In England, we have a type of electricity pricing called “economy 7” where electricity overnight is at half price. This led to a large rise in storage heaters (radiators that heat up clay bricks during the night and release the heat during the day). People also use timer plugs to run washing machine and dishwashers overnight to take advantage of this. Rather than waste solar, surely it would make sense to offer a similar incentive near midday?! People will modify their electricity demands when there’s the potential to save money!
That's a really interesting solution that just changes the problem space towards capitalizing on its strengths. Should definitely work this way once solar is more fully implemented (or now, I guess, don't know the landscape too well), and would be the way people approach it anyway if there was no centralized power.
In Belgium it's a similar situation For years, we've been incentivised to consume electricity at night through cheaper prices for night and weekend consumption. This was probably to provide counterweight to the then huge consumption of companies during the day. That's also why the gov has decided to get rid of the reversing meters. Currently electricity meters reverse (count down) when private production > private consumption, allowing you to build a "buffer" during the day for the night and during the summer for the winter. The idea is to get people to consume when they produce, e.g. by using washing machine and dish washer during the day. I also wonder wether it'd be hard to change the timer in storage heaters as to charge during the day and release heat in the evening through the morning.
Electricity companies could also pay a different rate for power to the grid based on these demand curves which could incentivize local solar providers to store power and release it at higher demand times. You could store power in batteries and sell it back to the grid when the price is highest, helping to recover the cost of the battery installation and helping smooth generation.
It kinda doesn't. It doesn't change the energy "production" during the day a lot. The received by Earth from the Sun energy is the greatest at midday. So, in short; *ORANGE YEET YOUGHURT*
This statement is actually wrong... Sun produces pretty much same amount of energy at any given moment, changing only in astronomical figures. Only on any given point on earth the Sun releases the most energy during midday, only in that particular spot.
Didn’t they solve this in Spain? A kind of solar power plant that heats up salt to extreme degrees then uses that heat to generate electricity long into the night. But the hydro pump back idea works too, using excess electricity to pump water back up hydropower dams then sending it back down at night. Some dams already do that
This works for low solar&wind penetration because you still have reserves (other power plants) for the longer periods of low solar irradiance and wind speeds.
@@raphaelkw7630 It is, though I believe it is fairly inefficient, though I doubt it's so inefficient it won't be good still. There are other interesting methods of energy storage, one I find really cool being the Flywheel. Basically you use energy to spin a wheel specially designed to store energy kinetically.
@@immazoorun4404 It's directly overhead, at the highest position in the sky, with it's rays most perpendicular to the surface of the Earth (as the shadows will clearly tell you). All of this is readily apparent.
I don't know if it is an option, US has a much different power from my country, but here we have two hydro plants, that are used as "batteries". Basically there are 2 large tanks, or lakes or whatever you call them, and when there's too much power in the grid, they use it to pump the water from the lower lake to the upper one, and when you need the power back, they just release the water and let gravity and water turbines do the work and generate power...
+Aedar18 There isn't that much for improvement for hydropower in the US. At most we can get 75 more GW from hydro-power, which would be a 75% improvement over the current 100 GW production. We already are fully utilizing half of our river potential. And that is ignoring the negative environmental effects of hydro-electric power. As for what you are talking about, Pumped storage, we already do that in the US. We have 22 GW of pump storage potential. And plans are in the works to increase that to 56 GW. But hardly enough to fix the growing duck's curve problem, also ignoring the fact that it only helps when you are near a dam of sufficient output, which large swaths of the US aren't.
Hydro only amounts to 2.4% of US Energy demand, and 6% of electricity generation. Its also mostly limited to the Northwest. It's a great option for a place like Denmark, which can provide most of its requirements from offshore wind, but has easy access to Swedish hydropower when the winds are low. At present, there's a symbiotic relationship between renewables and combined cycle gas turbines, the only fossil generation that can ramp quickly enough to accommodate renewable intermitancy. Every MW of installed wind/solar means a MW of natural gas turbines. Solar has been GREAT for natural gas demand, which is replacing coal in the US. There are some good future options. Pumped gravity storage, in which excess electricity is used to pump water uphill into reservoirs. Solar thermal with storage, in which collecting solar generation is used to heat a material, like molten sodium, hot enough to drive turbines at night. Germany is a leader in power to gas/methane, in which excess renewable energy is used to synthesize methane, which is pumped into the natural gas pipeline network, for low-carbon generation. Better transmission networks, with fewer losses so that the Great Plains or offshore New England can export excess wind energy, the Southwest solar energy, balancing things out. Alas for chemical battery storage, there are supply constraints on materials such as the cobalt presently used in lithium battery cathodes. We can make a lot of batteries, but maybe not enough for anything near the required scale.
The magnitude of power requirements would mean you'll end up building hundreds of acres of batteries fields, even if that would be possible, it would force a battery production at scales never before done, not even during the war. An then there's the pollution from refining, digging activities, manufacturing each cell. Batts can be good for mobile stuff, good density for weight ratio, and demand is not too high yet (low vehicle production). To support a national grid, batteries would have to improve on factors of 100 or more. I'd rather go Thorium nuclear and have the hills and fields free from wind and solar panel farms.
@@Charlie-ii5rr Quite right, but there are some energy storage systems that can, e.g. that pump massive amounts of water up with the excess energy and generate it via turbines letting the water back down later when it is needed. Not the most efficient system perhaps, but it does smooth out that use curve.
Thomas Vieira No I know how a star works, I’m just saying it was pretty common sense that you can harvest the most energy from the sun when it’s unobstructed and in the middle of the sky
New technology opens up new challenges. But we have been pretty good in the past to meet those challenges and this is just a problem to be solve just like any other.
Louis K "Combine with nuclear" Did you watch the video? Nuclear is one of the worst "partners" for renewable, as it is very hard to turn them of and on again and the economics demands them to run 24/7. Partnering renewable with nuclear means basically to throw away energy, just to keep nuclear. A workable alternative is to go 100% renewable (over time) and produce to much and safe it for the time the produce to little. In Germany they have something called EE-gas or wing-gas, where they take renewable overproduction and take CO2 from the air and water and produce oxigen/hydrogen at first and then (artificial)-natural gas and put it in their standard gas-pipelines. The pipelines in Germany have enough capacity to safe 3-6 month of energy consumption.
It would be as expensive as sourcing your daily eggs or dairy from another continent rather than the nearest supplier in your city/state. Moving electricity from one point to another is a 'lossy' job and the costs are incredible.
In theory, yes. But moving electricity that far results in huge losses. Nevertheless, regional power grids capable of transferring electricity between say US states or countries in Europe is vital. Not so much to compensate for day/night patterns, but to compensate for varying wind and cloud cover. The larger the region, the greater the ability to share and thus compensate variations in production and demand.
There are so many energy storage technologies available today (batteries, pumped hydro, compressed air, ...). Shame that you didn't mention any of those solutions. The South Australia Tesla battery pack is a great exemple of a battery system that not only stabilised the grid but is a well generating record benefits!
@@justaquestion1934 as someone in an electrical engineering technology program he's right. If all that energy went to say filling a water reservoir with a hydro station on it, you could store the energy (in the form of kenetic energy from elevation) for later use
@@justaquestion1934 i neither lied nor mentioned battries, energy can be stored in many diffrent forms (ie. Thermal energy, kenetic energy, and electrical energy). If you move 1kg of water up 1m then you have spent (1kg*1m*9.8m/s2)=9.8J of energy, if that water was in a cup and does not fall immediately then that energy is effectively stored
Water reservoirs are very effective, but they only work in certain landscapes and therefore couldn't be implemented throughout the US and become a standard way to store energy
Max R Assuming the cost of infrastructure to do this is not prohibitive, that seems like a great idea, especially in California, where there is plenty of sun and has been drought problems.
Only if there is a need to purify sea water. Desalination plants are one of the most expensive infrastructure plants. Salt is extremely corrosive so the material used for the plants are very expensive. It's why you find most desal plants in places where water is extremely scare, like the gulf states and parts of Australia.
in countries where most houses have a roof angle of around 45° (instead of, say, a flat roof) it wouldn't be quite so foolish to check whether mid-morning and/or mid-evening are actually more productive (because of sun angle). Plus generally in science it's a great idea to check rather than assume...
@@nicholasb1471 Australia is currently building a power export project from Central Australia to singapore, some 2300 miles. Only a few hundred miles short of a theoretical Cal to NY Cable. The technology is there with UHV Cabling
Make a huge two level reservoir with massive water pumps. Pump up with water during peak solar power excess during the day. Let it run down through hydro generators during sunset. You're effectively making a battery. Would something like this work??
Yes. I have visited one of these "hydro-batteries" in Switzerland. Turns out that its crazy expensive to build, especially making an efficient pump. But all in all I agree, this is well suited for the job because of the energy capacity in comparison to a chemical battery alternative
Doesn't have to be on a river though which can remove the fish issue. This plant in Wales used a disused quarry for example, plenty of places in California they could do something similar. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
Fast Car Central honestly aside from bio reactors and gravity generators this idea is really really good. With such a reservoir, the thermal composition of the land would create wind, where you could use wind turbines. However we need a very very efficient way to pump water up..
You didn't mention anyways to combat the duck curve like creating an artificial lake, pumping water into it during the excess hours, and then letting the water drain through a turbine when power is needed.
If we factor the price of batteries in to renewables it starts to look like really uncompetitive... Especially when taking in to consideration that demand for storage increases dramatically when nearing 100% renewables. And this is why we need nuclear ;)
Every battery on Earth combined won't even be able to power what the USA uses in one day. We would need reliable power backups that can last months in case of disasters or a period of low solar output. Think of the pollution it would take to build that amount of batteries, it is inconceivable.
@@postvideo97 Don't be silly if the us would sink 10% of it's gdp to batteries the whole us would have enough in few years. You can use water as a battery it is just a matter of cost.
@@jholotanbest2688 California study came up with needing 36 million MWh of grid storage to go pure wind/solar/geoterm to cover poor generation days and winter lulls. I believe at the end of 2017 we had around 2000 MWh grid storage in the whole world (708 MWh in the US).... going to projected 18,000 MWh in 2022... and the US consumes 11.45 million MWh per day... so postvideo is also right, even if you third the amount per day (assumed power need for within day for solar, assuming enough installed solar to power 133% us need to actually charge said batteries, which is also not reality yet). The power usage in the US is mind boggling higher than people realize.... I just don't see this being a reality any time soon.... we can't agree as a country on anything at the moment... asking every man, woman, child in the US to pay the government an extra thousand dollars a year for the next 10 years to pay for enough batteries for just California...which we couldnt even make... . but i do think that we need to add grid-storage and do it soon...be it battery, pumped hydro, compressed gas, flow batteries, or whatever.... as that will lessen the need for fast-acting power plants, and allow for full utiziliation of existing base load.. and if that is nuclear, still provides same or less greenhouse gas pollution for kwh generation full life compared to solar.. which lets us focus on developing options to get more people in EVs and etc to further reduce mobile (uncontrolled/poorly controlled) emissions. But .. anyhow....
You shouldn’t use solar energy in isolation. Use it with wind and hydroelectric energy. Also, why did this video not mention Elon Musk’s efforts in Australia to solve this problem?
Elon Musk's efforts in Australia weren't to solve this problem, that's probably why it wasn't mentioned. I totally agree with you on combining solar energy with hydroelectric power to help mitigate the limitations of solar (as expensive and as hydroelectric projects are). However, with regards to Elon Musk/Tesla's battery project at the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia, it wasn't about helping provide solar outside of daylight hours (which it does do on occasion). But rather, it was focused on exploiting the limitations of the South Australian grid, namely the slow response time of gas plants and the heavy reliance on imported power and wind power. The Hornsdale Power Reserve can deploy electricity far more rapidly than any gas peaking plant can; meaning it can profit off of sudden and unexpected disruptions to power generation (namely lack of wind) as well as unexpected peaks in demand. (In fact it's so effective at this that it's forcing the Australian Energy Market Operator to reconsider their current price modelling which calculates power in 15 second batches, while Hornsdale can respond in 600 milliseconds) Additionally, South Australia has to import lots of its electricity from coal plentiful east coast states, but there's a hard cap on how much it can import at any given time due to physical infrastructure limitations. So on days when SA reaches its import limit, Hornsdale can respond and profit.
Elon's Musk's project in Australia is designed to fix load imbalances on a much smaller timescale. Instead, it's meant to come in for a few seconds when a massive load is suddenly flipped on, or a generator suddenly has to be shut down. It's a HUGE battery, but it's not even close to being big enough to address the "duck curve" problem.
That wouldn't solve the problem. Assuming hydro and wind give out fairly even energy throughout the day, then you still have the exact same problem, that you have oversaturation during daytime when demand is low and production is very high, so you have to shut off hydro, wind and/or solar production and that means they are less economical. With hydroelectric plants you can somewhat influence your output, but ideally you'd be wanting them to run at high capacity all of the time because of the economic factor again. Also, what if you have a hot, dry and none-windy summer? That's typical summer weather in many places. Rivers are low so hydros put out very little energy, windmills have low output too, and at dusk and dawn solar gives little energy too, which is when consumption is highest. Geothermal isn't really an alternative either because it is very expensive. Solar, without the ability to store large amounts of energy, is unfortunately pretty useless.
Large Scale Energy Storage. Pump Hydro, Gravity Mass Drop, Compressed Air CAES, Liquid Flow Cells. We need to hedge our bets and develop all these technologies soo we have the right solution for every location.
That is not how it works... Electricity has a fall off, combined with multiple power grids, there is really no way this could work. If we had one power grid, it is a massive security risk. I think solar power will be more useful, if we get better batteries.
