We currently make hydrogen and ammonia from methane - there's no financially viable way to make it from electricity which is generated from fossil fuels (and therefore always costs more). Once that electricity becomes free or negative, it completely changes the economics.
You’re ignoring capital costs. Try to think of all the things you know what consume electricity and compare the price of that thing to the cost of the electricity it consumes.
Specifically, free electricity is only useful if the cost of electricity is a high percentage of the cost of the machine that consumes it. E.g. building a $10M machine that normally consumes $100k worth of electricity in its lifetime doesn’t make sense just because the electricity becomes free (or even priced at negative $100k). You’d still be spending 99% on the machine itself, thus saving — at most — 1% due to cheaper electricity.
We’ve seen Tesla do it quite successfully in Australia, no reason why we won’t start seeing similar thing happening in the U.K.
I also suspect that there are many applications of unpredictable bursts of free electricity (I don’t really know what “unstable” electricity means when it comes to pricing). The most obvious is district heating, it’s a massive natural energy store. You can use the electricity to reduce your consumption of what other energy supply you normally use.
Then there are things like canal pumps. You could basically turn canals into huge hydrostores by varying their level by a few cm. This is just demand shifting, but no reason why you can’t do it.
Basically any application that currently involves topping up a natural energy store, whether that be pumped water, heat, or just any lifted mass. Could be converted to shift demand to take advantage of low or negative energy prices.
All of these systems have natural buffers that can be utilised safely and cheaply. They just need the economic incentive to make it happen. And there are far more of them in the world than most people realise.
For example, we wouldn't want unpredictable/unstable bursts of heating and cooling for buildings; but it would be very useful for a heat source/sink, which a building's heating/cooling can use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning
Likewise, batteries which will be used on a known schefule don't need to be charged as quickly as possible (which is the current assumption for most charging). For example, we can slow/delay charging of commercial vehicles in case prices go down.
Datacentres can also spin up machines in seconds to take advantage of lower energy costs. Cloud providers like AWS allow resources to be auctioned off, e.g. we can put latency-insensitive tasks (backups, indexing, report generation, etc.) in a queue until resource costs drop below $X/minute (if it lingers for too long we can either re-insert with a higher threshold, or cancel and process at normal price).
The cost estimate for batteries was about $137/kWh last year.
Therefore, ITER costs about as much as ~160 GWh of storage, which is enough for the entire UK for 4 hours 40 minutes… or the thermal output of ITER for 13 days, 9 hours. Which is enough to cover even the least productive production gaps in combined wind and solar output. Also, those batteries are rechargeable and last at least 1000 cycles, which would be a bit more than 36.5 years of drain (even with negligible recharge time), which is 16.5 years longer than the planned lifetime of ITER.
And remember, the batteries are made at a profit, even including the cost of building the factories.
PV has been growing at close to ~37% per year (compound) since 1992, and at current rates will be making almost all electricity by 2025 and all power (i.e. enough to electrify transport, heat, etc.) by 2030. And given wind and solar are currently the two cheapest form of power, it is very plausible the growth of these two will continue at least to the 50% point.
I find it fascinating that a tech focused forum like HN is so intent on taking an inferior solutions like wind and solar which literally can't provide enough heat for the majority of needs we have, can't scale, requires insane amounts of land, requires complex daisy chains of different solutions to work, isn't reliable, requires absurd amounts of resources, needs backup from oil, coal, gas or nuclear and won't be able to deliver anything even close to useful baseload and most importantly is so inadequate when it comes to thinking about any future civilisations energy needs both in scale and density. A forum like this people still clings to these Rube Goldberg constellations and think they are somehow supportiing progress. Especially since 3billion people still don't have proper access to energy. Oh well.
I know. I made implicit reference to that with the 2025/2030 split.
> I find it fascinating that a tech focused forum like HN is so intent on taking an inferior solutions like wind and solar which…
Has it occurred to you that you might be… wrong? I mean, when I find myself disagreeing with a lot of smart people, I do ask myself that question. I could go thought all of your claims separately, but I’ve never found that to be successful at convincing anyone.
Everything. Literally everything.
> wind and solar which literally can't provide enough heat for the majority of needs we have
Almost all heat on Earth is solar in origin, including the majority that we don’t use.
> can't scale
Scales up to Kardashev III.
