this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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They've got economist-brain and view everything as a money thing, which is fucked up and a problem.
But negative net demand (the thing "negative cost" is signaling) is a pain in the ass, because you either need to shut off the panels from the grid, find some very high-capacity and high-throughput storage, or blow out your power grid.
Like some hydroelectric dams in Germany get run backwards, pumping water back up behind the wall. I think there are pilot projects to pump air into old mines to build up a pressure buffer. Grid-scale batteries just aren't there yet.
Solar is good for things where the power demand is cumulative and relatively insensitive to variation over time (like, say, salt pond evaporation, but you don't actually need panels for that). It's also good for insolation-sensitive demand (like air conditioning).
Turns out distributed rooftop solar makes more sense given our current grid than big solar farms out in the desert (California built one, it was not a good use of money).
It's not great, but we need to bite the bullet and use fission+reprocessing in a big way for the near future.
Agreed. It's framed incorrectly, but the real problem is the "duck curve," the time disparity between peak generation and peak consumption. Pumped hydro, battery storage, electrolysis, and mechanical storage are all options, but each has its own constraints. Ultimately, though, it's an engineering problem with viable solutions. We just need the political will for the investment.
Distributed rooftop solar is the worst way to use our grid. It's designed to pump a lot of power from a single place to a lot of little places. The opposite doesn't work very well.
The solution is to not focus on solar by itself. Solar/wind/water/storage/long distance transmission need to be balanced with each other. Each has strengths and weaknesses that cover for the strengths and weaknesses of the others.
Distributed rooftop isn't supposed to be about feeding the larger grid so much as topping off local demand right when it's needed.
I'm kind of eccentric so I got a humongous array; even then at peak production I was running the A/C for 3-4 houses in my cul-de-sac other than my own. Most installations around where I live are like 1/4 of the size I put up and rarely feed much back.
And home-scale batteries are getting cheap enough that excess won't necessarily need to get fed into the grid anyway.