He should have mentioned that we can store excess energy from midday and use it when demands are higher via hydroelectric power plants. You pump water to the reservoir when you have excess power and release it when you have high demand.thid helps smooth the curve out
It does but there are several problems, for example: 1) These pumped hydro stations would be payed for by consumers, meaning higher electricity bills. 2) When there is no solar production and the dams are empty, you need backup power plants - higher electricity bills.
@@FrainBart_main If the price of electricity varies there can be a good businessmodel for storage to be developed at both production side and user side and also in between. You can store energy when it is cheap and realease it when you get a higher price for it. Now at the user(home,offices,industries) side of things it seems like a good idea to have enough storage to get you to most power outages, so have a storage capacity that is X% of your daily consumption. How high X is depends on how long outages are. If every users would have an X > 33% it should help solve a big part of the duckcurve. Of course this storage needs to be charged, preferably when lot's of electricity is available. If steered by price smart systems will be developed to profit from that. You then charge your storage with cheap electricity and use the storage when it is expensive but needed. Price can be a steering mechanism. It would be great if every solar plant of windmill would be able to store Y% of it's daily production so it can profit from higher prices at moment there is little sun or wind. Would be interesting if someone can calculate the optimal X en Y that will cause the grid to be stable, people have lower electricity bills and less polution from coal plants.
i don't think chemical batteries will ever be practical for large-scale energy storage as they all slowly deteriorate and charge less efficiently based on charged storage
Finally, a video on the Solar Duck! Quack Quack. Hopefully battery storage and diversification of the supply chain helps with the ramp. Curtailment will probably drive battery storage and self consumption.
One more note on nuclear technology. This video describes nuclear as unable to ramp up and down, which is accurate (in most cases), but it does not look into the possibility of utilizing excess energy production for other processes. One potential option is to construct nuclear reactors in modular systems (not small modular reactors) so that excess production can provide energy needed for other tasks such as desalination or hydrogen production. For example the University of California Berkley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory developed a conceptual Advanced High Temperature Molten Salt Reactor that has the dual purpose of being used for hydrogen production as well as electricity generation. Since this reactor would operate in excess of 750C it is ideal for potential replacement for steam reformation procedures. fhr.nuc.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/AHTR.Nuclear.Technology.Article.May20.2003.pdf
Similar to power plants themselves industrial scale uses of electricity also suffer from the problem that they are most economic if they operate 24 hours a day. To get the same amount of water operating only during high solar output versus 24 hour operation you need three times the capacity, which is three times the fixed costs and three times longer to pay back the initial investment. Desalinating water is a money losing proposition most of the time and would be even if the energy were free because as soon as demand drops below natural supply desalinated water is valueless. Similarly there is no hydrogen economy and pretty much never will be for a bunch of good reasons. A better option would be aluminum smelting, which is very energy intensive but again suffers from fixed costs and capacity factor economics. You can't compete with a factory in iceland that gets nearly free geothermal energy and operates 24/7 even if your energy is "free" (paid for by someone else and not needed by anyone else) if you only operate 8 hours a day on sunny days. The ideal energy solution would be to access geothermal energy in places where it is inconvenient to access, but we don't have the technology to do so currently.
Luke Simonson What do you mean there is no hydrogen economy? The USA consumes over 9 million tons of hydrogen per year for chemical refining, meat processing and fertilizer production. I’m not talking about generating hydrogen for fuel cells, but rather I’m looking for a cleaner solution to methane and naphtha steam reformation production.
You are right, you mentioned steam reformation processes in your comment, which derives hydrogen from fossil fuel based feed stocks. Anyway, the same logic as applies to aluminum smelting applies to hydrogen. A factory that only operates one shift a day is a waste of 2/3 of its capital expenditure. The French reactors do indeed ramp up and down rapidly and whenever anyone talks about nuclear they should use the French as their example because they are the only country using nuclear in an at all sensible way providing the majority of their electrical needs, actually exporting it, ramping it up and down to match demand and compensate of intermittent renewables and reprocessing their spent fuel. Nuclear reactors should absolutely be co-located with energy intensive industry and particularly heat consuming industry. That can't happen right now. Nuclear is regulated to death. The reason it takes 15 years and 15 billion dollars to build a nuclear plant is they change the rules for how the plant is allowed to be built while the plant is being built. That is not a good faith effort at regulating, it is an covert effort to kill nuclear power. The private sector isn't allowed to innovate, since not just "what" but also "how" are dictated to them by regulators. There will never be any meaningful advance in nuclear power in the United States until the NRC is dismantled and a completely new regulatory framework is adopted. At this point batteries plus solar are on a trajectory to undercut fossil fuels in cost sooner than we could get our act together and get next generation designs for nuclear power deployed. Meanwhile France has had good nuclear power for decades.
+Luke Simonson Regulations play a key role in the cost for nuclear, but they are by no means the primary reason why costs for nuclear are so high. Its important to look back and recognize that the initial economic challenge facing nuclear happened 7 years prior to Three Mile Island and the major regulations that would follow. Nuclear more than any other energy source is very capital intensive, and as the industry has grown the capital costs have increased due to extrapolation of the technology. Yes regulations have required nuclear to increase the amount of systems and materials as well as plagued construction (although there are other challenges with constructing nuclear reactors), but at the end the largest cost comes back to capital expenses. This is perhaps the largest reason why nuclear scientists and engineers have looked back to other nuclear technologies as a way to reduce capital costs and make nuclear more economical. There is actually a very good video by Argonne National Laboratory that goes through the history of nuclear reactors in the USA and why nuclear scientists and engineers are developing different technologies related more towards chemical engineered systems as opposed to mechanical engineered systems. (Speaker starts at 9-00): ua-cam.com/video/X5HoS6KiPAM/v-deo.html As for this comment, "There will never be any meaningful advance in nuclear power in the United States until the NRC is dismantled and a completely new regulatory framework is adopted"- this is a really bad idea. How would you even develop a new nuclear regulatory framework if not building off of the NRC, which is considered to be the most advanced in the world? Furthermore, the NRC itself recognizes the challenges of nuclear technology and is actively working on developing a new framework for Gen IV reactors in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They are also currently in the process of reviewing designs from FLiBe, Thorcon, NuScale, Terrestrial USA, TerraPower and Southern, and this process will factor into how the framework is designed so that the permitting and licensing process for Gen IV reactors can be efficiently expedited. Additionally there are four new bills in the US congress for the advancement and progression of Gen IV reactors that have implications in both the NRC and the DOE. One bill in particular ( Advanced Nuclear Energy Technologies Act) calls for four new Gen IV nuclear projects to be started no later than 2028, and must prove that they can cost between $.06/KWh and $.07/KWh. The bill you would most likely be interested in is the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which requires the NRC to modify their regulatory framework for Gen IV reactors. France may have the most nuclear generation per capita, but there is no question that the USA has always lead the way in nuclear advancement and development of technology. The sole reason that China and India were able to develop their molten salt programs is because they have been working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the past 15 years on a project Oak Ridge completed 50 years ago. Idaho National Laboratory is perhaps the most advanced facility for testing and designing advanced nuclear reactors on earth, which is why even though Terrestrial Energy is building their reactor in Canada their IMSR project team is collaborating with the national laboratory. IMSR project after all is based on technologies developed from the three major nuclear national laboratories.
In my other comment on this video I actually go into further detail about how specific varieties of Gen IV nuclear technology will reduce capital costs and become more cost competitive.
nice video but it puts the needs of coal plant and contractors above anything else. Many hydro power plants use the excess of renewable energy to pump water back into the damn and reuse it at night.
@@jaceksiuda. Germany is not the example to follow. They would like to be it in the future; but they aren't now. Take El Hierro or Costa Rica as examples. El Hierro has a fuel plant but its off most of the time. That's quite OK for the environment.
The question wasn't really whether they make most energy during the day or at night, it's what part of the day they make the most energy. There's more that goes into solar than just how much sun is in the sky. Not all panels are facing the same direct and PV cells are less efficient as they start to heat up. The answer is a lot less obvious than you'd think.
Is that all u learn from the video? Stop make a big deal out of it, its just a way of expressing his language for whoever write the script. They just try to tell u that the produce more at noon but no one use it. How else do u want them to explain it ? Many dont aware of this production and demand inbalanceness.
Orson Welles yup, he made us laugh at the inconsistencies of his presidency, while also making us nervous about his foreign policies, to say the least.
Iuri Pereira, foreign diplomacy is actually turning out to be one of Trump's strong suits. It may be his only strong suit, but give credit where it's due.
Use the excess energy to run desalination plants mid day? More drinkable water isn't a bad thing. Or use the extra energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, burning it during the evening to make power during peak times? Or both at the same time?
The dewar flasks of O2 and H2 would be stored at the desalination plant, which I suppose would be a desalination/power plant combo. I mean, you could pipe the water elsewhere from the desalination plant to a facility that splits the molecules. And then you could also ship/pipe the liquid gas to a separate power facility that burns it, thus creating power. But meh. I like to picture an all in one sorta deal. Dunno why you assumed that would be in peoples homes. Agreed, that would be a non viable plan. Though people do store acetylene, MAPP, etc. in their garages for home workshops, so dewar flasks wouldn't be that much more crazy. Probably cost prohibitive for individual civilians, but on an industrial scale it wouldn't be bad. The bulk of the flasks would most likely go through full and empty cycles daily with a set percentage of flasks staying full for "emergency reserves". In fact, since we would "create" and "destroy" about the same volume of matter each day (I assume), you might not need to store as much liquid gas as you'd think. But I could be terribly wrong and it all may very well be the ramblings of a mad man. I am talking out of my ass after all as I'm not qualified in the least to speak on the subject. Though I am around large dewar flasks of oxygen each day at work, so I suppose that might qualify me as an "internet expert".
Like andrius999 said: conversion losses. Like close to 50%. Also: storing dihydrogen is hard, as it's one of the smallest molecules we know of. Also the conversion engine is an added cost. Also explosion risk. Desalination is a nice idea, but they don't provide power at night, and aren't very economical for 99% of the world.
germans answer "pump speicher kraftwerk" using midday overpower pumping water uphill. when more electricity is needed, this water used to create new electricity
If there's no solar production for days, you can't pump water uphill. Then you need 100 % backup for solar. Solar + pumpe hydro + backup could become very costly very fast.
đeri662 we have a lot of windenergie mills (dang it, can't remember the English word). and if you really want to get rid of oil/ coal and nuclear power, you would invest into tide powerplants and also produce H² while producing to much electricity
@@marcop4136 Yes you do but they are even more intermittent than solar (output depends on the cube of wind speed). There are longer periods of time when combined production of solar and wind is very low (you import electricity produced in conventional power plants then (nuclear, coal, gas, hydro)). Hydrogen production by electrolysis is a very inefficient process. What to do when there is too little electricity, convert hydrogen back to electricity? The combined process is about 30 % efficient. Not to mention this would be extremely expensive to do. You have one of the highest residential electricity prices just due to renewables, let alone when energy storage and additional grid stability measures will be needed. Not to mention that more than half of European countries have cleaner electricity production than Germany.
So we would have to crate a reservoir for every large city to hold this water and destroy million of trees to do it. And where are you going to get all that water
For everyone saying batteries....you might as well say cold fusion. Saying a technology that doesn't exist is the solution is really stupid. Yes batteries exist but battery technology to solve this problem is not even close to existing.
Such an absurd statement, Mr Major, I have to ask for your full disclosure of any links with utility companies. For the more curious, forward looking, optimistic, solution oriented among us, here's just one link to inspire us: www.pocket-lint.com/gadgets/news/130380-future-batteries-coming-soon-charge-in-seconds-last-months-and-power-over-the-air
In large part, what you're saying is that coal's shortcomings are solar's problem. I disagree. What you're calling the demand curve is only the residual (or non-solar) demand curve. If coal is cost-inefficient at meeting non-solar demand, that's coal's problem, and it should be reflected in the cost of coal-based energy through smart-metering rather than by artificially supporting coal through minimum-consumption contracts. As for batteries: flywheels.
ncooty Ah, yes... the thing so many people forget exist. The powered kinetic generators. Probably should be held in a sustained vacuum for the least lost energy.
The problem is the probably malicious argument he used. It's not just Nuclear and Coal energy who produce electricity continiously in the time. Wind, Water and others types of renewable energy are constant and can't be controlled, so you can't turn it on and off, specially hydraulic. So, if most of the energy park works in a way, it's obvious the solar energy is the one who need to adapted it. As well, almost all the renewable energy has cycles as the solar does (usually in longer lapses on time, so you need fossil energy to make up for the diminution of supply in the valleys of the cycles.
Pumped-storage hydro could help, or rather it DOES help where it exists. Hydroelectric power plants use descending water from high reservoirs to power their generators. In a pumped-storage hydro plant, the generators can also be used as pumps to lift water up into the reservoir, using "excess" electricity -- for instance, on a sunny day when there's lots of extra solar power. After dark they can use that pumped water to put electricity back into the system. You could think of it as a gigawatt-size water battery.
It does help in climates where water is abundant, but this video is California-centric. So unless someone designs a ingenious closed loop system, it probably won't help them.
It's the other way around. Reservoired hydro (the kind that environmentalists hate, prefering run-of-the-river that can't do storage), can simply not produce power when there's a lot of wind or solar and store that power. What usually happens is that the wind farms and solar plants are not in the same place and the wind and solar becomes a minor fuel saving device for natural gas plants.
Oh do tell. Usually the top/bottom reservoir setup fills the top lake at night with cheap KW power allowing those coal or nuclear plants to keep burning through the night currently. Why couldn't they do a second fill during the day with free power from solar? It isn't that it wouldn't work, its that evaporation from lakes is a huge drain on a resource that's more needed elsewhere. It does work fine in other places though (as long as someone doesn't overfill the top lake >_< ).
