons with captured carbon, the process is slightly carbon-negative. ~10% of hydrocarbons are not burned, they're turned into plastic or lubricants etc. So for every 10 carbons you take from the air, only 9 are released back.
Bitcoins as grid energy storage? Just install my BitWall box next to the pv junction box. I'd be surprised if the economics math works out but that's a fun idea.
I cannot tell if this is sarcastic or not so the assumption is it isn't. In which case: WTF? There are many solutions for cheap energy but a pointless digest algorithm isn't one. While I do not agree with the AI craze it would still be a better solution.
That isn't correct, it is just bad news for everyone. Sure if there was a sustainable deal that offered negative prices that'd be good, but in this case it just means the prices when positive will have to go up to cover the overall profits of the energy producers. Negative prices represent waste and it is quite unusual for waste to be good for consumers.
Although this is a minor point. The solar revolution is pretty exciting.