Chile Has So Much Solar Energy It's Giving It Away for Free (bloomberg.com) 231
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report: Chile's solar industry has expanded so quickly that it's giving electricity away for free. Spot prices reached zero in parts of the country on 113 days through April, a number that's on track to beat last year's total of 192 days, according to Chile's central grid operator. While that may be good for consumers, it's bad news for companies that own power plants struggling to generate revenue and developers seeking financing for new facilities. The main culprit is the northern part of the country, in the Atacama desert. Chile's increasing energy demand, pushed by booming mine production and economic growth, helped spur the development of 29 solar farms, with another 15 planned, on the country's central power grid. Now the nation faces slowing demand for energy as copper production slows amid a global glut, and those power plants are oversupplying a region that lacks transmission lines to distribute the electricity elsewhere.
Can we have this problem, please? (Score:4, Insightful)
Too much clean, renewable energy? That's a problem I'd like the US to have.
Re:Can we have this problem, please? (Score:5, Informative)
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But jobs.
And you don't want the government paying for other peoples energy with my tax dollars.
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Too much clean, renewable energy? That's a problem I'd like the US to have.
Not really. That is already a fact in countries like Denmark and Germany. It's bad for a whole host of reasons, both technical when it comes to distribution etc. and economic. In fact Denmark and German couldn't handle their large solar/wind-installations today, if it weren't for all us good neighbours to buffer their wild swings. (And Germany is still 50% brown coal, don't forget that).
The fact of the matter is that renewables that we have today at any scale (i.e. wind and solar) due to their intermittenc
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Though I should look at putting some more money into a solar company after the last one I invested in got bought out...
Re:Can we have this problem, please? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but that was back when most people stayed with one employer for life and you had to go to East Germany to find a place where you had to present papers to travel from city to city or to get a job,
That USA is dead and gone.
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Yes, but that was back when most people stayed with one employer for life
Actually, "lifetime employment" is a myth that mostly never happened. Average job tenure is higher today than it has been in thirty years, and is about the same as it was in the 1960s. Sure, some people spent their entire career at one company (as some people still do today), but many more (especially women and minorities) did not have stable employment.
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Yeah, "for life" is a bit of a stereotype, and like many stereotypes, more apparently true than universally true. But until the mid-1980s you didn't have to start looking for your next employer the minute you settled into your new job. Especially for non-menial positions. Most reasonably-competent people were more likely to change jobs voluntarily and not live in fear that they'd be "right-sized" into unemployment.
You don't have to present your papers - yet - when driving, but you can't even fly between cit
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But until the mid-1980s you didn't have to start looking for your next employer the minute you settled into your new job.
This is false nostalgia, and is not supported by evidence. Average job tenure in the mid 1980s was about the same as it is today, and there is no data that shows either employer or employee loyalty was any better than it is today. As each generation reaches geezerhood, they come to believe that things were better when they were young, and the world is going to hell because of those dang kids today who are all lazy/stupid/selfish/etc.
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...And I challenge you to drive from Atlanta to Honolulu.
Yet another failed promise from our leaders. Where's our flying cars, dammit!
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Sure, that USA is gone, as is the USA from 50 years before that, and the USA 100 years before that, etc.
The only person I know of that had the same employer for life was my Uncle Billy, an Independently Owned and Operated Farmer. I understand that if you go back far enough, about 90% of the people had the same employer. That USA is gone too.
I do agree "show me your papers, please" is getting highly worrysome. The creation of the TSA, one of the largest make-work projects in our history, has created a huge b
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By that criterion of yours, the expression "renewable energy" is an oxymoron.
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I'm not sure I follow you. If you consider the hydrological cycle to be renewable, why not the sun energy which powers it?
The sun has been providing stable energy for billions of years, and it's the thing that ensures the hydrological cycle remains steady.
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The sun isn't renewable, but it will last long enough that we really don't have to worry about it for now.