The thing is it really doesn't matter too much WHERE the pumped hydro is located. If it's placed far up in the mountains where evaporation is less of an issue then it is still usable. Northern California doesn't really have the same evaporation problem that southern and central Callifornia do, but even there, the Sierra Nevada to the east have hydro plants which would be usable as pumped hydro.
"The thing is it really doesn't matter too much WHERE the pumped hydro is located." It is absolutely *vital* where the hydro is located. If it's up a mountain somewhere, you need to blast a serpentine roadup a mountain and construct massive transmission. That's going to be tied up in court forever on environmental concerns. If there's no existing reservoir you need to make one by drowning wast swaths of land; usually a lot of people live there or own forrest property or whatever and it's a huge mess. If it's far from where the water is located, you need longer pipelines to pump the water, with larger friction losses. If it's far from where the people live, your powerlines will be very expensive and disruptive. If it's far from where the power plant is located, you also need long expensive power lines. If it changes the hydrology of the surrounding areas too much, farmers and environmentalists will kill you. If not figuratively then literally. With a 50 meter drop you need to build a new lake superior. That's the scale of things.
Two solutions come to mind. 1) Invest more in not only solar panels but also batteries to flatten the supply curve (on the solar electricity producer side) 2) Sell electricity at different prices during different times of day to flatten the demand curve. When you have excess power, sell it for less, when you have less power (more need for batteries etc) sell it for more. Maybe some people will shift their power use due to economic incentives. Maybe they'll buy their own batteries, and charge them during the least priced hours, and use it the rest of the day...
I envision a future civilization with new, used, and discarded batteries (of various sizes) everywhere like cigarette butts and water bottles. Why not use nuclear power--expensive up front, cheap in the long run?
Yes. It’s not enough to just know that it reaches the max at midday, you need to also know the actual quantity of power generation throughout all times of day in order to manage a power plant. You don’t just stop at a surface level understanding and then proceed to learn nothing else.
you do understand that for a battery you need DC voltage and current so if you want to store power in it you can't use the power from the network since It's AC voltage. Therefore you either have to use your own solar cell which generates DC power or you have to have a rectifier which turns AC to DC and an Inverter which does the opposite as you might have guessed already it is very costly. therefore, we either have to develop much better batteries to store solar energy during day in solar power plants or we have to use another method for storing energy like dams, molten salt fuel cells etc.
C Lincoln, so government can steal even more money from people who are actually generating income (only around 50% of adults, pathetically) and put it towards giant batteries in order to justify a hair-brained energy scheme that would be totally unnecessary if we just scaled up nuclear energy? Wow! Sign me up!
kowalityjesus I wouldn't say with such confidence that scaling up nuclear energy will solve anything. Thogh it is true that each person having his own battery is kinda nonsensical. However around ten to twenty years from now when everyone have their own electric vehicles we may be able to use their batteries. This is actually a subject of study around the world.
That's cool in theory, but most countries want electrical autonomy, not a potential strategic dependency. In the US at least, we've seen massive investment into solar and fracking because they both reduce dependence on foreign entities for energy.
@@Lazirus951 The creation of the modern "Nation-State" could be called the worse thing that man has ever invented. Holds humanity as a whole back so much.
@@Lazirus951 You forgot to mention it may not be realistic to go very far from the source unless the electric current flow without restriction (supraconductivity).
Yay, 18th century technology keeping innovation stagnant. Breeder reactor nuclear would make solar and fossil fuels not only obsolete, but far too expensive to even be considered. We could have so much electricity it would cost more to charge for it than not. Post-Scarcity is possible, and we perfected the tech for it in the 1980s. Too bad Big Coal and Big Environmental are suppressing it.
Tesla's $50M "Big Battery" in South Australia can only store 125MWh - or about 1/50th of the states peak hour demand! It is not "doing exactly that job" as you say. It is only designed to "stand in" for the few minutes that the big plants need to take up a sudden increase in demand.
Energy storage (strangely enough not mentioned!!) is the solution to this problem and over time the old fashioned power plants can be turned off. Simple.
You can just use excess electricity to produce Hydrogen and Oxygen from water so that it can be used as fuel for a hydrogen fuel cell and therefore be used later on.
The biggest problem I see with this is that there are many areas in the US that have next to no ability to implement hydroelectricity. I live in CO which is a highland desert. A large amount of the continent is arid or semi-arid. However, this does bring up an important concept that needs to be further implemented which is that we need to use multiple styles of renewable energy in tandem and, if possible, decrease overall consumption/give incentive to use energy during times when electricity is most readily available.
You'd most likely have a battery storing unused solar to be used at night. I don't understand the issue in this video. Countries sell power to each other. America operates at a net loss of electricity (we have to purchase elect from other countries to meet demand). Solar is helping bridge the gap.
World experience different times all at the same time, thats why international power grid can help a lot to make the solar power curve more horizontal, and managable, edit: difference of an hour or two can make a lot of difference, it is not about giving electricity from Bharat to Mexico or vice versa during ones night but to blunt the peaks of usage and production curve.
Divyansh_34 No, that is not the solution. There are power losses over distance and high voltage lines cost a lot of money. You would need to transport electricity from continent to continent for your idea. And THAT definitely is not an option.
Wow, that looks like a solution, but only international exchange between neighbors will be hardly of any use. We’ll have to transfer it to the other side of the world, then there comes the looses.
No that wont solve anything. 1. It's very expensive. 2. The longer electricity runs, the more it is being wasted to heat. 3. If one country or region takes up the main load of energy production, any disaster or problem in that region will end up affecting the world.
Another issue is that the world operates on different grid frequencies and voltages. These have to match up to connect grids. To switch so that they do match would create a lot of e-waste from all the electronics that run on the removed systems.
Can't remember what it's called but they do store solar energy for when there is no day light. They use the energy, that would be wasted otherwise, to pump water to top of reservoirs, hills, etc, so when they need the energy that can let gravity pull the water down and turn a turbine which will create instant energy for when they need it.
Yep there's pumped storage, also molten salt solar power, battery storage, and there's the simple mix of renewable energy sources to provide constant baseload :)
I work in the control room of a nuclear power plant and renewable energy supply does affect our operations. It "forces" us to ramp down due to "negative power pricing." This means it cost the plant money to put it on the grid. I few hours later prices will change and we will ramp back up. The point of the video is not or should not be that solar panels make the most power at noon. The point is that solar and wind create large uncontrolled fluctuations in power prices that effects the whole electrical power ecosystem.
Change in power prices will invite new investors anyways. What'll keep nuclear and coal bases alive is the fact that they can price their availability. Electricity price is composed of availability + energy itself. Renewables cannot provide the availability aspect, meaning that you will likely keep your job for a while. You probably won't ever have a pay raise though.
Jung Yul Kim what keeps Nuclear and coal alive is the fact that they produce a sustainable amount of energy the public can use, while solar and wind can’t meet our needs (solar might one day with better batteries, but wind will never be able to produce enough electricity).
Wind could produce as much s 40 times what we need. And with including wind fluctuations into the calculation you would need to have enough turbines that together they would cover Spain. But that's about the same size as the number of open pit coal mines in the world now, so well that doesn't seem that big of a deal. www.businessinsider.com/how-many-wind-turbines-would-it-take-to-power-the-world-2016-10
howard baxter -- I do hope you realise that nuclear is the ONLY clean alternative to coal. If folk who think that they're environmentalist could grasp this, we'd not need to clutter up fields with solar panels, and need permission as to how many hundreds of eagles it's permissible to kill in Altamont Pass with propeller blades 50 metres long.
@@Hallointhehouseif you think about is not true, in Italy, where we have a lot of hydroelectrical energy, we pump during the late night some water up, as the cost is really low. If the price will drop at midday, you can pump some water up and use that power as storage
@@CarraroAlberto And how much land it would take to store energy, enough for one whole state, or even one country, in more than a few hours? How about the region where the water supply is just enough for drinking and household purposes? What is the cost to build and sustain it? Is it as cost-efficient as the coal power plant? You think that those people in energy industry are all evil and did not think that as a solution, or maybe they already know that this is still not business viable? Sometimes people can be so naive
The Duck Curve should be looked at more like an opportunity rather than a problem. Instead, look at it as an opportunity. There is a time of day where there is an over-abundance of power, which can be bought cheaply, and put to good ends. Like, say, carbon/pollution scrubbing in a city. Or converting that electricity into chemical energy (like hydrogen or even recreating petroleum products) and reselling.
Why are they talking about renewable energy like it's only solar power? A lot of these problems can be fixed with hydro (especially pumped-storage hydroelectricity), wind, geothermal, osmotic, etc. Let's make planet killing coal the economically unviable solution by continuing to invest in renewable energy. Coal is not worth further investment, it's a dead industry and it's been killing our planet and is for decades. Lots of small power sources will make our planet cleaner, us all healthier and will also make us more resistant to disasters that could cause mass blackouts if we continue to rely on single sources of energy.
Welp you didn’t pay enough attention: Solar panels are deployed at households, so whenever you need to use electricity, your consumption mostly comprises solar energy during a day time, however when night comes energy producers find it hard to fill the demand cause excessive usage (your solar plates aint storage u know).
I dont believe that rewnewables can power a grid as large as the US until battery technology catches up with solar because solar would be the main way of generating energy. Wind is just not consistent enough and we dont have much geothermal potential. Nuclear is the cleanest and most reliable source of energy and can be the bridge we need to go from coal primary energy to renewable primary energy. Nuclear is the best solution for now.
The sentence „Let‘s just make some Batteries and store that extra Power during mid day so that we have it in the evening“ is missing the entirely video.
Something also connected to this is the fact that to be 100% solar or even just mostly, you always have to have more panels than their peak output, because they will not always be at peak output. Rain, clouds, etc all decrease power generation, so you need more panels to make up for the losses. So while X number of panels run at full capacity might be able to supply our energy needs, you're going to need possibly 5 times that or more, drastically increasing the cost and complexity. And let's keep in mind that whether these panels are used or not, they still need to be replaced ever X number of years. So you're basically having to replace the ENTIRE solar generation grid every 10-20 years, and that's not even including the logistics cost of it all, along with the battery and power storage side of things which is an even tougher issue because we simply don't have the battery technology to actually make widespread solar a reality, and even if we did, we would still need to replace those every X number of years too. This could very well make solar more costly than traditional energy, even though the energy itself is essentially free.
Its nice to see Vox putting out a point of view that shows the shortcomings of their point of view. A corrections are: 1. Its not really economics why coal and nuclear can't/don't shutdown its that they aren't designed to. Turning them off can take hours or days to restart so they physically can't cycle on and off. 2. I can't speak for ALL plants in the world, but ramping up power is typically very easy on natural gas or hydro plants 3. Again, I can't talk for all plants in the world, but its far more likely gas or hydro dams would be shut off as opposed to solar. Bonus: Some of those 'polluting' power plant photos are not power plants, but some type of petrochemical plant (the clouds are steam not pollution btw)
Big tower. Use extra power to pump water to the top. Keep the water there. Release water at night, spinning a turbine thus creating power. Ooooooooooooooooo
destroys the environment creating all these additional dams, what happens when battery's get more efficient than hydro? are you going to climb up a massive hill to swim in a water wasteland?
You should see a video by I believe Tom Scott called something like “England’s largest battery is a lake.” They do essentially this idea but with a lake instead of a water tower for this very purpose.
@@kingsinge1324 He means just cycling same water up and down a tower. It's closed-loop. No dam. Use solar to pump up during day then gravity brings it down through turbines to generate power after the sun goes down.
@@isaackvasager9957 and you seem to not grasp the concept that you can build more than one short tower, rather than one insanely tall tower? Guess we can never build a ladder again because every single we'd ever build would have to be as big as the biggest one we could ever possibly need, reaching hundreds of feet high. The trees would suffer greatly!
@@liams923 I have visited this hydro dam in Wales. It's quite a marvel. But despite its huge output, it is only useful when supporting other power stations at peak demand time, because it runs out in short time, additionally, the lake is insanely huge. This alone cannot suffice in supplying the demand of a large city, only small-medium cities. But, if it was used in harmony with other similar principles such as using solar energy to heat a medium that can easily be stored with the energy content and using that energy content at night time to run a steam turbine engine, that could also do the trick. And I think this latter suggestion will require far less land space.
10k on a house that will power the whole household for the day and still continue to recharge when the sun is up, electric companies will pretty much go bankrupt... no one wants that.... and plus how many middle class households would be able to finance a battery anyway.
I kept waiting for them to say something. I just spent the last 5 weeks interning at a startup thats trying to solve the duck curve in CA. They're using second-life Nissan leaf batteries. Really cool stuff!
The problem is cost and materials. I dont recall specifics too well, but in short batteries are simply too expensive to meet energy demands on a nationwide scale. There was a company selling batteries large enough to help supply solar powered homes and it was 50 grand.
In addition to the problems mentioned, they would probably only make things harder for the grid operators to follow generation and demand in the short term
We still don't have that kind of storage (battery) that can store that much of a power that can sustain at least a city. The technology about energy still lags behind and as mentioned there's also the economic concern.
A big battery is still a battery. ;-) But I get what you mean. Rechargeable batteries are booming across all scales, from hearing aids to cell phones, personal homes, cars, office buildings, all the way up to regulating demand fluctuations in giant power plants.
Many seem to believe that Tesla's $50M "Big Battery" in South Australia is a 'duck curve' solution.. This 'battery' can only store 125MWh - or about 1/50th of the states peak hour demand! It is only designed to "stand in" for the few minutes that the big plants need to take up a sudden increase in demand.
