What about the gas guzzlers?
What about the gas guzzlers?
Posted Jun 14, 2024 14:18 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)In reply to: What about the gas guzzlers? by paulj
Parent article: Opt Green: KDE Eco's New Sustainable Software Project
I think, on all three of my solar arrays, I get paid for feeding in to the system roughly 1/3rd what I get paid for taking out. Which encourages me to provide my own (inefficient) batteries etc to try and "save" energy. DAFT!
What should happen (and happens accidentally on my home array) is I have an old-fashioned electricity meter that runs backwards when my panels are generating a surplus. So I actually only pay for my net consumption.
The other thing in the UK (and I'm sure other countries could build them) is we have one or two hydroelectric "batteries" where excess base load at night is used to pump water up a mountain, and then it's released at times of peak demand. Given that those times used to be commercial advertisement breaks when everybody put the kettle on, and those days are long past, I'm sure they would go a long way to reducing our need for gas or whatever to iron out fluctuations in wind and solar.
(I think they are 500MW stations, and can go from 0 to full power in 30 seconds ...)
Given a decent weather forecast we can predict renewable generation. We can predict electric demand. Given sufficient notice, there's no reason why nuclear can't be ramped up and down even over a short time period. And then we've got one or two of these huge batteries to allow for differences between forecast and reality.
(Of course, the other thing to do is switch the domestic gas network to hydrogen (or in the interim a hydrogen/methane mix), and store surplus generation as hydrogen in the existing gas storage network!)
Cheers,
Wol
Posted Jun 14, 2024 17:50 UTC (Fri)
by malmedal (subscriber, #56172)
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Sounds reasonable, or even generous depending on your local neighbourhood. If your neighbour is using the power you create, that's reasonably efficient. But if it has to go back out through the nearest transformer most of it will be lost...
> Given sufficient notice, there's no reason why nuclear can't be ramped up and down even over a short time period.
No, current nuclear plants can't ramp up and down even once per day.
> switch the domestic gas network to hydrogen
You can add maybe 20% extra hydrogen to most existing gas networks. Hydrogen molecules are small and will leak from pipes that are designed for natural gas.
However, there's a company planning to generate hydrogen and capture CO2 from the air and create methane and even heavier hydrocarbons from that. We'll see if they can do it cheaply enough.
Posted Jun 14, 2024 22:10 UTC (Fri)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
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Absolutely not. The grid has one requirement: power generated = power consumed at all times. If you are generating and consuming power and not making any effort to correlate the two, then you are asking someone else to do it for you and they obviously want to be paid for that. Which happens now via the difference in pricing between your production and consumption.
The different between (predicted) production and (predicted) consumption has to be rectified by the energy imbalance markets, because while we can predict production to some extent, predicting consumption is obviously also not 100% perfect. In NL households without solar panels cost energy companies €4-8/MWh in imbalance costs, but with solar panels €32-65/MWh. These costs used to be distributed over all customers, but there are now moves to charge solar panel owners directly, unless they take steps like disconnecting their solar panels when the electricity price goes negative, or installing a battery.
There's no doubt we could be much smarter about it, with community batteries and allowing you to match your production with your neighbours consumption, but those technologies are only just starting to be rolled out. People who think they can just install solar panels and call it a day massively underestimate the complexities of the electricity grid.
What about the gas guzzlers?
What about the gas guzzlers?