PV+storage is how many hours of storage? Storing enough power to last a night is just getting close to commercially viable afaik, but storing enough power to last a winter is still quite expensive.

The best storage is no storage at all, it is demand-response.

Things like responsive appliances and EV chargers that can schedule their load rather than insisting that limitless power be available instantaneously. I don't care when the dishwasher runs as long as the dishes are clean by tomorrow, you know?

Of course right now, putting the word "smart" on an appliance doesn't imply any of that, and the way it ends up implemented will probably be terrible and a half. But theoretically, demand-response could dramatically reduce the need for storage. I think it truly has a large role to play, but the folks releasing insecure internet-of-shit devices have a lot to answer for first.

> I don't care when the dishwasher runs as long as the dishes are clean by tomorrow, you know?

You can already accomplish 95% of this now with any dishwasher made within the last 20 years that has a delay timer on it. Just load it up and tell it to run in 6 hours and then go to bed.

I don't want some 3rd party company driving a huge team of middlemen sucking up a gigantic pile of data in order to determine when it might be strategically useful for my dishwasher to be on. I don't want my dishwasher on the internet. I barely want it to have any electronics at all, because I want the damn thing to last for 20 years, not the scant 5 years people seem to be getting out of major appliances these days. You wanna talk carbon footprint and recycling, making things reliable would probably save us a million times more energy than would using the internet-of-things to run this stuff at night time.

I _might_ be willing to accept a compromise where my smart power meter uses an open protocol to inform devices in my house of the current energy cost for Time-of-Use billing and then the appliance decides when to start based on a threshold I set, but even that's more implementation than is really necessary here.

Also, there are only a few appliances that can really make use of that kind of thing. As a parent, I need to run laundry all the time, non-stop, because children are filthy monsters. I can't factor energy costs into that, because laundry takes a long time to run and many loads need to be run. It's only a small number of people who can stick their one weekly load into the dryer and tell it to wait for night - and again, a timer would do 90%+ of the work spreading the load around, you don't need a gigantic network of flimsy compute doing the work here.

I think we agree more than we disagree. An overnight timer is ideal right now while most base-load comes from coal and nuclear, and power is cheapest at night.

But as we move past combustion (I'm in Michigan and the amount of coal we burn for power is absolutely shameful) and into more solar, it's less predictable. I can't set a timer that knows when the sky will be cloudy.

This is why I'm so excited to see EVSEs that take data from PV inverters and have a "PV surplus only" mode, where the car is charged only when the sun shines, without ever importing grid power. Modulating 30kW of load is just as good as 30kW of storage, but costs nothing but a few lines of code.

And yeah, networks and middlemen can suck it. Keeping it local is always better.

> You can already accomplish 95% of this now with any dishwasher made within the last 20 years that has a delay timer on it. Just load it up and tell it to run in 6 hours and then go to bed.

With solar PV, sort of the opposite. Just load it up, and tell it to run in 4 hours, while you and most everyone else is at work :)

I agree, but I think you can't demand-response away all of winter. People still want to drive their EVs and heat their homes and industrial processes can't be time shifted for weeks or even months.

You'll need some storage. Right now that would probably be Hydrogen or Methane, and making those is pretty expensive. Perhaps something better will come along, or it gets cheaper with scale, but at the current CO2 price it's not competitive with fossil fuels.

Yes, but bulk of the demand is heat and industry, so you're quickly back to having to build a lot of "storage" in the form of buildings with high thermal inertia and spare capacity for production, so that you can keep the high energy plants idle at inconvenient times. Hard to say if that is more efficient than building actual energy storage.

Every little helps I guess, but getting people not to shower on cloudy days is not gonna move the needle materially.

Heat is fairly trivially stored for months on a mass scale, check out Polar-night Energy's system - basically, you heat up (usually with just resistive heating) a bunch of sand in a 40metre-wide insulated cylinder, and when you want to use that heat you use fans to blow air through ducts that are surrounded by the sand.

The amazing thing is that every single part of the tech is old and boring - resistive heating is literally as old as electricity, electric fans and ducting are trivial, heating sand is basically impossible to screw up, etc etc.

Sand can be used as a surprisingly effect store for electrical energy (round trip efficiency > 50%).

https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20D...

I am particularly taken by the fluidized bed heat exchanger. What an neat concept, and so compact.