Exactly.. Batteries are not the solution. Pumped Hydro might help. But, the future will belong to things like Thorium Power (once they solve the problem of pipe corrosion)
Not a viable option everywhere though. The miners cost a lot, but most importantly the more miners the less profit. If every country started doing that it wouldn't be making money anymore
just cut the electricity rate from 10am-4pm and have people do their laundry and recharge their electric cars etc. during this period to use up the excess capacity
To make it work it out, you need a balanced energy mix. A good example is Spain. It is an energtically isolated country, which used around 47% renewable energy in 2018. One key is to have pump stations. They are like massive battery cells of water. Also, a remove coal plants, which are extremely pollutant, and build more combined cycle power plants (natural gas). More flexible and with A lower carbon footprint
KR!RK the problem with storage is that it isn't very efficient. Pump requires a lot of space and is only around 35% efficient (electric to gas to electric). In order to meet peak demand at all times you need to have an energy source when the sun isn't shining (or wind isn't blowing) that can provide 100% power if needed. So you'd need storage of 1/0.35 = 2.86 X the current grid capacity. That just isn't possible with current technology.
Why point to renewable energy being a problem just because traditional power plants were never well suited for grid management? Battery farms respond 100x faster to grid management needs compared to conventional power plants. When deployed these battery storage solutions are extremely effective and have dramatic cost savings due to their rapid response times. Just check out Tesla's 100 Megawatt battery farm in Australia. It can power 30k homes. It is so successful that other cities in AU are now racing to build larger storage farms. You see solar on the rise due to technology innovations but fail to see that battery innovations are just as integral. The real revolution is solar power combined with affordable and efficient energy storage. You can even shrink the demand down to manageable units by combining residential/commercial solar, battery storage packs, and electric powered devices like a fridge, A/C, light bulb or even your electric vehicle (which also happens to be a giant battery). This creates a new type of distributed grid architecture that will make our current power grids obsolete. Information went from analog to digital. Power is going through the same transformation. It is all about the movement of electrons~
When someone comes swerving into your lane, are you at flaunt for hitting them because you weren’t able to react fast enough to their erratic behavior or them for being erratic?
kokofan50 I believe it's the person who hit you as long as you were paying attention and not doing anything stupid like thinking autopilot ment fully autonomous and texting
that type of mechanical storage is a viable contributor to act as a sink for excess production. same as stacking mass towers, pumping water to higher elevations etc...
There's no problem with running coal/gas/nuclear power on tick-over until it's needed - the only problems with that aspect are with the power plant owners' business models in the face of technological progress.
Homes can have battery storage to shift solar power into night, but is there also the possibility of building an extremely high capacity battery that the power plant can manage, so it can charge it up at the bottom of the duck curve, then discharge it during peak hours so the power plant doesn't have to ramp up production so much? I know lithium ion batteries get exponentially more tricky to produce as size increases, so I wouldn't be surprised if any battery that size isn't feasible.
Georg F Considering efficiency = The amount of usefull that gets out of something to what you put into it. So what do we really need is the next point i'm getting to. We should panic about the energy crisis. It's just a crisis but thats not leathal. Anyway im never really convinced that technologie can solve it's own problems it brings with it.
It is a chemical reaction after all, At large scales they can be recycled and be made into new cells, just at small scales such as double AA it is not worth it. Reading from Popular mechanic, Any battery issue is by definition a chemistry problem. In a healthy battery, ions flow freely between a cathode and an anode. Charging a battery forces ions from the cathode to the anode; using the battery reverses the flow. Over time, this process wears out the cathode, which results in reduced capacity. In this case why can't they just replace the electrodes. there is nothing different between Lithium from a fresh battery and a 10 year battery.
Krzysztof Dolecki but when you look at the recycling rate in the US of lead batteries it's well over 90%. I don't think it'd be too far of a stretch to implement measures that ensure larger batteries could also be recycled in a similar way!
An efficient country wide grid would balance the curve, as there is different time zones (a place were its sunset would buy energy from a place that is midday). This, and fluctuating prices according to the time of day.
@@red1monster_ In the european union, for example there is a common market for electricity. What needs to happen is to create common network around standards, quite like the internet. If we can achieve that, most of the need for energy storage would be no more.
In the UK, there is large power surges after certain TV shows end when a large amount of people turn on their kettles to brew tea. Power surges are hard to manage in power supplies because you can't quickly up the output. So the solution is to store that energy, and one of the best ways is to pump water uphill and r lease it into a turbine when demand rises or supply needs to rise.
1:19 "sun produces the most energy" No, at 12pm sunlight falls perpendicular(nearly) to any location(Except for the North-South poles). As lightbeams travel shorter distance in the atmosphere, they are able to maintain most of their energy.
Wow so many people in the comments talking about big technological problems while being so out of touch of actual technological reality. The amount of energy we need to store in batteries to rely on solar power and the amount of energy we can feasibly store in batteries without digging the entire surface of the planet for fancy metals and pawning the world's economy to do it are on different orders of magnitude.
Currently a lot of energy suppliers have deals where energy used during the night is cheaper to encourage people to use appliances like (dish)washers and dryers run during the night which helps decrease the nighttime dip. Something similar can be used but rather for energy used during midday. Combinations of power sources also can help stabilise things, there might be no sun at night, but there can still be wind and rain which can spin turbines to generate electricity. Furthermore, building lots of battery storage dedicated to this is not realistic, but things like electric cars can function as grid storage. People can set their chargers to allow backwards flow (in order to supply higher demand when the car isn't in use anyway) as long as the battery doesn't go below a certain value, or is at least charged to a certain extend at a certain time.
It makes the array less efficient and it would take more time to return on investment. the duck curve can be solved by plugging ev cars at midday to increase the demand and absorb the peaking solar production.
Nuclear waste isn't nearly as big of a problem as often believed, simply by the fact that the amount produced is minuscule compared to the toxic wastes produced by even solar panel production. Regardless the waste output relative to energy output has continued to decline over the past few decades due to both more efficient power production processes and via the recycling technologies which have made considerable advances is recent years.
Alright what if we set up some really big wires and send the overgenerated energy around the world to countries that arent facing the sun at that moment
You would have amp up the voltage to such stupid levels that it becomes ro dangerous for transport. This does exist within europe. But it requires superconductors. And the price for that is intense. Also needs to be underground.
It's simple. In the UK we use water reservoirs as batteries. During mid day when there is an extensive amount of energy we use excess energy to pump water up to a reservoir on hill.... Then when it gets dark and more supply is required we let the water out into a lower resivare... As the water flows it goes through turbines... Basically a rely big battery! Quite efficient aswell :)
Where is the solution? Battery storage? EV adoption is going up. Soon we can even use EVs to store power and give it back if needed. Curtailment and energy storage should be discussed hand in hand. This is just one side of the equation.
Speaking of one side of the equation, discuss lithium mining, the nickel contamination of making these batteries, the millions sickened and killed where these batteries and solar panels are made each year, and how we get past that and say screw those people like you seem to want to. Lots of calculus to consider here.
Sounds like utilities should really push businesses to install chargers at work so that the batteries in electric cars can be charged during peak production instead of overnight at nadir production. Most cars just sit all day regardless, and I believe batteries often like to charge slowly.
In England, we have a type of electricity pricing called “economy 7” where electricity overnight is at half price.
This led to a large rise in storage heaters (radiators that heat up clay bricks during the night and release the heat during the day).
People also use timer plugs to run washing machine and dishwashers overnight to take advantage of this.
Rather than waste solar, surely it would make sense to offer a similar incentive near midday?! People will modify their electricity demands when there’s the potential to save money!
That's a really interesting solution that just changes the problem space towards capitalizing on its strengths. Should definitely work this way once solar is more fully implemented (or now, I guess, don't know the landscape too well), and would be the way people approach it anyway if there was no centralized power.
In Belgium it's a similar situation
For years, we've been incentivised to consume electricity at night through cheaper prices for night and weekend consumption. This was probably to provide counterweight to the then huge consumption of companies during the day.
That's also why the gov has decided to get rid of the reversing meters. Currently electricity meters reverse (count down) when private production > private consumption, allowing you to build a "buffer" during the day for the night and during the summer for the winter. The idea is to get people to consume when they produce, e.g. by using washing machine and dish washer during the day.
I also wonder wether it'd be hard to change the timer in storage heaters as to charge during the day and release heat in the evening through the morning.
They call it demand side management :)
Umm, no, its a lot more expensive during peak. That makes it seem cheaper at night.
Electricity companies could also pay a different rate for power to the grid based on these demand curves which could incentivize local solar providers to store power and release it at higher demand times. You could store power in batteries and sell it back to the grid when the price is highest, helping to recover the cost of the battery installation and helping smooth generation.
"The sun produces most energy at midday"
Every 60 seconds in Africa a minute passes
ah i see, the floor is made of floor
what an interesting point of interest
he also tacked on the fact that 'researchers found' that like yeah a 2 year old baby found that out too
It kinda doesn't. It doesn't change the energy "production" during the day a lot. The received by Earth from the Sun energy is the greatest at midday.
So, in short;
*ORANGE YEET YOUGHURT*
This statement is actually wrong...
Sun produces pretty much same amount of energy at any given moment, changing only in astronomical figures.
Only on any given point on earth the Sun releases the most energy during midday, only in that particular spot.
Didn’t they solve this in Spain? A kind of solar power plant that heats up salt to extreme degrees then uses that heat to generate electricity long into the night. But the hydro pump back idea works too, using excess electricity to pump water back up hydropower dams then sending it back down at night. Some dams already do that
This works for low solar&wind penetration because you still have reserves (other power plants) for the longer periods of low solar irradiance and wind speeds.
the *solution* you are talking about isn't truly going to *solve* the problem. it's only the *temporary* alternatives
Had never heard of the hydro pump back idea. Really innovative!
@@raphaelkw7630 It is, though I believe it is fairly inefficient, though I doubt it's so inefficient it won't be good still. There are other interesting methods of energy storage, one I find really cool being the Flywheel. Basically you use energy to spin a wheel specially designed to store energy kinetically.
Batteries are more efficient in storing energy than water towers or flywheels.
"They found that the sun produces the most energy at midday."
Wait, really? Who would've thunk it. That's unbelievable.
You only think it because we have been told it...
@@immazoorun4404 It's directly overhead, at the highest position in the sky, with it's rays most perpendicular to the surface of the Earth (as the shadows will clearly tell you). All of this is readily apparent.
@@ZiPolishHammer yes..... because scientist worked it out?
@@immazoorun4404 cause it takes a PhD to notice that the brightest and hottest time of the day is midday?
Thought*
Hopefully we'll quack the problem someday.
Even without the pun, saying “hopefully we’ll crack the problem” doesn’t make sense.
@@jacobs279 he means solve
chicawhappa I know but that’s not a pun is it
@@jacobs279 Seriously, what're you, the pun police? Get a life
chicawhappa kek
I don't know if it is an option, US has a much different power from my country, but here we have two hydro plants, that are used as "batteries". Basically there are 2 large tanks, or lakes or whatever you call them, and when there's too much power in the grid, they use it to pump the water from the lower lake to the upper one, and when you need the power back, they just release the water and let gravity and water turbines do the work and generate power...
Aedar18 I was thinking the same thing, however, I'm not sure we have enough hydroplants in enough places for that to be our only solution.
The US has a fair amount of Pumped Hydro, but the geographical redirections mean it will never be the entire solution.
Jup, that's the only way we have yet to store big amounts of energy.
+Aedar18
There isn't that much for improvement for hydropower in the US. At most we can get 75 more GW from hydro-power, which would be a 75% improvement over the current 100 GW production. We already are fully utilizing half of our river potential. And that is ignoring the negative environmental effects of hydro-electric power.
As for what you are talking about, Pumped storage, we already do that in the US. We have 22 GW of pump storage potential. And plans are in the works to increase that to 56 GW. But hardly enough to fix the growing duck's curve problem, also ignoring the fact that it only helps when you are near a dam of sufficient output, which large swaths of the US aren't.
Hydro only amounts to 2.4% of US Energy demand, and 6% of electricity generation. Its also mostly limited to the Northwest.
It's a great option for a place like Denmark, which can provide most of its requirements from offshore wind, but has easy access to Swedish hydropower when the winds are low.
At present, there's a symbiotic relationship between renewables and combined cycle gas turbines, the only fossil generation that can ramp quickly enough to accommodate renewable intermitancy. Every MW of installed wind/solar means a MW of natural gas turbines. Solar has been GREAT for natural gas demand, which is replacing coal in the US.
There are some good future options. Pumped gravity storage, in which excess electricity is used to pump water uphill into reservoirs. Solar thermal with storage, in which collecting solar generation is used to heat a material, like molten sodium, hot enough to drive turbines at night. Germany is a leader in power to gas/methane, in which excess renewable energy is used to synthesize methane, which is pumped into the natural gas pipeline network, for low-carbon generation. Better transmission networks, with fewer losses so that the Great Plains or offshore New England can export excess wind energy, the Southwest solar energy, balancing things out. Alas for chemical battery storage, there are supply constraints on materials such as the cobalt presently used in lithium battery cathodes. We can make a lot of batteries, but maybe not enough for anything near the required scale.
A good follow up video to this would be *exploring the limitations of batteries.*
The magnitude of power requirements would mean you'll end up building hundreds of acres of batteries fields, even if that would be possible, it would force a battery production at scales never before done, not even during the war. An then there's the pollution from refining, digging activities, manufacturing each cell. Batts can be good for mobile stuff, good density for weight ratio, and demand is not too high yet (low vehicle production). To support a national grid, batteries would have to improve on factors of 100 or more. I'd rather go Thorium nuclear and have the hills and fields free from wind and solar panel farms.
lol only vox could do a video on solar energy and not ever say the word 'battery'
Lmao your comment is so in point xD
What?
