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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Just for another angle on the problem: baseload generation (nuclear) is most efficient at its highest possible output, but it has to maintain that output 24/7. It can’t ramp up and down fast enough to match the demand curve, and it can’t be ramped up above the minimum overnight demand.

    To increase its efficiency, utilities push large scale consumers like steel mills and aluminum smelters to overnight shifts. This artificially increases the overnight demand, allowing the baseload generators to ramp up their relatively efficient production. This reduces the need for less-efficient peaker plants during the day.

    That overnight demand can’t be met with solar, and wind generation tends to fall overnight as well.

    What nuclear can do is help level out seasonal variation, between the short days of winter and long days of summer. If you want to contemplate a truly pie-in-the-sky scenario, there are provisions for tying large ships, (like aircraft carriers and hospital ships) to shore power, and backfeeding the local grid to support disaster relief efforts.

    Imagine a fleet of nuclear generation ships, sailing to northern-hemisphere ports from November to April, and to southern-hemisphere ports from May to October.

    Pumped storage is also essential, but extraordinarily limited. We can probably run essential overnight loads on pumped storage, but it does not make sense to keep an overnight load on pumped-storage that can be shifted to solar/wind directly.

    We need to take a look at demand shaping rather than supply shaping. We need to shift load to times we can produce, rather than shift production to times of demand.



  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhat the hell Proton!
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    2 months ago

    They need to advertise a legitimate use for their service.

    If they don’t have a threat from public wifi or other security concerns to remedy, then the only purpose for their service is to bypass region limits and block infringement notices. They would be considered complicit in such infringement.

    That their service also hinders efforts to stop pirates needs to be an “unintended” and “unavoidable” side effect.


  • We have incentivized night time consumption. Base load generation (nuclear, coal) can’t ramp up and down fast enough to match the daily demand curve. They can’t produce more than the minimum overnight demand, but they have keep producing that around the clock. To minimize the need for “peaker” plants during the day, they want the overnight demand to be as high as possible.

    So they put steel mills, aluminum smelters, and other heavy industry on overnight shifts by offering them extraordinarily cheap power.

    That incentivized overnight load needs to be shifted to daytime, so it can be met with solar and wind. Moving forward, we need to minimize overnight demand.


  • Because it is not cost effective. Simple as that.

    The problem is that we don’t have enough demand shaping to shift night time loads to day time, and we don’t have enough storage to shift production to overnight. The result is that daytime generation is regularly going into negative rates (you have to pay to put power on the grid, which melts the returns on your investment into solar.

    As far as problems go, it’s a good one to have, as it will eventually result in lower prices for daytime generation.


  • It takes hours to days to start, stop, or change nuclear and coal generation rates. You can’t just turn it on and off as needed. If you need coal or nuclear to meet overnight demand, you have to leave it running during the day as well. If you need 2MW of power overnight and 5MW during the day, you can only add 3MW of solar generation before you are putting too much power on the grid. If your solar puts out 5MW, you have to find out something to do with the extra 2MW that your nuclear plant needs to output continuously.

    If you size your solar plants to produce 3MW in the middle of winter, then in summer they are putting out about 9MW. What can you do with the 6MW excess?

    There is no single solution to manage every issue, but the single most important is “demand shaping”. We need to reduce demands that can only be met with baseload generation. We need to move that demand to peak solar production times. We need to increase daytime demand to incentivize greater investment into solar. We need east/west transmission lines across every continent, shifting power from wherever the sun is up to wherever the sun is down.

    Storage has to be a very distant second. Every 1 MW we time shift from night to day takes 2MW of load off the grid.


  • Number 2 is not inherently true. We can incentivize time-of-use, and push it to time-of-generation. Not with all loads, of course, but with a lot of them, and a lot of very heavy loads.

    Our old nuclear/coal model pushes a lot of these loads overnight to reduce daytime demand and “level the curve”. Steel mills and aluminum smelters often operate overnight and shutdown during the day, because that is what nuclear and coal needed.

    With solar and wind becoming predominant, we need to reverse those overnight, “off peak” incentives, and push consumption to daytime hours.

    The concept is known as “demand shaping”. It is an underutilized method of matching production and consumption, but it is essential if solar and wind are to become our primary source of power.