You could just implement enough surge pricing that people/companies work around peak times on their own and build their own storage.

Industry often works around the clock already. You don't want to buy and install three times the equipment you need, and have it sit idle 16 hours of the day. You also don't want to shut down for winter just because the electricity is less abundant then.

Someone needs to pay for the storage and additional generation—both the direct costs and the externalities. Why not let the market figure out who pays for it?

If factories can’t afford to pay those prices, they’ll have to rework their business model, or maybe relocate to areas with cheaper power.

There really aren't many things that can be off for significant periods of time without making them useless.

Indeed I can't think of any that can be off for more than a day.

Can you?

Most EVs have enough battery to cover more than a week of daily commute. If you could charge for significantly cheaper and greener than you do right now, by simply telling it to only charge when the panels on the roof are producing a surplus, isn't that sort of a no-brainer?

Maybe you'd go back to grid mode when anticipating a weekend trip, or when the charge hits some sort of level of concern. And I expect polar places with cloudy winters would probably run a fair bit of conventional generation like we do now, in the winter. But during the sunny season, shut it down!

There are companies that will drive your "smart" thermostat and purport to save you money by strategically controlling it, but in the end if you want to save money on your house's climate control, you're going to end up being warmer/colder than you would like.

In our last house we had a box attached to the AC compressor that let the utility turn it off for 3 hours at a time, a prescribed number of times per month. We got a $10/month discount for this.

We never noticed any effect on comfort.

Nitpicky, but shouldn’t this pattern be called “supply-response” (as in, appliances programmed to respond to a supply glut) “Demand-response” sounds like it should be used for power sources that only spin up when demand exceeds the production rate.

It strikes me as weird too. They're calling it "demand which responds", but it's phrased funny.

"We should put more resources into breeding faster horses now, internal combustion can wait." - someone in late 19 century.

The benefits of a car were immediately obvious as soon as supply lines were considered. Feed for horses was something like 30% of all deliveries in a horse-based supply chain.

Railroads run off of coal, but steam-engines were huge. ICE engines were miniature engines that also ran off of a fuel source (eventually settling upon oil, but many different fuel sources were considered in those early days, including electricity).

---------

Such benefits are not immediately obvious with solar/wind. In particular, USA doubles its electricity usage each day, and then it shrinks down to 50% by nightfall (which does NOT time with the sun, its slightly offset: the 5pm sun loses most of its solar-power but homes are still hot and using a ton of electricity for A/C)

As a baseload plant, solar/wind, even with storage, is a bit unreliable. That's fine, they're a cheap source of energy but you need to consider things like hurricanes: winds too fast so you need to shut off the wind plants (otherwise they'd spin too fast and damage themselves), and the cloud cover so thick you lose most of your solar power.

Since there's no storage mechanism that lasts for days (ex: hypothetical hurricane), you end up needing to build a 200MW gas turbine ("just in case"), +200MW of clean energy.

Note: this is fine. This is probably the best path forward for now. But nuclear is reliable and doesn't need this "natural gas assist". Even if a hurricane sweeps over an area, the nuclear power plants will keep working.

EDIT: The issues come up if someone builds 200MW of solar panels / wind but fails to build any "just in case" energy sources. Which is happening. Their grids will fail when solar/wind inevitably cuts off.

"But nuclear is reliable and doesn't need this "natural gas assist". Even if a hurricane sweeps over an area, the nuclear power plants will keep working."

Actually, they don't.

"As a precaution measure, the reactor shall be shut down at least two hours before the hurricane’s strong winds arrive at the location. Generally this happens when the speed reaches between 70 and 75 mph (between 113 and 121 km/h)." (https://www.foronuclear.org/en/nuclear-power/questions-and-a...)

Also, they need electrical power to keep the reactor cool---typically the power grid and co-located diesel generators, not necessarily the best redundant backup system.

It’s only the older designs that need active cooling.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/27/136920/the-new-s...

Given how long it took Fukushima to cool down, does this actually do anything appreciable in the two hours before arrival?

I believe it means that, 2 hours before arrival, the reactor is off. Dead. Not generating heat.

They'd need to start shutdown sometime before that.

