So what about fusion?

[wraper]

The problem with fusion is that you are still going to get a power bill. No matter how much you support it you will never get to bill anybody for the energy produced.

Big companies invest in it because they can charge people for energy. It is centralized power by its very nature.

As if you get your solar energy without any bills. It's just in different form. You get huge instant (investment) bills instead of small monthly bills. By the time it pays of, very likely you will need to invest again, like changing batteries, inverters, whatsoever. Yes, likely you can save something over time but it's not like there is no cash flow.

Big companies do not invest in solar because they can't write bills for it over and over. There is no shortage of supply they can put a toll booth on.

No they don't care if it's solar or whatsoever. Why they can't write the bills? Does it stop to be a centralized power? All they care is investments vs profit. And solar power is not easy to exploit. As I said before it's not feasible on it's own because you don't have stable power output over the time.

[wraper]

For solar energy fans. Watch this 5 minute video and then think how this can be dealt with with just a solar power.

[HAL-42b]

Watch this 5 minute video and then think how this can be dealt with with just a solar power.

The answer is trivially simple, but can we stop for a minute and think about how retarded the concept of AC power distribution is? Not only it has zero on site storage and all demands must be met instantaneously but it also has to be phase synchronised across continents.

This is like building circuits without filtering caps.

The simple way to solve it even in the current situation would be to simply change the billing.

1 - Households purchase energy from the utility at constant power. Households and the utility agree upon a rate (say 2kW) and are billed at that rate regardless if they use the energy or not. Energy above this rate is not supplied. It is in the customer's best interest to store what they can't use.

2 - Households have to supply enough storage capacity on site to meet their own peak demands. How they achieve that is up to them as long as they comply to code.


This has two consequences: 1 - utilities do not have to deal with demand peaks. 2 - Consumers with large peaks and irregular power demands must pay for the luxury out of their own pockets.

So if you are particularly efficient you can get by with only 750W of power and very little storage.

If you want both of your kettles and the toaster running at the same time you are running your dishwasher and jacuzzi you have to pay, dearly.

There, solved your peak demand problem. Where do I send the bill?

[Samogon]

There is no free power in the nature, you have to pay for it anyway, if it costly solar installation or big power plant running on tritium. You can only reduce consumption.

[wraper]

1 - Households purchase energy from the utility at constant power. Households and the utility agree upon a rate (say 2kW) and are billed at that rate regardless if they use the energy or not. Energy above this rate is not supplied. It is in the customer's best interest to store what they can't use.

2 - Households have to supply enough storage capacity on site to meet their own peak demands. How they achieve that is up to them as long as they comply to code.

Long time didn't read something so ridiculous. Regardless of this thing won't work in the first place, let's assume it would. 2kW constant rate is just retarded, it's 1.4 MWh per month (go green, yeah). Now, wee need this "storage". BTW you forgot that there is no power at night (solar). Do you even imagine how big this storage need to be, how insanely it will cost, and how much resources it needs and the waste it would create? 

[mtdoc]

Large, centralized solar installations are no solution.

Small, decentralized, community or household based solar could do a lot to meet current electricity needs but this would require a dramatic change in infrastructure and thinking.

Storage is, as always the big challenge for solar PV systems. With small, localized solar installations this is more easily solved with available battery technology, molten salt, pumped water storage, etc - with the best solution dependent on the size of the installation and local resources.

The utility companies - who have the financial and political clout - have no interest in doing this for obvious reasons.

[HAL-42b]

2kW constant rate is just retarded, it's 1.4 megawatt/month (go green, yeah).

Well, an order of magnitude here and there can be fixed. Wasting time with whiny naysayers can't.

[grumpydoc]

How it would be economically feasible, such power lines would cost much and power losses should be considered. Solar systems are ok for home customers. But for industrial use it is questionable. Most power used by industrial customers. They require high power sources and solar panels not among them.

Given the current socio-politic-economic climate I agree it would, in practice, be a non-starter. I am not convinced it could not be achieved from a purely technical perspective.

That said what is economic depends on the cost of the alternatives, you are also assuming that industry will stay where it is at present.

Suppose you woke up tomorrow and there was no other way of supplying power for the planet? Or that we were not constrained by the need for profit?

Could you transmit power from the EU to the USA from a purely technical perspective? Well, maybe - the longest transmission line at present is 2,300km long - that is short of the 2,900km from the coast of Africa to the coast of Brazil but not by orders of magnitude. Admittedly the logistics of submarine cables are different, the longest of those at present is less than 1/10th of that 2,900km span but there is (or was) a proposed 1000km cable.

You'd also need a few of them - the Rio Madeira link transmits 7.1GW, perhaps 1% of North America's needs, that 1000km cable was to have a capacity of 2GW. However I'd argue that it is not so far fetched as to be utterly in the realms of science fiction.

As to PV not providing enough power - well, it is certainly less efficient in terms of space than conventional plant (an argument, I suppose for distributed generation utilising otherwise unproductive space - such as domestic rooftops). But there is a 290MW array somewhere in the 'states is there not - that should do for a bit of industry.