Also consider that using solar energy or not, the sun will keep burning (fusing really, but whatever) anyway so we're not wasting it by using it.
And you're mistaken, something does reset the sun... when it explodes... but that won't do Earth much good. :)
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Unless the explosion causes fission and breaks it all back apart...
I make no claims to understanding it, nor does it really matter in our lifetime, or even our civilization's likely lifetime. :)
And yes, you're right, if solar is renewable, then so is oil! :)
But again, it doesn't matter, the sun keeps running if we use it or not, so we might as well use it.
Re:Can we have this problem, please? (Score:4, Informative)
It's my understanding that "renewable" applies to energy sources that are continually replenished (over human timescales) and are *literally* renewable. The sun's energy is not being replenished as it burns, and so is not really "renewable".
The combustion of hydrogen could be considered renewable in this sense, because burning it creates water vapor, and you can extract hydrogen from water. Energy sources that depend on the hydrological cycle would be considered renewable because that process ensures that the supply remains steady, even while it may be continually being used.
Hydrogen is not "renewable energy" source. Hydrogen is effectively a "battery" as it stores energy in chemical form. You have to put in energy to extract hydrogen from water. You recover the energy when you burn hydrogen. If you burn it with oxygen and you recapture the resulting water back you can recycle to extract hydrogen from the water again.**
Renewable energy is really a code word for energy sources that are converted into commercially viable form from large energy sources on human timescales. On earth, the "large" sources are basically solar, geothermal, nuclear, inertial/gravitaional. PV, wind farm, hydro-electric, and petroleum are all basically "solar", the only difference is the conversion timescale which is what distinguishes renewable. Commercially viable petroleum doesn't get conversion from "solar" in human timescales and is not renewable.
**Theoretically, you could do the same with methane. You can put energy into making methane from CO2 and H2O (basically what some bacteria like Archaea do) and then recover then energy when you burn the methane. If you recapture the resulting CO2 and H2O, you can recycle to reform the methane. The main differences are that currently we don't recapture because it's "cheaper" to get new methane than to put energy into making methane, or similarly recapturing the water to resplit to extract hydrogen isn't as cheap as it is to make new hydrogen from methane.
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I thought it referred to energy sources that are literally renewable... they don't run out on human timescales because they actually "rewew" themselves in a short time frame, leaving just as much energy (in that particular system) as there was before any of it was used. I see this as being entirely orthogonal to the matter of whether the energy is cheap,
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Renewables vs. second law of thermodynamics (Score:4, Insightful)
A conclusion that perfectly renewable energy does not exist would be consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.
But the earth is not a closed system; it receives energy from the Sun at a power that has varied little over human history. "Renewable" in practice refers to means of turning this power, called "insolation", into industrially usable power within a human lifetime. It encompasses direct methods (PV and solar thermal) as well as methods tied to insolation's effect on climate (wind and hydroelectric) and photosynthesis (biofuel). Petroleum and coal are not "renewable" because though they originate in biofuel, the process to produce them takes far longer than human civilization has been around.
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Are there any energy sources that you consider to be renewable that are not ultimately fueled by sunlight?
Gravity...
One day, we'll likely invent gravity electric generators that somehow use gravity to make power.
How? I have no idea, but that won't be sunlight based.
Black Holes might be another interesting power source.
Central planning failure (Score:5, Insightful)
And must people keep using the normally beautiful word "free" in such an Orwellian context? There is literally a whole world of unseen (a la Bastiat) opportunity costs behind this overbuilt boondoggle, especially in a country largely still mired in poverty.
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Do you really know what "Orwellian" means?
Re:Central planning failure (Score:5, Informative)
I guess OP refers to Orwellian twisting of word's meanings. "Freedom is slavery" like stuff.
Don't mix it with the popular use of Orwellian, meaning a surveillance state. But his book was about much more than that.
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Implying that the meaning of the word "Orwellian" now means something different than it used to is... Orwellian? Or maybe, meta-Orwellian?
