[titzer]

I agree with most of your comment, but this:

> We should be blanketing every inch of desert with solar.

Please god, no. Solar is so much more useful close to where it's consumed, like rooftops and parking lots. Utility-scale solar power projects like this are just more corporate welfare boondoggles.

And I happen to think that maybe humanity should learn how to leave some things alone. Deserts have fragile, intricate ecosystems. This fucks them up. We need to learn to stop fucking things up to gobble up more energy.

[idiotsecant]

I am an electrical engineer that designs control systems for renewable power production for a living.

Curious what makes you think that the overhead and inefficiencies inherent to a million small solar installs is somehow better than a single managed facility benefiting from economy of scale both for maintenance and design.

Additionally, curious how you plan to address the problem of adding additional generation to existing way overloaded distribution systems to accomplish this. If this massive hypothetical solar install is all non-grid tied then fine, I guess, but you're losing a substantial amount of the power that's made that way.

Distribution systems don't come for free and have many of the same problems as 'last mile' internet. Not terribly complex but expensive en masse, particularly in areas that are not densely populated (which is a lot of the US).

There is a reason we spend a lot of money on transmission. Spending a lot of money on distribution helps a very small part of your network. Spending a lot of money on transmission helps a huge part of your network.

[quags]

Not OP but I suspect some comes from what I would view as the ability to first add solar to where there is existing infrastructure like parking lots, roofs, telephone poles etc. These areas are already built out and adding solar on top of it doesn’t take over an untouched eco system. Deserts are not voids of nothing ness and there is already a vast impact on the environment already.

[walrus01]

In my opinion the greatest benefits for large numbers of discrete small PV installs (with battery) is in places where it's uneconomical to extend the grid.

I'll use some hard to reach parts of WA and BC and OR and ID for example. You might be able to build a nice house/cabin on a piece of rural land and find that setting the poles and running lines to bring basic 100A or 200A service to that house will cost $40,000.

For 40k you can build quite a large off grid PV system that will have a reasonable ROI on it to serve the same loads, vs. spending 40k one time on construction costs for grid and then $50 to $200 monthly electric bills recurring for a long time after that.

As far as grid tied decentralized power systems do I agree with you 100%. It is VERY COSTLY in labor and complications to do something like cover the roof of a Home Depot or similar warehouse-sized structure in grid feeding PV, as compared to doing medium-sized to massive scale ground mount PV on empty land somewhere.

[oceanplexian]

Unfortunately, banks don’t finance anything “off grid” with conventional financing. There are some banks that do, but you’re going to pay a premium compared to a standard Fannie/Freddie backed mortgage.

That’s the biggest issue with this plan, which can be fine for a certain kind of person but not 90%+ of the market of potential people who inevitably have to finance a home.

[walrus01]

It can sometimes be "good enough" to check the box for bank financing that electrical service is available at the county maintained road which is the mailbox/street address location for the property... Something with a long or difficult driveway could easily be 30-40k to extend grid service from road to house.

[seanmcdirmid]

My uncle in Newport WA, close to the Id border and pretty isolated (although the house has electrical service now) used a solar shower for a long time. But there wasn’t actually enough sun to be off grid all that much, and unless you have running water to build a water wheel, some grid access is needed. You could probably do more with solar in scrub areas, but you might need some kind of diesel generator back up for the dark winter.

[walrus01]

Yeah one of the big challenges with off grid at that latitude is that your december and january kWh cumulative production (per month) will really suck. It's not as bad as it used to be with panels available at $0.40 per STC watt rating.

If you go to the NREL pvwatts calculator and plug in a theoretical 20kW STC rated system at his latitude/longitude you'll find that the Dec. and Jan. production will not be very much at all.

Sometimes it can be more affordable to significantly over-size a system to product enough kwH per month in mid winter vs. spending $4000+ on a generator.

If you can get 360W 72-cell panels at $150 a piece in whole-pallet quantities, 4000 bucks buys a lot of panels... Not counting the mounting and cabling and junction box cost.

As a budgetary figure, can easily spend $4000 on a small Generac propane generator and wiring/transfer switch.

