alt Hacker NewsThis isn’t remotely true. Solar / wind / nuclear / coal / gas / any electrical source including from neighboring grids can be inbound or outbound from your grid using, the grid. There are capacitors and transformers, relays and transmission lines. Any energy source can provide power. Solar used to give money back to its owners by selling power back to the grid but they killed that initiative quickly and will just use your energy you provide.
The issues you describe are from coal, oil, and gas lobbyists saying solar isn’t viable because of nighttime. When the grid is made up of batteries…
If every house had solar and some LiFePo batteries on site, high demand can be pulled from the grid while during low demand and high production, it can be given to the grid. The energy companies can store it, hydropower or batteries, for later. We have the ability. The political will is simply the lobbyists giving people money so they won’t. But we can just do it anyway. Start with your own home.
Replies
Also, power companies did not necessarily kill energy export incentives. Here in Massachusetts my meter “runs backward” when I export to the grid. This does not earn me money but it does earn me kWh credits, which means that if I am net negative for energy import in the summer and net positive for import in the winter, I can be net zero (or close to it) for the year.
In MA and a few other states, polluters are also required to buy “renewable energy credits.” Since I have a solar array I can sell my RECs whether I export energy or not. It’s my first year with a solar array, so I’m not sure how much to expect, but neighbors tell me that they earn between $500-$1000 a year.
Well there are real challenges here. Generators which rely on massive spinning things naturally provide the grid with inertia; they resist changes to grid frequency. Power sources which rely on inverters or otherwise dynamically adapt to grid frequency don't naturally provide the same inertia.
This is a solvable problem, but it requires a solution nonetheless.
It's hard for people to really understand this because utilities and grid operators are using this is a headline justification for electric capital projects. In New York, they've deferred capital projects for decades and we're absorbing a massive distribution charge increase. I think my electric delivery portion of the bill is up 40%.
> Any energy source can provide power.
Not all prime movers are the same with regard to grid dynamics and their impact.
Solar, wind, etc., almost universally rely on some form of inverter. This implies the need for solid state synthetic inertia to provide frequency response service to the grid.
Nuclear, coal, gas, hydropower, geothermal, etc., rely on synchronous machines to talk to the grid. The frequency response capability is built in and physically ideal.
Both can work, but one is more complicated. There are also factors like fault current handling that HN might think is trivial or to be glossed over, but without the ability to eat 10x+ rated load for a brief duration, faults on the grid cannot be addressed and the entire system would collapse into pointlessness. A tree crashing into a power line should result in the power line and tree being fully vaporized if nothing upstream were present to stop the flow of current. A gigantic mass of spinning metal in a turbine hall can eat this up like it's nothing. Semiconductors on a PCB in someone's shed are a different story.