Solar generates more energy than coal in US for 1st time: Report

Now let's see it work when the sun doesn't shine.

Tuur said:

Now let's see it work when the sun doesn't shine.

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Gosh, like at night? That's just when you need power for lighting. Maybe no-one has taken that into account.

Bradskii said:

Gosh, like at night? That's just when you need power for lighting. Maybe no-one has taken that into account.

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No. In the winter you also need it for heating. A good bit actually. In my career I've seen the utility where I work go from summer peaking to winter peaking. And no, they haven't taken it into account. If they had, they would be concentrating on power storage, which lets you do a whole lot more stuff that solar panels. The methods we have of power storage now isn't all they're cracked up to be, as we learned trying to find a place where we could safely put one.

Now, this isn't going to agree with the narrative, so it won't be believed. That's one reason I keep looking at home generation. Might be a good idea if others did, too. Or they can sit in the dark. Their call. I no longer care.

Bradskii said:

Gosh, like at night? That's just when you need power for lighting. Maybe no-one has taken that into account.

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Simple, you switch the lights on and aim them on the solar panel. It will generate the power you need.

I don't particularly feel like joking about it. The lack of energy storage is the Achilles' Heel of any intermittent source of electricity. There always seems to be a breakthrough "on the horizon," like it's claimed about nuclear fusion. Maybe there is; maybe there isn't. All I know is it's been a long time coming.

The lithium ion batteries in great big battery banks are fine when nothing goes wrong, but you have to plan for things going wrong. Just how much you have to plan is eye-opening. They would really help our utility if we could put them were we need them, and that's just with the normal cycles of electricity use, but we can't because houses are too close if something goes wrong. Dual reservoir systems relying on water to store energy are better than nothing, but require the right terrain, and droughts play havoc with them. The molten sulfur batteries that were so promising some decades ago apparently weren't. There's a new chemical system that looks promising and with a higher energy density, but I've lost my notes about it and right now it's only a potential.

And no, the inherent instability in wind and solar isn't being considered like it should because the ones who make the decisions aren't. I've seen this before, first with load deferment that was supposed to prevent the need to build new generation but didn't take into account increasing load due to growth; then with load deferment and the idea that we could always get electricity from areas without a high demand. And then came the day when there was nowhere we could get enough electricity and load deferment wasn't going to cut it. We got through that day and a few others not as close by the skin of our teeth, then ran great big diesel generators the size of semi-truck trailers until peaking stations came online. And now the hot thing is solar, with the conceit that there will be sufficient backup for when the sun doesn't shine, all while load increases due to growth and coal plants are decommissioned. This is worse than what I saw forty years ago, and not funny at all, not one little bit.

Energy storage is where the emphasis should be, but isn't. It's not glamourous.

I really do need to see about home backup power before I retire. What I'm seeing now is just a different verse of the same old song.

Since I live in a place with plenty of sun all year long. I would love to have solar panels.

Tuur said:

And no, they haven't taken it into account. If they had, they would be concentrating on power storage...

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If by 'they' you mean the current administration then I can't really disagree. Trump seems to be doing everything he can to wind back renewable energy.

Just as a heads up, South Australia is looking to go 100% renewables sometime next year: South Australia fast-tracks 100 pct renewables target to 2027

'The South Australia state government says it has fast tracked its target of “net 100 per cent” renewables to 2027 – rather than 2030 – as a result of the state’s new wind and solar developments and its ambitious hydrogen plans.

South Australia already leads the world with more 71 per cent (or 74 per cent according to government data) of its annual demand being met by wind and solar only over the last 12 months.'

Our 6.0kW solar panel installation cost around U$3500 and we've just been quoted about U$2000 for a battery. If you have a government that is very keen to push for renewables, then the price comes down and more people get involved.

And from here: Household solar electricity generation in the Australian national accounts

'Since 2010, supported by government incentives and improving technology, rooftop solar installations have surged. Australia now leads the world in per capita household solar, with more than 4 million homes - approximately one in three – equipped with solar panels.'

Perpetual Student said:

Simple, you switch the lights on and aim them on the solar panel. It will generate the power you need.

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We had a very clear night last week and a full moon. I actually checked the solar panel app to see if it was generating anything. I thought maybe a couple of Watts? But...nada. Cloudy and raining at the moment and I'm not getting a half kiloWatt.

CRAZY_CAT_WOMAN said:

Since I live in a place with plenty of sun all year long. I would love to have solar panels.

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They had a long pay-back time; maybe still do. Those that stay connected to the grid are cheaper than those with storage batteries. Keep in mind that batteries degrade. The panels, too, but much slower than the batteries and not by as much.

