[api]

If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here.

Nuclear fission may still have on-paper advantages in some markets/climates, but the high PITA (pain in the aXX) factor would probably mean we wouldn't bother going there. We'd just build transmission lines, more solar/wind, and more storage even if it were marginally more expensive just to avoid the headaches of nuclear energy.

[DennisP]

Storage helps nuclear too, with less demanding requirements. You can keep running your nuclear plants at full blast and use storage to average the load. If the storage is cheap enough that'll cost less than partially idling the nuclear plant.

Wind and solar, like nuclear, have costs dominated by capital cost, but with less predictable output. To run civilization on those alone, we'd need quite a bit more storage, to cover times when it's cloudy and still for a couple weeks. Long-distance transmission helps but that's not free either.

Particularly now that Gen III+ plants are on the market, fast reactors are maturing (in Russia at least), and half a dozen startups are working on molten salt reactors, I wouldn't take nuclear off the table. We need every non-carbon energy source we can get.

[Retric]

Wind over a large area is far more constant than you might expect the problem is you need a vary large area (east - west coast) to see this. http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2010/04/averaging-us-east-coas... Still the major advantage to wind is it's the cheapest power out there. (Yes lower than coal, nuclear, hydro, etc.)

PV Solar is also vary steady in the areas you would put it. (AKA not the South Pole.) Storage is useful, but transporting power over distance is much more useful than you might think.

Finally, Hydro has a lot of built in storage allowing you to double output for weeks at a time.

[Animats]

Wind over a large area is far less constant than its enthusiasts claim. Check out the California ISO wind power graphs [1] and the PJM wind power generation graphs.[2] That's real world data over areas over 500 miles across. About 4:1 variation over a day is typical.

To average wind over the entire US, a big network of ultra-high-voltage transmission lines would be needed. This is quite possible; China is building one, with transmission distances up to about 1200 miles. Acquiring the right of way for a UHV line, which has roughly the space requirements of an interstate highway, is the main problem in the US. Long-distance UHV lines are usually DC; the conversion equipment is cheaper than running 3 wires instead of 2. There was talk a few years ago of an "energy corridor" going up through the Texas panhandle and northward, to the good locations for wind and natural gas. The corridor would carry both power lines and pipelines.

[1] http://www.caiso.com/green/renewableswatch.html [2] https://www.pjm.com/about-pjm/renewable-dashboard/wind-power...

[mikeash]

Stupid question: if UHV lines need roughly the space of an interstate highway, could the right of way be acquired by building them along interstate highways? There's lots of grassy medians in which to put towers, and the lines themselves are comfortably off the ground.

Dumb idea, or dumbest idea ever?

[foxylad]

Not a bad idea, although you'd want extra protection for the pylons so a truck running into one didn't take out the grid.

[pkulak]

Millions of DC volts next to a steady stream of cars and trucks?

[mikeash]

Yes, nothing can possibligh go wrong.

[epistasis]

How much of that observed variation in production is due to the current state of energy demand, and the state of other generators on the grid? It seems that turbines are often powered down.

[IndianAstronaut]

I wonder what sort of distribution algorithms they use to disperse the wind power. Seems like an appropriate optimization algorithm would do much to solve this issue more than blind infrastructure investment.

[Animats]

There are a surprisingly small number of good wind power sites. California has only four really good onshore sites, all of which have large wind farms in operation. Wind power, like hydroelectric power, is very dependent on geography.

[digikata]

Wind and solar might have large capital costs in-total for similar capacity, but you can deploy it in much smaller increments and time periods than nuclear plants - that goes for both actual deployment as well as R&D investments. I think that makes a huge difference in how the technologies are rolling out in practical market terms. I expect it will be similar for storage technologies - much lower capital investments required for a given increment of technology improvement & roll-out.

Now, new small fission reactor R&D may work out differently, but we have yet to see any of those efforts come out of the gate in terms of being even close to ready-to-install states.

[toomuchtodo]

Wind and solar have a fairly beneficial failure scenario (ie nothing happens, save for the few turbines that have destroyed themselves during adverse conditions).

You'll never be able to compete with that, fission, fusion, whatever. We still don't know where to put the waste, we still refuse to acknowledge the ability to reprocess said waste, and so forth. You don't even need more storage to run wind and solar as base load; you simply need to overbuild capacity and maintain a sufficiently intelligent transmission network. The sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere.

Solar and wind will win the day.

