I wonder if it could ever make sense to have ultra-high voltage or superconductive power transmission lines wrapping around the planet so that we could take advantage of the fact that it's always daytime somewhere to forgo much grid-scale storage and instead just get electricity from wherever it's daylight. Aside from the geopolitical/national security issues, I wonder if such a thing is feasible or it's ultimately going to be more efficient to store energy than transmit it half-way around the world.
Originally I always fantasized about such tech but the technology required to develop this super conductor then produce it in the volumes needed, just think of all the communication cables that have been laid just seems insurmountable.
I think the best bet is finding more storage alternatives that can be replicated on a large scale and don't require any rare earth elements and localized enough to not worry abut shifting political alliances
Electricity transmission would be a foundational part of an orbital ring around Earth. And around a dynamo like Uranus, it could be used to generate electricity too.
I keep wondering about the Solar Sinter project by Markus Kayser *
What if instead of manufacturing artwork, it manufactured a mechanical energy storage, large enough to store either daily variations or even yearly insolation?
Perhaps glass blocks (filled with sand) as weights for storing as potential energy (how deep would a shaft have to be to store daily or yearly insolation, assuming the weight is ideally half as tall as the shaft?)
Perhaps storing compressed (even liquified?) air? How airtight is the resulting sintered glass?
Perhaps making 1 upper reservoir and somehow digging a narrow shaft (making the walls glass while digging/blowing up the sand through the already vitrified upper part of the shaft? Then somehow building the lower underground reservoir from the inside out, and store potential energy in the closed system containing water (condensed from air?)
Solar panels, wiring, cheap plastic Fresnel lenses, control electronics would need to keep getting supplied to attach to newly built energy storages. But as much as possible, especially things that wear out should be renewably built from glass onsite (for example scoops to move and redistribute sand)
In example consider an NxN square of already completed storage, sites then there is ~ 4N adjacent sites under construction so the project either could speed up by actually building ~N/4 circumference layers at a time, or start delivering ~(N-4)N of renewable on-demand energy (since the storage site height was chosen to have enough capacity to store daily, weekly or yearly insolation)
ok I calculated the height/depth for a shaft housing a glass weight half the size (which is the optimal height for the weight in any shaft of fixed height, I assume you understand this is optimum, if you want a derivation I can provide it upon request)
For clear skies (typical of deserts), we can use the daily insolation at sea level: 21,6 MJ/m^2
(I will ignore inefficiency of solar panel, the less efficient, the less deep or tall we need to store the energy generated, and one time construction of the storage is preferable over reconstructing the weights and shafts once more efficient panels become available)
So if we want to store it as potential energy of a glass weight under the solar panel that generated the energy we have for each square meter of panel:
a glass weight with cross section one scquare meter, and height l = L/2 where L is the height of the shaft.
glass weights 2500 kg/m^3, so we have mass of the weight: m = l * 1 m^2 * 2500 kg/m^3 = l * 2500 kg/m = L/2 * 2500 kg/m
We want the weight to be at all times contained in the shaft so it can be closed and sand can not blow under the weight or into the mechanisms.
the height difference for the glass weigh at the top -but still completely inside the shaft- to the bottom -but also still completely inside the shaft- is h = L - l/2 - l/2 = L -l = L - L/2 = L/2
The potential energy difference for a weight of mass m and vertical travel distance h is E = m * g * h
Plugging everything together:
E = ( L/2 * 2500 kg/m * 9.81 N/kg * L/2 )
Solving for L = 2 * sqrt ( E / (2500 * 9,81 N/m))
Since the assumed insolation is 21.6 MJ/m^2 then one square meter of (ideal futuristic) solar panel will simply generate 21.6 MJ = 21,6 MNm
Plugging into the equation for L we get L = 59,35 m
I seeriously underestimated potential energy I guess, I thought it would have been larger.
If your panels are less efficient (say 10%) or you have a large unused area you can of course make the structure less tall/deep.
Please forgive me if this is a stupid question - but is heavily investing in solar electricity a good idea in Europe considering the variation in climate throughout the year?
Energy demand is highest in the Winter, when mean monthly sunshine hours are at the lowest.
Even in Nice (the very south of France) where I assume this difference would be smaller, there's still a big gap between 347.5 mean hours in July and 139.3 mean hours in December (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice#Climate).
Surely we'd need to heavily invest in backup generation capacity that would be dormant for the vast majority of the summer then heavily in use over the winter?
Admittedly I have a very limited amount of knowledge in this area - but wouldn't wind or tidal power generation be a better bet here (well, Europe anyway)?
There are lots of green energy funds. If you ask at most European banks, they will put you touch with their "wealth" team where you can pick a managed portfolio or fund to invest in. It may also be a checkbox you can tick on your pension scheme.
Could you store renewable energy via electrolysis, and instead of having storage tanks of dangerous hydrogen at home, pump the gas back into a grid? Most houses have natural gas lines and those are relatively safe. Would it be viable to have "hydrogen lines" that just ran in reverse when excess renewable energy is produced? Then draw off it to a home fuel cell during peak demand?