At other times it can totally make sense to have a small generator to run 2-3 hours a day in mid winter, feeding a charger that can add a constant 1500W into a battery system to keep up the battery string voltage.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> For 40k you can build quite a large off grid PV system that will have a reasonable ROI on it to serve the same loads, vs. spending 40k one time on construction costs for grid and then $50 to $200 monthly electric bills recurring for a long time after that.

Why would such an off-grid system have any monthly electric bills? Are you just pre-amortizing the cost of replacement batteries?

EDIT: I'm an idiot. The bills are for the grid-tied option.

[bombcar]

They’re saying that it’s 40k once for PV or 40k once for a grid connection, but then you need to pay the grid operators monthly.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Ah, thanks. I didn't read carefully enough.

[debo_]

You are not (necessarily) an idiot. Misreading something doesn't make you stupid!

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I said I was an idiot, not a stupid person :)

[debo_]

I knew that was coming.

[epistasis]

Interconnection queues are overloaded. But most of all:

> There is a reason we spend a lot of money on transmission

This should be in the past tense. Transmission was the only option, because generation needed to be centralized to be anywhere near cost effective. And transmission is suuuuuper expensive, by far the biggest part of my solar bill.

Further, it's used ineffectively, often with capacity factors far below 30% because it's sized for peak, not for average use.

As the cost of generation gets lower and lower, the cost of transmission and distribution becomes an ever higher fraction of power costs, and the next thing to minimize.

Big transmission across the continent makes the most sense. But it's also the hardest to build. We are likely stuck repowering existing transmission to higher capactities.

Sure, we will need a lot more transmission capacity, but the less we can get away with will probably lower costs.

(And transmission is only geographic arbitrage, we will soon have time arbitrage with batteries that will rival nearly all transmission costs. Transition is not getting cheaper, but storage solar and wind are.)

[nonethewiser]

> Curious what makes you think that the overhead and inefficiencies inherent to a million small solar installs is somehow better than a single managed facility benefiting from economy of scale both for maintenance and design.

Location. Deserts are far from people. 80% of people in the US live on the east half of the country (and most of these on the eastern half of that). But even the midpoint is too far from deserts to use energy from it.

[maxerickson]

My town built a solar install on undeveloped land adjacent to the airport. That's lower impact than desert and cheaper than smaller installs would have been. I'm sure there's lots of situations like that, even in areas denser than the rural Midwest.

[s1artibartfast]

Transmission losses are tiny. Think single digit percent.

Meanwhile urbal solar is many times more expensive, and vastly less efficient per panel.

The total us grid transmission losses are 5%

https://www.nrdc.org/bio/jennifer-chen/lost-transmission-wor....

[unusualmonkey]

> Deserts are far from people

So... you've not heard of LA or Arizona or Nevada etc?

[titzer]

I lived in LA. It is a desert. It'd be just fine to cover parking lots, highways, and rooftops with solar. There are at least 100 square miles of parking lots in LA.

[seanmcdirmid]

LA actually isn’t a desert, although there is desert in the LA area. Most of LA is classified as Mediterranean, and gets enough rain (the closer to the coast, the less deserty it is). Lots of mountains make for interesting climate zones.

[titzer]

Fine, to be pedantic, it's right on the limit of being desert. LA averages about 15 inches of rainfall per year, whereas the classification for desert is less than 10 inches. With the amount of irrigation in the area, this is not generally acknowledged. Funny, I used to have to hop over a giant puddle in the street every morning to catch the bus to UCLA because the sprinkler systems for someone's 4ft wide lawn were just that badly misconfigured. I always thought that inane.

[ben_w]

You could, with current technology, put the PV on your antipode with sufficiently small losses it's basically fine.

Actually building one is harder than designing one, so I'm not suggesting breaking ground on a global grid immediately, but if you in the USA can get past the three way split of {east, west, Texas}, that'll do a lot all by itself.

[caeril]

Transmission losses are a concern, but this is fairly irrelevant to the OP's original idea: that of producing carbon fuels in the desert and then transporting them. Most populated places in the US are pretty far from Erath, Louisiana or Cushing, Oklahoma, and we get by just fine under this arrangement.

[tobias2014]

High voltage direct current is the keyword. It is possible. Unfortunately the plans to build a giant solar farm in the Sahara and connect it to Europe never took off (for now). Losses are about 10% per 3000km. See also what the DESERTEC foundation does.

