this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Ok, you've added more solar panels and wind turbines.
It's nighttime. There isn't much wind. An extremely common thing to happen I'm sure you'll agree.
There now isn't enough power, places have constant blackouts, electricity prices skyrocket because demand far outstrips supply.
Grid storage large enough to replace fossil fuels + nuclear is far, far, far, far, far, far further than 10 years off.
I'll ask again:
Nuclear base load that assists renewables
Continued fossil fuels for multiple decades that assists renewables, and hope that we can reverse some of the damage done in the meantime through some kind of carbon capture tech
regular blackouts, energy rationing, but 100% renewable
What do you choose? Saying that you'll magic up some batteries in a capacity that currently isn't possible isn't an answer.
I want 100% renewables too, but it's currently not feasible. Our choice is between having a fossil fuel base load or a nuclear base load. Other options aren't available yet.
And here’s the magic choice …… “time of use metering”. As we electrify everything and add “smart” controls, we can be much more dynamic with time of use metering to adjust the load.
When the sun doesn’t shine at night, already has much lower electrical load than daytime. Early analog efforts at time of use metering tried to shift more load to the night so “base load” wouldn’t have to adjust, and max load wouldn’t be as high
Now we can develop smart time of use metering to shift more load to “when the sun shines”. I’m not aware of anything to quantify this so let me just make shit up: if the load “when the sun doesn’t shine” is half what it is when solar is producing, that’s a crap load of grid storage or base load that magically never has to exist