Almost Plausible Solar Takeover Plan

[Svein]

if space was not an issue like in the deserts or rural areas could we use flywheel storage to compensate within 24h time frames the overproduction at day and under production at night problem?

Friction...

 

[anorlunda]

if space was not an issue like in the deserts or rural areas could we use flywheel storage to compensate within 24h time frames the overproduction at day and under production at night problem?

It has been researched and it has been tried. There were even a few commercial ventures based on flywheels. But none of them have been a success. I don't know the details of why.

Is there a hill nearby? If so then there is a variant on pumped hydro that's easier to achieve, able to scale, and with lower capital costs. Use electric railroad trains with regenerative braking. The trains go up/down the hill just as water goes up/down in pumped hydro.

 

[artis]

@Svein well friction yes but now we have magnetic bearing systems and other methods so in theory one could overcome this. Although probably not the most compact energy density wise.
@anorlunda I am also not aware of any existing large scale flywheel storage systems to be honest

 

[anorlunda]

I am also not aware of any existing large scale flywheel storage systems to be honest

I still don't think they are particularly successful, but they do exist.

It only took 60 seconds searching to find these:

Beacon Power opened a 5 MWh (20 MW over 15 mins)[18] flywheel energy storage plant in Stephentown, New York in 2011[48] using 200 flywheels[49] and a similar 20 MW system at Hazle Township, Pennsylvania in 2014.[50]

A 2 MW (for 15 min)[51] flywheel storage facility in Minto, Ontario, Canada opened in 2014.[52] The flywheel system (developed by https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NRStor&action=edit&redlink=1) uses 10 spinning steel flywheels on magnetic bearings.[52]

Amber Kinetics, Inc. has an agreement with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) for a 20 MW / 80 MWh flywheel energy storage facility located in Fresno, CA with a four-hour discharge duration.[53]

Beacon Power opened a 5 MWh (20 MW over 15 mins)[18] flywheel energy storage plant in Stephentown, New York in 2011[48] using 200 flywheels[49] and a similar 20 MW system at Hazle Township, Pennsylvania in 2014.[50]

A 2 MW (for 15 min)[51] flywheel storage facility in Minto, Ontario, Canada opened in 2014.[52] The flywheel system (developed by https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NRStor&action=edit&redlink=1) uses 10 spinning steel flywheels on magnetic bearings.[52]

Amber Kinetics, Inc. has an agreement with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) for a 20 MW / 80 MWh flywheel energy storage facility located in Fresno, CA with a four-hour discharge duration.[53]

Convergent buys up 40MW of flywheels in New York and Pennsylvania

 

[mfb]

The German Wikipedia has a nice table of typical values. flywheel = Schwungrad, they even have two types, steel and carbon fiber. Both have way more capital cost per stored energy (€/kWh column) than batteries. €1200/kWh means you need over 10000 cycles before this becomes somewhat interesting. Even if you can make a full cycle every day and can sell the electricity at 10 cent/kWh more than you buy it you need 30 years to recover the initial investment. If you can make a cycle every hour then things get much more interesting, but the grid doesn't need that.

 

[anorlunda]

If you can make a cycle every hour then things get much more interesting, but the grid doesn't need that.

Some of them offered frequency regulation service, where plus/minus responses at the time scale of seconds is important. They work OK for that purpose, but the prices we pay for frequency regulation are low.

All the other forms of generation, including wind and solar, can devote a fraction of their capacity to modulate for plus/minus frequency regulation. That makes lots of competitors and low prices. Low prices make it a poor business strategy for flywheels.