[chiefalchemist]

> Distribution systems don't come for free and have many of the same problems as 'last mile' internet.

Nor does centralized. The grid needs to be upgraded to handle the significant increase in demand. But more importantly, over-centralization will mean we're putting all our energy production in fewer baskets (than we have now). Decentralized is a form of a redundancy, a form of backup. It's also a form of independence.

There's no single silver bullet. We'd be wise to blend, and blend wisely. And yes, they might have some added financial costs, but not doing it will surely come at other costs (e.g., blackouts).

[noiceyeha]

Engineering mitigate signal attentuation and paying all the middle men from Desert->a home thousands of miles away ain’t cheap

[mycall]

What is your opinion of distributed solar having less or more chance of causing forest fires than a few managed facilities?

[CyberDildonics]

Where are you getting the idea that solar panels cause forest fires?

[mycall]

No, the opposite. High power long distance power lines do. Solar panels are much less likely.

[CyberDildonics]

What does solar have to do with it at all? Why mention 'forest fires' in the first place?

[thinkcontext]

> Utility-scale solar power projects like this are just more corporate welfare boondoggles.

Rooftop residential is 2x+ times as expensive as utility scale. Lazard's well regarded annual Levelized Cost of Energy survey puts the range for utility scale at $24 - $96 MWH vs $117 - $282 for residential rooftop.

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost...

[titzer]

> Rooftop residential is 2x+ times as expensive as utility scale.

This may be true, but a residential install does eventually pay for itself in 5-10 years, and after that, effectively free power. So it's cheaper and better for consumers.

How does that work? Oh yeah, it's because they don't have to pay for the maintenance of the entire distribution network plus the profits of utility companies.

[pfdietz]

If a residential install pays for itself, it's because it's gaming the details of the rate structure. That is, it lets the consumer avoid paying for much of their electricity at the full retail price, while still deriving benefit from the distribution infrastructure those retail prices are supposed to pay for. This is neither honest nor sustainable.

[glenstein]

> That is, it lets the consumer avoid paying for much of their electricity at the full retail price

Much like growing my own vegetables is "gaming" the marking by letting me "avoid paying the full retail price."

This presumes that grid operators are preemptively entitled to dollars out of the pockets of anyone within range of the grid regardless of whether they need it, which is utility propaganda that they use to fight the development of residential power in state legislatures across the country.

[pfdietz]

Physical objects like vegetables have much more inherent storage (especially when canned or frozen). Also, the consumer is typically responsible for the last mile. This is unlike a grid connection, where you have a wire running to your home sized for the maximum you might consume at any moment, not the average. Because solar is correlated among consumers, the distribution network still has to be sized for what they might occasionally consume, not their average consumption. Also, the power sources on the grid have to be there for these occasional peaks. If vegetables aren't available? You eat something else.

If enough people get solar, rate structures will change to be less based on kWh consumed and more based on what you have the right to call on, even if you don't consume it. This is similar to large industrial rates.

[taylodl]

What you are doing by opting out of the grid is raising the price of electricity for poor people. That's an aspect of electrical energy that's rarely talked about. The current model of the grid providing power to everyone only works because everyone is buying power from the grid.

[titzer]

> for poor people

Well, I don't get how only poor people would be targeted, but to inject data into the picture:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/the-u-s-elec...

That suggests that all of the distribution, maintenance, and administrative costs are on the order of 2-3 centers per kWh, which is about 1/8th of the cost of a kWh. So I'm going to soft disagree on that point. Besides, we could further decentralize with small modular nuclear reactors (think neighborhood to small town to even small city scale) and cut out a ton of grid cost.

[thinkcontext]

> This may be true

So you are admitting its not a corporate boondoggle?

> but a residential install does eventually pay for itself in 5-10 years, and after that, effectively free power.

LCOE amortizes over the life of the system so that its an apples to apples comparison.

> So it's cheaper and better for consumers.

Its cheaper for the homeowner. Its likely more expensive for the other ratepayers, especially if there is net metering or RPS. They have to spend more on storage or flexible generation to combat the duck curve and have to make up for the fixed costs that net metering is not covering plus buy solar generation at the retail rate instead of wholesale. And its not a good deal for the taxpayer who is paying for a third of the system price since they are getting less carbon reduction per dollar than they would with utility scale.

