this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
158 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
59132 readers
2905 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Seriously? Anyone involved economically will care. The energy company, their suppliers and vendors, and the customers. No one wants to pay for huge overcapacity.
If we could store the excess energy and use it in higher-demand times (like long winter nights) that would be another story. But storage has always been the major challenge with solar and wind.
It’s hard to say it’s “wasted”. That just means the sun will shine, and the wind will blow, and nobody will use some of the electricity it could generate.
By that metric, almost 100% of wind and solar power is currently “wasted”. By putting up all that capacity, the amount “wasted” goes way down.
And what becomes possible if you have huge amounts of no cost energy available for some of the day/year? Direct carbon capture? Widespread desalination to produce fresh water? These are things that would help a lot, but are currently infeasible for to energy cost. You don’t have to do them 24/7 - just turn them on to soak up the excess grid capacity. If the cost of electricity went way down, I guarantee you somebody would figure out what to do with the power.
I'm talking about "wasted" as in the energy is collected but then not stored or put to use. That's just needless wear and tear on the machinery. If it's not collected in the first place I would just call that untapped.
And extra capacity is never really free. Someone has to invest in the infrastructure and upkeep. It's takes money and effort to get energy to the right place at the right time, such as those carbon capture and desalination plants you seem to suggest will appear out of thin air.