Tuur said:

They had a long pay-back time; maybe still do. Those that stay connected to the grid are cheaper than those with storage batteries. Keep in mind that batteries degrade. The panels, too, but much slower than the batteries and not by as much.

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Actually I prefer the battery. My aunt had a choice to get batteries. But she didn't. And she doesn't loose power, since got them. It snows and rains where she lives, during the winter.It sunny in the winter, where I live.

Tuur said:

I don't particularly feel like joking about it. The lack of energy storage is the Achilles' Heel of any intermittent source of electricity. There always seems to be a breakthrough "on the horizon," like it's claimed about nuclear fusion. Maybe there is; maybe there isn't. All I know is it's been a long time coming.

The lithium ion batteries in great big battery banks are fine when nothing goes wrong, but you have to plan for things going wrong. Just how much you have to plan is eye-opening. They would really help our utility if we could put them were we need them, and that's just with the normal cycles of electricity use, but we can't because houses are too close if something goes wrong. Dual reservoir systems relying on water to store energy are better than nothing, but require the right terrain, and droughts play havoc with them. The molten sulfur batteries that were so promising some decades ago apparently weren't. There's a new chemical system that looks promising and with a higher energy density, but I've lost my notes about it and right now it's only a potential.

And no, the inherent instability in wind and solar isn't being considered like it should because the ones who make the decisions aren't. I've seen this before, first with load deferment that was supposed to prevent the need to build new generation but didn't take into account increasing load due to growth; then with load deferment and the idea that we could always get electricity from areas without a high demand. And then came the day when there was nowhere we could get enough electricity and load deferment wasn't going to cut it. We got through that day and a few others not as close by the skin of our teeth, then ran great big diesel generators the size of semi-truck trailers until peaking stations came online. And now the hot thing is solar, with the conceit that there will be sufficient backup for when the sun doesn't shine, all while load increases due to growth and coal plants are decommissioned. This is worse than what I saw forty years ago, and not funny at all, not one little bit.

Energy storage is where the emphasis should be, but isn't. It's not glamourous.

I really do need to see about home backup power before I retire. What I'm seeing now is just a different verse of the same old song.

Click to expand...

What about offshore wind, it works well, have a capacity factor of about 0.4 (about the same as for US coal plants, can increase to about 0.7 if need be) and should work well along both northern half of the contiguous US coast (they would work ok even in the southern half in most cases)?

If you build them in places where you already have well functioning hydroelectric power generation, you intentionally save water when the wind is blowing (which off shore is most of the time) and use hydroelectric when wind capacity is low.

Is the total capacity for pumped storage hydroelectricity fully developed?

You build some overcapacity and then you integrate the electric grid along the seabords, it works very well.

If need be you can have some quick starting gasturbines or gas heat and power for emergencies.

That way you maximize the economies of both intermittent technologies (they should be utilized as much as possible, installation is expensive while fuel costs are low) and gas power generation (should be used minimally, it is the fuel cost that dominates over time).

My guess is that capacity factor for wind power is quite good across the great plain as well, so while there might not be a panacea for power generation using the right tools in the right places should make it possible to use non-fossil sources of power generation in many places in the US.

For alternative power to work well, wide area networks are necessary. It might be raining in California but sunny in Arizona. It might be cold, wet and windless in New York, but blowing a gale in Wyoming.

I think down the track hyrdogen is going to be a large part of the energy mix. The infrastructure isn't there yet, but given enough time and economic desperation, it will come.

Bob Crowley said:

For alternative power to work well, wide area networks are necessary. It might be raining in California but sunny in Arizona. It might be cold, wet and windless in New York, but blowing a gale in Wyoming.

I think down the track hyrdogen is going to be a large part of the energy mix. The infrastructure isn't there yet, but given enough time and economic desperation, it will come.

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"given enough time and economic desperation, it will come."
Yes, but I want things being in place an,d running before the situation becomes desperate.
The scientific world has been warning for this at least since the 80's, but politics remained deaf.
Trump is even rewinding the little efforts that have been done.

Bob Crowley said:

For alternative power to work well, wide area networks are necessary. It might be raining in California but sunny in Arizona. It might be cold, wet and windless in New York, but blowing a gale in Wyoming.

I think down the track hyrdogen is going to be a large part of the energy mix. The infrastructure isn't there yet, but given enough time and economic desperation, it will come.

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Yeah…no, I remember this being pitched in the late ’70s; too volatile outside of fuel cells.

Perpetual Student said:

"given enough time and economic desperation, it will come."
Yes, but I want things being in place an,d running before the situation becomes desperate.
The scientific world has been warning for this at least since the 80's, but politics remained deaf.
Trump is even rewinding the little efforts that have been done.

