Cheaper yes, but I don't think Lithium is that cheap, or ever will be. I think storage (even the expensive ones like pumped hydro) will become more useful over time to handle day/night issues. Probably even enough to handle 2-4 week variations in weather. However for seasonal weather storage is going to be too expensive compared to just building a more solar panels that we don't use in summer.

Of course once we have solar that we won't use in summer there will be programs to use that power. I suspect things like ore refining, steel mills, and the like: will start running in summer only. They will go offline in winter for maintenance. (Investors will make a ton of money buying in summer and selling in winter - as they already do for lots of other commodities that have seasonal aspects)

The energy mix of the physical grid (the western interconnect in this case) is what matters for stability. (in places with limited transmission this is more complicated but at a state level it's approximately true).

articles like this talking about high solar or wind in one state are tricking people into thinking we're can actually increase inverter power sources past about 25-30%.

local power authorities power mix data is about contracts and paper not energy.

this kind of article is basically just lying to people.

Only if there is a very large lake at the bottom. If that lake doesn't exist then you have to build it at great cost. You also lose a lot to evaporation if you do this.

The problem with pumped storage is most of the places we can use it are already taken and have been for years.

> pumped storage is still significantly cheaper for seasonal storage

Only because most of the costs have been financially depreciated long ago. Try to build a brand new dam nearly anyplace and the costs will be much higher.

In most practical cases, the cheapest way to provide carbon-neutral seasonal storage is to use the existing natural gas generators and feed them with carbon neutral synthetic gas. That synthetic gas is super expensive, but when you're only running it a couple times a year the gas is a tiny percentage of the cost.

can you explain the economics of that to me, because it doesn't track my understanding.

Are you just talking about total capacity dominated breakeven? The economics of both want daily cycles. Water has a more favorable power/$ scaling curve for storage if you have a site.

Maybe. Depends on the plant. Nearly every plant goes through shutdowns for maintenance. If energy is a large cost they work with the utility (and vice versa - when the utility needs to shut down a big power plant they need industry to shutdown something at the same time). Many of them take December off for maintenance. My company has long pour iron in the foundry only at night: we get enough of a discount on power as to be worth paying the workers extra to work the night shift (I last checked this 15 years ago - I would not be surprised if this has changed now that the local power is mostly wind and thus has different factors)

Of course every plant is different. There is a big difference between "batch" processes where you can shutdown after any batch, and "continuous" processes where startup/shutdown is a large process since the machines depend on running. They have different abilities to respond. Some plants/processes use more energy than others - obviously if they don't use much energy they don't care about free energy much either. The more energy a plant uses the more they are interested in cheap energy. In some cases a less efficient process may suddenly become better when solar is "free"

It's not "will it" it's just a series of balances, capital costs vs energy costs.

If there's enough free energy and automation there gets to be a point where there will be people will start to disregard the capital costs as well and run 0ish input cost businesses with a vertical stack of stuff that they produced with 0ish input cost.

Well, manufacturing capacity was the basis of US military dominance, which was the underpinning of the post WW2 US-led world order. That's pretty clearly eroded, and we're not sure we could win in a war against China, especially not a full-on war of attrition, and they're not sure about that either, and so they're steadily getting more willing to throw their weight around geopolitically, trying to get a setup that's more favorable to them. The difference in shipbuilding capacity is staggering, for example. Even if each of our ships had a 10-1 kill ratio, we'd still run out of ships first.

My read on why we want it back, anyway. I'm sure there are other reasons, too.

> I just don't get it! What's the appeal?

its the k shaped economy. the big opportunities are great if you can get into them, but otherwise all there is is serving coffee to the wealthy. People are already poorer without a ladder or fulfilling work at the bottom

There is a tremendous amount of money in those high capital costs enterprises. High tech can make you a lot of money, but you can also go bankrupt when everyone buys from your competitor - just like everything else. The world needs the things that heavy industry makes, and despite the large capital costs they are valuable. People are still making a lot of money in those industries - even if it is less than the silicon valley can make.

Also industry is only low value so long as someone friendly to you has it. The world really worried about China climbing that latter because they are making some political moves that could lead to war. Maybe they won't, but China clearly is building a powerful military and they are not friendly to the freedoms that the US and western Europe likes. If it comes down to war we need heavy industry.

What you’re generalizing as “inverter power sources” don’t have any fundamental technical limitation like you describe. Those limitations are an artifact of the historical default of a “grid following” inverter that was suitable when the grid was mostly turbine and hydro generators.

Grid following inverters assume the existence of a certain critical mass of large spinning wheels as power sources to set the baseline frequency for the grid, and when those are lost can lead to brownouts as the follower plants are forced to go offline in response.

But newer solar plants can be designed with “grid forming” inverters which completely replace the role of spinning mass with a computerized vs mechanical baseline for the grid.

You can absolutely have a 100% “inverter based” grid as long as there are sufficient grid forming inverters within the mix. This wasn’t a problem until relatively recently when solar adoption exploded thanks to falling costs, and so the additional complexity of the technology wasn’t actively demanded by the market but that is no longer the case.

https://ffdpower.com/grid-forming-vs-grid-following-pcs-what...

https://www.opal-rt.com/blog/grid-forming-vs-grid-following-...

Battery storage provides grid stability services (frequency and voltage response, broadly speaking) within milliseconds at a lower cost than thermal generation.

TLDR System Diagram: Renewable generators<->Battery storage<->Transmission<->Battery storage<->Electric consumers.

https://ember-energy.org/chapter/the-rise-of-batteries-plus-...

Potential analysis of current battery storage systems for providing fast grid services like synthetic inertia – Case study on a 6 MW system - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.est.2022.106190 - Journal of Energy Storage Volume 57, January 2023, 106190

> Large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) already play a major role in ancillary service markets worldwide. Batteries are especially suitable for fast response times and thus focus on applications with relatively short reaction times. While existing markets mostly require reaction times of a couple of seconds, this will most likely change in the future. During the energy transition, many conventional power plants will fade out of the energy system. Thereby, the amount of rotating masses connected to the power grid will decrease, which means removing a component with quasi-instantaneous power supply to balance out frequency deviations the millisecond they occur. In general, batteries are capable of providing power just as fast but the real-world overall system response time of current BESS for future grid services has only little been studied so far. Thus, the response time of individual components such as the inverter and the interaction of the inverter and control components in the context of a BESS are not yet known. We address this issue by measurements of a 6 MW BESS's inverters for mode changes, inverter power gradients and measurements of the runtime of signals of the control system. The measurements have shown that in the analyzed BESS response times of 175 ms to 325 ms without the measurement feedback loop and 450 ms to 715 ms for the round trip with feedback measurements are possible with hardware that is about five years old. The results prove that even this older components can exceed the requirements from current standards. For even faster future grid services like synthetic inertia, hardware upgrades at the measurement device and the inverters may be necessary.

(this paper is ~3 years old, state of the art has advanced in that time from an improvement perspective)

But those aren't dams. Dams are something that stops the flow of water. And it's this stoppage that causes the environmental problems.

Reservoir walls might look like dams, but they're not dams.