The grid isn't optimized for it, and the base generation is highly incompatible with the fluctuations wind and solar create. There are very real costs to rapidly cycling power demands on steam turbine driven generators, regardless of what fuel is used to generate the steam. Each heat/cool cycle causes microfractures in the shafts to grow just a bit, and those have to be bored out periodically to remove the cracks, and there is only so much metal that can be safely removed.
So, storage is an issue. If no storage/grid tie is possible, utilizing the full output of the panels to heat or cool a mass for night/cloudy days could be helpful in a home situation.
> What do you think is the biggest problem with solar energy?
Stupid people.
(Also the biggest problem with everything else. It's almost, but not quite, the only problem.)
> How can this problem be solved with our existing knowledge and resources?
Well we can't throw all the stupid people into a volcano. Let's get that out of the way right off.
Instead, we distract and hypnotize them with the Farnsworth device (Philo, not Hubert). We miniaturize it and make it portable. Then we can plug them into virtual Skinner Boxes and hopefully modify their behavior to make them less destructive.
We have to maintain tight operational security. If they ever find out what we're doing to them they will attempt to destroy us, or, failing that, to destroy themselves to spite us (that's how goddamned stupid they are!)
(However, it turns out you can talk about the plan in public with complete candor as long as you pretend you're joking. The only risk is that some of the stupid people will get confused. But since they are confused anyway it's usually moot.)
It's unpleasant to treat the bulk of humanity as ignorant and insane children who shit in camp, but the evidence is undeniable, the real question is how do we manage the stupid people?
In the Tao Te Ching (book of wisdom, thousands of years old) it says:
With the best kind of leader
When the work is finished
The people all say
"We did it ourselves."
> 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world,[a] in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
I afraid I don't get what you're saying?
I mean, idolatry is wrong, and we should know and love God, of course.
Storing the energy for when the sun doesn’t shine. There are many options. The DOE is aiming to get the cost down by a factor of 10 by the end of the decade which is ambitious and not necessarily realistic…
Because there are fixed costs, and you need to pay for all the infrastructure in case it's a cloudy day.
Imagine there is a car that costs $10,000 and works every day, or there is a car that costs $3000 but works only every other day. But you need to drive every day.
Does it make sense to buy both cars and drive the cheaper one on sunny days? No, economically you only buy the reliable car and you don't buy the unreliable car at all. Notice the discontinuity -- until the reliability problem is solved, it makes no economic sense to deploy any solar. This is the economics of fixed costs.
Whereas what you are thinking of are variable costs. So say the unreliable car can be fueled for $1 a day and the reliable one costs $2 dollars a day. In the world of variable costs, it makes sense to use solar up to 100% of sunny capacity.
Whenever there is a battle between fixed and variable costs, what determines the winner is the interest rate. With low enough interest rates, you get to 100% solar on cloudy days. But with high interest rates, you don't go with solar at all because it is too expensive to keep all those fixed assets on standby and pay for twice the capacity you need just because your solar system goes offline.
So it is the relationship between interest rates and energy prices that determine when it makes sense to max out the cheap, unreliable producer and pay the reliable producer to be on standby, or when you only go with the reliable producer.
And interest rates and energy prices differ over time and in different places. There are many individual producers making these binary choices and in aggregate they never end up using 100% of one option or 0% of the other, it is usually something in between. But just because you see that there is something in between doesn't mean that lack of storage capacity is inhibiting the adoption of solar. It is the only thing inhibiting it. On the other hand, if you solve the storage problem, you can go way past 100% usage on sunny days, you can go to 100% total usage.
So because of fixed costs, it's totally wrong to focus on what happens just on sunny days. What prevents the adoption of solar is affordable storage -- and that is inhibiting the adoption of solar right now.
The unwillingness of people to deal with the storage problem, how they handwave it away or just pretend that it's not a blocker in the present is one of the most frustrating aspects of energy discussions. It is all about storage. That is 100% of the problem. Whether renewables succeed or fail is solely determined by the affordability of storage. The storage problem dwarfs every other consideration by a mile.