There is no battery technology that could even come close to meeting the needs of a modern city. Yours is the laughter of a fool.
@@Charlie-ii5rr Quite right, but there are some energy storage systems that can, e.g. that pump massive amounts of water up with the excess energy and generate it via turbines letting the water back down later when it is needed. Not the most efficient system perhaps, but it does smooth out that use curve.
@@zvxcvxcz or nuclear power.....
“The sun produces the most energy at midday” wow.
Charles dude this is such surprising information!
but most importantly there's no solar energy production during night time because.... wait for it..... there's no sun light
*mind blowing*
he was just establishing a point ... he wasn't telling just this fact as if u dont know
Thomas Vieira No I know how a star works, I’m just saying it was pretty common sense that you can harvest the most energy from the sun when it’s unobstructed and in the middle of the sky
whodathunkit!?
It has its con's, but renewable energy sources are the way forward. If we want this planet to be habitable in the future.
Gipsy Danger Renewables by themselves are not practical. They have to be coupled with nuclear to meet base load supply
Louis K why? You can store solar energy you don't use in batteries
New technology opens up new challenges. But we have been pretty good in the past to meet those challenges and this is just a problem to be solve just like any other.
"renewable" energy produces at least twice as much waste as nuclear per kW.
Louis K
"Combine with nuclear"
Did you watch the video? Nuclear is one of the worst "partners" for renewable, as it is very hard to turn them of and on again and the economics demands them to run 24/7.
Partnering renewable with nuclear means basically to throw away energy, just to keep nuclear.
A workable alternative is to go 100% renewable (over time) and produce to much and safe it for the time the produce to little.
In Germany they have something called EE-gas or wing-gas, where they take renewable overproduction and take CO2 from the air and water and produce oxigen/hydrogen at first and then (artificial)-natural gas and put it in their standard gas-pipelines.
The pipelines in Germany have enough capacity to safe 3-6 month of energy consumption.
So we need to just cross wires all over the world and when in Australia is midday in the Americas is nighttime.
Easy? innit?
Doesnt electricity lose power over long distance because of heat lol
@@Cami555555Sheep yeah, basically every force in existence will reduce that energy XD
It would be as expensive as sourcing your daily eggs or dairy from another continent rather than the nearest supplier in your city/state.
Moving electricity from one point to another is a 'lossy' job and the costs are incredible.
Or even one side of the USA to the other.
In theory, yes. But moving electricity that far results in huge losses. Nevertheless, regional power grids capable of transferring electricity between say US states or countries in Europe is vital. Not so much to compensate for day/night patterns, but to compensate for varying wind and cloud cover. The larger the region, the greater the ability to share and thus compensate variations in production and demand.
The ducks: peace was never an option
There are so many energy storage technologies available today (batteries, pumped hydro, compressed air, ...). Shame that you didn't mention any of those solutions. The South Australia Tesla battery pack is a great exemple of a battery system that not only stabilised the grid but is a well generating record benefits!
@@justaquestion1934 as someone in an electrical engineering technology program he's right. If all that energy went to say filling a water reservoir with a hydro station on it, you could store the energy (in the form of kenetic energy from elevation) for later use
@@justaquestion1934 i neither lied nor mentioned battries, energy can be stored in many diffrent forms (ie. Thermal energy, kenetic energy, and electrical energy). If you move 1kg of water up 1m then you have spent (1kg*1m*9.8m/s2)=9.8J of energy, if that water was in a cup and does not fall immediately then that energy is effectively stored
Water reservoirs are very effective, but they only work in certain landscapes and therefore couldn't be implemented throughout the US and become a standard way to store energy
@@m.g.6559 You mean potential energy... hope your finals didn't happen already xD.
@@tehguitarque lol i guess i should have said pottential
Use the extra energy to purify sea water.
Max R Assuming the cost of infrastructure to do this is not prohibitive, that seems like a great idea, especially in California, where there is plenty of sun and has been drought problems.
or dozens of other industrial uses that can run at variable rates
Only if there is a need to purify sea water. Desalination plants are one of the most expensive infrastructure plants. Salt is extremely corrosive so the material used for the plants are very expensive. It's why you find most desal plants in places where water is extremely scare, like the gulf states and parts of Australia.
"They found that the sun produces the most energy at midday".
"They"? Like no one else could have told "them" about it.
It's not justified to just conclude what you expect. But the language used was very heavy handed
lol
in countries where most houses have a roof angle of around 45° (instead of, say, a flat roof) it wouldn't be quite so foolish to check whether mid-morning and/or mid-evening are actually more productive (because of sun angle). Plus generally in science it's a great idea to check rather than assume...
550 Million in Obama money went into this. True story
California can sell electricity to NY because California still has sun when in NY is evening
Resistance along wires prevents this from being practical.
@@nicholasb1471 can't this be solved? Maybe easier than better batteries.
Technically, with good enough wires, and good enough diplomacy, the lit part of the world could always power the other part.
@@nicholasb1471 Australia is currently building a power export project from Central Australia to singapore, some 2300 miles. Only a few hundred miles short of a theoretical Cal to NY Cable.
The technology is there with UHV Cabling
@@Mrsquiggley wow. How does it work? I had no idea they existed.
Make a huge two level reservoir with massive water pumps. Pump up with water during peak solar power excess during the day. Let it run down through hydro generators during sunset. You're effectively making a battery. Would something like this work??
Yes. I have visited one of these "hydro-batteries" in Switzerland. Turns out that its crazy expensive to build, especially making an efficient pump. But all in all I agree, this is well suited for the job because of the energy capacity in comparison to a chemical battery alternative
Stops salmon from spawning though. Which causes environmentalists to protest dams.
Otherwise it is a practical real world solution to the duck
You're a freaking genius my friend!
Doesn't have to be on a river though which can remove the fish issue. This plant in Wales used a disused quarry for example, plenty of places in California they could do something similar. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
Fast Car Central honestly aside from bio reactors and gravity generators this idea is really really good. With such a reservoir, the thermal composition of the land would create wind, where you could use wind turbines. However we need a very very efficient way to pump water up..
You didn't mention anyways to combat the duck curve like creating an artificial lake, pumping water into it during the excess hours, and then letting the water drain through a turbine when power is needed.
it can even be an underground lake, re purposed from an old mine (limits evaporation losses)
Or batteries.
Genius!
EnlightenmentLiberal University of California can't keep their website certificates up to date?
They already have pumped storage in California. It's called Helms pump storage plant.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms_Pumped_Storage_Plant
Praise the sun
Umbasa!
Mi and the wind and the water and Jesus. Always praise Jesus. 👍
+Mi Escanor, lion sin of pride much? :)
TalesOfGod Woooosh
George Carlin - Sun God ?
Should mention how the price of batteries used for storage fell by over 30% in just the past year.
Batteries are unable to store anywhere near this amount of energy though so that really isn't relevant here
If we factor the price of batteries in to renewables it starts to look like really uncompetitive... Especially when taking in to consideration that demand for storage increases dramatically when nearing 100% renewables.
And this is why we need nuclear ;)
Every battery on Earth combined won't even be able to power what the USA uses in one day. We would need reliable power backups that can last months in case of disasters or a period of low solar output. Think of the pollution it would take to build that amount of batteries, it is inconceivable.
@@postvideo97 Don't be silly if the us would sink 10% of it's gdp to batteries the whole us would have enough in few years. You can use water as a battery it is just a matter of cost.
@@jholotanbest2688 California study came up with needing 36 million MWh of grid storage to go pure wind/solar/geoterm to cover poor generation days and winter lulls. I believe at the end of 2017 we had around 2000 MWh grid storage in the whole world (708 MWh in the US).... going to projected 18,000 MWh in 2022... and the US consumes 11.45 million MWh per day... so postvideo is also right, even if you third the amount per day (assumed power need for within day for solar, assuming enough installed solar to power 133% us need to actually charge said batteries, which is also not reality yet). The power usage in the US is mind boggling higher than people realize.... I just don't see this being a reality any time soon.... we can't agree as a country on anything at the moment... asking every man, woman, child in the US to pay the government an extra thousand dollars a year for the next 10 years to pay for enough batteries for just California...which we couldnt even make... . but i do think that we need to add grid-storage and do it soon...be it battery, pumped hydro, compressed gas, flow batteries, or whatever.... as that will lessen the need for fast-acting power plants, and allow for full utiziliation of existing base load.. and if that is nuclear, still provides same or less greenhouse gas pollution for kwh generation full life compared to solar.. which lets us focus on developing options to get more people in EVs and etc to further reduce mobile (uncontrolled/poorly controlled) emissions. But .. anyhow....
You shouldn’t use solar energy in isolation. Use it with wind and hydroelectric energy. Also, why did this video not mention Elon Musk’s efforts in Australia to solve this problem?
Elon Musk's efforts in Australia weren't to solve this problem, that's probably why it wasn't mentioned.
I totally agree with you on combining solar energy with hydroelectric power to help mitigate the limitations of solar (as expensive and as hydroelectric projects are).
However, with regards to Elon Musk/Tesla's battery project at the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia, it wasn't about helping provide solar outside of daylight hours (which it does do on occasion). But rather, it was focused on exploiting the limitations of the South Australian grid, namely the slow response time of gas plants and the heavy reliance on imported power and wind power.
The Hornsdale Power Reserve can deploy electricity far more rapidly than any gas peaking plant can; meaning it can profit off of sudden and unexpected disruptions to power generation (namely lack of wind) as well as unexpected peaks in demand. (In fact it's so effective at this that it's forcing the Australian Energy Market Operator to reconsider their current price modelling which calculates power in 15 second batches, while Hornsdale can respond in 600 milliseconds)
Additionally, South Australia has to import lots of its electricity from coal plentiful east coast states, but there's a hard cap on how much it can import at any given time due to physical infrastructure limitations. So on days when SA reaches its import limit, Hornsdale can respond and profit.
Gary Buckley exactly. And what happens when the son gets covered with volcanic dust.
What happens when LittleRainGames learns some spelling?
Elon's Musk's project in Australia is designed to fix load imbalances on a much smaller timescale. Instead, it's meant to come in for a few seconds when a massive load is suddenly flipped on, or a generator suddenly has to be shut down. It's a HUGE battery, but it's not even close to being big enough to address the "duck curve" problem.
That wouldn't solve the problem. Assuming hydro and wind give out fairly even energy throughout the day, then you still have the exact same problem, that you have oversaturation during daytime when demand is low and production is very high, so you have to shut off hydro, wind and/or solar production and that means they are less economical.
With hydroelectric plants you can somewhat influence your output, but ideally you'd be wanting them to run at high capacity all of the time because of the economic factor again.
Also, what if you have a hot, dry and none-windy summer? That's typical summer weather in many places. Rivers are low so hydros put out very little energy, windmills have low output too, and at dusk and dawn solar gives little energy too, which is when consumption is highest.
Geothermal isn't really an alternative either because it is very expensive.
Solar, without the ability to store large amounts of energy, is unfortunately pretty useless.
Large Scale Energy Storage.
Pump Hydro, Gravity Mass Drop, Compressed Air CAES, Liquid Flow Cells.
We need to hedge our bets and develop all these technologies soo we have the right solution for every location.
Make an extension cord that goes around the world, pulling energy from where ever there is day time. Much easier than batteries!
Could be very possible if the electricity is transformered to a very very high voltage.
The tecnology is not good enough as it is now.. you would need to find a way to isolete cables better
That is not how it works... Electricity has a fall off, combined with multiple power grids, there is really no way this could work. If we had one power grid, it is a massive security risk. I think solar power will be more useful, if we get better batteries.
Nowerdy yes i also agree we need to have a global grid that takes care of it.
you must have 2 nobel peace prizes by now
He should have mentioned that we can store excess energy from midday and use it when demands are higher via hydroelectric power plants. You pump water to the reservoir when you have excess power and release it when you have high demand.thid helps smooth the curve out
It does but there are several problems, for example:
1) These pumped hydro stations would be payed for by consumers, meaning higher electricity bills.
2) When there is no solar production and the dams are empty, you need backup power plants - higher electricity bills.
@@FrainBart_main If the price of electricity varies there can be a good businessmodel for storage to be developed at both production side and user side and also in between. You can store energy when it is cheap and realease it when you get a higher price for it.
Now at the user(home,offices,industries) side of things it seems like a good idea to have enough storage to get you to most power outages, so have a storage capacity that is X% of your daily consumption. How high X is depends on how long outages are.
If every users would have an X > 33% it should help solve a big part of the duckcurve.
Of course this storage needs to be charged, preferably when lot's of electricity is available.
If steered by price smart systems will be developed to profit from that. You then charge your storage with cheap electricity and use the storage when it is expensive but needed.
Price can be a steering mechanism.
It would be great if every solar plant of windmill would be able to store Y% of it's daily production so it can profit from higher prices at moment there is little sun or wind.
Would be interesting if someone can calculate the optimal X en Y that will cause the grid to be stable, people have lower electricity bills and less polution from coal plants.
i don't think chemical batteries will ever be practical for large-scale energy storage as they all slowly deteriorate and charge less efficiently based on charged storage
That's really limited by geography
@@jebeandiah he's not talking about chemical batteries
REALLY BIG BATTERIES
Ian Anderson yeah, come on scientists and engineers, do your job!
Bang!
NUCLEAR POWER
Lithium Ion is in the middle east and Africa. Let's get rid of currency and make energy our new economic resource.
basically yes - that is what we need, but storing energy in batteries is really difficult and dangerous.
Lets hope that batteries improve steadily.
Finally, a video on the Solar Duck!
Quack Quack.