 

[paradisePhysicist]

From what I understand, opponents of solar energy usually make claims that using green energy uses "too many resources" or "pollutes the environment also". But this is a fallacy because, making regular cars and motors pollutes the environment the same amount as building solar cars and components. So overall, making solar cars would pollute less, since they no longer pollute after it is made.
source: https://understandsolar.com/solar-uses-more-energy-to-manufacture-than-it-produces/

It is said (online) that solar energy will pay for itself after 4 years. This is for the individual home. Worldwide, can we build enough solar panels for every home? Well using rough estimates, there is about a 1:1 ratio for every car and home. So there are about an equal amount of cars as there are homes. And building a car is much harder than building a solar panel. So why not do as many solar panel installations, as cars? What is the world's excuse? To upgrade a home with a solar panel installation would cost about $11,000-22,000. The price of average car costs much more than that, even 3x more at $37,000. So why cannot we build solar panels? From what I read, solar panels are made out of sand, an abundant resource. What about wind power? Well we need copper for the motor for that. There is more sand than copper. Why not give all the people living in sunny areas solar power, and give those in Alaska wind power? It makes perfect sense.
source: https://www.homedepot.com/c/cost_install_solar_panels
https://mediaroom.kbb.com/2019-06-0...ar-for-May-2019-According-to-Kelley-Blue-Book

The current solar panel efficiency is only 18% or 23%. Imagine if we can get it to 50% or even 75%. Building the solar panels can be even greener if the factories that create solar panels are powered by solar panels.
https://www.solar.com/learn/solar-panel-efficiency/

I am not sure if the $11,000 solar installation is overbuilt by a factor of 4. But in places like Alaska, wind power can be used instead of solar. If the $11,000 solar installations are already overbuilt, even better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Alaska

There are crystals that can slow down light to 17 meters per second. Maybe even some day we can use the crystals to store and release sunlight energy incase there are clouds above the panels. Once computers become photon computers, it may help continue to make solar research even better.
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-seconds.html

 

[hmmm27]

Well, if we're going all speculative...

- for obvious reasons, find an equatorial'ish desert which has decent SiO2 sand.

- because of cheap land and power, and local target sites, build factories in situ, to produce garden-variety solar panels and glass. Locally-powered of course, but an MNR or two would make for a faster and greener ramp-up, for at least the initial factory.

- to use all that insolation in a non-stupid manner, design and build greenhouses with optical filters that pass the frequency range(s) which the crops need at any given time, reflecting the rest onto the (double-sided, of course) solar panels.

- just keep churning them out and emplacing them.

- concentrate local CO2 into the greenhouses. (Maybe ship in CO2 to saturate the hermetically sealed'ish enclosures)

- PV + crops will use 20% of insolation on a good day (but they're all good days ; that's why we're here), so some way of using/ditching the other 80%ish. And, in that regard...

- Install windfarms on the periphery to catch the heightened windspeeds from the massive solar-tower effect from the totally tanked albedo of thousands of square miles of black.

- when there's so much PV installed that it messes up more than just the local weather pattern and - site-specifically - starts pulling in clouds too far, backtrack a bit and start shipping to other equatorial cloudless areas : ones with crap sand.

Infrastructure requirements:
Rail's a good start for the trunks. Water, fresh from the coast, desalinated enroute or at destination (which means shipping salts back). Power lines : lots of. Battery recycling in situ.

etc.

Just sayin'.

 

[anorlunda]

Well, if we're going all speculative...

You missed the opportunity to use the spoiler feature of our post editor.

Spoiler: Warning sarcasm enclosed

Just sayin'.

 

[Rive]

Others have proposed use rather than curtailment before, but they weren't thinking on the scale of 700% of peak demand.

Well, that's my favorite, actually. I mean, doing the curtailment (and grid balancing, at least daytime) through the curtailment of a slightly overbuilt solar capacity.

But overcapacity at this scale... I bet that even just for the cost (end environmental footprint) of periodically replacing the aged panels we could do something better, nicer.

Still, I get the point. Had to have an estimate for the price and method of 100% PV generation. Just... well, what's the next step?

 

[mfb]

It is said (online) that solar energy will pay for itself after 4 years. This is for the individual home. [...] To upgrade a home with a solar panel installation would cost about $11,000-22,000.

Even if this solar panel installation could make the home fully autonomous, that would need an electricity bill of $250-500 per month. No, I don't pay that much, not even close. And solar panels alone don't make the home autonomous.

