pnichols wrote:
John & Angela wrote:
2. Storage. The sun doesn't shine at night and although the storage technology is now becoming mature the production (read factories) still has to catch up and will also be hard to sustain.
John, I'm curious: What massive storage capacity for the output from solar farms is large enough to supply whole cities at night and during long cloudy periods is becoming mature?
The only storage methodology I know of large enough is for the solar farms when the sun is shining to run electric pumps that pump water up into a reservoir so that water coming down from the reservoir can then turn those same electric pump motors as generators to provide huge amounts of power at night and during long cloudy periods. We live close to one of those large electrical energy storage reservoirs.
Using local solar arrays to keep charged local arrays of lithium or similar technology batteries so as to power mobile devices, electric trains/trucks/cars, and individual buildings is one thing ... but storing energy for massive population centers probably is a whole different ball game. IMHO, that's the real challenge in using solar to really get us off fossil fuels withouut increasing the use of nuclear fission reactors.
So far I'm not a fan of localized solar energy creation and storage systems ever being able to supply the world's large scale energy needs. Centralized and massive solar energy collection and storage is probably the final approach that must be used. (That is until, and if, science can someday tame nuclear fusion.)
Hi Phil. They talk about it a bit in the video. I have watched it twice and picked up on different stuff the second time. Some of it at a household level will be covered by products like the solar wall from Tesla. Here is a link to the Tesla website and the product. People forget that Tesla is not a car company but rather a technology company that build cars. This is a significant part of their business.
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/energyThe technology is maturing and is already commercially available at not horrible prices. There is a lot of info on the web but I can see this kind of grid storage being very regional, at least for the next decade or two. What I mean by this is, there would be no requirement or market in a province like British Columbia or maybe the state of washington as Hydro power rules (almost 95 percent for BC) and there is no shortage of it...therefore no need for solar...therefore no need for storage. However, take a place like Nevada, or a country like Morocco (largest solar installation in the world) it makes sense to have both residential and main grid storage. Typically most countries use half the residential power as we do in North America so it is an easier problem to resolve. It is essentially a cost per KWH storage thing and at some point it is cheaper to have solar and storage then "peaking generators". That point is pretty much here or will be in a couple years depending on the region of the world. Like I say, he talks about it in the video and there is additional info out there. He talks about using the vehicle batteries as surge coverage as well. Obviously the grid is going to have to evolve. In Japan you can by a "leaf to home" interface that allows you to power your house from your nissan leaf. The Nissan guy at the recent CES in vegas talked about bringing this product to market in Canada and the states in 2018. No idea of the cost but speculation is under 4700 bucks. We would probably be buyers as that is about the cost of a decent generator that could be used as back up for our house in a power outage. It would plug into the CHADEMO direct current charge port on our leaf so essentially it is a big asss Inverter. A 30 to 60 Kwh pack will run a house for a few days...or more.
Baby steps but you get the idea. Like I said, I think the implementation will be the challenge.
Let me know what you think of what he says in the video. .
Be safe out there.
John
