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comment by goobster
goobster  ·  2660 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Coal is dead, because nobody wants to build coal-fired power plants.

Thanks for engaging with me on this.

I really think that our power grid needs to be way more like plumbing: a base level of water is always available, and then if Nevada needs to water their lawn tonight, there is additional capacity in store to draw on.

A radical rethinking of where we get power, how we store it, and how we make it available to the places that need it, especially when that need spikes...

It's a Big Problem, but one I can't imagine we aren't going to have to solve in the next 20 years.





WanderingEng  ·  2659 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's definitely a Big Problem. The challenge with flexible load is finding load that's flexible and manipulating it to the advantage of the system. Some load can be shifted pretty simply. My refrigerator is currently running. If it had waited five more minutes to run, my food would still be cold and safe. But it will need to run eventually.

Storage is the potential miracle here. Despite press to the contrary, batteries aren't economical today to store energy for any significant length of time. They've been deployed economically for extremely short duration energy shifting, seconds to maybe a minute. I think they need to come down in price by an order of magnitude to really change anything. Maybe they will; it'd be great if they did.