I'm sorry I still don't understand why this is the biggest problem now. I get why it's a long term problem - that for sure.
But, your comparisons are about building new stuff. My understanding is that the gas / coal capacity is already there - so it's not a question of adding more, right ? So we don't have those fixed costs - they are already paid.
We already have 100% of coverage with those, so adding solar, even without storage, will indeed decrease those variable costs.
Economically speaking, if we say solar is cheaper than gas / coal - what's preventing a rational actor from installing more capacity ? Until we get to 100% solar on sunny days, he is sure to sell 100% of his production if it's cheaper gas / coal no ?
> So we don't have those fixed costs - they are already paid.
No, that's generally not how infrastructure is funded. Infrastructure is funded by bonds that are sold and have to be serviced. So the payment for the fixed costs is spread out over time -- ideally over the lifetime of the asset -- and what happens when you add unreliable source that are cheaper -- like solar -- is that they cannibalize the revenue stream used to service the debt and those plants are taken offline right now, or they have to be subsidized somehow by the taxpayer -- which is why regions that make a big push to solar end up paying high energy prices and need to import a lot of energy. They are not paying high energy prices because solar is expensive, but they end up paying high prices to keep their reliable plants online. Or they require subsidies from the taxpayer. California is one example, but you see this often in Europe as well. California just got a billion dollar Federal subsidy to keep diablo online for a few more years, but the reason it was going to go offline was because it needed massive subsidies to remain operational in a market in which it competes with solar. But at the same time, solar can't replace Diablo without blackouts and water shortages - Diablo supplies 10% of California's energy and is used to pump water, so this is something that requires reliability, but it is losing money every year because it's cannibalized by solar. That's the situation of the household that chooses to buy both cars -- that household has to spend a lot more.
Solar has basically made nuclear uneconomical in the U.S. because nuclear has massive fixed costs but almost no variable costs, so it can't exist in a de-regulated market with solar -- the solar just drives it out of business. At the same time, solar is driving greater use of coal because coal plants have the cheapest fixed costs. So Germany was ditching nuclear and using more coal as a result of deploying all the renewables. If you don't pay extra to maintain your reliable capacity, you get blackouts or pay emergency rates to beg for energy from your neighbors (California has to import 20% of its electricity).
Rational actors -- like the household choosing between the two cars who knows they need to drive every day -- are required to plan for sufficient capacity look at this and say "we're not ready to deploy solar at scale" because they want to avoid the blackouts and price spikes. Politicized actors choose a different route, and you get the energy mess that is California, UK, Germany, etc. And all of that is solely because of storage, and it gets worse the more solar you deploy without storage.
it is the most efficient in terms of energy transfer. I think it is lacking in terms of actual storage capacity. the upfront costs are also extreme.
ideally, every green energy farm would have a gravity well storage system nearby (like pumped storage) for the purposes of keeping discharge steady. Energy would be transferred into and out of this system pretty quickly, and stored in a more cost/size efficient storage option that could act as the true "battery" on dark days / longer periods of energy production downtime
A good example is the large scale hydropower project in Switzerland where they added 900MW capacity to the grid for storage. They do have a good geography for that.
I wonder how difficult this would be to implement for consumers/smaller deployments. Could someone dig an underground pool sized hole for a tank of hot water that can be converted back to electricity?
For some applications you can store heat. For instance you can have an electric heater with a lot of bricks inside an insulator box in your house and move heat out of it convectively with a fan.
For static applications, wouldn't we be better off with batteries based on Sodium chemistry? Less efficient, but removing the geopolitics from one of the main components feels like a pretty big compensating factor.
Don't forget flow batteries using iron, vanadium and other chemistries, as well as various sorts of molten-salt batteries. For fixed installations we could put up with many inconvenient attributes if it gets the cost down.
There is no big problem with solar energy. In the US at least the industry is installing as much new solar as possible.