[DennisP]

The advanced reactors I mentioned produce about a hundred times less waste, and it's back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. Encase in a block of glass and bury it. They can also use our existing waste stockpiles as fuel, so we'd end up with less waste than we have now. No renewable can accomplish that.

I did see a paper a couple years ago on running a section of the U.S. electric grid on wind/solar alone. They had a computer try about ten thousand scenarios, and found that the cheapest was to overproduce energy by a factor of three, and add a bit of storage. So at least for that region, wind/solar would have to be less than a third the cost of fossil per kWh to be competitive. I certainly hope it gets there.

In the meantime, we can't really afford to be picky about our non-carbon energy sources. Modern nuclear plants have excellent safety records, and more advanced reactors look even better. Let's just not build any more of the 1970's-era plants that have run into trouble. We've learned a lot since then.

[classicsnoot]

In my limited experience [1 windmill that i am currently working on] the biggest issue we are facing is lightning strike. The windmill is located on a small island .6 miles off of the coast of Maine. the structure rises 20+ feet over the tops of the trees. The Seawind is pretty consistent so wind seemed like a good idea, but the first strike fried the innards of the turbine and compromised the lines running to the battery array [the system uses a ruggedized Ranger power management computer to charge the batteries (28 inline 1.5 amp boat batteries) from either the windmill or the diesel generator]. I know very little about all of this, but it has been left to me to get it working. The system only has to power 110v outlets [30+], a water pumping system [well pump + distro pump], and a washer and dryer. As it stands we run the Genny for ~6 hours then use the batteries for ~18 hours. The island is only inhabited for ~2 months all year, but it is still expensive and dirty. The Island is conifers rooted in primeval moss on top of pink granite. there is little to no dirt, and i have limited access to TNT and my biggest rock drill bit only goes down 2 feet, so the grounding system (which i think is where the fault in the system is) is my biggest concern. As of now, i am going to attempt to use a surface, chemical grounding system, but, again, i don't really know what i am doing so it is pin the tail on the donkey with my hands tied behind my back. If anyone has experience with windmills and/or grounding i could desperately use some advice...

[Animats]

You need a lightning protection consultant. Lightning protection is a solved problem - power lines, large communication towers, and wind farms are struck all the time, without serious problems. Doing it right can get expensive, but is quite possible.

Grounding on hard rock is tough. There are methods for measuring ground conductivity, and in a situation like that, you'll need them.

[ghshephard]

We have a lot of our equipment tested in Florida (where they have some large testing centers) for lightning tolerance. I've been told, that you don't actually verify the equipment can be safely struck by lightning - as anything that is hit by lightning, is immediately destroyed. The objective is to ensure that equipment nearby a lightning strike doesn't suffer secondary damage (possibly from a power surge in the line). We install lightning arrestors near our electronics, but anything that actually gets hit is replaced.

Airplanes though, are supposedly struck by lightning, and continue to work. I'm guessing that this has something do do with them being suspended in air, and not having a connection to ground.

[Animats]

Antenna towers get hit all the time, and the transmitters and receivers survive if installed properly. First, there's a spark gap between the antenna and ground, with big metal contacts, copper or silver, a short distance apart. That diverts most of the lightning bolt to ground. Then the feed line for the antenna has a big inductor, a coil made of heavy busbar, usually in a grounded can. This is often placed through the wall of a grounded metal equipment enclosure.

The inductance blocks a fast risetime lightning bolt, forcing the energy to the spark gap. A few hundred volts will still get through that. So following that there's a gas tube protector, which is essentially a neon tube which will ionize and short to ground. (Phone lines also have those at the central office end.) Following that is a MOV, as in a surge suppressor, to dump the remaining surge into ground. What's left after than can be tolerated by most RF electronics intended for such applications.

If this didn't work, radio wouldn't work in Florida. It's not that this stuff is expensive compared to the equipment it protects. It's that the front end stuff is big; #4 copper cables, big spark gap units, heavy ground rods, and solid metal equipment enclosures with welded seams.

Somewhere right now, a cellular tower is taking a lightning hit and restarting itself without damage.

[pixl97]

Like the other poster said, lightning can be dealt with, but I'm very glad I don't have your problem. You are dealing with the worst possible combinations of landscape and expense. My honest answer is you need a specialist with the proper testing equipment measure the resistance to earth at your location. If it is very high you will likely need deep holes dug (reading about one mountain top location that needed 600' to get proper grounding, you shouldn't need anything that extreme). The combination of a chemical grounding system in a well shaft may overcome your grounding issue. But, without that proper ground any lightning protection on your tower is apt not to be the shortest path to earth and will likely fail.

http://www.copper.org/applications/electrical/pq/casestudy/m...