Re:Central planning failure (Score:4, Informative)
No, it is literally free.
In a free (as in freedom) or "perfect" market, price is determined by offer and demand. If you *have* to get rid of a good (like solar energy), and you can't store it (like with energy, in connected energy networks the produced energy always has to be exactly the same as the used energy otherwise the frequency goes awry), and nobody wants to pay you for it, you either have to give it for free, or even pay for it.
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Or you can just waste it.
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Even for that you need to build "energy waste plants", and maintaining those plants is a cost for you. And it gives you really bad publicity.
Re:Central planning failure (Score:5, Insightful)
With solar it's actually quite simple: You turn off the inverters. The solar panels don't break if you don't consume the electricity. Of course there's a capitalist incentive not to do that and to give away the electricity instead. If you can't make a buck, at least you can prevent the competition from making a buck.
Re:Central planning failure (Score:4, Informative)
The solar panels don't break if you don't consume the electricity.
Not immediately. But if you shutdown the inverters, the voltage builds up in the cells until the backflow of electrons cancels out the solar induced flux, generating heat. Hotter cells have a shorter lifetime.
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Not immediately. But if you shutdown the inverters, the voltage builds up in the cells until the backflow of electrons cancels out the solar induced flux, generating heat. Hotter cells have a shorter lifetime.
Plastic tarps over the panels?
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or just turn off the solar cells.
Re:Central planning failure (Score:4, Insightful)
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In a free (as in freedom) or "perfect" market, price is determined by offer and demand.
Are you implying there's anything resembling a perfect market in the electricity generation world? You're talking about an industry which from every single angle and for every single source and supply is regulated, subsidised, penalised, taxed, refunded, and generally blended in a massive blender of regulation sponsored by tax money.
The power industry is a textbook example of an imperfect market, which is exactly how people ended up in the situation of investing money for a product they can't get anything f
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The fact that it is "free" does not make it "given away".
As long as you have no consumer your problem in connected energy networks the produced energy always has to be exactly the same as the used energy otherwise the frequency goes awry is not solved by energy that costs nothing but by energy that is promptly consumed.
Regarding that particular grid: I doubt it that private consumers get the power for free. They have a meter. They pay at the end of the month what the meter shows.
Energy for zero or negative
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Speaking of opportunities, it looks like there is a huge one for someone who can build water desalination and hydrogen production plants, among other things.
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And must people keep using the normally beautiful word "free" in such an Orwellian context? There is literally a whole world of unseen (a la Bastiat) opportunity costs behind this overbuilt boondoggle, especially in a country largely still mired in poverty.
"Mired in poverty"?
Get your facts straight. Chile's numbers are similar to hellholes such as South Korea, Japan, and Denmark.
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No, the end-game of a market economy is a single conglomerate corporation that owns everything and is controlled by a small closed politically dominant class of extremely wealthy people. Like Wal-Mart, once it decides that retail is tapped out and expands into energy, transportation, chemicals and so forth using its substantial existing cash assets to buy the dominant players in each sector in bulk.
Challange for expansion on renewables (Score:4, Interesting)
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It depends on to what extent you can adapt your electricity usage to take advantage of excess electricity during the daytime.
In much of the US, peak electrical usage is during the summer, due to air conditioning loads. The worst heating loads are on sunny days at mid-day, and it turns out to be relatively simple to design air conditioners to store cool for a few hours*, so you can adapt the air conditioning electrical usage to use energy in the mid day and then continue cooling houses during the evening and
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*water has high heat capacity (as well as high latent heat of fusion) and thus stores cool very well; and is both cheap and environmentally benign.
The use of windmills to pump irrigation water is not entirely uncommon, less common is using that water to cool a barn or workshop although it is done. They pipe the irrigation water which depending on where you are can be very cool {it's usually below 60f in my area year round} through a radiator with a blower before it goes into storage tanks, etc.. and is used to irrigate.
Make it into H2? (Score:2)
Why not make it into H2 and export it?
