I’d be more interested to know how things have been in the recent disaster scenarios. The fires have downed power infrastructure all over the place. Have renewables been a positive, negative, or no different in terms of keeping the power on for people?
Comment on California just debunked a big myth about renewable energy
IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
California didn’t really debunk anything here. It’s a coastal state with plenty of wind and a predominantly warm, sunny, rain free climate. Of course renewables like wind and solar do well. The reliability concerns are usually more prevalent in areas that have much higher precipitation, and especially in climates that get snow.
wewbull@feddit.uk 1 week ago
RubberElectrons@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Shouldn’t be a big change, the transmission system is the same no matter the prime mover.
When fires melted power lines near where I used to live in soCal, SCE would have trucks roll in, dig in new power poles and run the cable. Power restored within about a week, so long as they had stock on transformers.
wewbull@feddit.uk 1 week ago
Right but, for example,
- most solar Inverters require a power supply to operate and define the switching frequency.
- Distributed storage and private generation may have enabled some areas to get by on reduced supply.
- Turbines and solar farms may have been in locations threatened by the fires or been damaged by ash / other debris.
- Repairing grid structure whilst the may be private batteries or generation online (damaged or not) might slow things down for safety reasons.
Once the electrons are on the wires I agree with you, it’s all much the same. However there are other aspects and I expect we’re still learning the good and the bad.
RubberElectrons@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Sheesh I didn’t know the inverters may not run without a grid reference. Where have you seen that, what a terrible idea!
LOL imagine they skimped on a 555 generating 60Hz when in local mode.
SteveKLord@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
From the scientific journal directly sited in the article :
IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Ok, but none of that mentions how they plan to account for panels buried under a foot of snow for half the year. That’s the source of the concern, not simply smoothing out daily peaks and valleys.
SteveKLord@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
The article is focusing on California as an example so that doesn’t seem entirely necessary but you could look to Norway to discover how they deal with this:
Vertical Panels are one solution as are Snow Repellent Panels and heated solar panels
Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Exactly! Like how hydro-power is a dead end and we shouldn’t invest in it.
It’s like, “guys, you know there’s who cities that aren’t by a river, right?”
SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
The snow problem isn’t really that much of a problem if you build for that in mind.
All the panels need is a small heat strip running through some part of it, maybe even behind the panel, added as aftermarket options, to melt it as it falls, and some sort of sensor to only kick heat on when it’s needed. They have things like that for led traffic lights already, so it would really just be repurposing something that already exists.
Sure that uses some electricity, reducing the overall efficiency, but 90+% of the year it’s not actively snowing hard enough to need to kick the heat on, so that’s a minimal loss.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Could even make it a manual thing or periodic and dependent on the panel having reduced power generation during the day. Heat up the snow while the panel is angled and it will eventually fall off without needing to melt all of it. Then, the rest of the time you can just let it get cold.
I wish my car’s wheel wells had that to periodically drop the slush/snow that builds up behind the wheels. Just needs to run for a little bit until the chunk falls off.