[stickfigure]

I'm certain there's a perfectly logical answer to this question, but I couldn't find it in 5 minutes of googling:

Why can't the ocean be used as ground?

[emiliobumachar]

Very good question. I've posted it to Stack Exchange, let's see if someone answers.

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/164898/can-th...

[ochoseis]

My guess is that it'd be dangerous for those who might be swimming when a storm quickly moves in.

[avn2109]

I too would like to know this.

[classicsnoot]

So i am going to keep a journal on this project. I must be honest that the windmill overhaul is at the top of my punt list due to the multifaceted danger [climb up, remove topper, winch down, climb down, reverse&repeat, inline battery array, wicked wind in the west] but there are a number of other cool things i am doing there: rebuilding an articulating dock, re routing the water system, planning and implementing a solar system, repairing roads, rewiring structures, and preforming black magic rituals to curse the monsters at HughesNet [jk but serious]. We are going to play around with using Pi s or Arduinos for some of the management tasks, and the Ranger Power Management system is pretty cool, if dirt simple and dangerous to mess up. All this to say, if you are interested and have any advaice for my team and i, please hit me here. I will start posting a journal and pics when we start Phase I. The island is Norton Island in Downeast/Acadia right next to Jonesport-Beals [setting for SKs The Fog]. The organization that runs the writer's residency can be found here: http://www.easternfrontier.com/ aaaand i just realized it is EFF... lol. No relation.

[manigandham]

We know where to put the waste, lots of the issues are political rather than technical. Lots of NIMBY with this stuff. Fusion also produces far less actual nuclear waste than fission if we can ever get that working. There are also working designs like the molten-salts that have failsafes that work without power and have no disastrous consequences (like radioactive fallout).

[voidlogic]

>You'll never be able to compete with that, fission, fusion, whatever.

You do realize their are passively cooled nuclear reactors being designed?

[IgorPartola]

So cold fusion (as in cold enough to run on Earth, not cold enough to power your laptop) may compete with it, depending on what it will end up being. Unlike fission, fusion requires very specific parameters and if those are not present the reaction stops. My understanding and memory of this subject is rather dim, but I remember discussion benefits of fusion over fission as a potential power source in college. Relevant Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Magnetic_confineme...

[the8472]

Cold fusion is totally the wrong term here, no matter how you twist it.

Artificial fusion actually requires higher temperatures than fusion in the core of the sun[1] because other parameters are less beneficial than at the center of the sun.

[1]: https://www.iter.org/mach/heating

[exelius]

Actually; cheap storage makes the argument for nuclear energy even better. Nuclear is very bad at responding to demand because it can take weeks or months to restart a nuclear reactor.

Under any scenario, you're going to need some kind of power grid. That grid is going to have a non-zero "base" load as batteries charge, etc. Nuclear is perfect for generating this base load - it's reliable, clean and not subject to the variability that solar and wind are. Don't get me wrong, solar and wind are going to be a big part of the grid, but you want diversification of technology so that if you have a cloudy, but not very windy day, the grid can still keep up.

Also, fission reactors are being miniaturized, and at the timescale we're talking about, fusion may be an option as well. I don't think nuclear will be 50% of energy generation or anything, but it's a good, reliable technology that can supply a consistent amount of energy in any weather conditions.

[afarrell]

The problem for nuclear is that with the way the bulk electricity market works, shaving off the peaks could hurt the ROI of building a new nuclear plant significantly. In New York and New England, suppliers bid in how much power they are willing to supply at a given price, the market operator runs a giant LP solver over the bids and transmission constraints between locations in order to satisfy demand in each location, every supplier that is scheduled in a given location gets paid the price of the marginal watt in that location. So nuclear plants bid negative to make sure they get scheduled and rely on other positive-price sources getting scheduled in order to turn a profit.

[exelius]

Those economics change drastically when cheap, mass storage of electricity is available. Spend all day charging your batteries with solar and wind, then discharge them in the evening. You could afford to underbid conventional fuels with renewables at similar margins and still negative-price nuclear. But that's the great thing about capitalism: it adapts to small efficiency gains in commodities production very quickly.

[ThrustVectoring]

Storage shaves off price valleys, as well, by adding demand in off-peak hours. Every kilowatt-hour that's low enough under the peak price will convince someone to buy a battery to time-shift the power.

My model is that cheap batteries would drive on-demand power stations out, in favor of batteries + base load.