Why not hydrogen [Re:Make it into H2?] (Score:2)
In the long term this may make sense. In the immediate case, there are a number of practical problems. The two big ones are:
1. There isn't an infrastructure to use hydrogen,
2. Hydrogen electrolysis on an industrial scale isn't a well-developed technology (because there's no push for it-- current hydrogen production is by stripping H from methane, and right now methane is very cheap). Since it's not a commercial technology, there hasn't been a development process to make it cheap and efficient.
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Because it requires a large infrastructure to actually separate and use that H2 and that infrastructure is unlikely to be economically viable because of the inherent inefficiencies of using hydrogen as an energy store.
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Because storing and transporting H2 is a goddamn nightmare?
Good luck with those ever-embrittling tanks and pipelines with H2 leaking directly through their solid walls....
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That's where subsidies come in. You don't think that these project didn't anticipate this did you? The entire point is to build out systems to the point where you price out companies with high ongoing costs.
Aluminum (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not create some aluminum recycling factory? Those are pretty energy intensive. They could scale their operations based on excess demand. Perhaps even solely to create aluminum-air batteries.
Re:Aluminum (Score:4, Informative)
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Okay, then Aluminum reduction for the spent Al-air batteries.
Re:Aluminum (Score:5, Informative)
Last year I saw a presentation by the head of Technology Development of Hydro [hydro.com], which has aluminium electrolysis as one of their core businesses. He proposed the same thing you do, using aluminium as an energy carrier: make aluminium (primary production though, not recycling) where you have power, then transport aluminium instead of setting up expensive DC subsea cables.
Since I work in renewables and hydrogen, I asked him if this could be done for wind power; it could not, because aluminium factories require an enormous amount of steady power. If power is interrupted, not only production stops, but the electrolysis cells solidify and cannot be restarted: this is a damage that requires hundreds of millions of dollars and months of lost production to fix. For example, this happened when the Qatalum, Qatar plant went offline [aluminiumtoday.com].
So, intermittent renewables such as solar and wind are not a good match for aluminium, because it requires constant power. Hydro power is a better match.
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Hmm, I wonder if solar molten salt storage could serve as a hedge against the cells solidifying. Or grid backup.
That is a great insight though, thanks!
This is the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
People see this as a good thing but it actually points out the big problem with solar.
It produces a lot of power at non-peak times and almost no power at peak usage time and none at other times.
So in the morning when everyone is getting up and turning on TVs and cooking solar makes very little of power. At noon it makes way more power than is needed. Then in the evening when people are coming home, doing laundry, cooking, and taking showers solar makes little to no power. Then over night you get no power.
Frankly solar is just not going to be practical until a storage method is worked out. IMHO Solar is about useless except in some specific locations. Wind is a much better bet for renewables. Hydro is great but we have really used most of it.
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". Check the weather forecast for the next few days, and you know roughly how much you can expect to be produced."
Same is true for wind.
Yes you can have lulls but solar only makes power for around 8 hours a day and the peak never matches usage.
Solar is about useless, wind is better, but nuclear is the best solution for low carbon power generation.
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No it is in the evening/late afternoon. I just pulled Las Vegas and the hourly forecast shows them hitting the high at 3PM and it stays a the high until 7PM.
Noon which is solar pleak is 7 degrees lower than 6PM. Add in cooking loads, lighting, laundry, hot water for baths, TVs coming on and so on and peak power usage starts around 4 pm and runs until 8 PM https://www.pacificpower.net/y... [pacificpower.net]
So if peak production is solar noon then peak demand starts 3 hours later which is when output is really starting to dro
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It depends on where you live.
In most places, Peak usage happens from 2-6pm.
If you are in Massachusetts, you only get about 3.5 hours of peak sun per day. (~11am-2:30pm)
If you live in Texas, you might get 6 hours of peak sun per day. (10am-4pm,)
So it's not too far off from matching peak production and usage, but where you live does make a difference in how well it matches.
