Solar and wind energy could fulfill energy demand 10-fold, Oxford study finds::undefined
A change in thinking about energy needs to happen to truly understand why Wind and Solar and a bit of storage is enough. You have to accept that at times there will be overproduction of power because storing it to hit exact use capacity isn’t cost effective. Some storage makes sense, but its much cheaper to have more capacity.
What I think will happen in the future once we reach the point this is how most energy comes is more people will be on Octopus like smart energy schemes where you might get paid for using electricity and there will be companies that use this to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We are approaching a world of energy excess but only at certain times and there are opportunities to use that energy for the right reasons to reverse the damage we have done with CO2 emissions.
if it’s to cheap, the market wont be able to profit enough, so I’m pretty sure they will find a way to squeeze us dry anyway
Will solar operate if there’s a nuclear winter?
In case of nuclear winter, I don’t think renewable energy is going to be the main concern.
However, it is possible to put solar panels on satellites that transmit the energy down to the surface. It’s costly and dangerous, but a benefit over surface solar is that the satellites can point at the sun for longer time during days and send the energy to places that are not in the sun, thereby producing solar power 24/7. It’s wildly impractical and expensive, but in case of nuclear winter it may be a realistic solution.
Wouldn’t the dust in the atmosphere also prevent energy transmission just as it does solar?
Wind, still works
You’d use frequencies that can penetrate cloud cover in that case, it wouldn’t work otherwise because then it would still be subject to weather.
Some sort of orbital death beam? I seem to recall a 2000ad story around a space energy beaming facility that goes horribly wrong.
Oh sure, it sounds extremely dangerous, just like standing too close to a radar will poach your brain. The satellite beaming the energy back would have to stay on target and if it didn’t it would need a quick and safe way to shut off. Of course dissipation of excess energy in a ground-based grid is a serious issue, so how you would design a satellite to deal with the sudden stop in energy flow is completely beyond me. Maybe you just write it off and launch another one in that case, and you have a lot of redundant paths rather than one critical one.
I don’t know for sure but it’s particulates that make it a nuclear winter, not just cloud (water) but would also need to penetrate the clouds as well.
It’s probably not wise for me to Google “what frequencies of EM can penetrate a nuclear winter clouds” though 🙂
That’s actually a pretty good point and I don’t know how it would work either. It would definitely interfere with the signal to some extent.
As long as you clean the surface of the Solar pannel from snow I dont see why to shouldn’t work. Even on cold and cloudy days our panel works.
Gonna need a tall ladder.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
Nuclear winter is a severe and prolonged global climatic cooling effect that is hypothesized[1][2] to occur after widespread firestorms following a large-scale nuclear war.[3] The hypothesis is based on the fact that such fires can inject soot into the stratosphere, where it can block some direct sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth. It is speculated that the resulting cooling would lead to widespread crop failure and famine.
No, you will be put into the matrix.
The only thing is that they take up a hell of a lot more space and are a lot more unsightly than “dirty” power plants. Nuclear power is great, the only quandary is what do we do with the spent fuel rods since they’re radioactive for about another 10,000 years.
Nuclear meltdowns like what happened at Chernobyl and Fukushima wouldn’t happen in the US. The only nuclear accident we’ve had was Three Mile Island which is nothing compared to the above two. Also terrorists attacking nuclear power plants wouldn’t happen either because the walls of pretty much every reactor in the US are like 30 feet thick of reinforced concrete, they can withstand direct hits of a 747 or a missile (my dad worked on the one here in NJ), if an ICBM with a nuclear payload is targeting a nuclear plant, we’re already fucked.
The primary finding of the study asserts that wind and solar energy have the potential to generate a staggering 2,896 terawatt-hours (TWh) of energy annually.
Yes, and most of that will be produced during summer, where our needs are at their lowest, and will therefore be wasted. The problem with solar and wind has never been production potential.
Yeah. Wind energy production is always lowest in the winter. Right. Gotcha.
https://newatlas.com/energy/highest-density-lithium-battery
Tesla battery apparently have a density of 244-296 Wh/Kg, so does that mean 1000 metic tonnes of of batteries at 289.6 Wh would be enough to provide annual storage here? That doesn’t seem infeasible or unreasonable for something potentially so beneficial.
Lithium battery is usually not what’s is used for grid scale batteries. The new natrium batteries could do that and are made from far cheaper and more abundant materials. The energy saving concrete also promises to be a good solution when used instead of regular concrete and candy be built directly beneath renewable power plants.
Nice, sounds even better!
Over production of energy may well be cheaper than battery storage anyway
Terrawatt is 10^12 so 1000 tonnes of battery would give you around 200MWh of storage. To get to 2000 TWh you are looking at 10,000,000,000 tonnes of Li-ion batteries. For a bit of scale, thats like turning around 10% of mount Everest into battery.
Who cares if its wasted?
Seriously? Anyone involved economically will care. The energy company, their suppliers and vendors, and the customers. No one wants to pay for huge overcapacity.
If we could store the excess energy and use it in higher-demand times (like long winter nights) that would be another story. But storage has always been the major challenge with solar and wind.
It’s hard to say it’s “wasted”. That just means the sun will shine, and the wind will blow, and nobody will use some of the electricity it could generate.
By that metric, almost 100% of wind and solar power is currently “wasted”. By putting up all that capacity, the amount “wasted” goes way down.
And what becomes possible if you have huge amounts of no cost energy available for some of the day/year? Direct carbon capture? Widespread desalination to produce fresh water? These are things that would help a lot, but are currently infeasible for to energy cost. You don’t have to do them 24/7 - just turn them on to soak up the excess grid capacity. If the cost of electricity went way down, I guarantee you somebody would figure out what to do with the power.
I’m talking about “wasted” as in the energy is collected but then not stored or put to use. That’s just needless wear and tear on the machinery. If it’s not collected in the first place I would just call that untapped.
And extra capacity is never really free. Someone has to invest in the infrastructure and upkeep. It’s takes money and effort to get energy to the right place at the right time, such as those carbon capture and desalination plants you seem to suggest will appear out of thin air.
