I just read an interesting article in The Atlantic about the peculiarities, if that is the right word, of electricity. It works oddly, the author writes, and I think the author has a point, which is the article’s contribution and why you might want to read it.
It describes how demand peaks just as solar power is going off line around sunset, and how that is being managed. And it suggests that the charging of electric cars can mostly happen in the hours after people have gone to sleep. I appreciate the fact that the author doesn’t assume we can generate power at one time of day and use it at another, “store electricity for later” is not likely to ever be a major factor.
It is probably too optimistic about how usage can be moved into the hours when solar is dumping extra megawatts into the system. High usage items like ovens are hard to move when all adults in a household work outside the home. Ditto with anything else that involves resistance heating, like taking hot showers or ironing, or especially heating the house, which most often happens on winter nights when there is no sunshine.
I imagine it will be possible to design systems which run during the day when people are at work and the solar power is flowing, and build up heat or cold which can be “stored” for a few hours. Imagine a freezer that did most of its work during midday and could ‘coast’ through the peak demand hours of early evening. The article doesn’t say so, but we know how to store heat and cold for a few hours, while it isn’t easy or cheap to store the electricity itself.
For sure we need to improve the electric grid, and add sources of uninterruptible power like nuclear and hydro power. Skeptics have convinced me that wind turbine and solar will never be our major sources of power, at least not with currently available technology. Absent tech breakthroughs totally unforeseen at this point, at no time in the life of anyone reading this will non-polluting, renewable sources produce most of our electric power.
What the author foresees is a system the intricacies of which will render it fragile and precarious. Minute by minute balancing of generation and consumption of power is like juggling, doable but not easy and far from bullet-proof. It will make our civilization even more balanced on a knife edge, and that concerns me because as we all know Murphy’s Law is still in effect, bad stuff does happen.