> requires insane amounts of land
Only looks like lots of land because there’s 7 billion people.
15TW all-source power use * 1kW/m^2 * 20% cell efficiency * 25% capacity factor = 300,000 square km = 1.7 years of lost rainforest = 38.9 m^2/person = a little more than half my apartment as land area per person.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=15TW%20%2F%28%201kw%2Fm...
Again, that 38.9 m^2/person is for all power — heating and transport, domestic and industrial usage — if you only wanted to deal with electricity you can achieve that just by covering rooftops, while you can cover about 90% of car needs with PV on BEV cars (if you allow them to share, but that’s not difficult, heavy users need to charge just like they already do and light users would want to sell the excess, dismissing this as “complex” would be ridiculous given what cars are), meaning not much extra new land has to be dedicated to PV (or to wind if you want diversity).
The only big things people even need to think about now is stuff like synthetic jet fuel, and even then we already know the chemical reactions, it’s just about commercialising them.
> requires complex daisy chains of different solutions to work
No more complex than anything else in the modern world, therefore calling it complex as a criticism is false.
And further, they’re still incredibly valuable even without batteries.
And they are the only existing long-term solution to our energy needs, given fossil fuels are finite and commercial fusion isn’t actually a thing yet.
> isn't reliable
Can be forecast reliably a week ahead in great detail, and seasonally in broad brushstrokes. We’re not going to be surprised that winter is dark, we can plan around this trivially in much the same way and for much the same reasons that supermarkets don’t get surprised by seasonal demand for ice-cream or raincoats.
> requires absurd amounts of resources
Less than the alternatives, again only looks big because there’s 7 billion people.
> needs backup from oil, coal, gas or nuclear and won't be able to deliver anything even close to useful baseload
Or, as demonstrated, batteries.
You could also do it with a sufficiently large grid, because transmission losses between e.g. Berlin and the Sahara desert are less than the price difference between PV and coal or nuclear.
> and most importantly is so inadequate when it comes to thinking about any future civilisations energy needs both in scale and density
Literally Dyson swarms.
> A forum like this people still clings to these Rube Goldberg constellations and think they are somehow supportiing progress.
“PV + battery” is two items, calling that a Rube Goldberg machine is like dismissing the wheel because you get the most out of it by adding an axel.
Plus I can literally buy USB batteries with PV pre-mounted to them at negligible cost compared to those without PV — the hard stuff has already been done, commercialised, commoditised, and made it to the high street.
> Especially since 3billion people still don't have proper access to energy. Oh well.
PV and wind are the cheapest power sources, so the most capable of improving that.
yes and it's spread out thinly which is why it doesn't kill us.Your solution is to take the least energy dense form and spend material, huge areas of land and money to build a solution that is inferior to all the other solutions.
Scales up to Kardashev III" In theory not in practice. You are speculating not actually proving anything.
"Only looks like lots of land because there’s 7 billion people."
Ehh we are going to be 9 billion. Not sure what exactly you think it proves. You are playing excel sheet scientist not actually proving the application in reality.
"No more complex than anything else in the modern world, therefore calling it complex as a criticism is false."
There is a world of difference between having a nuclear power plant or using oil or gas or coal which all have the energy STORED in themselves vs having to convert thin layers of energy into batteries which again aren't even close to be able to deliver the kind of utility the other sources can.
"Can be forecast reliably a week ahead in great detail"
No it can't and it isn't and will require backup from other sources. Again excel sheet acrobatics isn't really useful here.
"Less than the alternatives, again only looks big because there’s 7 billion people."
We are going to be 9. It's a reality and you aren't actually dealing with it. It's not going to go away.
Batterie are not demonstrated as being a solution by any metric what so ever so no.
You keep comping up with speculative solutions which wont actually work nor solve anything as the grid will never be flexible enough and batteries can't actually deliver what you seem to be dreaming they can.
"Literally Dyson swarms."
Again more speculcation.
Come back when energy from wind and solar is more than 10% of the worlds energy consumption.
"“PV + battery” is two items, calling that a Rube Goldberg machine is like dismissing the wheel because you get the most out of it by adding an axel."
I am not. I am calling all your other solutions to solve the issues with intermittency like grids and weather forcasting PLUS batteries plus storing of energy in batteries and PV for rube goldberg machines.