That last one combined with RPS has really gotten on my nerves lately. My city I've seen several panel installations done on the north side of a gabled roof. That's such a horrible deal for tax payers.

[kelnos]

Sure, but that's only free power during the day, when the sun is shining.

If you want "free" power at night (and on cloudy days), you also need battery storage, which can double your initial cost. And the batteries don't last 25+ years like the solar panels do; you may even have to replace them before your break-even point.

If you don't have battery storage, you're still relying on the grid at night, and relying on selling excess power back to the grid during the day in order to zero out your power bill. So you're still making use of the distribution network that someone has to pay to be maintained.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> it's because they don't have to pay for the maintenance of the entire distribution network

How is that going to be paid for?

[olyjohn]

Right you just have to pay for maintenance of all of your own equipment.

[adventured]

And we should actually be doing both.

For exactly the same reason we should subsidize the cost of nuclear energy to ensure a sustained ~25-40% nuclear base, we should subsidize solar locally (rooftop et al.) and utility scale.

The answer isn't either or, it's all of the above.

[peter422]

Also I’d assume the people who physically install rooftop solar are different than the people doing utility scale projects.

We should be doing both!

[cpleppert]

Lazard's LCOE metric is absolute nonsense. Besides ignoring intermittency and the variability of renewable generation it uses an incredibly unrealistic cost of capital comparison that favors capital intensive renewables. Rooftop solar would look better if the cost of building a massive utility scale solar farm had to funded at realistic corporate discount rates.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

IIUC, levelized cost of energy DOES NOT include transmission costs: https://www.re-explorer.org/re-data-explorer/cost-of-energy/...

Adding in transmission costs would make non-rooftop solar 2x+ more expensive...

[pfdietz]

Rooftop solar is still taking advantage of that transmission and distribution; the consumer with their own solar is just not paying their fair share of the cost of that infrastructure.

[WaxProlix]

> Utility-scale solar power projects like this are just more corporate welfare boondoggles

Citation strongly needed. Especially in a context where turning sun power into carbon-based fuel wouldn't want to be in a parking lot, but could be near or even colocated with a large solar installation.

[hinkley]

I’m sure somewhere along the way someone called the idea of centralizing power distribution in the first place a corporate welfare boondoggle.

After all, why can’t these industries generate their own power, like in the good ole days?

[titzer]

Ivanpah (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility): $2.2 billion for 392 megawatts, including a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee. It'll be profitable (yay!)

..but that'd pay for 100,000 - 200,000 residential solar panel installs that would primarily benefit...residential homeowners. That'd be a ton of jobs, too. And there'd be no power-company profits.

We could crunch numbers on how much more efficient a utility-scale plant is, but look at the reality of who ends up with the money and the profits and who has to keep paying the same damn power bills.

[Analemma_]

Ivanpah is a CSP plant; that technology is a dead end and its cost numbers have nothing to do with PV plants, which are the only kind which get built now.

With the benefit of hindsight, Ivanpah should never have been built, but at the time both CSP and PV looked competitive, and so it made sense to invest in both. Now it does not.

[Veserv]

That is a solar thermal system not a photovoltaic system. You are comparing different technologys.

Last I checked, solar thermal is not a price competitive utility scale generation technology; photovoltaic is. That facility was probably funded as a large scale experiment to investigate the viability of solar thermal at increasing scales (or corruption).

The gigawatts of new utility scale PV being brought up every year are largely privately funded and cheaper than existing generation sources (in the current context).

[atourgates]

My biggest case against utiliy-scale solar is that it (can) displace important natural ecosystems. Whereas home or commercial solar nearly always is just displacing rooftops, or parking lot covers.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> but that'd pay for 100,000 - 200,000 residential solar panel installs that would primarily benefit...residential homeowners. That'd be a ton of jobs, too. And there'd be no power-company profits.

If those homes are not grid-tied, good luck with electrically-powered heat pumps as a winter heat source during the winter anywhere that has a winter. Not everyone has (and for the foreseeable, can have) a Passivhaus.

So that means the local grid has to be able to accept the overflow in summer and deliver in winter, which means ... power-company involvement and likely profits.