Outside the box (Score:3)
Maybe we should all adjust and get up at noon.
Re:This is the problem. (Score:5, Informative)
Your model of energy usage is lacking the majority daytime use: commercial and industrial. These uses match insolation (and therefore available solar-based power) pretty well, it turns out.
Here's a very, very simple part of it: cooling office buildings. Mostly, that needs to happen when the sun is shining, because that's when (a) the building is being warmed by the sun, and (b) the building is occupied by people who want it cooler.
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Actually I bet you do not have many brownouts at noon and that they start around 3 to 4 PM.
Peak load tends to start around 3PM and runs to around 8PM. The hottest part of the day and the time when people are coming home and cooking and such. BTW production of power from PVs really drop off starting around 4PM in the summer.
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You are talking about photovoltaiks? Then you are wrong as they produce power during peak times. E.g. in Germany People put PV panels on roofs that point in random directions east or west, and not only south.
Or do you mean solar thermal? Then you are wrong because they store power in heat storages and produce power also at night (where you have a low power demand) and in the next morning when you need morning "peak".
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So, these were built for the commericial mining industries, but you're talking about how nobody is home during the day? Guess what? They're at those mining operations.
A little context would be good for you.
Sort of (Score:2)
The real problem with solar is the areas of the world that are the best for producing solar energy are a long way from the population centers that that would consume the energy, requiring the construction of massive power transmission lines, can you say NIMBY, or the creation of some other way to transport the energy, maybe hydrogen if someone can figure out how to scale hydrogen production and the logistics of transportation.
Yes, Germany has many small scale solar production facilities near population cent
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What we need is for the world's environmentalists to realize that energy storage and infrastructure projects are more important the solar cells and wind farms themselves.
When an environmentalist engineer says to an environmentalist politician that "This $100 million solar farm will be useless unless we also invest $500 million in energy storage and infrastructure" the response will always be "Why are you bashing solar cells? I'm firing you and replacing you with someone who cares about the environment." rat
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When an environmentalist engineer says to an environmentalist politician that "This $100 million solar farm will be useless unless we also invest $500 million in energy storage and infrastructure" the response will always be "Why are you bashing solar cells? I'm firing you and replacing you with someone who cares about the environment." rather than "OK, I guess I'll have to find another $500 million in funding".
Then that environmentalist "politician" probably won't be able to produce that $100M in funding either.
I'm sure a *real* politician would immediately know that this whole thing is a $700M** solar farm project because *real* politicians have PR staffs that know when you are selling things, the ribbon makes the package...
If there is a solar construction company that wants to construct the $100M project designed by some environmentalist enginerd, I'm sure there's another construction company that would happily
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People see this as a good thing but it actually points out the big problem with solar.
No it doesn't, it points out the big problem with not having a decent worldwide electrical grid. The world is always using power, if the transmission capability existed to get that power to the people who need it now then your "problem with solar" is not a problem. It's not a problem with how the power is produced, it's a problem with where the power goes once you produce it. The world doesn't shut off at night, because it is never night across the entire world. You can always produce solar power, and y
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"Wrong solution. Connect world power grids and you don't have to store anything until the world produces more power than it uses (in which case, what's the point of storing it?)."
Get back to me when you figure out how to run a grid across the oceans. and put solar cells in the middle of the Atlantic and pacific to make that 24/7 power work out for you. Take a good look at a map and you will see that there is a whole lot of ocean.
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Industrial uses of energy use up a lot more than consumer uses. The average aluminum smelting plant can use hundreds of Megawatts.
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" The average aluminum smelting plant can use hundreds of Megawatts."
And those run 24/7 which will not work for solar at all.
BTW that is also why the are often located near dams for cheap hydro power. See Iceland for example.
My own energy output (Score:2)
Funny, whenever I have chili, I produce natural gas. I also give it away for free, by the way.
