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0 pointsphicoh5y ago0 comments

I don't see how that would work. Suppose there is no wind for a couple of days, do you expect homes to shutdown everything and wait for wind to return?

Solar in a desert is easier, if you only have to cover the night then install a big enough battery. But a battry in every home is probably less efficient than a huge battery next to the solar panels.

So most likely, renewables come with storage. And the smart grid idea with mostly fade. Possibly with the exception of car chargers that charge faster or slower depending on conditions.

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ajford5y ago

The solution for things like this is a multi-facet power grid, with renewables, nuclear, and (small ammounts of) fossil fuels, paired with grid-scale energy storage.

For example, the pumped hydro station in Wales [0] can store up to 9.1GWh and can push 1.8GW peak, with a spin up time under a minute.

Systems like these can serve both as buffers until fossil fuel or nuclear reactors can spin up to peak in the even of wind/solar shortage, and can even serve as overnight generation to replace solar if large enough (given the usually much lower demand at night).

If each state was required to implement their own (presumably smaller) grid-scale storage this would have the benefit of removing a single point of failure and spread the cost. A construction project of this scale would also serve to create hundreds or thousands of jobs in various areas, stimulating the economy.

Having grid-scale storage would be drastically improved with a smart grid, since it would have much more real-time data on power demands and allow more seamless management of capacity.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jx_bJgIFhI

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