Countries are building lots of solar and wind. However, these techs only operate/run during the daytime or when the wind is blowing... which is not 100% of the time.
If they continue to build out solar/wind and thereby drive FF-production "out of business" what happens when solar/wind cannot meet demand? Are they building stored energy reserves as well? What happens then?
The electric power produced by "peaker plants" (e.g. gas turbines, hydroelectric, pumped storage) will become more important. If there aren't enough of those, the cost to buy power from peaker plants will rise and investors will build more of them.
More long distance transmission lines will be built to average out local variation in production.
Grid-scale battery systems like brine4power may start to come online.
Excess power may be dumped into power-to-gas systems which enrich natural gas with hydrogen.
My guess is that energy will be so cheap, we produce much much more than we consume in the future. There will be an abundance of energy some decades down.
Also electric cars will create very large storage capcities for energy in the next decade.
On top of that we get intelligent meters, with machines like my washing machine pulling power at the best time, my battery chargers using the right time etc, so (non-industry) demand will flatten out over time with intelligent metering.
I would have feared about this issue 20y ago, but I think this is no longer of any importance for the development of solar power.
What is relevant with the ongoing centralization of solar power is power transmission.
everyone on hackernews knows this stuff. yet every renewable posts gets these "but there is no sun at night" posts to the top.
build large scale energy storage instead of offshore oil wells, super tankers, and refineries I guess.
It will be hard, it is hard to get oil out of the ground and into your car too.
France has never relied on FF energy in the first place. They have a modern, well run nuclear program, lots of hydroelectric, a few geothermal, and FF power plants as well.
Nothing, it's a false premise. In reality, what will happen is that we'll be using the more expensive FF power when we can't get cheap renewable power, and supply will adjust to that demand. Why would FF plants go "out of business" when there's a need they could meet?
France doesn't plan to drive other energy out of business, we plan to diversify (with the ageing of some of our older reactor, replace them with solar and wind so we decrease to 50% nuclear). We still have a lot of hydro power with no plan to touch it, and we don't want to replace all nuclear by solar/wind either.
If that happens often enough, it will be profitable to run something serves electricity in these demand peaks. For example, storing excess electricity in batteries or by pumping water to elevated reservoirs, and generating electricity with them in that moment.
Negative prices (i.e. excess of energy), and really high ones (lack of it) rarely happen. When they do, there is ancillary services that take over (which there is plenty in Europe).
Actually, the share of intermittent renewable energy is negligible in France. Let's worry about that later, as there will be plenty of choices (demand response, PHES, and even tesla, which is building AS plants without us noticing (Belgium))
You have to keep in mind that capital costs are a huge part of electric generation. The capital costs associated with most traditional generators are too high - this is why utilities pushed for regulatory
PV/wind are cheap and have low opex and will start to eat at the baseload generators. Gas plants can spin up quickly, but the marginal cost will be high if they are idle too much. That market condition will make storage cost sustainable.
I think we have to shape demand. Right now people use eletricity whenever they feel like it. I think people will need adjust their lives around when energy is cheap - eg wash clothes on windy days, A/C only runs during the day, have cooler houses on cold, windless nights.
Gas, oil, coal plants fill in when solar and wind don't work. That - along with nuclear phase-out - is why there's lots of several new coal plants being built in Germany, for instance.
[+] [-] laser|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|7 years ago|reply
I think the best bet is finding more storage alternatives that can be replicated on a large scale and don't require any rare earth elements and localized enough to not worry abut shifting political alliances
[+] [-] stephengillie|7 years ago|reply
This (long) video about orbital rings brings such things to mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E
[+] [-] ztetranz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ximeng|7 years ago|reply
If we assume 200km has 1% power loss then 20,000km is around 63% power loss.
[+] [-] freebs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex_duf|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoctorOetker|7 years ago|reply
What if instead of manufacturing artwork, it manufactured a mechanical energy storage, large enough to store either daily variations or even yearly insolation?
Perhaps glass blocks (filled with sand) as weights for storing as potential energy (how deep would a shaft have to be to store daily or yearly insolation, assuming the weight is ideally half as tall as the shaft?)
Perhaps storing compressed (even liquified?) air? How airtight is the resulting sintered glass?
Perhaps making 1 upper reservoir and somehow digging a narrow shaft (making the walls glass while digging/blowing up the sand through the already vitrified upper part of the shaft? Then somehow building the lower underground reservoir from the inside out, and store potential energy in the closed system containing water (condensed from air?)