The price of average car costs much more than that, even 3x more at $37,000.

And the average home costs even more. What's the point of comparing unrelated costs?

From what I read, solar panels are made out of sand, an abundant resource.

You'll find silicon both in solar panels and in sand, but that doesn't mean they are made out of sand. You can find oxygen both in you and sand, does that mean you are made out of sand, too?

Imagine if we can get it to 50% or even 75%.

If you make up numbers anyway, you might as well speculate about 99%.

I am not sure if the $11,000 solar installation is overbuilt by a factor of 4.

It is not.

There are crystals that can slow down light to 17 meters per second. Maybe even some day we can use the crystals to store and release sunlight energy incase there are clouds above the panels.

That's completely baseless speculation.

Once computers become photon computers, it may help continue to make solar research even better.

That makes no sense.

 

[paradisePhysicist]

The average electricity bill is $96. It would pay for itself after 10 or so years.

"The same is likely true of the United States. According to the Energy Information Agency (EIA), every month the average American household has an average electric bill of $95.55, uses 920 kWh, and pays 10.4 cents per kWh. "
www.off-the-grid-homes.net/average-electric-bill.html

Cars do not pay for themselves (unless pizza driver). Solar panels generate energy thus will provide power to future generations. Online it says that low quality solar panels last for a minimum of 25 years. If solar panels are able to last for 100 years, that means your kids, grandkids and great grandkids are going to be saving a lot of money. So after about 25 years your solar panel will be providing 80% its original capacity of output. But if you have a decent quality panel you will still be getting a lot of energy out of it. High quality panels can offer about 0.3% yearly degradation. (And also remember that future tech will be more efficient and batteries will be better. So even though the solar might be at 80%, the electronics and batteries in your home will probably use less power by then also, provided companies of the future aren't intentionally making inefficient products due to planned obsolescence. )
https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/how-long-do-solar-panels-last

I got the 0.3% value from this website however I am not sure their math is correct. I am not sure if degradation rate is a constant or if it is cumulative. This is crucial to determine the viability of solar long term. Also keep in mind that solars will last a lot longer than 25 years, the 25 years number is due to power being at 80% of original.
https://news.energysage.com/how-long-do-solar-panels-last/

 

[mfb]

The average electricity bill is $96. It would pay for itself after 10 or so years.

This is still ignoring the storage and maintenance cost.

If solar panels are able to last for 100 years

You can always make things look more attractive if you make the assumptions unrealistic enough.

 

[russ_watters]

The average electricity bill is $96. It would pay for itself after 10 or so years.

"The same is likely true of the United States. According to the Energy Information Agency (EIA), every month the average American household has an average electric bill of $95.55, uses 920 kWh, and pays 10.4 cents per kWh. "
www.off-the-grid-homes.net/average-electric-bill.html

This is still ignoring the storage and maintenance cost.

Also ignores that in most jurisdictions you aren't legally allowed to go off grid. And if you go with net zero and forgo storage to sell the electricity back to the electric company, you still have to pay for the grid infrastructure parts of the bill. You mainly save on the generation. At least in the US that's how the vast majority do it.

 

[artis]

@russ_watters How can someone not be allowed to have no electricity if he/she wants to say live without it? Isn't that a breach of basic rights ?

 

[russ_watters]

@russ_watters How can someone not be allowed to have no electricity if he/she wants to say live without it? Isn't that a breach of basic rights ?

It's a public health and safety issue. A house is not considered livable unless it has basic utilities that meet certain minimum requirements.

And here's a real punch in the gut for solar: residential systems without batteries (basically all of them) require a grid connection for power regulation because of solar's intermittency. So if you lose grid power due to an outage, you lose electricity, even on a sunny day.

Individual building solar can help, but it is not the panacea a lot of people think it is.

 

[mfb]

@russ_watters How can someone not be allowed to have no electricity if he/she wants to say live without it? Isn't that a breach of basic rights ?

