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Rooftop solar panels are flooding California’s grid. That’s a problem. As electricity prices go negative, the Golden State is struggling to offload a glut of solar power (wapo.st)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/energy@slrpnk.net

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I'll note that right now, this is a seasonal issue, associated with moderate springtime temperatures when there is a lot of sunshine available.

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[–] Nollij@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

"Batteries" don't need to be what we commonly think of as storing electricity. They can very much be a different way of storing energy instead. For instance, pumping water up to a tower (or upstream), or splitting water into hydrogen + oxygen (for consumption/combustion later)

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yes I'm aware of water storage, and even quite fond of it, but it's very dependent on geography (as you need a very large body of water so you can't really just use a water tower) and also incredibly expensive. There are generally more effective and profitable uses for land.

Meanwhile BESS is tiny, something like 30MW per acre.

Storing energy as hydrogen is a fool's errand, in fact many of the new use cases for hydrogen are snake oil touted by people looking to sell more hydrogen. Even ignoring the fact that hydrogen leaks through and embrittles any container it's stored in (or that it explodes violently), converting hydrogen to electricity only leaves you about 70% of the energy you put in.