Would shifting terra watts of power long distances be the best solution? No, not really (I wasn't being entirely serious) but at present we have limited capacity to store energey generated from Solar or wind power and I don;t think enough has been done on this side of the equation (there are some developments though eg the Ionex "1MW" battery).

[wraper]

2kW constant rate is just retarded, it's 1.4 megawatt/month (go green, yeah).

Well, an order of magnitude here and there can be fixed. Wasting time with whiny naysayers can't.

Yeah, order of magnitude here - there  , just wow. Even 20-30% make a difference between very feasible and not feasible at all. The advantage of centralized electricity, cloud computing, internet and centralized whatsoever is centralization which makes them so effective. They can supply the needed resources to huge number of people on different times on demand while being not so big by themselves, they are just being effectively shared. Putting storage in every home is just insane, it would need to be very huge to supply the peak demands of particular home yet wasting most of it's time by doing nothing. Get your math right before spewing out some smart ideas.

[EEVblog]

Solar energy is a religion

I hope so.
Having a world full of people devoted to and worshiping solar energy sounds pretty good to me!

[miguelvp]

Yeah, most religions revolve around the Sun!
After all, without it there will be no life in our little rock

[Samogon]

Solar energy is a religion

I hope so.
Having a world full of people devoted to and worshiping solar energy sounds pretty good to me!

Nothing new
But i hope that this fate will not become blind following of single idea. We see now British government canceling solar subsidies. The first excitment fades away due to ungrounded "believes" that it will solve energy problems.

[mtdoc]

All Hail the Sun God!. Behold the Bringer of Light and Lord of Fusion!

[coppice]

Solar energy is a religion

I hope so.
Having a world full of people devoted to and worshiping solar energy sounds pretty good to me!

Really? You don't think that maybe religious devotion destroys objectivity? That maybe lacking objectivity might lead to some poor decisions causing something with real potential to fail miserably?

[Jeroen3]

The opposite of such tv pickup is a solar eclipse. The germans almost crapped their pants due to fear of grid collapse when a full eclipse was due.

Luckily for them they've had stability problems before, and managed to get strict regulations on the behavior of inverters. Iirc they improved the ride-through scenario where the inverter must survive and stay online when the grid dissapears for a shirt time of 100ms, I think. That basically is a dead short to most low power producers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_voltage_ride_through

[Mechanical Menace]

Regardless of this thing won't work in the first place, let's assume it would. 2kW constant rate is just retarded, it's 1.4 MWh per month (go green, yeah).

I think he meant a fixed 2kWh a day, so 62kWh a month. Well that's what I read it to mean. 2kWh may be ridiculously low, but double it and you're using much more than my average consumption and I don't do without my appliances and gadgets.

[wraper]

Regardless of this thing won't work in the first place, let's assume it would. 2kW constant rate is just retarded, it's 1.4 MWh per month (go green, yeah).

I think he meant a fixed 2kWh a day, so 62kWh a month. Well that's what I read it to mean. 2kWh may be ridiculously low, but double it and you're using much more than my average consumption and I don't do without my appliances and gadgets.

doesn't seem like that:

Households and the utility agree upon a rate (say 2kW) and are billed at that rate regardless if they use the energy or not.

Anyway, charging the batteries most of the time if the constant supplied power would be low, would cause very fast battery wear and energy losses as charging isn't nearly 100% efficient. Also Solar power (for what that idea was proposed) and constant rate are two mutually exclusive things.

[zapta]

Big companies invest in it because they can charge people for energy. It is centralized power by its very nature.

Computers used to be centralized and now we have them in our pockets.

Never say never.

[CatalinaWOW]

The proposed constant power idea doesn't violate any physics (after some minor number adjustment).  But it just brushes over the storage problem.  Even if people do fairly extreme things for load leveling there will always be the night.  If people are economically productive they must be working several hours a day, then have domestic duties to perform, maybe even some recreation.  Optimum placement of the sleep hours in darkness (not possible for some fraction of population) leaves a need to do some power consumption in the dark hours.  That storage will be expensive unless some technical miracle occurs. 

If we are going to believe in a technical miracle, why not fusion?

As to the specific approach from this company.  I sure wouldn't invest my money their approach.  Plasmas and high thermal conductivity high density fluids seem like a very tough set of bedfellows.  Add the difficulty of getting fusion style pressures out of an acoustic wave and it seems that there are only two ways to make money here.  One is by finding gullible investors.  The other is by betting against them.

[Kleinstein]

The tricky thing with fusion is, that there is a slim chance that it might actually work and could be even economical competetive.  Before we have done the research we just don't know if it works - we just don't know enough to say for sure it does not work. With the classical tokamak style, we might get to the point that it is likely to expensive even though it would likely work.

Before the potential of fusion is checked, it will be hard to find the large scale investors for solar, wind and the required storage.

However fusion might as well need storage too, as they might want to run the powerplant 168h a week because of the high investments, and they will most likely be rather large plants with quite some downtime.