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If we switch how we generate electricity then the people who make the money now, (doing it), won’t be getting that money in the future, so they’ll lobby for no change to occur.

You Are Here.

Stopped_lurking said:

What about offshore wind, it works well, have a capacity factor of about 0.4 (about the same as for US coal plants, can increase to about 0.7 if need be) and should work well along both northern half of the contiguous US coast (they would work ok even in the southern half in most cases)?

If you build them in places where you already have well functioning hydroelectric power generation, you intentionally save water when the wind is blowing (which off shore is most of the time) and use hydroelectric when wind capacity is low.

Is the total capacity for pumped storage hydroelectricity fully developed?

You build some overcapacity and then you integrate the electric grid along the seabords, it works very well.

If need be you can have some quick starting gasturbines or gas heat and power for emergencies.

That way you maximize the economies of both intermittent technologies (they should be utilized as much as possible, installation is expensive while fuel costs are low) and gas power generation (should be used minimally, it is the fuel cost that dominates over time).

My guess is that capacity factor for wind power is quite good across the great plain as well, so while there might not be a panacea for power generation using the right tools in the right places should make it possible to use non-fossil sources of power generation in many places in the US.

Click to expand...

There's this resource:


I have seen functioning windmill powered pumps, and they worked through the use of a huge water tank on the tower. That did two things: Use gravity to provide water pressure and allowed enough water to be captured prior to use that you didn't have to worry about running out if the wind wasn't blowing or not blowing hard. Otherwise, you run into what one peach packer did that used a windmill powered conveyor belt: When the wind barely blew it was useless; when it blew too hard, it was like that Lucile Ball skit with her and Vivian Vance working a high-speed conveyor belt in a chocolate factory. Yes, the wind powered conveyor belt really happened. Energy storage does much the same thing as that huge water tank on the old wind powered water pumps.

I don't think dual reservoir systems have been built as much as they could but there we run into public opposition. The first is the same that's led to the decommissioning of dams in places in the US. The second is fish kills. Utilities typically sell large reservoir projects as providing a place for recreation, including fishing. There was one such energy storage project in the SE US that I recall precisely because, with all the reporters and TV news crews assembled for the ceremony to officially put it online, the water turned red right in front of the cameras. A school of fish happened to get pulled into it and pureed. Public relations disaster. I really think that was behind that utility abandoning another such project, which was purchased and completed by another utility. But it's interesting to note that that other utility, to the best of my knowledge, never built another.

Gas powered peaking stations are typically used to tide over utilities during times of high demands and as a fall back. That's what was built by our power supplier while we were running those great big portable diesel generators to get through peak use. Those turbines can spin up very quickly. They are also noisy and there has been some public opposition because of it. The biggest opposition has been that they use fossil fuels and produce greenhouse gasses. That there might not be a better option doesn't get considered. If the goal is to reduce greenhouse gasses, then building gas powered peaking stations for standby for wind and solar is a big help. It's not like zero emissions but it's less than what we'd have otherwise.

My favorite is nuclear, which gives some the heebie-jeebies, but when in operation doesn't produce greenhouse gasses at all. Note that this often seems to be off-the-table due to issues like disposing of nuclear waste. That leads to the question of which do we want less? Greenhouse gasses or nuclear waste? There's seldom perfect solutions.

Bob Crowley said:

For alternative power to work well, wide area networks are necessary. It might be raining in California but sunny in Arizona. It might be cold, wet and windless in New York, but blowing a gale in Wyoming.

I think down the track hyrdogen is going to be a large part of the energy mix. The infrastructure isn't there yet, but given enough time and economic desperation, it will come.

Click to expand...

Line losses. We lose some electricity just by it flowing through a conductor. There are long distance ultra high voltage DC transmission lines, but they're uncommon. That limits how far we can move electricity. A lot of buying electricity from elsewhere is really buying capacity. The electricity we get is mostly from local generation simply by the way this stuff works. If someone has the option of buying green power and there's a coal fired plant close by, guess where their power actually comes from. That said, they're buying green capacity, which evens out, in a way.

I'll simply note that we thought we could do precisely what you propose back in the late 20th Century. What happened is that sometimes those weather conditions that are causing high usage in one place happens over a huge region. And that's how we ran into a situation where there was no extra electricity to be had.

It would be wonderful if we could buy electricity on one side of the continent for use on the other. If we build enough ultra high voltage DC transmission lines that might be possible, but we're talking about something more than just one line, and people tend not to like having transmission towers where they can see them.