You can't opt out of police, public streets and so on either. Not all places have a such a law about electricity but it is common. With rooftop solar power becoming more popular and decreasing storage prices we might see these laws go away in the future.

 

[russ_watters]

With rooftop solar power becoming more popular and decreasing storage prices we might see these laws go away in the future.

Storage is the key to enabling off-grid operation. A solar system with no storage and no grid tie simply can't self-regulate reliably most of the time - a single cloud shuts you down or worse browns you out (potential to damage electrical systems). And of course no night operation without it.

"Island mode" is fairly common, though, for commercial/industrial sites (albeit not usually on solar).

 

[russ_watters]

...also, this residential discussion is interesting but can't be a total solution. Residential and commercial rooftop solar can take a significant chunk of our electricity, but certainly much less than half. The topic of the thread - grid scale generation - is still required.

 

[artis]

Well where I live I can cancel my electric connection , especially if that is a private house.
If I had a house and some money to invest I'd probably experiment with having solar panels on rooftops and areas that are of no other use and then a wind turbine, given one doesn't need as much electricity during night/sleep this could in theory provide one with a daily 24/7 minimum load, given some battery storage is also used to drive out the peaks and cover the dips/gaps.But all in all not all places or people have the option to make their own power production facilities to feed them so it seems the grid isn't going anywhere and the best we can do is to incorporate solar and wind into the grid as much as possible and solve the storage problem

 

[russ_watters]

Well where I live I can cancel my electric connection , especially if that is a private house.

One needs to be absolutely sure that's true and there is always a risk that even if it is true today it will become false later. The problem is that when residential solar generation was small it was possible to ignore its disruption to the grid, but as it grows enough to become a relevant factor - even at only a percent or two of total generation - those disruptions can no longer be ignored. Laws/utility rates are changing so that fewer and fewer rate structures enable zero-ing out the bill:

Under traditional net metering, customers are only billed for their net consumption over a billing cycle, meaning that any energy they consume from the utility can later be offset by energy production from their solar installation. As a result, even though a customer’s solar installation only makes power for them during the day, they can use excess energy production during the day to cancel out their nighttime usage and drop their electric bill down to nearly zero...

Changes to net metering policies fall into three general categories: 1) changes to how long excess generation credits can be carried forward and applied to future energy charges, 2) the application of fixed energy charges which cannot be offset with solar energy credits, and 3) changes to the value of electricity sold to the grid from a solar installation compared to the value of electricity bought from the grid.

https://blog.aurorasolar.com/how-net-metering-is-evolving-three-changes-you-need-to-know

These changes reflect the reality that even if you export to the grid as many kWh as you get from the grid (net zero energy usage), you're still receiving a service from the grid that must be paid for by somebody.

 

[mfb]

Completely cutting the connection is as stable as it gets (for the grid): No demand, no supply.

 

[shjacks45]

You argue from the viewpoint of someone who assume that the sun is shining "most of the time". Some of us live in countries where that is not true. Try to calculate the solar energy hitting Alaska in the winter months - and then remember that parts of the Nordic countries and parts Russia lies north of Alaska.

I live in Seattle, overcast 260days a year. Overcast day provides 60% of sunny day energy. Bigger impact is length of day at 45’North. Note overcast usually means wind.

 

[shjacks45]

Solar thermal is cheaper low tech that can be used in 3rd world. Like solar frying French fries in Oregon. Large hydroelectric will be around until the dams silt in. Small hydro built into repair of riparian courses has good $$ return. Also geothermal: Alaska, Idaho, California, and how many volcanoes in Italy. VAWT, say at building rooftops, are a compact way to add local capacity. Light offshore wind can be 60 mph gusts in Seattle’s downtown “canyons”. Thermal recycling to capture waste energy e.g. concrete plant waste gasseshe was run an electric generator for the plant. Japanese natural gas fuel cell technology increases natural gas to electricity efficiency. Solar cell farms and wind farms would help maintain control for the energy industry elite, therefore more likely to get congressional approval.