Take a look at this EIA webpage [1]. Of all the new installed capacity in 2021, solar constituted 39%, followed by wind with 31%. Natural gas comes at a great distance, with 16%, and the next one is not really a source of electricity. It's batteries, with 11%. Nuclear comes with 3%. So, the only new installed capacity that can produce CO2 emissions is natural gas, with 16%.
EIA does not have the split for 2022 yet, but a quick google returned [2], that shows solar kept its share of 39% through the first half of 2022. It would have been higher, but for the supply constraints. Going forward, it is expected that new solar installation will increase significantly, not in small part due to the Inflation Reduction Act.
I think it is political will and long term thinking.
Even today, aerial view of any place shows what a missed opportunity lies below. So many parking lots that could be covered ones with solar panels on their roofs(who invests on adding the panels? If I want to, would I be allowed to?)
Same goes to the roofs of several businesses, supermarkets etc. It is not their core business to buy solar panels and invest for the longer term. Many times they are leased places, and the owner is some faceless corporate entity.
If a local politician thinks for the long term instead of what gets him/her elected the next term, they could change the city code to mandate opening up of such rooftops for community solar projects.
Secondly, the power grid needs to be strengthened/modernised to accommodate localised power generation. This ineens heavy investment.
Of course there will be the oil&gas companies that will fight every step of the way to keep the status quo because they are set to lose if people generate their own energy..
The economic advantage in delaying. Given the large build outs and that you don't want to replace panels for 15+ years, a Moore's law like rate of improvement often seems like a reason to wait and pay less for better panels that will have a higher productivity.
I'm not really sure.. Expiring tax incentives for home energy choices seem to deliver points where one knew it was better to invest before the expiration than in the 12-36 months after the credit was gone. Devices reaching limits of a current system can also drive people to buy as devices that are much more sophisticated are often a longer wait than incremental improvements.
Seasonal storage. To store surplus energy from summer for use in winter.
In a sense, fossil fuel has never been needed as energy source. It’s only been needed as a storage vehicle, to be able to move energy around in time and space.
If you factor in all the cycle energy (making, disposing, replacing…), What is the real current total energy balance of solar energy (versus others)?
I'm wondering because solar is very tech intensive. So if you build a 1 billion dollars farm, 10 years later the technology is a lot more efficient. Are you going to replace it all?
To be honest, this is more like a question too: How big of a problem is this , energetically speaking?
> Do you know anything about the whole life cycle of solar
Unfortunately, No. And it is indeed a dilemma. If you don’t invest, you don’t grow. However, if you invest early, you may be creating a lot of unnecessary energy use.
This also apply to things like electric cars and batteries. We should always see the bigger picture, but someone has to do the dirty math.
Efficient allocation is one big problem. Given the assumption that solar panel production will lag the optimum demand for a good while, the panels we do produce should be installed in places which maximize their output, modulo efficiency of transmission to a population centre. So, Sahara desert is out of the question, but Northern Europe is not ideal either. Arizona, Nevada and Texas should be blanketed.
Battery seems bigger problem to me, when comes to solar energy.
If something like "Astrophage"(from Project Hail Mary) would really solve such problem.
Not an electrical engineer so would love to see opinions on cross-continents grids and challenges with it, because I think that could solve lot of storing energy problem but seems like might introduce new transmission problem !
Scaling up manufacturing faster. The skills required to install solar (installing ground mount racking, installing panels, wiring panels to inverters, wiring inverters to utility service entrance) can be taught in under a year, the bottleneck is how fast panels come off the fab.
Solar-cell efficiency versus cost to produce is a big challenge. Mostly because the power generated is an average based on unpredictable weather days. So you need higher efficiency and lower cost to offset that and make it worth the price for consumers.
Permitting to build the solar farms and any necessary transmission lines are the number one challenge. See the opposition to solar projects in hawaii or transmission line project in Maine. Classic nimby stuff.
Sadly not a technical problem that is easily solved.
So, storage is an issue. If no storage/grid tie is possible, utilizing the full output of the panels to heat or cool a mass for night/cloudy days could be helpful in a home situation.