Hopefully battery storage and diversification of the supply chain helps with the ramp.
Curtailment will probably drive battery storage and self consumption.
One more note on nuclear technology. This video describes nuclear as unable to ramp up and down, which is accurate (in most cases), but it does not look into the possibility of utilizing excess energy production for other processes. One potential option is to construct nuclear reactors in modular systems (not small modular reactors) so that excess production can provide energy needed for other tasks such as desalination or hydrogen production. For example the University of California Berkley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory developed a conceptual Advanced High Temperature Molten Salt Reactor that has the dual purpose of being used for hydrogen production as well as electricity generation. Since this reactor would operate in excess of 750C it is ideal for potential replacement for steam reformation procedures.
fhr.nuc.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/AHTR.Nuclear.Technology.Article.May20.2003.pdf
Similar to power plants themselves industrial scale uses of electricity also suffer from the problem that they are most economic if they operate 24 hours a day. To get the same amount of water operating only during high solar output versus 24 hour operation you need three times the capacity, which is three times the fixed costs and three times longer to pay back the initial investment. Desalinating water is a money losing proposition most of the time and would be even if the energy were free because as soon as demand drops below natural supply desalinated water is valueless. Similarly there is no hydrogen economy and pretty much never will be for a bunch of good reasons. A better option would be aluminum smelting, which is very energy intensive but again suffers from fixed costs and capacity factor economics. You can't compete with a factory in iceland that gets nearly free geothermal energy and operates 24/7 even if your energy is "free" (paid for by someone else and not needed by anyone else) if you only operate 8 hours a day on sunny days. The ideal energy solution would be to access geothermal energy in places where it is inconvenient to access, but we don't have the technology to do so currently.
Luke Simonson What do you mean there is no hydrogen economy? The USA consumes over 9 million tons of hydrogen per year for chemical refining, meat processing and fertilizer production. I’m not talking about generating hydrogen for fuel cells, but rather I’m looking for a cleaner solution to methane and naphtha steam reformation production.
You are right, you mentioned steam reformation processes in your comment, which derives hydrogen from fossil fuel based feed stocks. Anyway, the same logic as applies to aluminum smelting applies to hydrogen. A factory that only operates one shift a day is a waste of 2/3 of its capital expenditure. The French reactors do indeed ramp up and down rapidly and whenever anyone talks about nuclear they should use the French as their example because they are the only country using nuclear in an at all sensible way providing the majority of their electrical needs, actually exporting it, ramping it up and down to match demand and compensate of intermittent renewables and reprocessing their spent fuel. Nuclear reactors should absolutely be co-located with energy intensive industry and particularly heat consuming industry. That can't happen right now. Nuclear is regulated to death. The reason it takes 15 years and 15 billion dollars to build a nuclear plant is they change the rules for how the plant is allowed to be built while the plant is being built. That is not a good faith effort at regulating, it is an covert effort to kill nuclear power. The private sector isn't allowed to innovate, since not just "what" but also "how" are dictated to them by regulators. There will never be any meaningful advance in nuclear power in the United States until the NRC is dismantled and a completely new regulatory framework is adopted. At this point batteries plus solar are on a trajectory to undercut fossil fuels in cost sooner than we could get our act together and get next generation designs for nuclear power deployed. Meanwhile France has had good nuclear power for decades.
+Luke Simonson Regulations play a key role in the cost for nuclear, but they are by no means the primary reason why costs for nuclear are so high. Its important to look back and recognize that the initial economic challenge facing nuclear happened 7 years prior to Three Mile Island and the major regulations that would follow. Nuclear more than any other energy source is very capital intensive, and as the industry has grown the capital costs have increased due to extrapolation of the technology. Yes regulations have required nuclear to increase the amount of systems and materials as well as plagued construction (although there are other challenges with constructing nuclear reactors), but at the end the largest cost comes back to capital expenses. This is perhaps the largest reason why nuclear scientists and engineers have looked back to other nuclear technologies as a way to reduce capital costs and make nuclear more economical. There is actually a very good video by Argonne National Laboratory that goes through the history of nuclear reactors in the USA and why nuclear scientists and engineers are developing different technologies related more towards chemical engineered systems as opposed to mechanical engineered systems.
(Speaker starts at 9-00): ua-cam.com/video/X5HoS6KiPAM/v-deo.html
As for this comment, "There will never be any meaningful advance in nuclear power in the United States until the NRC is dismantled and a completely new regulatory framework is adopted"- this is a really bad idea. How would you even develop a new nuclear regulatory framework if not building off of the NRC, which is considered to be the most advanced in the world? Furthermore, the NRC itself recognizes the challenges of nuclear technology and is actively working on developing a new framework for Gen IV reactors in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They are also currently in the process of reviewing designs from FLiBe, Thorcon, NuScale, Terrestrial USA, TerraPower and Southern, and this process will factor into how the framework is designed so that the permitting and licensing process for Gen IV reactors can be efficiently expedited. Additionally there are four new bills in the US congress for the advancement and progression of Gen IV reactors that have implications in both the NRC and the DOE. One bill in particular ( Advanced Nuclear Energy Technologies Act) calls for four new Gen IV nuclear projects to be started no later than 2028, and must prove that they can cost between $.06/KWh and $.07/KWh. The bill you would most likely be interested in is the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which requires the NRC to modify their regulatory framework for Gen IV reactors.
France may have the most nuclear generation per capita, but there is no question that the USA has always lead the way in nuclear advancement and development of technology. The sole reason that China and India were able to develop their molten salt programs is because they have been working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the past 15 years on a project Oak Ridge completed 50 years ago. Idaho National Laboratory is perhaps the most advanced facility for testing and designing advanced nuclear reactors on earth, which is why even though Terrestrial Energy is building their reactor in Canada their IMSR project team is collaborating with the national laboratory. IMSR project after all is based on technologies developed from the three major nuclear national laboratories.
In my other comment on this video I actually go into further detail about how specific varieties of Gen IV nuclear technology will reduce capital costs and become more cost competitive.
nice video but it puts the needs of coal plant and contractors above anything else.
Many hydro power plants use the excess of renewable energy to pump water back into the damn and reuse it at night.
Yup, but also needs more investment and with lower and lower PPA prices, rate of return becomes less atractive
exactly. This is not “solar power’s” greatest challenge, but rather the energy industry’s challenge....
Lol you need these dirty coal plants anyway in case of bad weather. At least this is what germans do to sustain their "clean" energy.
Jacek Siuda geothermal doesn't rely on weather and runs all the time you coal worshiping idiot
@@jaceksiuda. Germany is not the example to follow. They would like to be it in the future; but they aren't now. Take El Hierro or Costa Rica as examples. El Hierro has a fuel plant but its off most of the time. That's quite OK for the environment.
These facts will blow your mind: scientists discovered that solar panels produce the most energy during daytime
The question wasn't really whether they make most energy during the day or at night, it's what part of the day they make the most energy. There's more that goes into solar than just how much sun is in the sky. Not all panels are facing the same direct and PV cells are less efficient as they start to heat up. The answer is a lot less obvious than you'd think.
physics has never been the same after this historic discovery.
Is that all u learn from the video? Stop make a big deal out of it, its just a way of expressing his language for whoever write the script. They just try to tell u that the produce more at noon but no one use it. How else do u want them to explain it ? Many dont aware of this production and demand inbalanceness.
Trump got us two Vox videos in 1 day. And y’all say he does nothing for us
That's Obama. Trump has done a lot for the American people
Orson Welles lol
Orson Welles sure...... eye roll
Orson Welles yup, he made us laugh at the inconsistencies of his presidency, while also making us nervous about his foreign policies, to say the least.
Iuri Pereira, foreign diplomacy is actually turning out to be one of Trump's strong suits. It may be his only strong suit, but give credit where it's due.
Use the excess energy to run desalination plants mid day? More drinkable water isn't a bad thing.
Or use the extra energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, burning it during the evening to make power during peak times?
Or both at the same time?
Agent Ham this is the smartest comment so far
The dewar flasks of O2 and H2 would be stored at the desalination plant, which I suppose would be a desalination/power plant combo. I mean, you could pipe the water elsewhere from the desalination plant to a facility that splits the molecules. And then you could also ship/pipe the liquid gas to a separate power facility that burns it, thus creating power.
But meh. I like to picture an all in one sorta deal. Dunno why you assumed that would be in peoples homes. Agreed, that would be a non viable plan. Though people do store acetylene, MAPP, etc. in their garages for home workshops, so dewar flasks wouldn't be that much more crazy. Probably cost prohibitive for individual civilians, but on an industrial scale it wouldn't be bad.
The bulk of the flasks would most likely go through full and empty cycles daily with a set percentage of flasks staying full for "emergency reserves". In fact, since we would "create" and "destroy" about the same volume of matter each day (I assume), you might not need to store as much liquid gas as you'd think.
But I could be terribly wrong and it all may very well be the ramblings of a mad man. I am talking out of my ass after all as I'm not qualified in the least to speak on the subject. Though I am around large dewar flasks of oxygen each day at work, so I suppose that might qualify me as an "internet expert".
Convertion loses
agree electrolysis and using the H2 for fuel cells at night
Like andrius999 said: conversion losses. Like close to 50%. Also: storing dihydrogen is hard, as it's one of the smallest molecules we know of. Also the conversion engine is an added cost. Also explosion risk.
Desalination is a nice idea, but they don't provide power at night, and aren't very economical for 99% of the world.
germans answer "pump speicher kraftwerk"
using midday overpower pumping water uphill.
when more electricity is needed, this water used to create new electricity
I was already wondering why there was no mention of it in the video..
If there's no solar production for days, you can't pump water uphill. Then you need 100 % backup for solar. Solar + pumpe hydro + backup could become very costly very fast.
đeri662 we have a lot of windenergie mills (dang it, can't remember the English word).
and if you really want to get rid of oil/ coal and nuclear power, you would invest into tide powerplants and also produce H² while producing to much electricity
@@marcop4136 Yes you do but they are even more intermittent than solar (output depends on the cube of wind speed). There are longer periods of time when combined production of solar and wind is very low (you import electricity produced in conventional power plants then (nuclear, coal, gas, hydro)).
Hydrogen production by electrolysis is a very inefficient process. What to do when there is too little electricity, convert hydrogen back to electricity? The combined process is about 30 % efficient. Not to mention this would be extremely expensive to do.
You have one of the highest residential electricity prices just due to renewables, let alone when energy storage and additional grid stability measures will be needed. Not to mention that more than half of European countries have cleaner electricity production than Germany.
So we would have to crate a reservoir for every large city to hold this water and destroy million of trees to do it. And where are you going to get all that water
For everyone saying batteries....you might as well say cold fusion. Saying a technology that doesn't exist is the solution is really stupid. Yes batteries exist but battery technology to solve this problem is not even close to existing.
You are wrong. The technology not only exists already but is improving all the time.
Bollocks.
Such an absurd statement, Mr Major, I have to ask for your full disclosure of any links with utility companies. For the more curious, forward looking, optimistic, solution oriented among us, here's just one link to inspire us: www.pocket-lint.com/gadgets/news/130380-future-batteries-coming-soon-charge-in-seconds-last-months-and-power-over-the-air
Crinolynne Endymion This is so dumb. If batteries held even like 10x more energy then everyone would have a potential bomb in their pocket.
Carbon batteries...
In large part, what you're saying is that coal's shortcomings are solar's problem. I disagree. What you're calling the demand curve is only the residual (or non-solar) demand curve. If coal is cost-inefficient at meeting non-solar demand, that's coal's problem, and it should be reflected in the cost of coal-based energy through smart-metering rather than by artificially supporting coal through minimum-consumption contracts.
As for batteries: flywheels.
ncooty Ah, yes... the thing so many people forget exist. The powered kinetic generators. Probably should be held in a sustained vacuum for the least lost energy.
The problem is the probably malicious argument he used.
It's not just Nuclear and Coal energy who produce electricity continiously in the time. Wind, Water and others types of renewable energy are constant and can't be controlled, so you can't turn it on and off, specially hydraulic. So, if most of the energy park works in a way, it's obvious the solar energy is the one who need to adapted it.
As well, almost all the renewable energy has cycles as the solar does (usually in longer lapses on time, so you need fossil energy to make up for the diminution of supply in the valleys of the cycles.
Pumped-storage hydro could help, or rather it DOES help where it exists.
Hydroelectric power plants use descending water from high reservoirs to power their generators. In a pumped-storage hydro plant, the generators can also be used as pumps to lift water up into the reservoir, using "excess" electricity -- for instance, on a sunny day when there's lots of extra solar power. After dark they can use that pumped water to put electricity back into the system.
You could think of it as a gigawatt-size water battery.
It does help in climates where water is abundant, but this video is California-centric. So unless someone designs a ingenious closed loop system, it probably won't help them.
It's the other way around. Reservoired hydro (the kind that environmentalists hate, prefering run-of-the-river that can't do storage), can simply not produce power when there's a lot of wind or solar and store that power.
What usually happens is that the wind farms and solar plants are not in the same place and the wind and solar becomes a minor fuel saving device for natural gas plants.
Oh do tell. Usually the top/bottom reservoir setup fills the top lake at night with cheap KW power allowing those coal or nuclear plants to keep burning through the night currently. Why couldn't they do a second fill during the day with free power from solar? It isn't that it wouldn't work, its that evaporation from lakes is a huge drain on a resource that's more needed elsewhere. It does work fine in other places though (as long as someone doesn't overfill the top lake >_< ).
The thing is it really doesn't matter too much WHERE the pumped hydro is located. If it's placed far up in the mountains where evaporation is less of an issue then it is still usable. Northern California doesn't really have the same evaporation problem that southern and central Callifornia do, but even there, the Sierra Nevada to the east have hydro plants which would be usable as pumped hydro.
