Not as expensive as I thought. 5.5kwh there I have another 100 cells ordered to bring it to 7.4kwh, 5 to 6 bill cycles and it will pay for itself. I already have the solar panels and 25kva genset for backup. Just needed a battery.
Where are you getting the cells from?
It’s a bit more complicated than that. Load is also variable and as one solar panel goes into clouds another comes out etc. No doubt that both solar and wind are more variable than load and certainly more so than generators. In any case the grid simply must be balanced! Doubtful to me that the net effects of peaking plants in terms of pollution or efficiency are anywhere near a net negative compared to what solar puts into the equation. However, storage must be integrated into the grid in order for renewables to reach their potential.
The scale of base load generation, which can not ramp quickly with load and also requires peaking plants, is quite mind boggling to me. I worked for a smallish utility. One of our “big” plants was a 360 MW coal plant. In terms of the ability to come on line consider that when it was taken down for maintenance it required something like 45,000 gal of fuel oil to act more or less like kindling in order to get the machine up to temperature so that it could maintain proper coal combustion!
For stable, reliable, 24/7-producible power, thorium is probably the answer. I’ve read that thorium nuclear plants won’t have runaway meltdowns like uranium, and thorium can’t be used for weapons. The US has a 1,000 year supply of thorium in the ground.
The technology exists now, but it needs to be scaled up. And imagine building modular thorium generators that can be shipped to third world countries. They could even power the cargo ships (say good-bye to the diesel burners).
I found the batteries online and brought most of their limited stock.
You have Base load and minimum load. You hear lots of half truths about this and it doesn’t apply to solar or wind or batteries because the AC wave is generated electronically. With a synchronous generator it is RPM therefore need a stable load.
Base load is the minimum load needed on a turbine to run efficiently. If a coal fired steam turbines load drops to a certain point it needs to switch to oil.
I have left the power generation industry and don’t want to have to pay retailers or generators for something I can do myself. They can go jump
Thorium reactors produce uranium-232 that are high-energy gamma emitter penetrating much further than lower energy beta. Good news only has a half-life of 68.9 years. Also produces iodine-129 that has a half-life of 15.7 million years and is readily absorbed by creatures with Thyroids. Iodine-129 is a cancer causing radioisotope. Probably not going to be given to third world countries.
Agree on that. Last time gas prices soared around 2012 investors with huge heaps of money were investing in oil “as a hedge against the falling dollar”. Sounds familiar eh? Before they ruined that, they drove the housing market over the cliff by over aggressive investing in real estate which artificially drove the prices through the roof.
So the tactic is- drive the prices so high it becomes unsustainable, while reaping huge profits on rent,
dump it while its high, cause the bubble to burst, then buy everything up when it hits rock bottom so they’ll be set when the prices climb back up in 20 years. Same cycle over and over. Make money which ever way the market goes. Make money on both sides of the energy drift. Make money hand over fist when nobody can afford their rent. Make money when energy shortages cause prices to skyrocket.
Bottom line, its all market manipulation. Even pipeline hacking, power plants going down, blocking the suez canal, baby food shortages,trucker strikes,port backups…isnt it all sounding a bit too contrived?
Let me see if i get this straight- my friend described it a bit differently to me…
So you are saying power plants have to take up the slack for renewable when it drops in output, that makes sense. Base load generation is what the coal plants run at constantly, to provide the stable power we need at minimum I presume. Renewable works off and on, bust most days the solar is more predictable than wind- however if you get a large cloud system output drops like a rock. So peaking plants make uo the difference whe demand peaks well over the base load and renewable can’t keep up. Thes plants use diesel, because coal plants can’t ramp ip or down quickly. So we’re running engines, with terrible efficiency, instead of running coal plants because we now have renewable energy sources, or is this something we have to have anyway when peaks hit, regardless of renewable’s influence?
A steam turbine has a minimum load before it can switch from fuel oil to coal. Then it has a base load where it will run efficiently and stable on coal.
For 60hz the steam turbine has to spin at 3500rpm. The intermittent nature of renewables cause that speed to become unstable. Coal fired power stations are not as stable as you would think. Someone hosing a radiator could be keeping a unit from tripping.