[tsycho]

Valid points. Is there a known solution to this, even if it's too expensive today?

Would it make sense for local electricity companies to go full solar with large battery backups? Or are batteries too expensive, or don't last long enough, for this to be feasible?

What about a wind+solar combination? Both of them are unlikely to go offline at the same time.

I see articles that the cost of wind and solar keep going down every year at a rapid rate, and the same for battery tech too. How far are we from where the costs are low enough for cities to have their own reliable grids composed of renewable energy?

[kla-s]

The real solution is the dynamization of electricity prices. This needs some adjusting from your average consumer but not a lot if done right. In Germany there are startups like 1.5C, Enpal etc which will sell you a heat pump, solar, ev charger pack with some "smarts", switch you over to a dynamic pricing electricity contract and then claim to optimize the overall cost (i have no direct experience of my own). If you are willing to take a small amount of temperature swing your house is a big thermal battery (even more so if you have a heat pump to water with a big, well insulated reservoir), your ev is a battery with vehicle to grid. With this you can shift your main loads a good amount. Washing machines and dryer as well as cooking/baking might be slightly more problematic/harder to shift, though the car battery should be more than enough for average evening cooking and i have seen washing machines/dryers which can take an external signal as to run when the price is low/there is excess electricity...

[mlsu]

The most sensible solution in the short term is to keep the distribution that we have in place and aggressively invest in large solar plants coupled with very large battery systems to ease the duck curve.

Individual homeowners can do their part with solar + heat pumps to shift that duck curve. Power rates should see way more wild swings: 0c at the trough around 11am-2pm, $.50 at the 5pm peak. That aligns consumers to make sensible investments, either the energy they use or the energy they produce/store.

Smart charging of cars, so that those car batteries can help shift the load? But that requires global coordination that is nonexistent today.

Solar is no doubt the energy solution, there's really nothing better. It's low maintenance and lasts a long time, capital scalable, and can be deployed basically anywhere. Solar is far and away the cheapest thing for about 70% of our energy needs. For the last 30% that is very tough to squeeze out -- that baseline power for 24/7 stuff like aluminum smelters, datacenters -- you basically have: high voltage transmission (only available if you have land to your west), big battery banks (tenable, but only if batteries follow solar's dramatic reduction in cost), or nuclear (but requires a big culture change that I cannot really imagine). Or fossil fuels but those are not good obviously.

Basically any of the other green stuff (hydro, wind, geothermal) can't be built at any price most places.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> Would it make sense for local electricity companies to go full solar with large battery backups?

Sure. But opposition to those battery energy storage systems (BESS) is intense and growing.

[scotty79]

The solution to that is as much distributed storage as possible and cryptocurrency mining (or LLMs) for monetizing excess energy.

[mlsu]

Sorry, capex for crypto -- let alone llm (datacenters must be on 100% of the time to pay nvidia) -- is way too high. It must see high utilization for amortization to be favorable.

You only see crypto in areas that have really cheap, 24/7 power. Big crypto mining operations are only built near remote hydroelectric power stations, or worse, natural gas or coal rich areas. Places where fossil fuels are made but that don't have easy/cheap access to refineries, rail lines, or pipelines.

[scotty79]

You are probably right about LLM because barely anybody tries to use distributed compute (like folding at home was using).

But crypto is running 24/7 because energy price is still positive so people buy latest, most efficient hardware to be as efficient as possible. But latest hardware is expensive. You can buy prev gen mining hardware for peanuts comparatively. It can make you money if you run it when you have more energy than you can use or sell.