Siemens is making a lot of money selling inertial stabilizers. There is ongoing research on how to stabilize grids in the face of decreasing inertial frequency stabilization.
Do you have any resources you can share on how this compares to synthetic inertia battery storage and renewables inverters can provide? I am interested!
And how does this disprove their point? I don’t think its the lines of code you write that allow you to decide whether or not you should roll your own crypto…
All that needs to be checked to avoid that is the statement of the main theorem. Any divergence further inside means you proved the main theorem differently than you thought you did -- but you still proved it.
This assumes the Lean kernel itself isn't bugged, but getting it correct is a matter that affects all uses, not just this one, so the cost of making it correct is spread over all those uses.
Rooftop solar has the benefit that you distribute the investment cost over a large number of people, even if the costs are a lot higher than grid-scale installations on the ground.
I'm surprised to hear that you need to replace roofs every fifteen years. What are they made of? The roofs I know last decades longer than that.
Grid scale installations are also amortized over many people (?!?!). This is literally why governments and corporations exist.
And rooftop solar had to be subsidized in the US, so apparently it wasn't attractive enough as an investment on its own. Even now, solar without batteries isn't economically beneficial to individuals, and batteries are ludicrously expensive and require a lot of space.
> I'm surprised to hear that you need to replace roofs every fifteen years.
Asphalt shingles. Of course you can use something else like a metal roof. But the solar panel itself doesn't last that long since efficiency drops and new technology gets so much better. So you're still gonna have a new part of your house that can break whenever it feels like it and needs maintenance every so often. Something I want the government or a utility company to deal with, please.
Even better than that: the thermal time constant is proportional to the square of the radius. There's the square/cube effect that causes a factor of r ratio in the volume to surface area, but there's also a factor of r from the temperature gradient (which, from the center of the pile to the surface, is inversely proportional to r).
A completely renewable grid is less important than electrifying the low hanging fruit of heating and transport.
Anything below 800g of CO2 (which means basically every current grid) means electrifying is a net win. Even the famously coal heavy South African grid is already past that barrier and even if it wasn't all grids are getting cleaner over time.
A grid that has maxed out wind and solar and then used only coal for 2 weeks would be one of the cleanest grids in the world right now, on par with France or Sweden.
Chasing 100% on a grid to satisfy the complaints of people who are concern trolling isn't smart nor necessary. What you need is bulk cheap electricity to allow you to reduce your heating and transport costs and clean your air at the same time.
It looks like we’re pretty much in perfect agreement, but I think it doesn’t hurt to already start planning what to do about the last couple of percent. These are all projects with long time horizons
Keeping coal plants around is cheap to cover that. Longer term things like producing ammonia during summer and converting it to electricity in fuel cells will allow to remove needs for fossil fuels completely.
The main advantage of gas plants is that they support variability. In a world with enough battery storage to last for days that would be irrelevant. And as an insurance against rare events it is better to keep coal plants as transportation and storage of coal is vastly more resilient to interruptions.
Solar+A couple of hours of batteries is already economically viable. The storage problem that is still expensive is bridging days/weeks of insufficient sun and wind.
The US uses around 4TWh of electricity a night. A battery with that capacity, to get through the night with no generation, would cost over a trillion dollars. Of course thered still be some generation at night, but still, using a battery just to get through the night is not even close to viable
That sounds like a lot right? But it isn't large compared to US wars to protect energy resources (>$4T just for post-9/11 wars), and the payback it would generate over decades to come. In fact, this level of investment is a total no-brainer, compared to the benefits it will generate (forget about even the climate benefits - just the other economic and defense benefits.)
You generally get more return on investment if you invest in building infrastructure in your own country rather than investing in blowing up infrastructure in a different country. So I’m implying that solar and batteries are a lot cheaper than the war in Iraq.
1 week national battery storage is totally doable. All we need to do is convince the rest of the planet to stop making GPUs, phones, computers, and EVs for the next decade, and then give us all their rocks.
78.4TWh is about $19T (all in costs) for a national battery grid for 1 week storage, could be built over ten years but would need the US to build and own double the current global output, not even considering where all the raw materials and labor comes from.
And if we subtract all those datacentres crammed with Nvidia GPUs ? ;)
If we're being honest here, the problem with the US is that it has always treated any sort of energy source as being infinite and has always been quite extravagant in its use of energy.
Whether a preponderance for gas-guzzling SUVs or datacentres the story is always the same. The US mentality is there will always be infinite oil in the pump and infinite electrons in the cable.
Is that actually that much more than building 400GW worth of nuclear generation capacity (assuming 10 hours of nighttime)? I think that, that simple calculation shows that it is viable. Even a trillion is 1/32th of the US GDP. Construction over a decade should not stress the US economy at all.
I also think your trillion number is at least double the raw cell cost today.
Current li-ion pricing is $19 per kwh (BYD's latest cell's pricing), so a single battery that covers all 4TWh would come in at 76 billion dollars. Still a shit ton but reasonable.
Just by scaling up the existing technologies the full cost including installation and maintenance of a grid-scale battery in 5 years will be below 100 usd/kwh. So the price is max 400 billions or 1% of US GDP.
US has ~250 million cars. If they are all EVs (100KWh), it is 25TWh capacity.
Reserving 20% of that capacity to supply power back to the grid is 5TWh.
EVs can be charged for free during the day, ~20% of solar is lost due to curtailment. Even if a significant percentage (10 - 20%) of the people decide they are going on long drives from Florida to Vancouver and turn off supply-power-to-grid-for-money in the app, its fine, there are plenty of cars. It is the cheapest, most resilient, distributed and self-healing energy ecosystem. Only one problem, it won't make the super billionaires money. Unless it can be packaged in a way to make the super billionaires money, its a no go in US.
This infrastructure buildout costs nothing, people buy new cars all the time (~20M/year), just buy EVs instead. Because people are providing the capital and the storage infrastructure, they should be paid for it.
I think this is a pretty decent idea and hopefully within a decade at least california will be doing it. The problem though is that the biggest advantage of an EV is that you charge it overnight and never need to worry about going to the gas station or running low on power. I think a pretty significant number of people would want 100% charge every morning which makes the total addressable battery size a good bit smaller.
EVs with 300 miles of range are pretty common. The average round trip commute is 42 miles, i.e. you have on average more than 7 days before you run out from a full charge. Turning that into ~5.5 days in exchange for chopping tens of dollars a month off of your own electric bill because you're paying the daytime solar price instead of the nighttime something more expensive price is going to be very popular.
And when you know you're taking a long trip you can still do a full charge without needing to do that the other 99% of the time.
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