The point of solar panels is not to ensure "solar profitability," but to make for a greener, better world. Its profitability is only justified insofar as it moves us towards that goal. If we want to switch to renewables, then sometimes we're going to have surplus, because of how renewables work. This is well known and discussed ad nauseam. If that makes power markets unstable, then the problem is with markets, not with there being too many solar panels.
The primary problem is not with some abstract markets but with the power grid. PV supply is not synchronised with the country’s demand and in general PV produces too much electricity when it cannot be consumed, and too little when it’s needed. The core characteristic of electricity is that it needs to be consumed almost instantly as it’s being produced and if it’s not, then it damages the grid.
To deal with that you need storage, which is very expensive and complex in many aspects, which is why it’s being deployed way too slow. The PV investors deploy cheap Chinese PV specifically because it’s cheap and they don’t deploy storage specifically because it’s not cheap - that’s the logic any investor would follow, because PV investors don’t give a shit about the grid or CO2. The negative electricity prices are a market way of signalling the investors that their business is not sustainable economically without storage because their excess production damages the grid.
Yes, you can do the same thing without markets and negative prices - you have a national grid regulatory body simply ordering PV produces to stop supplying to avoid damaging their grid, which is when it becomes their problem how to get rid of the excess energy. The PV investors will moan the problem they create is pushed to their shoulders, but it still doesn’t remove the root cause which is the desync between PV supply and country demand.
My new #Meshtastic record — 49 km 😲 From hills around Wells to Cardiff. In general, this area is very busy with Meshtastic nodes so great opportunity to have a casual chat with radio geeks!
Now I can’t confirm traceroute as the remote node went offline but at that time there was no information it went through any hops, so I’d assume it was direct
On the right hand side you can see a PV panel, it’s 1.25 W, 250 mA, 110mm x 69mm https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/113383833070 It’s simply glued inside the clear cover because I wanted to avoid the complexity of passing the wires through. The cover reduces PV output by around 20% but with this size of the panel and 18650 battery inside it still can run 24/7 when placed outside.
If anything, other way around. Russians targeted civilians from the first day of the full-scale war, starting from this iconic photo made on 24 February 2022
Nie, jest OK. Blokady się skończyły i relacje są poprawne. Polska jest dla Ukrainy potężnym hubem logistycznym i w tym zakresie wszystko działa. Tyle, że po cichu bo to są dość wrażliwe operacje. Temat ziarna też się udało jakoś uregulować.
@bperruche A to jest inna sprawa. W pierwszych miesiącach wojny to była miłość i przytulasy, ale to była raczej anomalia z dyplomatycznego punktu widzenia. Ale może to było też potrzebne na tamtym etapie, i Polakom i Ukraińcom. Teraz jest… normalnie.
How #Russia understands Western #deescalation? Margarita Simonyan’s husband Tigran Keosayan explains to his colleagues:
Everything we wanted to know about NATO is now quite clear: we can start a war with any NATO country, almost any, and US will not intervene. As long as US doesn’t intervene, they are just a bunch of paper tigers.
Second of the three European EPR ( Evolutionary Power Reactor) #nuclear projects - #France#Flamanville - will be shortly connected to the grid. The projects caused many controversies due to long delays… but they are getting completed:
🇫🇮 Olkiluoto 3 ✅ connected in 2023
🇫🇷 Flamanville ✔️ finished, will be connected by end of 2024 : 🇬🇧 Hinkley Point C 🕓 will be completed by 2027
The moment these projects get connected, they start delivering gigawatt-hours of low-carbon electricity to the grid, which is desperately needed for #ClimateChange prevention and mitigation.
Each of these has been criticised for delays (which is factually true but unfair) and “huge cost” (which is unfair and untrue).
Talking about the total investment cost in case of clean electricity sources that may live up to a century is a popular manipulation but what matters is LCOE.
It’s the cost of investment and operations divided by value of electricity produced over its life time. In case of nuclear power LCOE is quite low, in the range of $60/MWh because the relatively big initial costs is divided by decades of delivery of huge amounts of power. This is exactly the same case with very costly off-shore wind farms (e.g. the Doggerbank project) or huge solar farms (e.g. Ouarzazate in Morocco).
The reasons for delays are… complex. This article[1] by Joris van Dorp is probably the best explainer to why exactly Hinkley Point C was delayed so much. It’s a mix of reasons, starting from “first of kind” scale of the project to prohibitive and often absurd safety requirements lobbied after Fukushima by countries who saw an opportunity in replacing EU nuclear by Russian fossil gas. And they were absurd, for example because you don’t get earthquakes and tsunamis on the La Manche Channel.
And the reasons are complex, for example due to general UK attitude to funding infrastructure projects - they exclusively opt for private funding, which means the investors need to get a direct financial profit. Most people see the absurdity of private ownership of UK water utilities (which leads to no investments in the network and dumping of sewage into rivers by underregulated companies) but nobody sees the same absurdity in funding the electricity grid (which is in turn overregulated).
Hmmm weird, because now you seem to very much believe in the current decarbonisation plan involving further increase in renewables and fossil gas which may be in unspecified future replaced by hydrogen?