[kelnos]

In addition to the other objections raised to this comparison (seriously, attempting to compare a non-PV solar farm with residential PV installs is... silly at best), consider that you're not even comparing them in the right way. Ultimately you want to compare the cost per unit energy per unit time, amortized over the respective life of the panels. You also need to compare the cost of maintenance over the life of the panels. And you don't get to say "the residential ones are covered under warranty, so it's free"; someone has to pay for it in the end. When I was looking, all the residential solar installers I talked to would also remove and replace the panels for free when the building's roof needed to be replaced. Again, that's a cost, even if it isn't borne by the homeowner.

Saying that "it cost $X to build this, and that would pay for Y other things" is meaningless.

[genocidicbunny]

> And I happen to think that maybe humanity should learn how to leave some things alone. Deserts have fragile, intricate ecosystems. This fucks them up. We need to learn to stop fucking things up to gobble up more energy.

A lot of people are responding to your other point about proximity, but I think this is the much more salient one.

Deserts are not dead. They are ecosystems too, and just paving over deserts with solar and wind is going to harm those ecosystems. We spend so much time and effort to elucidate the ecological harm that fossil fuel power generation does but we seem to be content to ignore how much damage solar and wind can do too.

No, this is not an argument against using solar and wind. We absolutely should be. Just...we need to stop ignoring the costs of these methods. There's no free lunch in this world.

[seanmcdirmid]

Wouldn’t solar benefit desert ecosystems by providing more shade? Most desert animals are nocturnal anyways, I guess you might even see more activity during the day. I don’t think solar means “paving the desert”, most panels aren’t at ground level, and they aren’t even that close to each other.

[genocidicbunny]

> Wouldn’t solar benefit desert ecosystems by providing more shade?

Potentially. Just as likely to destroy the ecosystem though. Barring a few human-caused ones, most deserts have been around for a long time, and the plants and animals that live in them are adapted to them as they are. Maybe additional shade will provide a new niche for some organisms, but it will also disrupt the existing ones.

> I don’t think solar means “paving the desert”

If we take any solar installation of notable size as disrupting the existing system, then the difference between literally and figuratively paving the desert becomes moot.

[rdevsrex]

Unfortunately, I don't think we get out of this without damaging the environment to some degree. Hell, just mining the copper that goes into this stuff damages the environment.

So yes deserts are fragile, but what isn't? Something is going to suffer no matter what.

[genocidicbunny]

My point isn't that we need to avoid the damage, it's that we shouldn't ignore it. It's really no better ignoring the negative consequences of renewables than ignoring the consequences of fossil fuels. They may be less, but as you point out they still exist and we need to do more to mitigate them.

[kelnos]

Installing solar on residential and commercial rooftops and parking lots is a fantastically inefficient use of time when compared to building utility-scale solar farms. The per-install fixed costs are a lot larger than you'd expect. Consider that, to reduce my own home's draw on the grid to more or less nothing, I'd have to spend $35k (before government incentives, so more like $23k) on a 4kW solar install plus battery storage. As a part of a utility-scale build-out, that $23k will go a lot farther.

We already have a ton of experience transporting electricity over large distances. Losses are not zero, but are not significant enough to matter (2-3%, usually).

Damage to desert ecosystems is a very important concern. I'm not sure how to solve that. But if an alternative is we fall further behind on saving our planet, the desert ecosystems will suffer there, as well.

Overall, I think we should be doing and encouraging both. Local generation is great, but we still need centralized generation.

[anonuser123456]

>Solar is so much more useful close to where it's consumed, like rooftops and parking lots. Utility-scale solar power projects like this are just more corporate welfare boondoggles.

What is more efficient, a utility with dedicated engineers and technicians who spend their days managing an install or clueless homeowners who can’t even be bothered to clear the leaves off their panels?

Installation and management for large scale commercial companies is _much_ cheaper. Bespoke rooftop installs require way more permit, engineer, contractor overhead. Oh year and don’t forget to upgrade your roof framing and hope your installer doesn’t ruin your waterproof membrane of your roof. Have a clay tile roof? There’s another 5k in broken roof tiles.

Transmission losses are in the noise by comparison.

And when your components go out… a small potato install can basically go pound sand. A friend of mine has been out 18 months b/c LG Chem recalled his battery and hasn’t replaced it! They remotely disabled it, so it can’t be used.

