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Comment by imoverclocked | Hacker News Reader

Ya know, we could make daytime energy usage cheaper than night time usage and then shift production to mostly solar without such an emphasis on storing it. Then we wouldn’t need to solve the problem of transporting so much energy.

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Bigger grids are more resilient to poor weather.

In the extreme case, you can get solar power in the middle of local night and winter by way of building a perfectly reasonable (one ohm resistance) global power grid for a reasonable material cost (260 or so billion USD at current aluminium prices, more for actually putting it wherever).

You'd still want storage for e.g. electric cars, and we aren't that coordinated globally, so I doubt we'd actually build a global grid; but I can easily believe we will see a unified north american continental grid once Texas gets out of its own way, or a unified EU+friends grid, and even at that scale you get several hours variation in sunrise and sunset, climate, and how long winter nights are.

A grid able to handle one area’s after-work peak with solar is a huge deal.

Big deal as in value, yes indeed.

Big deal as in expensive? Grid as a whole, not the wire itself, that's the point.

I'm seeing headlines about the USA needing to spend ten times that to modernise their grid. It isn't unreasonable to suspect the USA's grid modernisation could, for a very small increase in material cost, turn it into part of something much grander.

Big deal as in a political PitA at every level? Yup.

Less electricity storage means the need for larger transmission lines, as peak loads become larger. In general better aligning utilization with surpluses of electricity carries an intrinsic tradeoff versus the capital cost of oversizing the utilization equipment to make up for only working part of the time. And the real way to look at storage is pure electricity storage versus storing the output products of electricity. Like I can run my washing machine when the sun is shining, because clean clothes (product of electricity) are going to sit around for a week anyway, which is free storage. Whereas if say you run a desalinization plant only when the sun is shining, then you have to store the fresh water in tanks for when people actually want to consume it (in addition to doubling/tripling the pumps/membranes). Transmission lines are going to fall in a roughly similar category (modulo consumption local to generation), where now all that oversized utilization equipment is drawing twice as much during the day and very little at night, increasing the sizing of the lines.

Storing products and storing energy are very different. By storing work, you are consuming the energy while it is available… which is the entire point.

Storing fresh water is a good idea anyway. You don’t want to run out of that stuff :)

There’s a lot of backlash against time of use pricing. People simultaneously want predictable pricing and to get a good deal with off-peak pricing.

It’s a sensible idea, but unfortunately very few industrial processes would be economical if the plant runs at capacity only a few hours per dau.

>then shift production to mostly solar

"Let's just use solar" comments are tiresome. It's not a panacea.

Lots of energy is consumed by the industry and some industries do not sleep at night. Blast furnaces for instance need a huge amount of energy (https://www.energy.gov/eere/amo/articles/itp-steel-energy-us...) continuously.

>Lots of energy is consumed by the industry and some industries do not sleep at night.

People think you slap some solar panels on your roof and it's "problem solved". Apparently they have no idea how the world consumes energy, or the scale:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/666342/how-the-worl...

Other people think that we need an all encompassing solution that solves every problem without changing the way the world works.

I agree it works both ways. I just wanted to remind that electric transportation is a small part of the overall electricity consumption (0.02 Quads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_(unit)), while industry & commercial accounts for 13.3 Quads, 3 order of magnitude lower.

In "Transportation", there are a lot of non-electric consumption (in US in 2022: 89.45% oil, 5.7% biomass, 4.69% NatGas, only 0.08% electricity, and other) because only few trains and individual cars are using electricity the rest like boats, planes, and most trains in US runs on oil.

So, yes it is good for electric vehicles to charge during the day when solar produces the most. But the vast majority of the electricity consumption (in US 99.9%) is from the Industry, Commercial and Residential while the transportation is only in US 0.1% (source: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...).

Most of the Industry, Commercial and even Residential needs electricity at night, and storing that kind electric energy (48.57 Quads per year... that is 9,246,178,571 barrel of oil or 0.2 barrel of U235) is currently difficult.

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