Perpetual Student said:

"given enough time and economic desperation, it will come."
Yes, but I want things being in place an,d running before the situation becomes desperate.
The scientific world has been warning for this at least since the 80's, but politics remained deaf.
Trump is even rewinding the little efforts that have been done.

Click to expand...

Sigh.

Trump, Trump, Trump. There needs to be a separate discussion area where people can go to just type "Trump." It wasn't Trump who had the "bright" idea of zero emissions. It wasn't Trump who pushed load deferment, then load deferment and purchasing power elsewhere as a means of not having to build new generation. Good flipping grief. We were looking at rolling blackouts before Trump ever thought about running for office.

If this nation thinks it can go to zero emissions with what we have now, it's going to be sitting in the dark. Period. You want renewables? Fine. Require energy storage for the same capacity, or keep standby fossil fuel powered generation to get you through the shortfalls. But that's the common sense solution, so it won't happen.

Tuur said:

There's this resource:

https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/windexchange/maps-and-data

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Along the east coast off-shore wind turbines look feasible (or perhaps even suitable), the average wind speeds are very good and it doesn't get too deep too fast. The depths increase much faster on the west coast but there it looks like you can build coastal based instead, without any big loss in average wind speeds.

For the Great plains I looked at Nebraska, they seem to have quite good wind conditions for land based installations.

Tuur said:

I have seen functioning windmill powered pumps, and they worked through the use of a huge water tank on the tower. That did two things: Use gravity to provide water pressure and allowed enough water to be captured prior to use that you didn't have to worry about running out if the wind wasn't blowing or not blowing hard. Otherwise, you run into what one peach packer did that used a windmill powered conveyor belt: When the wind barely blew it was useless; when it blew too hard, it was like that Lucile Ball skit with her and Vivian Vance working a high-speed conveyor belt in a chocolate factory. Yes, the wind powered conveyor belt really happened. Energy storage does much the same thing as that huge water tank on the old wind powered water pumps.

Click to expand...

I'm talking about large wind power projects where you integrate them with existing power grids, Denmark produces ~60% of their electrical power from wind, the next big contributor for them is waste heat (from district heating by biomass) and bio-energy. No nuclear, coal or natural gas. From time to time they can say that they are 100% carbon-neutral, so they beat us (Sweden) to it (j/k)

We still have a 660 MW oil fired powerplant left (with some gas turbines), but it only runs if necessary. Still we can't say we our electricity production is carbon-neutral (we are 98-99% carbon neutral).

Tuur said:

I don't think dual reservoir systems have been built as much as they could but there we run into public opposition. The first is the same that's led to the decommissioning of dams in places in the US. The second is fish kills. Utilities typically sell large reservoir projects as providing a place for recreation, including fishing. There was one such energy storage project in the SE US that I recall precisely because, with all the reporters and TV news crews assembled for the ceremony to officially put it online, the water turned red right in front of the cameras. A school of fish happened to get pulled into it and pureed. Public relations disaster. I really think that was behind that utility abandoning another such project, which was purchased and completed by another utility. But it's interesting to note that that other utility, to the best of my knowledge, never built another.

Gas powered peaking stations are typically used to tide over utilities during times of high demands and as a fall back. That's what was built by our power supplier while we were running those great big portable diesel generators to get through peak use. Those turbines can spin up very quickly. They are also noisy and there has been some public opposition because of it. The biggest opposition has been that they use fossil fuels and produce greenhouse gasses. That there might not be a better option doesn't get considered. If the goal is to reduce greenhouse gasses, then building gas powered peaking stations for standby for wind and solar is a big help. It's not like zero emissions but it's less than what we'd have otherwise.

Click to expand...

Tell them you can run them on HVO or biogas. If they are only used sparingly the extra cost becomes negligible or very small. With a properly diversified power grid both in terms of sources and geography (in the north-south direction, east-west might be harder due to the long distances) they should only be needed in the most extreme circumstances.

Tuur said:

My favorite is nuclear, which gives some the heebie-jeebies, but when in operation doesn't produce greenhouse gasses at all. Note that this often seems to be off-the-table due to issues like disposing of nuclear waste. That leads to the question of which do we want less? Greenhouse gasses or nuclear waste? There's seldom perfect solutions.

Click to expand...

New nuclear plants are very slow to be built.

The US is a gigantic country so there are bound to be different solutions that suit its parts differently well.



Yes, there are negative pricing.




I went and checked, right now we import a small amount of power (first picture) because Poland and Germany have some excess capacity (we save money by using theirs instead). We can do this because we have so much "easily" controlled hydroelectric capacity.

Kärnkraft - nuclear power
Vattenkraft - hydroelectric (lit. water power)
Vindkraft - wind power
Ospecificerat - unspecified (mostly solar)