How can we make wind and solar more system sustainable?

Is power storage really cheap enough to make the overall wind and solar stuff cheap enough? Because storage and wind/solar goes together - no storage means only a small part of wind/solar can be used.

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more importantly : how can we make high heels mandatory to wear ?

More importantly, what's up with OP's file name

I never thought about that. With fossil fuels you just crank it up or down depending on the load. But with wind and solar you need storage...

Damn. Idk why more people don't talk about that.

Batteries are pretty damaging to the environment. I've hear to make an electrical car it pollutes more than a truck over the entire course of its life for example.

Hmm. Here is an idea.

You attach the power source to a water pump that pumps the water to a higher elevation reservoir.

Then you let the water flow back down through a hydro power plant?

That way it can fill the reservoir all day and you can throttle the flow for power?

No, batteries are inefficient and unless a quantum leap breakthrough is made they won't get any better because you can't chemically cram any more energy into them.

Wind and solar are nice on small scale where individuals can control their usage depending on conditions and output. They are not suited for baseload power as they are too inreliable.

No.
Renewable energy is only affordable due to subsidies. NPR actually did a long interview last week, on science Friday. Solar has a fifteen - twenty year payback. By that time, the panels have degraded. Wind requires moving parts, which means constant maintenance.

Without subsidies they are more expensive than other forms of power.

Nobody likes that?

Thought it was pretty niffty

>Batteries are pretty damaging to the environment.
There is stuff like reverse flow batteries which are not damaging to the environment and cheaper. Also, things like concrete ball hydro storage devices. etc.

But all of these things cost money. Should wind/solar have to pay for storage?

>Nobody likes that?
>Thought it was pretty niffty

It is called a pump storage plant and is the most common electricity storage system in the world. It is one of only 2 mature electricity storage systems we have.

Let's just figure out how to make fusion work and forget everything else. Or maybe create some half-assed dyson sphere around the sun, don't have to worry about cloudy days in space.

Humanity will be extinct well before a dyson sphere

Is it really hard to put some solar panels around the sun?

That is the real question here. Op, explain yourself.

Because of their intermittency wind and solar are on the wrong damn side of the grid load balancing equation. There's simply no benefit to adding these wildly varying negative loads to the grid for which conventional suppliers have to ramp constantly in order to balance.

It would require more matter than what is present on earth, so yeah.

You can't.

You run into planned economy problem^2.

Solar and wind power output can't be precisely predicted, neither can be energy consumption.
The easiest solution are battery banks, but now think about it. In ideal situation you'd always have battery bank that covers 100% of your needs(not exactly 100% of your consumption but let's not get into it because it'll be too complicated) that would require you to predict input and output though, so no way, it's not gonna work. As such, you'd rather want to overproduce because it's better to have than to have not on the worst scenario. So let's say you're trying to ensure that throughout the year, you'll have 10% more "reserve" than you need. The output of your power sources is still heavily varied depending on weather. Have fun trying to organize this shit in a coherent way.

Meanwhile in nuclear reactor you're adding inhibitors if the output is too huge and catalyst if it's too small. In coal/oil you just increase pressure by increasing the amount of fuel going in. And so on and so on.

If even NPR is admitting it, it must be pretty bad.

you can't.

I said "half-assed" dyson sphere, as in just putting up some solar panels around the sun. Not a literal megastructure covering up the entire sun.

Really the only way to find a way to reduce the amount of real estate needed.

The biggest issue I have with wind and solar is the amount of space they take up.

>In ideal situation you'd always have battery bank that covers 100% of your needs(not exactly 100% of your consumption but let's not get into it because it'll be too complicated) that would require you to predict input and output though, so no way, it's not gonna work.

Wrong. Most analysis show that you want to back up around 3-5 hours of your average capacity based on the circumstances. That is then put back into the system to smooth out electricity supply.

Or in other words, if you build a 1 GW peak capacity solar farm and a 1 GW peak capacity off-shore wind farm, you back up at max 10 GWh. You don't do this with lithium ion batteries, as this would be way to expensive. You use things like reverse flow batteries or you just go for pressurized air storage systems or you use pic related etc.

