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Your comment was chemically and biologically decomposed by microorganisms and fungi, which extracted energy from it and returned the remaining nutrients to the surrounding soil, providing a fertile ground for the growth of plants?
> In these discussions please keep in mind that frequency regulation, short term and long term shortage are different applications with different needs.
The comparison is valid; If you want to fill hour to hour demand or add some frequency regulation, an inverter with a bunch of batteries is far, far better than this
> You don’t want to used pumped hydro for short term storage because the rapid cycling will drive up the maintenance costs. You actually hear about hydro power plants talking about installing batteries to reduce wear.
They are still cycled daily, that's the entire point of them that even worked pre renewables - load up on cheap night energy and unload it with demand. Renewables just flipped that to load in solar peak.
And putting few hours worth of batteries to reduce cycling is beneficial in both of those cases.
Don't do that here.
Why 2 years?
Even though I'm expecting the current approximately-exponential growths of both PV and wind to continue until they supply at least 50% of global electrical demand between them, I expect that to happen in the early 2030s, not by the end of 2027.
(I expect global battery capacity to be between a day and a week at that point, still not "seasonal" for sure).
Significantly longer than that and you go from prediction to speculation, and it is unwise to base a country's energy policy on speculation.
1. Do the other costs scale with the number of panels? Because if the sites are 5 times the scale of the current ones I would imagine there are considerable scale based cost efficiencies, both within projects and across projects (through standardization and commoditization).
2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV already greatly smoothes the power production curve throughout the day, improving profitability. Lower cost panels make the downside of requiring more panels in such a setup almost non-existent. Additionally, they reduce maintenance/cleaning costs by being mounted vertically.
3. Battery/energy storage (which further improve profitability) costs are dropping and can drop further.
Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer. Possible projects are underground thermal storage ("Pit Thermal Energy Storage", only works in places where heating is required in winter), desalination, producing ammonia for fertilizer, and producing jet fuel.
Mostly yes. Once you're at utility-scale, installation and maintainance should scale 1:1 with number of panels. Inverters and balancing systems should also scale 1:1, although you might be able to save a bit here if you're willing to "waste" power during peak insolation.
But think about it this way: If it was possible to reduce non-panel costs by a factor of 5 simply by building 5x larger solar plants, the operating companies would already be doing this. With non-panel costs around 65%, this would result in 65% * (1 - 1/5) = 52% savings and give them a huge advantage over the competition.
> 2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV […] 3. Battery […] costs are dropping
I agree that intra-day fluctuations will be solved by cheaper panels and cheaper batteries, especially once sodium-ion battery costs fall significantly. But I'm specifically talking about seasonal storage here.
> Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer.
I'm quite pessimistic about that. Chemical plants tend to be extremely capital-intensive and quickly become non-profitable if they're effectively idle during half of the year. Underground thermal storage would require huge infrastructure investments into distribution, since most places don't already have district heating.
Sorry, very busy today so I can't go into all details, but I still wanted to give you an answer.
there's ammonia, methanol, and other derivatives that are easier to store and transport.
eg: * https://www.methanex.com/our-products/about-methanol/marine-...
The question is the same as for hydrogen: If it's easy, cheap, and safe to generate, store, and convert back into electricity, why isn't it already being done on a large, commercial scale? The answer is invariably that it's either not easy to scale, too expensive (in terms of upfront costs, maintainance costs, or inefficiencies), or too unsafe, at least today.
https://youtube.com/shorts/s0yWk4cJT_I?si=dNXftp8bk3PY6Nfg
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JZY38D3PtF4