New Record Bid Set for World's Cheapest Solar, Undercutting Coal

Re:New Record Bid Set for World's Cheapest Solar, Undercutti... by ghshephard on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @10:56PM (#11633710)

I'm curious - can you name a scenario in which battery storage isn't reasonable? It seems to me that once we hit the cost/price/weight/density points, they are a solution to pretty much any problem of power storage.

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Re:New Record Bid Set for World's Cheapest Solar, Undercutti... by yxhuvud on Thursday May 05, 2016 @02:18AM (#11634309)

Seasonal imbalances, as stated otherwise in thread. Image you have no sun for a month each year. Good luck building enough batteries to handle that.

The strong part of pumped hydropower is that it scales really really well even if the baseline efficiency isn't stellar.

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Re:New Record Bid Set for World's Cheapest Solar, Undercutti... by maxerickson on Thursday May 05, 2016 @02:04PM (#11638392)

This is a roughly 12 hour reservoir:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9207263,-86.3978435,18314m/d...

It's a big power station, 1.8 GW, but is only providing service to portion of consumers in Michigan.

Making it 10 times bigger would probably be doable but it wouldn't be trivial.

It's also one of the better places on the planet to build a single reservoir system (otherwise you need 2 enormous reservoirs).

I wonder if the answer to seasonal variation will be to make fuel in the summer.

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Re:New Record Bid Set for World's Cheapest Solar, Undercutti... by xbmcuser on Saturday May 07, 2016 @01:40AM (#11648535)

A larger connected world grid could solve some of the problems 10 years or so ago I read some articles of producing solar power in Africa and then using it in Europe.

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