Are you talking about Terrapower the legitimate advanced nuclear company, or Terraform Industries, the dream bubble making stupid claims? (There's also Terraform Power, a legitimate renewable energy developer in the US).
I don't know. I hope so!
#energysky
Fun battery dynamic in South Australia - dumping at cut rates so they can soak up negative prices the next day.
It's not a criticism, big fan of the Energiewende, but Germany still has 40% of electricity to decarbonise and coined the terms "dunkelflaute" and also "hellbrise" (the situation pictured is a one-day hellbrise).
It will come, and sooner than you think.
Not every one, but I am generating 10x as much as I am using, and more than 1 in 10 houses have similar amounts of solar here. And the sun is shining on all of them.
This is why curtailment is rising across Europe, and we should plan for it to rise higher.
Part of the answer is wind, and part of the answer is clean baseload, but the thing is that if you want clean baseload you're going to have to pay for it to exist, even when the solar + batteries is available for much less money... most of the time.
This is why net zero is much harder than a 90% reduction in carbon emissions, and we're not sure how to do it. We should do the first 90%! But the challenges beyond that are significant and I wish I could explain this better.
In all seriousness, industrial freezers are a decent source of demand response.
Utility with time of use, highly locational pricing, then.
The technical / economic problem is *the* problem: if you have surplus power most of the time across a whole region, who pays for and how do you supply the periods when it isn't available?
It's more run-of-river hydro really. The solar isn't useless, especially when the rivers are low it's good to turn down the turbines, but it's not really long-term storage. (Also means our power is super low carbon anyway).
No, because of curtailment.
(Also I am in Switzerland).
See bsky.app/profile/jaap...
Not in this region. Theoretically you can, but at the times of year when it's sitting nearly full all night, overall demand at night is not particularly high either.
Most useful ways to consume a lot of energy are really capex-intensive, so you're not going to build them just to run on curtailed energy.
(The exception is cars, but people do tend to take their cars to work when it's sunny).
It really frustrates me how hard this is to explain: solar generates all at the same time across a region! Batteries definitely do help (charts to come) but even a big battery (this one's 22kWh) will sit full most of spring-autumn and nearly empty all winter.
It's 22kWh!
The problem is that however big it is, it's either going to sit full most of the summer, or nearly empty most of the winter.
I am familiar with Solar Power Europe, yes....
Although I know there a subtleties, I think this is basically reinventing what we already have - utilities.
As this chart shows, the problem is that my battery is full.
My husband has the EV at work. Which tends to happen when you have an EV primarily for commuting.
My neighbours also have solar panels, so it's useless to them, in fact the village is probably exporting (for which, I think, it pays a penalty). That is what people don't really get about solar - it's incredibly correlated.
I'm wasting electricity. I only get paid about 4 Swiss cents per kWh for export.
About 2 weeks ago! I am enjoying it a lot.
Nooooo!
It's an absolute headache for data collectors like me!
Oh, yeah, loads more. For starters there is a lot of private diesel generators for households and businesses, especially in countries like Nigeria (estimate: 50GW private generators, about 15GW official grid). And some of those generators are being augmented / replaced with solar panels.
They're really not very photogenic right now, and I haven't been spending enough time with them because I have a seven-month-old baby, but here's a somewhat old one.
1. Geese
2. Watching my older kid play Pokemon Legends ZA
3. Batteries, like, seriously the government of Poland tried to tweak the rules of its last capacity auction to favour gas but about 2.5GW of gas and at least 2.5GW of batteries got contracted capacity payments. Big batteries gonna go nuts.
Yeah that does make me like @octopus.energy tbh. I just have big "is this too good to be true" suspiciousness.
Yeah, I'm just kind of suspicious of someone operating in a basically low margin, not high status space (energy) that is blowing a lot on advertising and also spreading its attention around a lot.
Most customers seem to have good experiences with Octopus the energy company, but the amount of advertising it does to the public in the UK (or London at least) is bizarre, and it also... will help you write your will?
octopuslegacy.com/will-writing