I have an idea... (Score:2)
How about they build a massive copper cable to the other regions of the country that don't have as good an electricity source. Then they get to recoup their costs on building the solar plants, and they get to run those copper mines.
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You do realize that the copper cable would need to be over 1000 miles long to get to Santiago and Valparaiso. That would be like producing electricity in Oklahoma and using it in Chicago. Canada does it for Hydro produced in northern Quebec but it ain't cheap or easy. T
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So? They have two industries that are hurting. They can help both with a fairly simple plan. Now, it may be better to send the electricity to a nearby country or something instead of transferring it internally - I don't know who could use it most, or what's most cost-effective - but it seems like a sensible plan either way.
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Sensible is relative, look at the geography of Chile, the distances involved and the relations with their neighbors, then get back to me about sensible. In the time it would take to build the lines you would probably go through more than one bubble/downturn in the copper/lithium markets.
Building transmission lines is more than just having the copper available. You need the factories to build the cable, steel for the towers, right of way for the lines. All doable but not something that can be create quickl
temp decrease in demand is not sustainable energy (Score:2)
there is over supply due to lower demand from copper mines.
that does not mean cost of production is zero.
they are simply selling at a loss, because demand dried up.
if this is not temporary, they will stop producing.
as such this is not a good example advocating increasing sustainable solar energy.
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Energy Storage Solutions (Score:5, Interesting)
With absolutely no knowledge of the technical feasibility of them, how about applying these two solutions?
1. Split Water Into Hydrogen and Oxygen
Could they use the electricity to store energy in the form of hydrogen? This could then be burned in fuel cells to generate electricity more readily, i.e. on demand, perhaps through the night when solar doesn't work? I guess the two issues with this are (i) the volatility/inflammability of hydrogen; and (ii) the fact that burning the hydrogen is exothermic and therefore contributes to warming...
2. Potential Energy Pumps
In the UK we have some minor success, with power stations like Loch Awe in Scotland, in which the turbines can be reversed into electric motors and can be used to pump water up a gradient. To make this work you need 2 lakes, one above the other [i.e. on sides of a mountain]. With a solar surplus in the day you use the energy to pump water from the lower lake to the higher one. When you have an electricity shortfall you allow the process to reverse, using gravity and falling water to generate electricity via hydroelectric power.
Both of these solutions are flawed and, to variable extents, inefficient. But they do work. If we put investment into good R&D on these sorts of challenges today, then they will become more refined with time...
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It is extremely unlikely that they reverse the turbins (and they likely don't even use turbins for power generation)
More likely they have real pumps for that.
With a solar surplus in the day you use the energy to pump water from the lower lake to the higher one.
That might be a bit tricky in desert
(ii) the fact that burning the hydrogen is exothermic and therefore contributes to warming...
Our warming probelms are from CO2 not from the very limited amouont of heat we produce.
Both of these solutions are flawe
Neither scale at all. Do what nature does (Score:5, Interesting)
As you mentioned, pumping water up hill requires specific geography - the same as hydroelectric, basically. Hydroelectric is pretty cool, so that's been done in the locations it can be done. It covers 1%-2% of our energy needs. For the US as an example, 48 hours of energy storage would require flooding most of the US west of the Mississippi river. It works on a small scale, can't ever be a primary source of energy.
In 7th grade I wrote a paper about splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen and I was excited about the prospect. Since then, I've learned that hydrogen is a bitch. Without going into details, it's a bitch to store, a bitch to transport, and not particularly efficient. However ...
The general concept of combining hydrogen and oxygen to release energy does work extremely well, if you add one other ingredient. In fact, it is the world's primary method of energy storage and transportation. Along with the hydrogen, you add carbon, creating hydrocarbons. (Combining them the other way around produces carbohydrates, the energy source your body uses). We know hydrocarbons are a very effective way to store and transport energy, and the infrastructure is already in place. Perhaps we could do almost exactly what nature does. Perhaps we could PRODUCE hydrocarbons using atmospheric carbon and solar energy. So the produces turns atmospheric CO2 and H20 into hydrocarbons and oxygen, the car or factory burns the hydrocarbon back into C02 and water, in a cycle. That's exactly what nature does with carbohydrates - plants convert Co2 and H20 into carbohydrate using solar energy, animals convert it back, in a balanced cycle. I know of no reason we couldn't have a similar balanced cycle for hydrocarbons, using solar energy to capture atmospheric C02 into hydrocarbons.