>The biggest issue I have with wind and solar is the amount of space they take up.
Off shore wind farms don't take up that much space. Solar farms in the desert take up desert space where you don't really have anything anyway.

So I do not see a problem with renewables as long as we use them as supplements to clean coal and 4th gen nuclear only.

Well, there's the dyson ring, the problem is that spaceflight is not advanced enough to build a megastructure in space.
Even just launching a Soyuz to the ISS, which is just 400km from us, costs millions, imagine not only getting to, but building a structure around an object that's 150 million km from us.
Right now we still don't have a ship capable of getting humans to Mars, and Mars, at it's closest, is 77 million km from Earth.
One day?
Maybe, but I really doubt it will happen in our lifetimes.
What we could do, however, is build solar panels in the atmosphere, maybe an entire space station dedicated simply to collecting Solar energy, but only when the costs get lower.

We have billions of years' worth of nuclear energy resources right on the Earth's crust so building a megastructure in space for generating solar power is just ludicrous.

One day it might be necessary if we want to leave the Solar system.
Those FTL ships won't warp on their own.

By the time we get to a point where we can even build a dyson spehere would won't even need it because we would had perfected fusion

>a quantum leap breakthrough
I'm having a giggle.

~

Batteries are not just bad they are fucking terrible.

In terms of lifespan cost of delivery converted into kw/hr the best battery outcome is over 60 cents per kw/hr. And this price assumes free installation no maintenance and no housing costs.
The more realistic numbers are $1.20 per kw/hr. While demand generation for gas/nuclear/coal runs $0.03-$0.07 per kw/hr.

Further any magic battery tech that makes wind and solar viable is better suited for adaption to coal or LWR nuclear.
The grid demand is a lot like the IQ bell curve with demand spiking at supper time and then falling to about 20% overnight, climbing all morning till mid day.
If you had enough magic batteries to store power you could have your cheap base load generators like coal/nuclear run at 100% output all night long charging batteries that would meet the peak demand.

Peak demand is currently the most expensive power to make because it's only required for 4 hrs a day, meaning that a generator for peak power can only run to recover it's costs for 4hrs. The actual grid is base load at 100% all the time, then all the other power suppliers running 20% to 80% ready to scale up as demand rises.

If batteries became economical you could remove a lot of the standby load following natural gas turbines which need to be able to meet instant peaking loads.

In short batteries don't work, and if they did it would be better to use them for sources other than wind/solar.

We can't German fag. Now go prep your wife for your live in refugee.

>Most analysis show that you want to back up around 3-5 hours of your average capacity based on the circumstances.
Lets hope your wind doesn't stop for a week, (which has happened) and your people don't want electrical power after the sun sets + 5hrs. If you are going full German and building only solar and wind.

Already done at scale. E.g. Longyangxia facility combines a 1GW photovoltaic plant with a 1.3 GW hydroelectric plant. No pumping, just throttling, tho.

Wind an solar are good on a small scale like for a home, but the large wind farms are incredibly inefficient. Over its lifetime, a large wind turbine won't generate the energy used to build it.

By investing money in thorium research

WE ARE NOW CAPABLE OF MASS PRODUCING CARBON NANO-TUBES.

COMPREHEND WHAT THAT MEANS. EDUCATE OTHERS NOW.

What's the effective real price?

Actually let me rephrase my question, how is that any different than any other hydroelectric operation that throttles down when other cheap sources of power are on the grid?

The biggest hold up to all of our technology right now (renewable energy, cell phones, drones, miniturization....whatever) is battery technology.

What we have now quite frankly sucks ass. We are bound to a hard limit of energy/volume by the dialectric constant. It's a really shitty place to be.

>We are bound to a hard limit of energy/volume by the dialectric constant.
That's meaningless for grid level power.

All that matters is cost for grid level. (within some reason)

I think the issue might be that the girls are 12...

>How can we make wind and solar more system sustainable?
Change the fucking laws of reality.

Solar and wind are bullshit. The maximum power a PERFECT solar panel can hope to extract is about 1000 W/m^2 during the few moments around noon.

Anyone who thinks solar is the future is clearly a retard.