[ridgeguy]

My understanding is that nuclear power is used to serve base load, which is the demand that isn't subject to significant variation. This allows generator owners to run nuclear generators at their cost-effective maximum output.

It's true that there is great variation in electricity pricing, with peak shaving and other so-called "ancillary services" bringing as much as 100X as high a price as base rate (for a short period of time). Nuke generators aren't capable of rapid load following, reactive power correction, voltage support, or other fast-response services that bring premium power prices.

[nl]

The issue with base load contracts is that they are increasingly being undermined by power that is much cheaper, and reliable almost enough to substitute for base power.

Generally speaking most jurisdictions would have to be stupid to sign up to new long term (20 year+) base power contracts, but that's what nuclear power needs to pat for the high upfront costs.

As this article shows, new storage tech and load management tech makes it likely that base load will be less and less important over time.

[exelius]

Yeah, but the long-term outlook for fossil fuels is still rising prices. If given the choice between building a new LNG plant or a new nuclear plant, are LNG fuel prices low enough and stable enough over the long term to justify over a 20 year+ contract? This is an honest question and I'm sure the energy industry has a legion of forecasters and quant jocks on it, but I personally don't know how the economics work out.

There's also the carbon footprint aspect to consider. If the "carbon tax" is successful, nuclear could be a more cost-effective option than hydrocarbon-fired plants in areas without a more stable "natural" power source like hydroelectric or geothermal. The petrochemical industry likely has enough political pull to neuter any carbon tax law, but in theory that's how it should work.

[ghshephard]

That's my understanding as well. Nuclear Power plants are base load, and are contracted to do such, with long term guaranteed capacity. Peaker Plants take on load that exceeds the base, are paid on the margin, but aren't guaranteed any particular load.

[beat]

Right. That's the correct use for nuclear in a solar/wind + storage future - a stable and reliable base load.

[cstross]

There are places where solar is less than helpful -- up here in Scotland, we're north of Moscow: in midwinter we get as little as 4.5 hours of daylight every 24 hours (6 hours here in Edinburgh, in the south). Also, we tend to live in apartment buildings: many dwellings, only one roof, shared gardens.

(On the flip side, we're in one of the world's best areas for wind and tidal power.)

The point is, the far north (think Scandinavia, Russia, the UK) really needs non-solar. And the far-far north is a lousy environment to go out and fix a broken wind turbine. So there's probably a role for nuclear there.

There may also be a role for nuclear in shipping, although civil nuclear shipping peaked early (in the 1950s/60s) and the only folks currently doing much of it are the military and the Russian arctic icebreaker fleet. If oil becomes too expensive for propulsion, nuclear may be necessary as backup for wind power (sails and weather satellites work great together -- until you're becalmed).

[bjelkeman-again]

Sweden in 2014 produced about 64 TWh (42%) from large hydro and 62 TWh (41%) from nuclear. The rest came from wind 12 TWh (7.9%) and from other 13 TWh (8.5%)! other being mostly biofuel and waste.

The interesting thing here is probably the change over time. In 2005 the distribution was 72 TWh (hydro), 70 TWh (nuclear), 0.9 TWh (wind), 12 TWh (other). With wind growing by 13x and the others staying relatively static, and energy use going down slightly. [1] There is quite a lot of variance per year, as the winter weather changes energy consumption quite significantly.

Electricity export has gone from about zero (2005-2007) to 15 TWh (2012-2014).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Sweden

[breischl]

I don't think that's quite true. You don't need a lot of storage to make the peak-shaving, time-arbitrage setup he mostly talked about economic. But you need a whole lot of storage to make a reliable grid out of unpredictable generators. The author briefly touched on this in the context of home battery usage:

"Solar + a small battery may get someone in Germany to 70%, and someone in Southern California to 85%, but the amount of storage you need to deploy to increase that reliability goes up steeply as you approach 99.99%."

I believe the same logic applies to grid-scale storage. Getting rid of those reliable, dispatchable base-load nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants is going to be very expensive.

[eigenvector]

Base-load nuclear is the opposite of dispatchable. Dispatchable means you can turn it on and off at will. It takes a long time to shut down a nuclear plant and start it back up again (on the order of days not minutes). By contrast, natural gas plants can be highly dispatchable hence their use as operating reserve in many ISOs.

[breischl]

Hm. I was about to tell you that you're wrong, but then noticed you're an electrical engineer... so I guess you probably know more about this than I do.