 

[paradisePhysicist]

thought of another idea, what if you put a bunch of mirrors to boost power on cloudy days... these mirrors work like a periscope to reflect off two angles, there is no limit to how many mirrors cause you can spread 'em apart at any distance...

i am wondering will this work for more help than just cloudy days?... for instance, can a solar panel use the power of two suns, or is it maxxed at only just one sun before the max power is achieved?... if you can get solar panels to accept the power of 10 suns or more the power is astronomical, assuming the actual photon waves do not cancel each other out...

if this idea is useful please consider giving me a nobel prize someday...

 

[shjacks45]

It's a public health and safety issue. A house is not considered livable unless it has basic utilities that meet certain minimum requirements.

And here's a real punch in the gut for solar: residential systems without batteries (basically all of them) require a grid connection for power regulation because of solar's intermittency. So if you lose grid power due to an outage, you lose electricity, even on a sunny day.

Individual building solar can help, but it is not the panacea a lot of people think it is.

Several local installations I've worked around (farms, agricultural, medical, etc.) have both wind, solar, and generators for backup power (the PNW often has power outages even in major cities.) Often cloudy weather brings wind, compensating for lower solar efficiency. Small Wind VAWT also work at night. Coastal cities like Seattle can depend offshore and onshore winds regularly. One customer even added "small hydro" to their power mix. Cloudy days affect the average Solar array less than you think. Usual Solar home/business rooftop array faces South (in the Northern Hemisphere) and is set at a fixed angle based on location latitude. Optimized for noon twice a year, but a pragmatic (cost) compromise. On a cloudy day solar radiation is dispersed and arrives from all direction. An array that follows the Sun will suffer more power loss than cheap fixed array. Generally, cloudy days provide 60% of the power of sunny days. Note that cloudy days are generally late fall, winter, early spring, whose days are shorter than the other half year.

 

[Tom.G]

thought of another idea, what if you put a bunch of mirrors to boost power on cloudy days... these mirrors work like a periscope to reflect off two angles, there is no limit to how many mirrors cause you can spread 'em apart at any distance...

Like this, perhaps? For a sense of scale, see the cars in the parking lot at lower right.

--

--
That is Solar One in the Mojave Desert (California). It was retired in 1988. This is a Solar Thermal unit. The top of the tower, operating at 1000°F, has molten salt circulating in it as a thermal transfer fluid. Then water is boiled to drive a conventional steam turbine/generator system.

Photovoltaic cells are destroyed at those temperatures.

Solar Two and a bit more info at:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/solar-one-and-solar-two

Also:
https://climatekids.nasa.gov/concentrating-solar/
But they are V-E-R-Y slow to connect, it may take a few tries.

Cheers,
Tom

 

[mfb]

@paradisePhysicist: With PV this is generally known as concentrator PV. You save some PV area but you increase the complexity of the system, you generally need tracking to follow the Sun, you create heating issues, and it only helps with direct sunshine - on cloudy days your mirrors are not brighter than the sky they obstruct.

 

[anorlunda]

The economics are changing so fast. I suspect that we are already at the point where the cost of one square meter of mirrors is about the same as one square meter of PV panels.

Three years ago, the price of panels (not including installation) was $1/watt. Now it is about $0.12.

 

[shjacks45]

Like this, perhaps? For a sense of scale, see the cars in the parking lot at lower right.

--
View attachment 272590
--
That is Solar One in the Mojave Desert (California). It was retired in 1988. This is a Solar Thermal unit. The top of the tower, operating at 1000°F, has molten salt circulating in it as a thermal transfer fluid. Then water is boiled to drive a conventional steam turbine/generator system.

Photovoltaic cells are destroyed at those temperatures.

Solar Two and a bit more info at:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/solar-one-and-solar-two

Also:
https://climatekids.nasa.gov/concentrating-solar/
But they are V-E-R-Y slow to connect, it may take a few tries.

Cheers,
Tom

Gotta note the solar thermal plant that Ore-Ida built in Eastern Oregon to fry french fry potatoes.