> ICE engines were miniature engines that also ran off of a fuel source (eventually settling upon oil, but many different fuel sources were considered

Fun fact - Rudolf Diesel's first engines were running on cooking oil. In fact, many diesel engines can operate on vegetable oils without modifications (not long term though). That sounds odd, but from the perspective of "burn hydrocarbons to generate heat", petrol, diesel, oil, body fat, coal or kerosene are all very similar to each other.

Here's a classic Top Gear on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lqCwNReU1Y

No, horse breeders argued the supply lines favored horses as horses could be fed by unlimited biofuels instead of limited fossil fuels. Of course, there was a difference in scale, but it’s just false to claim there weren’t major naysayers about automobiles from the horse industry.

First time I've ever heard this claim about horse naysayers. Do you have citations?

Interesting off-topic: according to Vaclav Smil, the number of horses in the USA peaked in the 1930s. In Europe, later still. David Edgerton's book The Shock of the Old talks about horses as well, among other "outdated" technologies.

People thought fossil fuels were a finite resource back then?

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if someone thought that, but given the frequency with which oil was being discovered, it seems reasonable that people would have assumed it to be effectively unlimited.

Even in the late 1800s when cars were just starting to be used, the ultimate scarcity of fossil fuels (including coal) was explored by Jules Verne who suggested hydrogen as a successor fuel in The Mysterious Island. And local scarcity of fossil fuels was acknowledged since everyone knew that oil wells started reducing output after a few years.

Nikola Tesla spoke glowingly about how we don’t need coal, oil, or gas if we just harness the energy around us (what he meant here was quackery, unfortunately, but wind and solar accomplish very much the same thing). People understood from the beginning that coal, oil, and gas are finite.

IIRC, people did think we were going to run out of coal back then. A minority, but yes, I do recall some quotes from the 1800s about the exponential growth of coal usage and that people were using too much coal.

But by the time ICE engines were getting invented, it was a done debate IIRC. Horses used to pull trains after all, the steam engine replaced horses in train-usage decades earlier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway, for the animal-based predecessor to trains)

I wonder if it’s possible to create air conditioning that generates electricity. It seems like you’re removing energy from the air.

Think of it like water flowing down a hill. The heat is in your room because it flowed down to a cooler space with less energy, just like the water flowed down to a space with less potential energy. Moving that heat back to a higher energy area, back outside, is the same as pumping the water back up a hill. It always takes more than one unit of energy to move one unit of energy back “up”. You can only capture energy if it’s moving “down”.

You might enjoy a physics course, especially if you enjoy calculus, although an entry level course won’t require it.

That’s a great analogy, thanks!

Do you mean a heat engine?

Because the "opposite" of air conditioning is just a heat engine (taking "hot" and "cold" source, and using the difference to generate locomotion). In fact, all engines are glorified heat engines: be it a steam turbine, ICE, geothermal, or whatever

When air gets hot, it expands. When air gets cold, it contracts. So heat up air through some mechanism (hot side) to push a piston up. To pull the piston down, either use momentum or the cold-source (cold air contracts, pulling the stuff down).

The sterling engine is the best general purpose demonstration of this, and you can buy such engines for $20 to $100 or so.

ICE engines use gasoline as the hot source. Steam engines use steam (water at 100C) to transfer the heat from the hot source to the needed locations (heat can be from nuclear, coal, or other sources)

----------

Air conditioning is just this process in reverse. Expand the air forcibly by applying force to the piston. This cools down the air. "Gather" the coldness through some mechanism, which heats up your air inside the A/C unit while cooling whatever is on your "cold plate".

Push the hot air and compress it down. This heats up the air even further: "transfer" the hotness through some mechanism (aka: heat something else up, like the air outside the house). This cools down the air inside your A/C unit.

Now find a fluid that's more efficient at this process than oxygen. Then realize that fluid is terrible for the Ozone layer and write a regulation for a newer, crappier fluid that's less damaging to the Earth, and you have modern A/C units.

> It seems like you’re removing energy from the air.

You're just transferring the hotness somewhere else. Go feel the air that your refrigerator outputs: its far hotter than the air inside. If you measure the energy, its the energy that was "stolen" from inside the refrigerator + the energy "spent" on the heat pump (that compression / decompression cycle takes work, and work generates heat)

We can transfer heat around, but it costs energy. Alternatively, a difference in heat can be used to gather energy, but it will "Average" the temperatures and eventually the hot-source and cold-source will be the same temperature.

