[adwn]

I don't see you countering my argument, only attempting to ridicule it ("slighty more sophisticated", "trope", "these silly hippies", "been aware of the concept of winter", "existence of winter as a gotcha"). That sucks, man :-(

> If you want to critique their plans for dealing with it […]

There are many ideas for seasonal storage of PV-generated electricity, but so far there is no concrete plan that's both scalable to TWh levels and economically feasible. Here on HN, there's always someone who'll post the knee-jerk response of "just build more panels", without doing the simple and very obvious calculation that 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there [1].

[1] Except for paying people to crank a generator by hand, although that might at least help with obesity rates.

[dinfinity]

> 5x to 10x overprovisioning would turn solar from one of the cheaper into the by far most expensive power generation method out there.

This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.

Additionally that implies the overprovisioned power is worthless in the summer, which does not have to be the case. It might make certain processes viable due to very low cost of energy during those months. Not trivial as those industries would have to leave the equipment using the power unused during winter months, but the economics could still work for certain cases.

Some of the cases might even specifically be those that store energy for use in winter (although then we're not looking at the 'pure' overprovisioning solution anymore).

[adwn]

> This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.

That's a huge "if". The cost of PV panels has come down by a factor of 10 in the last 13 years or so, that's true. I doubt another 10x decrease is possible, because at some point you run into material costs.

But the real issue is that price of the panels themselves is already only about 35% of the total installation cost of utility-scale PV. This means that even if the panels were free, it would only reduce the cost by a factor of 1.5.

[adrianN]

What amounts to „concrete plan“? Right now we’re still in the state where building more generation is the best use of our money with batteries for load shifting a few hours ramping up. So it’s entirely expected that there is no infrastructure for seasonal storage yet. However the maths for storing energy as hydrogen and heat looks quite favorable and the necessary technology exists already.

[adwn]

"Concrete plan" means a technology which satisfies all of these requirements:

1) demonstrated ability in a utility-scale plant

2) already economically viable, or projected to be economically viable within 2 years by actual process engineers with experience in scaling up chemical/electrical plants to industrial size

Yes, that's hard to meet. But the thing is, we've seemingly heard of hundreds of revolutionary storage methods over the last decade, and so far nothing has come to fruition. That's because they were promised by researchers making breakthroughs in the lab, and forecasting orders of magnitude of cost reductions. They're doing great experimental work, but they lack the knowledge and experience to judge what it takes to go from lab result to utility-scale application.