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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't matter how inefficient this is because as it stands we are "curtailing" — which means throwing away — an insane amount of energy in the spring just because we can't figure out what to do with it. The amount of solar power curtailed so far in 2024 was more than enough to desalinate one million acre-feet of seawater and pump it to 1000' above sea level.

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Residential solar was a terrible idea. It only works during the day, it is hard to store, and you can't efficiently transport it to where there is demand without a major overhaul of the grid.

I guess you could pump seawater to affluent neighborhoods for processing, but then you need to rethink drinking water distribution.

It would have made so much more sense to just build nuclear plants along side desalination plants, but the oil industry convinced everyone that nuclear is a scary boogie monster.

Naive question: if we expanded a lot of residential and light commercial solar heavily enough, could the excess capacity no longer needed from the grid in the daytime be efficiently transmitted to where it’s needed?

Somewhere I saw someones study that said it's better to build solar and batteries than solar and transmission lines. I think wind is maybe more of an issue since wind and people don't line up geographically as much as solar and people.

I saw somewhere the opposite: that it’s better to build solar and transmission lines. So idk what the truth is.

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