• 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Unfortunately we still need tunable baseline power in order to keep current, voltage, and frequency within the grid’s margin of error. Our options for that are: situationally available (and often environmentally problematic) hydro, fossil fuels, nuclear, and/or giant toxic/fire-prone battery banks.

    • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      Would geothermal work? I can’t think of any particular reason that the heat of the earth should vary much with time (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong in this assumption), and energy production should be more controllable because to my understanding it generally just makes steam for a turbine like more traditional power sources.

      • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Geothermal is really expensive in most parts of the world. It costs a lot of money to drill deep enough and to have enough capacity.

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Plasma deep drilling is starting to hit the market which should make geothermal available pretty much everywhere. The sad thing about current geothermal is that it’s not even used in areas where you do have heat near the surface, the reason is that geology is quite unpredictable and every borehole is a crap-shoot between hitting the jackpot and having to pay damages out of your arse because people’s houses collapse. Deep drilling has none of those issues.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      You forgot hydrogen, saltwater batteries, proper grids, biogas, etc.

      If you’d use nuclear power like that, you’d drive up the costs even more, because it’s just not very viable to compete with solar and wind during the day. Better to just invest in proper storage solutions.

    • oyo@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Out of those you listed, nuclear is the least flexible in terms of output regulation. PV with batteries is the most flexible.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Running frequency regulation off batteries is a silly idea, that’s more capacitor range. Also, flywheels, which is how fossil fuels do it anyway.