We can use fuels to make the hot-source stay really, really hot for long periods of time (as long as we have a source of fuel), and that's basically the design of steam engines / heat engines.

Your analogy falls flat because we're still decades away from a functional fusion power plant.

"Why breed faster horses now when maybe my grandchildren will get to zoom around in cars?"

The 1000 miles road starts with a first step, and it's not like we can't pursue several approaches at once. People like grandparent poster suggest us drop everything and concentrate on the idea he likes best. That is a very bad and harmful idea.

No one is saying we shouldn't invest in exploring fusion. But we shouldn't sit on our hands on the interim. We need to invest heavily in the best alternative resource available right now till such time as fusion is a viable alternative to solar.

Keep in mind horses and cars co-existed as mainstream transportation choices right up till the end of world war 2.

> No one is saying we shouldn't invest in exploring fusion.

Actually, jhallenworld's comment was saying exactly this: "We should put more resources into storage now, fusion can wait".

That's what prompted my response about horses in the first place. Analogy is apt, because first engines were wildly inefficient compared to horses, yet, if people back then would never pursue them, we would never have eventual progress. So no, while we should invest in storage, fusion CAN NOT wait.

We aren’t. MIT’s SPARC Tokamak design could be ready for commercialization by a decade. Less time than completing a high speed rail project in the US.

The word "could" is doing a lot of work, there.

And how many times have we heard the phrase "a decade" in this field?

Kind of a lazy comment. There has been substantial progress with the latest development from NIF as well as SPARC demonstrating a magnet section that would enable ITER at a much smaller scale using fundamentally superior superconducting technology With NIF’s latest result, we’re no longer just generating smoke from rubbing sticks together, now we got a flame.

That’s a substantial, qualitative change in the state of the art of fusion technology. Now we need to do it dozens of times per second and make steam from it, while using efficient lasers and breeding tritium from the lithium jacket.

Works kind of like the EUV light sources TSMC uses to make the highest end computer chips, except a fuel pellet instead of a drop of tin. Like so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Inertial_Fusion_Energy

The mininum viable Qplasma would be in the neighborhood of 100.[1] Fusion may get competitive for electricity generation with a Qtotal > 500.[2]

1. Sabine Hossenfelder, How Close Is Nuclear Fusion?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY&t=8s

2. Nicholas Hawker, A simplified economic model for inertial fusion, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33040650/

NIF's target cost millions of dollars to make. It produced 1.3MJ of energy, which is (generously) worth about a penny.

SPARC/ARC would enable a tokamak at a smaller scale (and self-sustaining from bootstrap current, most likely) but ITER is so far out of the running that something can be much better than it and still not be practical. ITER's gross fusion power density is 400x worse than a PWR's reactor vessel; ARC would only be 40x worse.

Call me with the second and third commercial reactors are completed. That's when we'll have an idea of the real world viability, including how to scale and deal with production concerns.

So we shouldn’t be investing in developing nuclear fusion power until after it’s proven and commercialized? How does that work?

No, I'm saying don't sit around talking about how this will be ready for commercial deployment in less than ten years until after it has been demonstrated to actually work in a production environment.

The first commercial production system will be an alpha build. The second and thirds are betas. It's only after those are completed that there's enough information to make commercial plans.

As of now, this system the GP is talking about hasn't even been built yet and won't be operational until at least 2025. And even when it is built, it is just a lab experiment designed to run in 10 second bursts. There are numerous more steps after this design phase before we get to commercial application.

Ten years is a pipe-dream for commercial application.

I'm excited to see progress in this field. But we are doing it a huge disservice by spreading misinformation about it. There are still a lot of problems to be solved before these are ready for prime time. And these problems will require a lot more funding to solve. If people sit around and talk about how this will be ready to go in 10 years, then who is going to want to fund it into year 11?

Scientific funding is directed largely by politicians. And there are many, many political opponents to science in our current Congress. Giving them ammo in the form of empty promises doesn't do advocates for fusion energy any good.

The honest answer is, we still don't know if tokamak will ever make for a viable commercial power plant. Best can be said is that it has been demonstrated to produce net positive energy for short periods of time, and that there is confidence that improvements can be made. That's it. The viability of commercial application has yet to be demonstrated and may never happen.

