gnubie
Solar Wizard
- Joined
- Sep 20, 2019
- Messages
- 3,847
To me the crushingly large amounts of energy that need to be stored to provide baseload when the sun isn't shining leave few viable grid scale options, with pumped water and thermal being the winners.
Our electricity networks are not built to accommodate distributed storage. Think about the space to do baseload storage for a substation's area, and put that in relation to your local substation. If you live in the inner city that substation may well be in an underground vault. If you live in a lower density area the substation it is probably above ground open air but surrounded by other buildings or constraints. The lack of space in the suburban / city context means large scale storage will have to be done outside of these areas on the high voltage transmission network which means very high energy storage at a few points around the network.
My own state's consumption in the hours that solar isn't doing a lot is in the order of 60GWh for 5 million or so people (eyeball of graphs publicly available real time graphs). That's an awful lot for any sort of chemical battery storage.
Our electricity networks are not built to accommodate distributed storage. Think about the space to do baseload storage for a substation's area, and put that in relation to your local substation. If you live in the inner city that substation may well be in an underground vault. If you live in a lower density area the substation it is probably above ground open air but surrounded by other buildings or constraints. The lack of space in the suburban / city context means large scale storage will have to be done outside of these areas on the high voltage transmission network which means very high energy storage at a few points around the network.
My own state's consumption in the hours that solar isn't doing a lot is in the order of 60GWh for 5 million or so people (eyeball of graphs publicly available real time graphs). That's an awful lot for any sort of chemical battery storage.
