yeah people don’t often realize that electricity is generated on demand. You flick a switch and 50km away instantly some turbine has to work harder for producing it. you can’t store electricity as is, it’s not an liquid being pumped in and out of the grid. Electric grids are a massive balancing act of keeping the capacity constantly at the sweet spot where lights stay on, but also that the substations don’t catch fire. You really can’t wish for the sun to shine brighter or dimmer when there is excess or not enough demand, but you can increase the heat output of an nuclear reactor…
While it’s not really on issue on a smaller scale, but with mass solar/wind/wave/etc. adoption the issue is not just the battery arrays that are needed, it’s the fact that grid infrastructure itself has to be able to cope with huge excesses and potential total starvation of electricity (yeah you can plan around day night-cycles) and the fact that the power might be coming from million different small providers that can be producers or consumers at different times of the day, instead of like a dozen powerplants which supply a city. If you move the coal, gas and oil out and discard nuclear then you have basically no stable baseline power and no reactivity if demand suddenly spikes or production drops (2 ton spinning turbine can resist sudden changes in grid voltage drops) in the grid and it’s all on batteries and the grid needs to be able to handle that since batteries can’t spike their output as high on demand without catching fire. Nuclear is drop in replacement and it lessens that fragility of the grid over mass solar. With SMRs and legal reforming the cost and build time can be brought down. Both of which are kinda artificial issues anyway brought on by the paranoia of Chernobyl and three mile island.
yeah people don’t often realize that electricity is generated on demand. You flick a switch and 50km away instantly some turbine has to work harder for producing it. you can’t store electricity as is, it’s not an liquid being pumped in and out of the grid. Electric grids are a massive balancing act of keeping the capacity constantly at the sweet spot where lights stay on, but also that the substations don’t catch fire. You really can’t wish for the sun to shine brighter or dimmer when there is excess or not enough demand, but you can increase the heat output of an nuclear reactor…
While it’s not really on issue on a smaller scale, but with mass solar/wind/wave/etc. adoption the issue is not just the battery arrays that are needed, it’s the fact that grid infrastructure itself has to be able to cope with huge excesses and potential total starvation of electricity (yeah you can plan around day night-cycles) and the fact that the power might be coming from million different small providers that can be producers or consumers at different times of the day, instead of like a dozen powerplants which supply a city. If you move the coal, gas and oil out and discard nuclear then you have basically no stable baseline power and no reactivity if demand suddenly spikes or production drops (2 ton spinning turbine can resist sudden changes in grid voltage drops) in the grid and it’s all on batteries and the grid needs to be able to handle that since batteries can’t spike their output as high on demand without catching fire. Nuclear is drop in replacement and it lessens that fragility of the grid over mass solar. With SMRs and legal reforming the cost and build time can be brought down. Both of which are kinda artificial issues anyway brought on by the paranoia of Chernobyl and three mile island.