Contrast that with a utility. LG chem would probably have a dedicated field agent to manage bad batteries for a utility scale buyer.

>Deserts have fragile, intricate ecosystems. This fucks them up. We need to learn to stop fucking things up to gobble up more energy.

You know what’s worse for desert eco systems than solar installs? Climate change. Gobbling up 25% of the deserts to prevent the other 75% from becoming totally uninhabitable sounds like a bargain to me.

We need more solar as soon as possible. Messing up the desert to save the artic and permafrost is a winning bet every time.

[nonethewiser]

> Installation and management for large scale commercial companies is _much_ cheaper.

Even when you need to transport it thousands of miles? Thats where most people are in relation to the deserts in the US.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

The tradeoffs:

1. we already have a grid

2. the US southwest is where the sun is. insolation per unit of area is crazy high compared to elsewhere, meaning you need less panels per unit of generating capacity.

[anonuser123456]

2.5% loss per 1000km.

1.45$/w for commercial install

2.95$/w for residential install.

That doesn’t include management economies of scale.

Big chunks of the US can’t do solar in the winter, so you need long range transmission anyway.

[fbdab103]

As a point of reference, it is about 4000 km from LA to New York. Assuming a linear drop-off (probably not true, but close enough), you would only lose 10% crossing the country.

Solar panels might be decreasing in cost 10% annually, so over-building to accommodate that seems entirely feasible.

[baron816]

There are better alternatives than rooftops. Covering canals and reservoirs works well because it also prevents evaporation. Farms and grazing land can also be covered with solar since a lot of plants and animals prefer not to be under direct sunlight all day.

[billythemaniam]

Imagine if every big box store parking lot was covered with a solar panel roof? Customers walk to the store in shade and out of rain, cars aren't extremely hot in summer when customer returns, electricity for EVs right there, excess can go to grid or batteries, not disruptive to anyone or ecosystem, large sizes. Obviously someone has to pay for it which is always the tricky bit.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Here in Santa Fe (and urbanized NM in general), you're seeing this not in big box parking lots (yet), but in public building parking lots (including schools).

It is freakin' awesome. I imagine the 2nd graders at school around here, growing up with the idea that you can make electricity from sunlight just as second nature to them as the internet is to all of us freaks here on HN.

[billythemaniam]

Awesome!

[baron816]

Well, I’d prefer there to be much less parking in cities and for those big box parking lots to get filled in with housing or something more useful. But I guess it’s fine to put solar in them for now.

[tspike]

This quote from Wendell Berry often occurs to me in these contexts:

"One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely.

This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on.

This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity: it is moral ignorance and weakness of character.

We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for.

And we cannot restrain ourselves.

Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy."

[anonuser123456]

Someday, when the last red dwarfs are burning out and all the black holes have evaporated, the Malthusians will get their “see we told you so” moment. Thankfully that day isn’t today.

[tspike]

> when the last red dwarfs are burning out and all the black holes have evaporated

An odd timeline to consider, given the speed with which this chapter in existence seems to be unfolding.

[m463]

> This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on.

I think this is like many new technologies - overestimated in the short term, underestimated in the long term.

I'm reminded of voice recognition systems. we would be able to talk to our computers! well, that didn't happen, but we did get telephone voice response systems, then you could talk to your car, and now it is ubiquitous.

[tspike]

The idea is less that we can or cannot develop unlimited sources of energy, and more that we have no idea how to use that amount of energy in ways that aren’t destructive.

[walrus01]

Long distance transmission of massive amounts of electricity is a solved problem, it just requires funding and political will to do it. Look at the Pacific DC intertie which takes power from the massive hydroelectric dams associated with the Columbia River down to California.

There is no serious reason why solar power plants in the UT, CA, NV, NM and AZ deserts can't transmit power 1000 to 1500 km to far-away loads.

[Animats]

This is what modern long distance transmission looks like.[1] This is a 12 gigawatt line running at 1.2 million volts.

China does a lot of this, because the good power sources are in northwest China, and the big loads are in the Southeast.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ2KfrP_R3s

[seanmcdirmid]

Did they ever get their ultra high voltage grid going? Last I checked, it was still in the planning stages, and they were still running coal in the east because they couldn’t tap renewable power from the west. Looks like they are still building:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-state-grid-in...

