this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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Mildly Interesting

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This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.

This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?

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It's still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it's pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.

Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Looking again at historical data, we can find the maximum lull there ever was and put enough storage capacity to cover that with generous padding.

Baseload storage is a pipe dream. The storage and generation capacity necessary to make that work would be about two orders of magnitude more expensive to maintain and operate than the equivalent nuclear capacity, and the environmental impact would be far greater still.

That's not to say that storage is useless; it certainly isn't. But its utility is in leveling spikes and dips, not replacing baseload generation during a "lull".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's simply not true. This has been well studied, and a 100% renewable + storage option is quite feasible. It's even easier if you focus on going 95% first (that last 5% gets much, much harder).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1009249541/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Depends on your definition of "feasible".

It is certainly within the capabilities of humanity to do it.

It would cost far more, and have much higher ecological impact than alternatives.

To me, that is not "feasible".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

It's feasible and cost effective. The academic research on this has been quite clear, but it isn't the sort of thing that generates headlines. Nuclear just isn't necessary.