Simple Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, it's not that simple. Considering that high-voltage transmission lines don't use any copper these days.
They have the solution, build transmission lines (Score:4, Insightful)
AWESOME! (Score:2)
What this means is that in a couple of years they will dismantle a lot of it and the used panels flooding the market will drive the solar panel prices down even further. When I had a solar powered home I had some used panels from south america and got them at 10% of the price of new. This was in the days before ebay and internet and I had to pay for trucking and customs to get them here.
This is a WIN-WIN for the small guy!
Can I trade... (Score:2)
...worthless copper for worthless electricity?
No?
How do 'spot prices' work for Chilean electricity? (Score:2)
Create a solutions, someone was more of a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like an opportunity. (Score:2)
Free Bitcoin mining during peek hours? Maybe Chile can get some startups moving into that space.
This is not necessarily a miscalculation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Copper and other non-ferrous metals (including gold) are a huge part of the economy of northern Chile. Which also happens to be where you find the Atacama, one of the places on Earth where sunshine is most reliably abundant. Oh, and vast stretches of unpopulated coastline where you can pretty much stick a pin anywhere and build a shipping terminal without there being any neighbors to complain about it.
And there happen to be methods for efficiently and relatively cleanly separating valuable metals from ore using electricity -- gobs and gobs of electricity so it had better be cheap. It has to be competitive with the nastier, cruder methods like mashing the ore into a pulp with lots and lots of cheap cyanide. So it's real easy to picture a future in which ore from the mountains is processed essentially on site using cheap solar electricity from nearby desert power stations, and then is shipped out in refined form.
But there's a catch-22. You can build your giant electrowinning plants until you have a big, cheap, reliable electricity supply. You've got to build that first. Which means there's a period between when you build your big solar plants and when investors build their electricity-hungry plants where you get a hell of a lot of kilowatt hours of electricity being generated that nobody has a use for. You literally can't even give it all away, but that generation capacity will have you rolling in pesos in a few years.
Infrastructure? (Score:2)
Abundance of cheap energy, Copper production, global glut of same, lack of transmission lines.
Hmm. Opportunity?
Neighboring Countries (Score:2)
If you look at a map, Chile borders three countries.
Argentina -- you would have to build transmission lines over the Andes, good luck with that. Also the power is in the north of Chile and Argentina borders the more southern parts of Chile. It would make more sense to build long transmission lines to Santiago and that would be over 1000 miles, a damn long transmission line.
Boliva -- The Andes are in the way and Bolivia and Chile still aren't the best of friends. Something about who should own the Atacama mi
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Or they could just build the first intercontinental underwater superconducting power line. You'd probably have to build several floating heat exchangers along the route, but in principle, I don't think there's anything preventing you from running a cable from Chile all the way to the U.S. west coast. And as long as it is HVDC, you don't have to worry about phase issues.
Sig line (Score:3)
Is that intercontinental underwater superconducting power line part of your sci-fi trilogy?
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Look, just because you have a way to transport the electricoity doesn't mean you can just store it and then bring it back out of storage when you need it...
oh, you meant - nevermind.
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With free power I could possibly generate a profit mining bitcoin!
Bitcoin mining requires a high capital investment in equipment that needs to be run 24/7 to return a profit. Occasional free electricity isn't as important as the average cost of power over longer periods. The best locations for bitcoin mining are where cheap and reliable hydropower is available, such as Iceland and Washington State.
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Is it me or is this a beautifully written allegory for EU immigration?