So one link at least according to your video, I would be curious about actual numbers about how much they can move already.

[Animats]

As of 2020 there was about 400 GW of installed UHV transmission in China now.

For comparison, Hoover Dam is about 2 GW.

[seanmcdirmid]

Source?

According to https://rethinkresearch.biz/articles/chinas-uhv-transmission..., they will be at 105 GW by 2025 (the article is dated 2022). 50% of the power on these lines will be from renewables by 2025 (right now at 43%).

I can't find any .cn estimates of UHV capacity.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

1500km from those deserts doesn't even begin to reach most major population centers. It needs to get much further than that to be impactful on the bulk of the population.

[specialist]

Surely u/bit_logic's enthusiastic phrasing was aspirational vs literal.

That said, the bottle neck is now expanding and upgrading the grid. u/bit_logic is advocating we continue to build new generators, do not wait for the grid, and use that excess capacity to create green hydrogen. ASAP.

aka known as The Correct Answer™.

Here's an interview with Andrew Wang of ETFuels, who is executing this strategy, with paying customers, today.

"Making shipping fuel with off-grid renewables" [2023/06/28]

https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-shipping-fuel-with-off-grid

https://overcast.fm/+oT_lO0G8Y

[imperfect_light]

The problem is that it's become so difficult to tie into the grid that projects are being cancelled.

There was a NY Times article on this (http://web.archive.org/web/20230226032242/https://www.nytime...) that mentioned that the PJM Interconnection, the biggest US grid, is not even accepting new applications for large projects until 2026.

[pstuart]

Air conditioning is a significant chunk of electricity used, and it would make sense to generate power to run it on site if and when possible.

We should have a national program to create zero-interest loans to incite homeowners and businesses to invest in on-site solar when possible. Make the loan payments managed by the power companies so they get a cut of the action and are incentivized to play along.

That way, you still are paying the power company monthly bills but most of that is paying down a debt that will eventually go away.

[bsder]

> Solar is so much more useful close to where it's consumed, like rooftops and parking lots.

Yes and no.

Yes. In places like Southern California, rooftops and parking lot solar would do a great job of providing power for mid-day consumption.

No. This is far less effective in, say, Seattle or Pittsburgh.

However, HVDC links are really good at moving power over long distances. The US has lots of places that are effectively completely uninhabited and would make really good spots for solar farms if they had an HVDC link.

[ericpauley]

Got numbers to back that up? Intuitively, it is far cheaper to put solar panels on the ground than bespoke micro-installs on every roof.

[KennyBlanken]

Utility/grid scale solar isn't just corporate welfare, it's old thinking regarding centralized production.

The electrical industry fears becoming a mere 'backup' or network instead of generation and supply. Or people disconnecting from the grid entirely, destroying economic viability of the infrastructure. They're pushing laws in various states that make a structure uninhabitable if it doesn't have a grid connection.

The only reason most people need to still be connected to the grid are low solar days and peak usage that the panels alone can't supply.

In 10 years you'll probably be able to have an iron flow battery in your basement or backyard that is completely harmless and can meet peak needs, like running an induction stove or a heat pump.

At that point, why do you need a grid connection? You don't.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> At that point, why do you need a grid connection? You don't.

I have a 6.7kW ground mount array. It generates 3x our needs in summer, 0.33 of our winter needs (we heat with air-source heat pumps). We'd need a battery as big as our house to deal with that.

[pfdietz]

Is it fixed angle? If so, is the angle chosen to maximize winter production, or annual production?

EDIT: ty!

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Fixed. Winter.

[kelnos]

> The only reason most people need to still be connected to the grid are low solar days and peak usage that the panels alone can't supply.

Your use of "only" is doing a lot of work there. It is absolutely essential that something serves electricity during those "only" times, and in many cases a power grid with centralized production is the only thing that can do that.

I live in California, and I could easily meet my year-long needs with a 5kW PV panel install and a couple storage batteries, and live completely off the grid. I don't think I'd do that, as it'd be pretty expensive to set up (with break-even period at ~15 years, after which the batteries would probably need to be replaced), and I'd want the grid as backup. But much of the US just can't do that, especially in the winter when they don't get much sun and their heating needs (even with the most efficient heat pumps, with a backup for the few coldest days during the year when the heat pump just won't cut it) would easily outstrip solar production and battery storage.