But, my understanding is that dispatchable is the opposite of intermittent generation (solar, wind), because you can choose when it's running or not. Also, baseload is the opposite of peaking, because baseload generators take a relatively long time to turn on/off.

Thus nuclear would be dispatchable, baseload power since you can decide when it runs, but it takes a long time to get there.

Or am I totally off base here?

[eigenvector]

Well yes, it's dispatchable in that sense. If you frame dispatchable as a binary property, it's certainly dispatchable in the way that wind is not.

But if you think of it from a power system planning perspective of economic dispatch (not just, can I dispatch - but can I afford it), nuclear isn't really there. Yes, you can E-stop a nuclear plant in seconds, but the cost is astronomical. Some nuclear plants like Bruce NGS in Ontario have thermal bypass - this increases their dispatchability by allowing them to dump steam and reduce electrical output quickly without touching the thermal output.

Nuclear's dispatchability doesn't really counter-act wind or solar's lack thereof since the time scale you're looking at is much different. Being able to start and stop my nuclear plant in 72 hours doesn't really help me if the wind stops blowing for a couple of hours. So in practice, you'd build other, more easily and economically dispatchable assets to meet your needs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_dispatch

[ghshephard]

My company does work in the UK, and we're putting together communications system that will allow the wind generations systems to stop loading the network when the transmission lines get too hot (apparently it's less expensive to shut down the wind power x% of the time, than it is to build new transmission lines).

I'm wondering if you have any insight into what happens when our comms system sends a signal to those wind turbines and tells them to "Stop" - it has to happen fairly quickly, we have working factors of 15, 30, and 60 seconds, at which point we start escalating and instructing groups of wind turbines, and then eventually the whole farm to cease production. The wind turbines also have a keep-alive that has them auto-shutdown if they lose comms, as obviously it's far more important that the transmission line isn't damaged, than it is to stop producing energy for awhile. (From the perspective of the Distribution Utility, obviously the private turbine owners take slightly different perspective).

I see you have familiarity with wind farms, and I'm wondering if you know what the turbines do - do they free spin? Send load to ground? Come to a halt?

[eigenvector]

The primary way that a wind turbine "stops" is by pitching its blades (in some vendors' terminology they call this "pause" because the machine is still connected to the grid just not producing any energy). On modern machines this can reliably be achieved in less than 3 seconds. There is also a mechanical brake that can be applied for emergency stop in 1 second or less. However, mechanical braking is not to be used in normal operations.

However, going to the maximum ramp-down rate (which for a large wind park can approach hundreds of MW/s) is usually not desirable because it will impact grid voltage. At most wind parks voltage control is accomplished using on-load tap changes of the main transformers as well as switched capacitors. Both of these need a time delay of at least 10 seconds to avoid wearing out quickly so if you ramp your whole wind farm from max output to zero in 1 or 2 seconds, you will see a big impact on grid voltage. So if we need to ramp down for a transmission system thermal constraint, we will do it at the slowest possible rate that still meets the transmission utility's needs.

[jn1234]

It makes sense to have the base load be something that is easily dispatchable and reliable. Renewables are an option in the short term, however the holy frail is nuclear fusion, which is clean, reliable and relatively cheap (building the infrastructure). In the short term, it actually only makes sense to replace generation that becomes retired with renewables because of the carbon costs associated with building new infrastructure. It makes sense that an inefficient natural gas plant that runs a couple of times a year at extreme peaks, will have a smaller carbon footprint than building new infrastructure.

[a8da6b0c91d]

Given gobs of cheap electricity, what are the options for synthesizing methane? Storing huge amounts of methane and using it to handle grid load is already a solved problem.

[beat]

Synthesizing methane from biomass is a solved problem at a known cost that can't really be scaled away. It's not significant in the market because it's far more expensive than fossil natural gas. It's also more expensive than coal gasification, which is probably the second round in that particular gun.

So we could see peak load plants powered by gas sourced from filthy coal. More likely than a clean biomass solution, sadly.

[markbnj]

>> We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here.

I think that's a simplistic view. Yes there is tremendous energy in the movements of air in the atmosphere, and water in the seas, even more in the daily exposure to sunlight, and quite a bit in the geologic forces operating in the earth's interior. That's all well and good, but what matters in terms of powering a modern civilization is energy density, portability, and durability. Electric power isn't going to get a lot more portable than it is now. Storage improvements will make it more durable. But in terms of density the only sources we have are heat cycle sources dependent on fossil and nuclear fuels. Storage advances don't magically make renewable sources dense enough to replace the power we now get from non-renewable sources.