Solar panels, wiring, cheap plastic Fresnel lenses, control electronics would need to keep getting supplied to attach to newly built energy storages. But as much as possible, especially things that wear out should be renewably built from glass onsite (for example scoops to move and redistribute sand)
In example consider an NxN square of already completed storage, sites then there is ~ 4N adjacent sites under construction so the project either could speed up by actually building ~N/4 circumference layers at a time, or start delivering ~(N-4)N of renewable on-demand energy (since the storage site height was chosen to have enough capacity to store daily, weekly or yearly insolation)
* https://kayserworks.com/
[+] [-] DoctorOetker|7 years ago|reply
For clear skies (typical of deserts), we can use the daily insolation at sea level: 21,6 MJ/m^2
(I will ignore inefficiency of solar panel, the less efficient, the less deep or tall we need to store the energy generated, and one time construction of the storage is preferable over reconstructing the weights and shafts once more efficient panels become available)
So if we want to store it as potential energy of a glass weight under the solar panel that generated the energy we have for each square meter of panel:
a glass weight with cross section one scquare meter, and height l = L/2 where L is the height of the shaft.
glass weights 2500 kg/m^3, so we have mass of the weight: m = l * 1 m^2 * 2500 kg/m^3 = l * 2500 kg/m = L/2 * 2500 kg/m
We want the weight to be at all times contained in the shaft so it can be closed and sand can not blow under the weight or into the mechanisms.
the height difference for the glass weigh at the top -but still completely inside the shaft- to the bottom -but also still completely inside the shaft- is h = L - l/2 - l/2 = L -l = L - L/2 = L/2
The potential energy difference for a weight of mass m and vertical travel distance h is E = m * g * h
Plugging everything together:
E = ( L/2 * 2500 kg/m * 9.81 N/kg * L/2 )
Solving for L = 2 * sqrt ( E / (2500 * 9,81 N/m))
Since the assumed insolation is 21.6 MJ/m^2 then one square meter of (ideal futuristic) solar panel will simply generate 21.6 MJ = 21,6 MNm
Plugging into the equation for L we get L = 59,35 m
I seeriously underestimated potential energy I guess, I thought it would have been larger.
If your panels are less efficient (say 10%) or you have a large unused area you can of course make the structure less tall/deep.
[+] [-] sdunwoody|7 years ago|reply
Energy demand is highest in the Winter, when mean monthly sunshine hours are at the lowest.
Even in Nice (the very south of France) where I assume this difference would be smaller, there's still a big gap between 347.5 mean hours in July and 139.3 mean hours in December (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice#Climate).
Surely we'd need to heavily invest in backup generation capacity that would be dormant for the vast majority of the summer then heavily in use over the winter?
Admittedly I have a very limited amount of knowledge in this area - but wouldn't wind or tidal power generation be a better bet here (well, Europe anyway)?
[+] [-] mariushn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wcoenen|7 years ago|reply
Or is this out of reach for the small "retail investors"...
[+] [-] dalbasal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Faaak|7 years ago|reply
I subscribed some years ago and it's been the second year that they've raised their action by 2%.
[+] [-] mikec3010|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply
You can incorporate hydrogen into the grid but only up to a point: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/01/06/hydrogen/ and it has issues https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/51995.pdf
[+] [-] nvahalik|7 years ago|reply
If they continue to build out solar/wind and thereby drive FF-production "out of business" what happens when solar/wind cannot meet demand? Are they building stored energy reserves as well? What happens then?
[+] [-] wcoenen|7 years ago|reply
More long distance transmission lines will be built to average out local variation in production.
Grid-scale battery systems like brine4power may start to come online.
Excess power may be dumped into power-to-gas systems which enrich natural gas with hydrogen.
[+] [-] _Codemonkeyism|7 years ago|reply
Also electric cars will create very large storage capcities for energy in the next decade.
On top of that we get intelligent meters, with machines like my washing machine pulling power at the best time, my battery chargers using the right time etc, so (non-industry) demand will flatten out over time with intelligent metering.
I would have feared about this issue 20y ago, but I think this is no longer of any importance for the development of solar power.
What is relevant with the ongoing centralization of solar power is power transmission.
[+] [-] gameswithgo|7 years ago|reply
build large scale energy storage instead of offshore oil wells, super tankers, and refineries I guess. It will be hard, it is hard to get oil out of the ground and into your car too.
[+] [-] yardie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jojo64|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nolok|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhaps0dy|7 years ago|reply
If that happens often enough, it will be profitable to run something serves electricity in these demand peaks. For example, storing excess electricity in batteries or by pumping water to elevated reservoirs, and generating electricity with them in that moment.
[+] [-] rjsw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golangnews|7 years ago|reply
Yes, they are.
https://www.edie.net/news/6/Green-light-for-first-UK-hydro-s...
or
https://www.fastcompany.com/40580693/exclusive-tesla-has-ins...
[+] [-] F_r_k|7 years ago|reply
Actually, the share of intermittent renewable energy is negligible in France. Let's worry about that later, as there will be plenty of choices (demand response, PHES, and even tesla, which is building AS plants without us noticing (Belgium))
[+] [-] Spooky23|7 years ago|reply
You have to keep in mind that capital costs are a huge part of electric generation. The capital costs associated with most traditional generators are too high - this is why utilities pushed for regulatory
PV/wind are cheap and have low opex and will start to eat at the baseload generators. Gas plants can spin up quickly, but the marginal cost will be high if they are idle too much. That market condition will make storage cost sustainable.
[+] [-] rb808|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mavdi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptaipale|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tribesman|7 years ago|reply