The idea that most or even many people could live off the grid economically, with current technology, is just complete fantasy. And I don't think anything is going to change dramatically enough in the next 10 years to change that.

[sanderjd]

> At that point, why do you need a grid connection?

Because winter happens?

[colordrops]

My understanding is that you only need to cover a small percentage of available desert to cover all needs.

[m463]

s/desert/unused land/

That said, 100 sq miles of desert is 10 miles by 10 miles.

also, distribution systems are pretty efficient, and power can be sent from sunny areas to areas with dimmer sun or clouds.

[jrockway]

> Solar is so much more useful close to where it's consumed

I'm not really worried about this. Humanity has already invented the greatest utility-scale battery. Pump water uphill when it's sunny. Let it flow back down, through a turbine, when it's dark out. No lithium needed!

People often talk about the space required for pumped hydro, but it's probably a lot less than all the shopping mall parking lots in America.

[j-wags]

This article [1] on pumped hydro tempered my expectations a lot - It calculates that a nation-scale pumped hydro battery for the USA would need to be about the size of Lake Superior and have a 300 m height drop

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

[Gibbon1]

I've read that before. The big thing he's wrong about is requiring 7 days of storage. For coal, oil, and gas you need 7 days of storage to account for supply disruptions. Like when a hurricane lashes the gulf coast.

Solar and wind while intermittent have so much redundancy they never have week long interruptions. You can look at CAISO's charts of solar output in California. You get a couple of days in the winter where production is off due to weather. But not a week.

[ryathal]

Pretty sure the UK already ran into this problem when the North Sea had low wind for a prolonged period. This year wildfire smoke would have cut into the valuable days for many solar installations in the northern US/Canada, many hazy periods were close to a week. The intermittency problem is only going to get worse as the amount the grid relies on grows, it's easy to cover the occasional 5% loss grid wide, but a 25% loss is a big problem.

[Gibbon1]

A little deeper comment is one should compare the costs associated with a supply reduction vs the cost of the storage needed to mitigate the disruption vs how often that happens.

The argument that you can't afford 7 days of renewable storage is just restating that the marginal cost of fossil fuel storage is lower than the cost of electric storage. While ignoring the ability to curtail demand.

[ebiester]

On the coasts, I think that's viable.

It's not viable where water is a valuable resource.

[pfdietz]

It's viable anywhere there's sufficient relief, even in deserts.

It uses at least an order of magnitude less water than nuclear does, per unit of electrical energy flowing through the system.

Here's an example of a system going into Nevada. 8000 MWH of capacity. Notice how tiny it is on the scale of the state.

https://www.cityofelynv.gov/pdf/CityCouncil2021/cc1-28-21/Wh...

Water use is just 500 acre-feet/year, which is tiny (Nevada's consumptive water use is 6000x this.)

[dumpsterdiver]

I wonder how efficiently a similar solar powered lift system would work for a "dirt battery"?

The *dirt battery I have in mind would be a vertical pulley system with small dirt scoops spaced at regular intervals. The scoops would pull dirt from the bottom of the pulley system and bring the material to the top were it is dumped into a mechanically locked, very large container. Over time the container would fill up, and when that stored energy is needed the container could be unlocked, at which point it would power a clockwork of turbines on its way down.

Thoughts, critiques?

[Armisael16]

It’s less efficient than normal electric batteries and will take up far more space.

Gravitational storage only works in the very particular case of water, where moving it is downhill nearly perfectly efficient and free, and where you can also get free energy from things like rivers feeding in.

[dumpsterdiver]

Yeah, now that you mention it I suspect that the mechanical stress upon a system that lifts dirt (as opposed to one that pumps water) would result in expensive routine maintenance, and possibly even catastrophe (i.e. the chain breaks).

[m1n1]

https://aresnorthamerica.com/

ARES Nevada is developing a 50MW GravityLine merchant energy storage facility on approximately 20 acres at Gamebird Pit, a working gravel mine in Pahrump, Nevada. This project will employ a fleet of 210 mass cars, weighing a combined 75,000 tons, operating on a closed set of 10 multi-rail tracks.