"The thing is it really doesn't matter too much WHERE the pumped hydro is located."
It is absolutely *vital* where the hydro is located.
If it's up a mountain somewhere, you need to blast a serpentine roadup a mountain and construct massive transmission. That's going to be tied up in court forever on environmental concerns.
If there's no existing reservoir you need to make one by drowning wast swaths of land; usually a lot of people live there or own forrest property or whatever and it's a huge mess.
If it's far from where the water is located, you need longer pipelines to pump the water, with larger friction losses.
If it's far from where the people live, your powerlines will be very expensive and disruptive. If it's far from where the power plant is located, you also need long expensive power lines.
If it changes the hydrology of the surrounding areas too much, farmers and environmentalists will kill you. If not figuratively then literally.
With a 50 meter drop you need to build a new lake superior. That's the scale of things.
"They found that the sun produces the most energy at midday"
Looks like we've got so real Einsteins working in this project
Two solutions come to mind.
1) Invest more in not only solar panels but also batteries to flatten the supply curve (on the solar electricity producer side)
2) Sell electricity at different prices during different times of day to flatten the demand curve. When you have excess power, sell it for less, when you have less power (more need for batteries etc) sell it for more. Maybe some people will shift their power use due to economic incentives. Maybe they'll buy their own batteries, and charge them during the least priced hours, and use it the rest of the day...
Özer Tayiz. Check out Fullycharged. It us a uk UA-cam channel and they do just that in the uk.
Thanks, I'll check it out. Makes sense, I'm not surprised. And UK is up north, not even really much sun potential...
I envision a future civilization with new, used, and discarded batteries (of various sizes) everywhere like cigarette butts and water bottles. Why not use nuclear power--expensive up front, cheap in the long run?
"They* found that the sun produces most energy at mid-day."
You had to research to know that?
Yes. It’s not enough to just know that it reaches the max at midday, you need to also know the actual quantity of power generation throughout all times of day in order to manage a power plant. You don’t just stop at a surface level understanding and then proceed to learn nothing else.
@@michaelk9279 Finally. A person with sense has arrived.
Ideally more and more people just buy their own batteries which would lessen that spike of demand.
Look up economies of scale. While you can distribute battery storage, there are other storage solutions which don't really scale down.
The problem is that power storage isn't that economical. Ok, understatement of the week I know, but that's why.
you do understand that for a battery you need DC voltage and current so if you want to store power in it you can't use the power from the network since It's AC voltage. Therefore you either have to use your own solar cell which generates DC power or you have to have a rectifier which turns AC to DC and an Inverter which does the opposite as you might have guessed already it is very costly. therefore, we either have to develop much better batteries to store solar energy during day in solar power plants or we have to use another method for storing energy like dams, molten salt fuel cells etc.
C Lincoln, so government can steal even more money from people who are actually generating income (only around 50% of adults, pathetically) and put it towards giant batteries in order to justify a hair-brained energy scheme that would be totally unnecessary if we just scaled up nuclear energy? Wow! Sign me up!
kowalityjesus I wouldn't say with such confidence that scaling up nuclear energy will solve anything. Thogh it is true that each person having his own battery is kinda nonsensical. However around ten to twenty years from now when everyone have their own electric vehicles we may be able to use their batteries. This is actually a subject of study around the world.
India's initiative of one world one solar grid can help basically in supplying excess of one side to another.
That's cool in theory, but most countries want electrical autonomy, not a potential strategic dependency. In the US at least, we've seen massive investment into solar and fracking because they both reduce dependence on foreign entities for energy.
@@Lazirus951 The creation of the modern "Nation-State" could be called the worse thing that man has ever invented. Holds humanity as a whole back so much.
@@Lazirus951 You forgot to mention it may not be realistic to go very far from the source unless the electric current flow without restriction (supraconductivity).
There's already a kick-ass battery in Australia doing exactly that job.
Shush, ... secret.
Yay, 18th century technology keeping innovation stagnant.
Breeder reactor nuclear would make solar and fossil fuels not only obsolete, but far too expensive to even be considered. We could have so much electricity it would cost more to charge for it than not. Post-Scarcity is possible, and we perfected the tech for it in the 1980s. Too bad Big Coal and Big Environmental are suppressing it.
'big environmental', right...
Tesla's $50M "Big Battery" in South Australia can only store 125MWh - or about 1/50th of the states peak hour demand! It is not "doing exactly that job" as you say. It is only designed to "stand in" for the few minutes that the big plants need to take up a sudden increase in demand.
That single battery station is not the solution for a complete nation. It's just a first step and a proof of concept.
I think it looks more like a goose curve
I think it looks more like a puma
its a snek
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Sickle Curve
snake curve
Energy storage (strangely enough not mentioned!!) is the solution to this problem and over time the old fashioned power plants can be turned off. Simple.
Build trillions of dollars worth of batteries with many orders of magnitude more battery storage than the world can build, simple.
kokofan50
Or give every house like 5 car baterrys to store thier own power
Yeah, a few batteries are going to get you through a winter storm or power a factory.
You can just use excess electricity to produce Hydrogen and Oxygen from water so that it can be used as fuel for a hydrogen fuel cell and therefore be used later on.
Aaron Lowe, and how long and how much money is that going to take?
Solution in Austria: PSH - Pumped-storage hydroelectricity
you know that california is a desert(mostly)
roy k you know that most of the US isn’t california
@@royk7712 you know Australia is mostly desert? ;)
The biggest problem I see with this is that there are many areas in the US that have next to no ability to implement hydroelectricity. I live in CO which is a highland desert. A large amount of the continent is arid or semi-arid.
However, this does bring up an important concept that needs to be further implemented which is that we need to use multiple styles of renewable energy in tandem and, if possible, decrease overall consumption/give incentive to use energy during times when electricity is most readily available.
@@GregHighPressure I come from Austria, not Australia! ;-)
At first I thought the duck curve was some way that sunlight reflected off of the solar panel causing less to be soaked up.
Praise The Sun
*\[T]/*
You are Everywhere
YOU ARE EVERYWHERE
Justin Y. The Great Demon is here
Justin Y. Its me video game dunky on my way trucking to moscow
\[T]'/
Imao why did you copy 😂
One day I will go solar and dump my utility company. they have a monopoly.
You'd most likely have a battery storing unused solar to be used at night. I don't understand the issue in this video. Countries sell power to each other. America operates at a net loss of electricity (we have to purchase elect from other countries to meet demand). Solar is helping bridge the gap.
No they don't, you can pick your producer in PG&E if you want.
World experience different times all at the same time, thats why international power grid can help a lot to make the solar power curve more horizontal, and managable, edit: difference of an hour or two can make a lot of difference, it is not about giving electricity from Bharat to Mexico or vice versa during ones night but to blunt the peaks of usage and production curve.
Divyansh_34 No, that is not the solution. There are power losses over distance and high voltage lines cost a lot of money. You would need to transport electricity from continent to continent for your idea. And THAT definitely is not an option.
Wow, that looks like a solution, but only international exchange between neighbors will be hardly of any use. We’ll have to transfer it to the other side of the world, then there comes the looses.
No that wont solve anything.
1. It's very expensive.
2. The longer electricity runs, the more it is being wasted to heat.
3. If one country or region takes up the main load of energy production, any disaster or problem in that region will end up affecting the world.
Countries need to be more independent in the wake of covid
Another issue is that the world operates on different grid frequencies and voltages. These have to match up to connect grids. To switch so that they do match would create a lot of e-waste from all the electronics that run on the removed systems.
Can't remember what it's called but they do store solar energy for when there is no day light. They use the energy, that would be wasted otherwise, to pump water to top of reservoirs, hills, etc, so when they need the energy that can let gravity pull the water down and turn a turbine which will create instant energy for when they need it.
Yep there's pumped storage, also molten salt solar power, battery storage, and there's the simple mix of renewable energy sources to provide constant baseload :)
I work in the control room of a nuclear power plant and renewable energy supply does affect our operations. It "forces" us to ramp down due to "negative power pricing." This means it cost the plant money to put it on the grid. I few hours later prices will change and we will ramp back up.
The point of the video is not or should not be that solar panels make the most power at noon. The point is that solar and wind create large uncontrolled fluctuations in power prices that effects the whole electrical power ecosystem.
Change in power prices will invite new investors anyways. What'll keep nuclear and coal bases alive is the fact that they can price their availability. Electricity price is composed of availability + energy itself. Renewables cannot provide the availability aspect, meaning that you will likely keep your job for a while. You probably won't ever have a pay raise though.
Jung Yul Kim what keeps Nuclear and coal alive is the fact that they produce a sustainable amount of energy the public can use, while solar and wind can’t meet our needs (solar might one day with better batteries, but wind will never be able to produce enough electricity).
Wind could produce as much s 40 times what we need. And with including wind fluctuations into the calculation you would need to have enough turbines that together they would cover Spain. But that's about the same size as the number of open pit coal mines in the world now, so well that doesn't seem that big of a deal.
www.businessinsider.com/how-many-wind-turbines-would-it-take-to-power-the-world-2016-10
howard baxter -- I do hope you realise that nuclear is the ONLY clean alternative to coal. If folk who think that they're environmentalist could grasp this, we'd not need to clutter up fields with solar panels, and need permission as to how many hundreds of eagles it's permissible to kill in Altamont Pass with propeller blades 50 metres long.
Wind goes from producing three times what anybody wants, to none at all, with very little warning.
So silly Video! There are solutions. Why not mention them?
Because the video is sponsored by big oil.
just use eolic and hydroelectrical energy at night. Not so hard right?
No there is no simple solution. You got to store over produced energy. Right now that is not possible in such huge numbers.
@@Hallointhehouseif you think about is not true, in Italy, where we have a lot of hydroelectrical energy, we pump during the late night some water up, as the cost is really low. If the price will drop at midday, you can pump some water up and use that power as storage
@@CarraroAlberto And how much land it would take to store energy, enough for one whole state, or even one country, in more than a few hours? How about the region where the water supply is just enough for drinking and household purposes? What is the cost to build and sustain it? Is it as cost-efficient as the coal power plant? You think that those people in energy industry are all evil and did not think that as a solution, or maybe they already know that this is still not business viable? Sometimes people can be so naive
Point: We got really bad battery game and we need to up it for efficient energy storage. We need it now.
The Duck Curve should be looked at more like an opportunity rather than a problem. Instead, look at it as an opportunity. There is a time of day where there is an over-abundance of power, which can be bought cheaply, and put to good ends. Like, say, carbon/pollution scrubbing in a city. Or converting that electricity into chemical energy (like hydrogen or even recreating petroleum products) and reselling.
Why are they talking about renewable energy like it's only solar power? A lot of these problems can be fixed with hydro (especially pumped-storage hydroelectricity), wind, geothermal, osmotic, etc. Let's make planet killing coal the economically unviable solution by continuing to invest in renewable energy. Coal is not worth further investment, it's a dead industry and it's been killing our planet and is for decades. Lots of small power sources will make our planet cleaner, us all healthier and will also make us more resistant to disasters that could cause mass blackouts if we continue to rely on single sources of energy.
Welp you didn’t pay enough attention: Solar panels are deployed at households, so whenever you need to use electricity, your consumption mostly comprises solar energy during a day time, however when night comes energy producers find it hard to fill the demand cause excessive usage (your solar plates aint storage u know).
@@GiorgiVardi maybe you should learn to read before trying to make a comment. Re-read the first two lines again slowly, child.
I dont believe that rewnewables can power a grid as large as the US until battery technology catches up with solar because solar would be the main way of generating energy. Wind is just not consistent enough and we dont have much geothermal potential. Nuclear is the cleanest and most reliable source of energy and can be the bridge we need to go from coal primary energy to renewable primary energy. Nuclear is the best solution for now.
The sentence „Let‘s just make some Batteries and store that extra Power during mid day so that we have it in the evening“ is missing the entirely video.
Exactly but I guess that's kind of obvious from the video's findings.
Apparently 5 years ago nobody had thought about batteries...
That is probably why I never hear this topic being mentioned anymore.
Something also connected to this is the fact that to be 100% solar or even just mostly, you always have to have more panels than their peak output, because they will not always be at peak output. Rain, clouds, etc all decrease power generation, so you need more panels to make up for the losses. So while X number of panels run at full capacity might be able to supply our energy needs, you're going to need possibly 5 times that or more, drastically increasing the cost and complexity. And let's keep in mind that whether these panels are used or not, they still need to be replaced ever X number of years. So you're basically having to replace the ENTIRE solar generation grid every 10-20 years, and that's not even including the logistics cost of it all, along with the battery and power storage side of things which is an even tougher issue because we simply don't have the battery technology to actually make widespread solar a reality, and even if we did, we would still need to replace those every X number of years too. This could very well make solar more costly than traditional energy, even though the energy itself is essentially free.
yeah and batteries have a theoretical limit to how much energy they can store, they are a lot less energy dense than gasoline and will always be it.
Making mountains out of Duck Curves.
This is great lol
Get your facts straight. Its a backstroke turtle curve
Its nice to see Vox putting out a point of view that shows the shortcomings of their point of view.
A corrections are:
1. Its not really economics why coal and nuclear can't/don't shutdown its that they aren't designed to. Turning them off can take hours or days to restart so they physically can't cycle on and off.
2. I can't speak for ALL plants in the world, but ramping up power is typically very easy on natural gas or hydro plants
3. Again, I can't talk for all plants in the world, but its far more likely gas or hydro dams would be shut off as opposed to solar.