Edit: I should also have mentioned the obvious non-heat cycle source, hydro, which is dense enough in some places to be a very significant contributor.

[brc]

This is entirely correct and always forgotten by the 'energy is everywhere, we just have to grab it' thinking.

The point is that wind energy is too diffuse and the capital costs of tying up that much land in wind generators is astronomical - and there is a very real degradation in site quality as you use up all the good sites first. It's pointless to say it's always windy somewhere, because transmission losses and costs make that unfeasible.

Solar is even worse because at even the best site on the best day you only get 50% of energy generation time, so event with perfect storage you have to have 2x the generation capability.

All this is the reason why - even right now with massive subsidies and compensation and special protection from environmental standards other developments have to adhere to - wind and solar account for about 1% of worldwide energy generation.

There is a limited role of grid top-up for solar and wind, but the future of energy generation is not either of them. The near term is in more efficient and less polluting modern gas and coal plants, with conventional nuclear filling increasing in use to provide clean energy without airborne pollution.

If the public can ever get over three decades of nuclear hysteria, that is.

[rhino369]

The goal doesn't really have to be zero emissions either. Transportation usage is only 30% of carbon use.

Just cutting electricity usage to zero emission would mitigate the worst of global warming.

[ThomPete]

I don't think thats is entirely correct. The issue isn't just storage but also production/output of the actual energy and as someone else once said here. Green energy is a linear solution to an exponential problem. I think there is something to that.

Also it doesn't solve anything for space travel which I don't believe are going to be put on hold.

But it will definitely be great.

[fennecfoxen]

> If we do get cheap scalable energy storage, it's pretty much game over (in the long run) for everything but solar and wind. We are basically drenched in free energy, but we can't store it cheaply enough. If that's fixed, we're done here.

You still need to get better return on capital before wind and solar are competitive on cost alone. Wind turbines don't last forever (and are hard to recycle well, since they need to be made of tough materials, which leads to some interesting but probably scalability-limited schemes to reuse old blades for things like bus shelters and playground equipment -- look up Wikado Playground in Copenhagen, for instance) and neither do solar panels.

Maybe that's also something they'll fix "in the long run" but it's really not a fundamentally different class of future-problem than improved storage.

[Shivetya]

Well one stumbling block is that we need to get thousands more people trained to service these energy storage facilities, let alone the windmills and solar panels. There is already a shortage there as the skill set is not one side, part electrician, part mechanical engineer, and so on.

[nine_k]

With automation cutting more jobs in other industries, this could actually be beneficial. I don't think that training someone to be a serviceman on a solar plant takes as much pain as e.g. training a good programmer or a mechanical engineer.

[digikata]

There's no reason you couldn't bring up a infrastructure for technician level training to get those spots filled. I think you could just tap into the bureaucracy for existing job re-training efforts and it would work out fairly well.

[toomuchtodo]

If Tesla is building cells on a massive scale at the gigafactory, nothing stops them or a partner from building these into cargo-container utility scale storage systems and shipping them by rail to strategic utility interconnect points.

[marze]

Fortunately, solar photovoltaic doesn't need servicing.

Energy is big business, revenue will be there for servicing once market share is there.

[intrasight]

Solar photovoltaic probably needs more servicing per kWh than any other method. If those panels aren't clean, you don't get the expected return.

[digikata]

I predict at some point that something like an roomba for solar panels might spring into existence...

[patrickk]

They actually already exist. Google "solar panel cleaner robot" or similar.

[sooper]

What about something unexpected like superconducting transmission lines between temporal energy producing / consuming zones?

[api]

Sure. Cheap superconductors would also be a "black swan" for energy markets. They could enable trans-oceanic power lines for example, which would allow solar in Africa to power Manhattan at night. You could create a planetary power grid, which seems to me like something that would almost define a Kardashev type I civilization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

[r00fus]

Fascinating. Never heard of this categorization of civilization technology before.

Apparently, according the wiki, in 2012 we were at type rating 0.724, presumably a large portion of that is non-renewable sources like coal/petroleum/natural gas.

Interesting that TypeII is almost a quantum leap over the TypeI - construction of a dyson sphere sounds like an almost unimaginably massive undertaking compared to blanketing the globe with solar cells.

[Terr_]

Partly, but it isn't just storage, it's also the losses in transmitting the energy from A to B, especially if we're discussing areas which are relatively dim or windless.

[tertius]

I still need to be convinced that those two methods can produce enough to even reach a point of surplus to be stored given our energy needs and projected future needs.