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by credit_guy
1615 days ago
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That's not really the problem with solar. Storing energy in batteries from day to night is a solved problem, it doesn't even double the price of electricity. The round trip efficiency is about 80%. The big problem is storing electricity from summer to winter at higher latitudes; it's difficult because the day is much longer during the summer than the winter, the incidence angle higher, so you may end up producing as much as 10 times less energy in the winter, while the energy demand is actually higher; storage losses over 6 months are very high, but that's not the really big problem. The big problem is that you are not getting the bang for the buck. For batteries used from day to night, you get MWh of energy into and out of them every day, and you can charge for that, so you can get a decent ROI. For batteries used from summer to winter, you'll charge for the energy once a year; you need to charge much, much more, and this becomes uneconomical by a huge distance. There's an alternative to storing energy from summer to winter: you simply overbuild solar capacity so that even in the winter you can produce enough during the day to last you through the night. At high latitudes, you need to overbuild by a factor of 10, and solar may be cheap, but not 10 times cheaper than other sources of electricity. However, if you find something to do with the excess summer energy, you may end up being profitable. India, being at a lower latitude, has a much easier problem. First, it's very likely the demand during "winter" months is not much higher than during "summer" months if at all. Then the day length during winter is not that short. So the overcapacity that you need may be only a factor of 3x. This guy wants to manufacture green hydrogen. Even if he sells it at a loss, the overall venture may still be profitable. |
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I very much doubt this is "solved" at the scale of an entire country's energy needs for half a day, never mind the entire world's. Lithium and other materials for batteries are not that abundant, and definitely not that abundantly extracted.