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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36359 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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I caught this exchange after the previous thread had mostly closed, and I'd like to push back on the claim a little.

BinaryHobo:

I remember talk about just using the excess power to pump water up hill during the day and running it through turbines coming down at night.

Did anything ever come of that?

The_Nybbler:

The physical conditions necessary to make hydro storage practical aren't common.

(How do we do the fancy quotes with user, timestamp, and maybe a link? It'd be useful here.)

It's true that hydroelectric power sources, as in dams, have saturated the supply of naturally-occurring American sites. You need a river in a rocky valley, and there are only so many of those to go around, and once they're used up, it's very hard to create more of them.

What haven't been exhausted, and in fact what can be readily found or exploited, are height differentials in general. Hills, mountains, exhausted mines, deep valleys with no water supply, all offer significant height differentials, are naturally occurring, and can be readily built out into large-scale closed-loop pumped-hydro storage, with a closed reservoir at one extreme and a closed reservoir at the other, and a reversible turbine to generate potential energy in times of excess and power in times of deficit. Should those be exhausted, off-shore dropoffs are an enormous resource of the same, at the cost of more difficult installation and operation in every regard. And if we exhaust THOSE, water towers at sea or underground reservoirs on land can be constructed as well.

All of this, of course, is dumb and America should just take the leash off nuclear, as argued here. (I've not read it yet, but I expect it to make the points I would inline here.) That we haven't yet is a shame and a testament to our collective idiocy and Puritan hangover.

It makes no sense to pump excess power uphill and then run it it downhill because the act of elevating water also consumes energy.

  • -18

Demand for electricity varies throughout the day. People are willing to pay more for a kWh during rush hour than at 2 AM.

For example, suppose the 2 AM discount is 50%. That means that if you can spend 1.5 kWh at 2 AM to get 1 kWh at rush hour, you will earn 33.3% more than if you had just sold that energy at 2 AM.

So would any other form of storage. The question is how much.

Personally, I doubt that it's worth the cost to use this technique. But scaling up renewables would require some sort of buffer.

Pumped storage has been a thing for almost a century now. I leaned about it in science class as a child.

good for you

  • -24

This was low effort and antagonistic. If you were a new user it would just be a warning, but you have been around long enough to know the rules. 1 day ban.

boo -- parent was also antagonistic and condescending. I don't personally care for bans in this situation, but if you're going to mod that comment you should be doing the whole chain while you're at it.

boo -- parent was also antagonistic and condescending. I don't personally care for bans in this situation, but if you're going to mod that comment you should be doing the whole chain while you're at it.

Good point. In isolation the comment looked not good, but not bad. But the followup comment made it clear they were trying to throw an insult.

Pumped storage has been a thing for almost a century now. I leaned about it in science class as a child.

@Hyperion this comment of yours was not very good. The first sentence seems fine, but maybe lacking context for why you are bringing up the point. The second sentence could come across as antagonistic.

You do understand that energy demands fluctuate throughout the day and spending energy when it's available and cheap to have it when it is in demand and expensive is important? I was taught that as a child.

Your followup comment made it clear you comparing greyenlightenment's knowledge to that of a child. Which is antagonistic. One day ban for you as well, since you have also been here long enough to know better.

TYFYS

You do understand that energy demands fluctuate throughout the day and spending energy when it's available and cheap to have it when it is in demand and expensive is important? I was taught that as a child.

I learned algebra as a child. so what. people learn different things at different ages.

  • -10

Grid load balancing is pretty fundamental to energy policy. Even ordinary people are bombarded by messaging telling them not to run appliances in the middle of the day.

Where? I have never been told that once in my life*, let alone been bombarded with it.

*not even as a child, since that's apparently important.

I've never heard this message directly, but I recall being told of the message in reference to preventing blackouts in other parts of the USA than where I live, I think California during the summer (air conditioning would stress the grid). More generally, during the past 10 years, with electric vehicles being big in the public consciousness, I recall conversations about how EVs wouldn't stress the power grid much, explicitly because they can be charged at night for the day's use, and the energy needs at night tend to be much lower than during the day (since people tend to sleep, and sleeping people tend to use less electricity), thus providing slack in the energy grid which is meant to function during much higher load times in the day. I've also heard it in reference to renewable energy and its advantages and disadvantages, such as how solar energy tends to produce energy when it's sunny which also tends to correlate with when there are greater energy needs, versus wind energy which tends to produce energy when it's windy, which for whatever reason tends to correlate with night when there are lesser energy needs.

Perhaps it's overselling it to say laymen are "bombarded" with such messaging, particularly specifically about not running one's own appliances during the day, but from my experience, the importance of load balancing for keeping the power grid functioning well is pretty well emphasized in the public messaging.

?

The goal here is storing energy for use later at a net loss, not harvesting energy for "free" like a dammed river reservoir that sometimes gets rained on. Inefficiency is acceptable, although to be minimized.

You use it like a rechargeable battery. The power grid is constantly having to deal with balancing the electricity produced vs the demand for electricity and this could provide a solution to that.

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