Billing for a constant power is a poor plan. The demand is just rather fluctuating and is does not make sense to add extra storage just because of an artifical pricing system. The more logical system would be a fluctuation price, depending on time - maybe with the meter showing the price a few hours in advance. So systems like washing mashines or battery chargers or heating / air conditioning could work when costs a lowest because of good supply. In hot areas solar power allready correlates resonably good with cooling demands.

[HAL-42b]

The proposed constant power idea doesn't violate any physics (after some minor number adjustment).  But it just brushes over the storage problem.  Even if people do fairly extreme things for load leveling there will always be the night.  If people are economically productive they must be working several hours a day, then have domestic duties to perform, maybe even some recreation.  Optimum placement of the sleep hours in darkness (not possible for some fraction of population) leaves a need to do some power consumption in the dark hours.  That storage will be expensive unless some technical miracle occurs. 

The idea of constant power delivery is just a thought and not meant to be taken too seriously. It's aim was to offload the problem of peak handling and associated expenses to the end user. I deliberately left the storage aspect moot.

In a free market the end user should be free to come up with a solution that best satisfies them. Wether that would be a lot of storage capacity or change of lifestyle is up to them.

My impression is that people generally do not change their lifestyle just because they are told to, but they do it readily when there is a financial incentive.

So either an expensive storage solution (expensive) or adjust your lifestyle to minimize your peak loads (cheap). The choice is yours.

After people become more receptive of the idea of adjusting their lifestyle to constant energy supply we may step up to the next level - adjusting our lifestyle to variable supply of power like solar. The option of paying dearly for storage is still there of course.

That was the point of the exercise.

[CatalinaWOW]

There is much that can be done to minimize peak loading.  But there are real consequences.  In the extreme, returning to an agrarian society eliminates electrical peak loads completely.  At the other end of the scale things like putting a timer on the washing machine to run after midnight, or even storing low grade heat from low cost intervals to high cost intervals is easy and not too costly, but also leaves the load profile fairly bumpy.  Joe the manufacturer of welded goods can put his primary manufacturing work after midnight to get cheap energy, but will have a smaller set of choices on employees than he would have had otherwise, and somewhere in the chain between his customers and the operations department there will be communications issues due to the lack of a common working hour.   And so on and so on.

Another consequence of minimizing peak loading is system fragility.  By this I am referring to the loss of robustness that results from excess capacity to meet peak loads.  Even at todays tentative steps toward load leveling (mostly levelling over geographic regions as shown in the BBC film) have had this effect.  An unexpected breakdown, or a large weather related event can seriously threaten system stability.  Local generation and storage can have the reverse effect, but comes at the expense of larger total capitalization.

Things that work well for a small number of motivated individuals often don't scale well.

[station240]

However fusion might as well need storage too, as they might want to run the powerplant 168h a week because of the high investments, and they will most likely be rather large plants with quite some downtime.

Actually that raises an interesting question, how many minutes/hours would a fusion reactor need to run to offset the power required to kickstart the reaction ?
I cannot see them being used as rapid start peak generators, for those short transients. Now peak and offpeak(night) is usable.

Fusion is a long term goal anyway, and not just for power generation. Would be real handy to visit other solar systems for instance, where lugging Uranium would be hazardous.
Whatever the final design is, it's going to be a hybrid of some of the current designs (and future ones).

[HAL-42b]

In that case Joe the welder would benefit tremendously from covering his roof with solar panels and even possibly splurging for a storage system that covers 5% of his daily use.

This way Joe benefits from easy access to employees, the utility benefits from even loads, we benefit from less carbon emissions, and politicians don't get any flack for imposing lifestyle changes on people.

The only ones that don't benefit are the energy monopolies - the 'extractables' people.  And since they hold the most money and steer the politics they will make sure that such a scheme never ever takes hold.

[Kleinstein]

With solar and wind power, there is no more the problem of too much power at night and to little from 11-12. The problem is more like to much power on a sunday and to little on some mondays.  So the times when power is plenty or short are not that predictable, though predictions over a few hours can be fairly accurate. So they usually know before when the wind dies out or the sun is covered by clouds.
As the peak power usage if the individual consumers is not that much correlated it does not make sense to use purly local storrage at individual consumers. It's just the beauty of a large network that you fluctuation partially compensate. This is also true for the sources. So a resonable large grid can save quite some storage capacity.

Just with PV installations it might be a good idea to have batteries for short time buffering close to PV installations as the inverters are allready there, and chances are good that the PV modules are working when the grid has excess power. One should still have a global controll for the local storage units. It's much better to shift power over the network than using local storage.

As a fusion reactor would work as a thermal power plant, it would react similar to conventional power plants: taking several hours to turn it all the way on or off. Smaller changes can be faster. Going down all the way is rather undisireble as this gives thermal stress and thus possibly reduced lifetime. Another special point with fusion reactors is, that they may have to run most of the time to keep up tritium production. So to much downtime would mean the need for extra very expensive tritium. So depending on the type of reactor they might want to run them really 24 h a day, even if they have to give away the energy at night.