Its power density will only be 40 times worse than a fission reactor, and made with steel operating at much closer to its strength limit (safety factor of 1.5 for the ARC design, I think, vs. at least 3.5 for steel pressure vessels in the ASME code). There is no way this will be cheaper than fission power plants, and they are already not competitive.

In many areas nowadays, solar is the cheapest source of energy bar none.

Now, suppose you live in one of those areas. Two questions:

1) What year was solar first ready for commercialization? 2) Would you ever consider that year's solar tech outside of extremely niche applications?

Hah, well what was the rate of progress on breeding faster horses vs. internal combustion in the late 19th century? I don't imagine that the progress rate was very high for horses..

I'm not so sure about internal combustion, but I think it took steam engines 100 years to start outperforming horses.

I think that that's a better technology comparison because internal combustion was able to leverage the theoretical insights originally derived for steam. There's no shoulders-of-giants effect going on for nuclear fusion, as there wasn't for steam.

Well, it kind of depends on what you define as teh first steam engines. Are you including like novelty stuff used for entertainment like magic shows and fountains? Or are we starting with the first steam engine used to do real mechanical work? The Newcomen engine came out in around 1712, but it's initial purpose as a water pump for mines wasn't really in direct competition to horse powered pumps. While they could be used to generate power for factories, that was an uncommon use case because they gradually lost power output over time.

The Watt design is when we finally saw steam engines replace animal power in the late 1770s. So not quite 100 years.

But yes, ICE development benefited from all the problems solved by steam power generation. I believe the ability to machine pistons to an accuracy of 0.1" wasn't developed until around 1750. Prior to that, people just hammered iron roundish and called it a day. Good enough for large steam engines, but not too valuable with an ICE.

I want to live in a world where we work on projects that will benefit us both 5 and 50 years in the future.

Long term projects often have the problem they are solving disappear out from under them. They become obsolete before they're done. Freeman Dyson famously pointed this out and suggested anyone planning ahead more than five years was fooling themselves (and he meant that in science, too.)

Fusion seems a good illustration of this. Work started on it about half a century ago. Its motivation was "fission will be cheap, but uranium will get scarce, so let's build fusion reactors that have cheap fuel!" Except fission didn't get cheap, the cost turned out to be dominated by the cost of the power plant, not the fuel, and fusion reactors don't solve that problem AT ALL.

Well, if we'd have gone down that road, plus strong environmental awareness, maybe the Earth wouldn't be warming up so badly right now, and the oceans wouldn't have islands of plastic (= oil) waste. Now, sure, we wouldn't have enjoyed some of the benefits of car technology, but - public transport (esp. trains) makes up for a lot of that. OTOH, public transport pollutes too.

Had we gone down this road, we'd have a thick layer of manure covering everything. Living creatures are a source of CO2 too, and a big one. Look up for a share of greenhouse gases coming form agriculture. Had we used faster horses, that volume of emissions would be effectively doubled or tripled.

>Living creatures are a source of CO2 too, and a big one. Look up for a share of greenhouse gases coming form agriculture.

CO2 emitted by horses comes from the food they eat, which is absorbed from the atmosphere in the first place by the plant when it grows.

And a ton of the greenhouse gases from agriculture come from using oil, a major component of that being from tractors and crop dusters (which wouldn't exist in a horse-only world).

No, not really. [1]

[1]: https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-m...

That's methane, I was addressing CO2.

But to address methane: That's cows not horses. Cows produce far more methane than horses.

I’d much rather take an ICE train than a steam engine train…

Especially when it's the Comet train entering the Taggart Tunnel.

Forget ICE, kets build a ICF powered train! :D

Why should we wait for fusion? We can and should do both, and fusion also benefits from storage. Fusion and fission help northern countries in particular as they actually produce MORE energy during the dark, cold months.

Lazard do not factor in the cost of accommodating the vagaries of wind and solar into these figures.

As just one example - when the wind turbines aren’t running, your lights are still on. That power comes from somewhere and that somewhere has a cost to keep it available.

That cost is passed on to electricity consumers but not the source of the problem - wind and solar generators.

Yeah, a better option is to use capital costs and input them into https://model.energy

Where does that leave turning existing coal plants into gas plants?

This is a great resource!