Bonus: Some of those 'polluting' power plant photos are not power plants, but some type of petrochemical plant (the clouds are steam not pollution btw)
Big tower. Use extra power to pump water to the top. Keep the water there. Release water at night, spinning a turbine thus creating power. Ooooooooooooooooo
destroys the environment creating all these additional dams, what happens when battery's get more efficient than hydro? are you going to climb up a massive hill to swim in a water wasteland?
You should see a video by I believe Tom Scott called something like “England’s largest battery is a lake.” They do essentially this idea but with a lake instead of a water tower for this very purpose.
@@kingsinge1324 He means just cycling same water up and down a tower. It's closed-loop. No dam. Use solar to pump up during day then gravity brings it down through turbines to generate power after the sun goes down.
@@isaackvasager9957 and you seem to not grasp the concept that you can build more than one short tower, rather than one insanely tall tower? Guess we can never build a ladder again because every single we'd ever build would have to be as big as the biggest one we could ever possibly need, reaching hundreds of feet high. The trees would suffer greatly!
@@liams923 I have visited this hydro dam in Wales. It's quite a marvel. But despite its huge output, it is only useful when supporting other power stations at peak demand time, because it runs out in short time, additionally, the lake is insanely huge. This alone cannot suffice in supplying the demand of a large city, only small-medium cities.
But, if it was used in harmony with other similar principles such as using solar energy to heat a medium that can easily be stored with the energy content and using that energy content at night time to run a steam turbine engine, that could also do the trick.
And I think this latter suggestion will require far less land space.
How about each individual house have a battery bank. Currently if you want to store solar, you have to obtain a permit and pay extra.
TheFireIsOnFire sure that will be 10000/house. Wanna buy one? They exist you know.
10k on a house that will power the whole household for the day and still continue to recharge when the sun is up, electric companies will pretty much go bankrupt... no one wants that.... and plus how many middle class households would be able to finance a battery anyway.
O v e r g e n e r a t I o n
I do it at my house. I store the power generation in my cars batteries
Don't forget you would need to replace the battery after a few years. So that $10k investment turns into another $10k bill over and over again.
Ok, time to build the accumulator array. - Factorio player
Was about to suggest that 😂😂
Time to build a hundred large batteries
-Mindustry player
This video should be titled "how to say absolutely nothing while talking for 3min 57 seconds"
I kept waiting for them to say something. I just spent the last 5 weeks interning at a startup thats trying to solve the duck curve in CA. They're using second-life Nissan leaf batteries. Really cool stuff!
isn't there a way to... store solar-generaged power?
The problem is cost and materials. I dont recall specifics too well, but in short batteries are simply too expensive to meet energy demands on a nationwide scale. There was a company selling batteries large enough to help supply solar powered homes and it was 50 grand.
In addition to the problems mentioned, they would probably only make things harder for the grid operators to follow generation and demand in the short term
TOTALY NEW KIND OF BATERIES ARE NEEDED TO BE MADE..
We still don't have that kind of storage (battery) that can store that much of a power that can sustain at least a city. The technology about energy still lags behind and as mentioned there's also the economic concern.
doesn’t tesla have some
Batteries.
Yep, but very very very big batteries:
www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-06/tesla-battery-outperforms-coal-and-gas/9625726
John Redberg you mean like, batteries??
A big battery is still a battery. ;-) But I get what you mean. Rechargeable batteries are booming across all scales, from hearing aids to cell phones, personal homes, cars, office buildings, all the way up to regulating demand fluctuations in giant power plants.
your on the right track. you'd needs loads of small batteries spread out for maximum efficiency. very expensive to set uo though.
Yeah and batteries are amongst the most eco friendly things in the world and don´t use any limited ressources, flawless plan.
So, we need more efficient batteries to store solar energy. Cool. Could’ve just skipped to that
And also, other complimentary renewable systems that do not need to run all the time and can store their potential, like Hydroelectric.
Many seem to believe that Tesla's $50M "Big Battery" in South Australia is a 'duck curve' solution.. This 'battery' can only store 125MWh - or about 1/50th of the states peak hour demand! It is only designed to "stand in" for the few minutes that the big plants need to take up a sudden increase in demand.
Exactly.. Batteries are not the solution. Pumped Hydro might help. But, the future will belong to things like Thorium Power (once they solve the problem of pipe corrosion)
It's funny how everything becomes interesting when it's told in a high-quality video.
As long as it cannot be stored sufficiently, unused energy can be used to mine bitcoin.
True
Not a viable option everywhere though. The miners cost a lot, but most importantly the more miners the less profit. If every country started doing that it wouldn't be making money anymore
T R A N S A T L A N T I C P O W E R G R I D
veridisquo That‘s going to be hard.
007Cat24 that’s literally impossible.
howard baxter too late he already said it so it's gonna happen
40% of energy produced is already lost during transport. Imagine how much would be lost over distances like an ocean
HVDC or superconductors, yo.
just cut the electricity rate from 10am-4pm and have people do their laundry and recharge their electric cars etc. during this period to use up the excess capacity
come on scientists, figure out how to make a capacitor the size of a small town and smooth that curve out
To make it work it out, you need a balanced energy mix. A good example is Spain. It is an energtically isolated country, which used around 47% renewable energy in 2018. One key is to have pump stations. They are like massive battery cells of water. Also, a remove coal plants, which are extremely pollutant, and build more combined cycle power plants (natural gas). More flexible and with A lower carbon footprint
P U M P S T O R A G E
KR!RK the problem with storage is that it isn't very efficient. Pump requires a lot of space and is only around 35% efficient (electric to gas to electric). In order to meet peak demand at all times you need to have an energy source when the sun isn't shining (or wind isn't blowing) that can provide 100% power if needed. So you'd need storage of 1/0.35 = 2.86 X the current grid capacity. That just isn't possible with current technology.
Simon Chislett-McDonald why not just dig the ground and place it underground ?
syahrul mubarok could do, but that's expensive and doesn't resolve the efficiency issue.
i see
I'm with you, pump water to a high reservoir and when the demand is high move water turbines with it.
Why point to renewable energy being a problem just because traditional power plants were never well suited for grid management? Battery farms respond 100x faster to grid management needs compared to conventional power plants. When deployed these battery storage solutions are extremely effective and have dramatic cost savings due to their rapid response times. Just check out Tesla's 100 Megawatt battery farm in Australia. It can power 30k homes. It is so successful that other cities in AU are now racing to build larger storage farms.
You see solar on the rise due to technology innovations but fail to see that battery innovations are just as integral. The real revolution is solar power combined with affordable and efficient energy storage. You can even shrink the demand down to manageable units by combining residential/commercial solar, battery storage packs, and electric powered devices like a fridge, A/C, light bulb or even your electric vehicle (which also happens to be a giant battery). This creates a new type of distributed grid architecture that will make our current power grids obsolete.
Information went from analog to digital. Power is going through the same transformation. It is all about the movement of electrons~
When someone comes swerving into your lane, are you at flaunt for hitting them because you weren’t able to react fast enough to their erratic behavior or them for being erratic?
If you were texting yes
kokofan50 I believe it's the person who hit you as long as you were paying attention and not doing anything stupid like thinking autopilot ment fully autonomous and texting
This sounds like a good excuse to build the world's largest flywheels.
that type of mechanical storage is a viable contributor to act as a sink for excess production. same as stacking mass towers, pumping water to higher elevations etc...
Elon Musk already told us two years ago how to solve this issue.
I’ve heard enough. Build that Dyson Sphere!
There's no problem with running coal/gas/nuclear power on tick-over until it's needed - the only problems with that aspect are with the power plant owners' business models in the face of technological progress.
Gas - fairly responsive, Coal - slower, Nuke - very long start/stop!
Homes can have battery storage to shift solar power into night, but is there also the possibility of building an extremely high capacity battery that the power plant can manage, so it can charge it up at the bottom of the duck curve, then discharge it during peak hours so the power plant doesn't have to ramp up production so much?
I know lithium ion batteries get exponentially more tricky to produce as size increases, so I wouldn't be surprised if any battery that size isn't feasible.
Hydraulic energy storage.
It's hardly new.
Kim Yeah only like 80% efficient. What a waste.
Georg F
Considering efficiency = The amount of usefull that gets out of something to what you put into it. So what do we really need is the next point i'm getting to. We should panic about the energy crisis. It's just a crisis but thats not leathal. Anyway im never really convinced that technologie can solve it's own problems it brings with it.
Wow people Here Really dont know that batteries are inefficient, are bad for environment, dont last long and later they are bad for environment too?
Krzysztof Dolecki look up lithium batteries
Graphene is coming.
It is a chemical reaction after all, At large scales they can be recycled and be made into new cells, just at small scales such as double AA it is not worth it.
Reading from Popular mechanic,
Any battery issue is by definition a chemistry problem. In a healthy battery, ions flow freely between a cathode and an anode. Charging a battery forces ions from the cathode to the anode; using the battery reverses the flow.
Over time, this process wears out the cathode, which results in reduced capacity.
In this case why can't they just replace the electrodes. there is nothing different between Lithium from a fresh battery and a 10 year battery.
In cars it still doesnt work (recycling) so why do you think at something 10000x bigger it would
Krzysztof Dolecki but when you look at the recycling rate in the US of lead batteries it's well over 90%. I don't think it'd be too far of a stretch to implement measures that ensure larger batteries could also be recycled in a similar way!
An efficient country wide grid would balance the curve, as there is different time zones (a place were its sunset would buy energy from a place that is midday). This, and fluctuating prices according to the time of day.
Wdym ? Most countries have 1 time zone
@@red1monster_ In the european union, for example there is a common market for electricity. What needs to happen is to create common network around standards, quite like the internet. If we can achieve that, most of the need for energy storage would be no more.
In the UK, there is large power surges after certain TV shows end when a large amount of people turn on their kettles to brew tea. Power surges are hard to manage in power supplies because you can't quickly up the output. So the solution is to store that energy, and one of the best ways is to pump water uphill and r lease it into a turbine when demand rises or supply needs to rise.
1:19 "sun produces the most energy"
No, at 12pm sunlight falls perpendicular(nearly) to any location(Except for the North-South poles). As lightbeams travel shorter distance in the atmosphere, they are able to maintain most of their energy.
Elon Musk: "Hold my beer".
Tesla Powerpack/Powerwall!
Problem solved.
(Just look at the amazing 120 MWh battery in Australia)
Sam Car Tesla’s earnings call stated he’s doing a 1000 MWH battery system this year.
Wow so many people in the comments talking about big technological problems while being so out of touch of actual technological reality.
The amount of energy we need to store in batteries to rely on solar power and the amount of energy we can feasibly store in batteries without digging the entire surface of the planet for fancy metals and pawning the world's economy to do it are on different orders of magnitude.
Currently a lot of energy suppliers have deals where energy used during the night is cheaper to encourage people to use appliances like (dish)washers and dryers run during the night which helps decrease the nighttime dip. Something similar can be used but rather for energy used during midday.
Combinations of power sources also can help stabilise things, there might be no sun at night, but there can still be wind and rain which can spin turbines to generate electricity.
Furthermore, building lots of battery storage dedicated to this is not realistic, but things like electric cars can function as grid storage. People can set their chargers to allow backwards flow (in order to supply higher demand when the car isn't in use anyway) as long as the battery doesn't go below a certain value, or is at least charged to a certain extend at a certain time.
Put some of the panels to the east for the morning peak, and some to the west for the evening.
louis callewaert makes more sense than batteries
Yeah. America basically needs a crap ton of solar in the Southwest, an upgraded grid, and a few batteries. Now you just need the funding.
Why not just track the sun at that point? besides most solar panels in industry do sun tracking.
Rotating the panels require additional investment and the motor driving it uses energy. But yes, that is also a way of reducing this curve.
It makes the array less efficient and it would take more time to return on investment. the duck curve can be solved by plugging ev cars at midday to increase the demand and absorb the peaking solar production.
0:21 why does this guy sound like thanos
Thanos is that a relative of you?
It’s remarkable that this video is already obsolete.
So much happened in the last years. We’ve already found solutions.
Vox:this duck is the problem
Me:peace was never an option
Duck Curve
Nuclear and hydro is the better option
Nuclear produces nuclear waste though.
Nuclear waste isn't nearly as big of a problem as often believed, simply by the fact that the amount produced is minuscule compared to the toxic wastes produced by even solar panel production. Regardless the waste output relative to energy output has continued to decline over the past few decades due to both more efficient power production processes and via the recycling technologies which have made considerable advances is recent years.
Alright what if we set up some really big wires and send the overgenerated energy around the world to countries that arent facing the sun at that moment
Voltage drop across that distance would mean the receiving areas would get virtually nothing
You would have amp up the voltage to such stupid levels that it becomes ro dangerous for transport. This does exist within europe. But it requires superconductors. And the price for that is intense. Also needs to be underground.
It's simple. In the UK we use water reservoirs as batteries. During mid day when there is an extensive amount of energy we use excess energy to pump water up to a reservoir on hill.... Then when it gets dark and more supply is required we let the water out into a lower resivare... As the water flows it goes through turbines...
Basically a rely big battery! Quite efficient aswell :)
Like how this video is very well made and neutral 👍
Sounds like coal companies are being salty over electric plants.
Where is the solution? Battery storage? EV adoption is going up. Soon we can even use EVs to store power and give it back if needed. Curtailment and energy storage should be discussed hand in hand. This is just one side of the equation.
Speaking of one side of the equation, discuss lithium mining, the nickel contamination of making these batteries, the millions sickened and killed where these batteries and solar panels are made each year, and how we get past that and say screw those people like you seem to want to.
Lots of calculus to consider here.
Sounds like utilities should really push businesses to install chargers at work so that the batteries in electric cars can be charged during peak production instead of overnight at nadir production. Most cars just sit all day regardless, and I believe batteries often like to charge slowly.