Wind an solar are a scam.

Just let the technologies progress at their natural pace. It'll happen, or it won't. Stop trying to force it - you're only sullying the brand of wind and sun.

This. If you want energy you have to split it or burn it. The only good solar does is for satellites and calculators.

Solar and wind are parasitic forms of energy production.

>le just le wait guys science will make a way
you fucking idiot, think for a second

It's not an issue with energy per unit of space. It's the lack of storage first and foremost, then sudden drops in output when clouds cross the panels or when it rains.

Yeah rain is actually a huge issue from the raindrops disrupting the angle of incident of the light after the panels get rained on. It's not hard to fix and for areas with no rain not an issue.

But then it's an issue of dust. You must constantly clean the panels or lose output. So that's a massive compressed air system blowing dust away.

But in the end it's the storage. No cheap storage and all solar does is make grid electricity more expensive.
youtube.com/watch?v=2zD0m_ci-oo
Video covers the LFTR but is actually mostly about grid economics.

Have you ever seen what wind turbines actually do to the surrounding environment? They are not green at all.
And solar panels are not that efficient, they can be used for emergencies only.
Nuclear energy is the best thing we have at this point in time.

>And solar panels are not that efficient, they can be used for emergencies only.

>emergencies only

It's night. A negro who got shot in the hood comes to the hospital to be fixed up. It's a freaking emergency. They try to call the doctor. Phones don't work... running on emergency solar power.

Austrian flag dude, you really thought this through!

What he means is when your main grid power is out you can have a solar system and battery so you can have a single 12v DC light on.

I don't think that is what he was talking about.

stop looking at this issue through the lens of centralized power generation and distribution.

How would decentralized generation and no distribution remove the storage problem?

Put them in orbit where there is no atmosphere to diminish effectiveness.

> space elevator to a ring in orbit

No storage facilities needed with solar panels attached to an orbital ring.

youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E

This [spoiler]picture is some prime jailbait[/spoiler]

It's garbage, nuclear or bust

Anywhere that's sunny, hot, and where 2pm-8pm power usage is high due to air conditioning can benefit from solar immensely. Ex. Texas.
Basically you can run on nuclear/dams/gas between 8pm and 9am, then start capturing solar energy in a giant flyweel/hydraulic system, and basically use the solar energy to power the high AC needs.

Because there is a borderline 1:1 correspondence between cooling needs and solar this prevents the need to borrow energy from out of state.

Solar doesn't belong in places like Oregon, at least not yet.

Wind power doesn't work. Maximum amount of kinetic energy that can be extracted from the wind is 59%. That's a theoretical calculation based on a turbine with infinite blades, iirc, among other practically impossible assumptions.

Energy consumption is growing at 2% per year, globally. If you wanted to have all new energy provided by wind, within 35 years, you would have covered a landmass equal to all of Russia in wind turbines. Or, to put it in American terms, Manhattan's energy consumption would require several hundred Manhattan's worth of wind turbine farms to supply. And that's without even beginning to consider the intermittent nature or wind or the storage issues.

Solar, on the other hand, has promise. Enough solar energy hits the Earth every day to power current needs for 25 years. A leap in cell and battery technology and we're within reach.

In reality, though, we should be pursuing nuclear. Most of the "waste" isn't actually waste. Something like 97% of what's considered waste is actually equal, in "contamination" to what you'd get if you buried one of those glowing watches in a tonne of dirt. And most of the remainder can actually be recycled for further use. Nuclear waste is a meme and so is any danger associated with the reactors themselves. People are fucking stupid.

>A leap in cell and battery technology and we're within reach.
Explain why that tech wouldn't work better with coal/nuclear power.

Nuclear is great but needs gov subsidies and laws to tell Not In MY Backyard people to fuck off.

The real question is why make wind and solar more sustainable?

Nuke and oil work just fine and we have a 1000 years of it.

Plenty of time to figure out a cheaper way for whatever replaces them.

For precisely the reason I gave in my post, senpai.

>Enough solar energy hits the Earth every day to power current needs for 25 years

That thing in the sky is literally a nuclear fusion reactor.