Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently.
Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently.
I’m not talking about using solar to make fresh water. I’m talking about using the excess power to make fresh water as to not put more power into the grid than it can use. The duck curve is often used as a sticking point for why nuclear doesn’t work, because nuclear needs a base load and the duck curve is a base load nuclear can’t accommodate.
Obviously more storage to use more renewables but also, just use the excess for something. Nuclear can boil water to desalinate, use excess electricity to desalinate via RO. Given the infrastructure you could even use this to water California’s immense farms. (But power companies like making profit so… no times of free power, climate change instead please)
With how cheap PV panels are per mW it is not really an issue about how efficiently the power is stored. We’d obviously want to recycle them but generally the fact that you don’t pay for fuel means eventually the power is free. There was a study done in LA where if you covered just the parking lots with solar you could provide power for the entire city (if storage was available obviously)
A chemical battery will be somewhere like 80% or more efficient but they can’t hold that for weeks, months, or years.
Pumped Hydro is ideal, the Hoover Dam produces 4.5 billion kWh of electricity a year. With pumped hydro you can effectively do the same thing in places rain doesn’t do it for you. Bath county for instance has 24,000mWh of capacity. They’re obviously really dangerous if they break and also damage ecosystems.
But green hydrogen can be done mostly anywhere, stored more easily (obviously not as easy as fossil fuels or well most things) and can be transported.
That’s really more of an indictment on LA having too much parking than anything else.
Put the solar panels on the roofs. Replace the worthless parking lots with more productive buildings. And, obviously, quit forcing everybody to drive everywhere.
I agree but I feel that is even more aspirational than renewable energy.
Personally I want high speed rail, commuter rail, trams, and bike infrastructure but I’ll probably be dead by the time any of that happens if it does at all.