Yea, more control over the panels will help with the overgeneration issue.
But there’s other issues like ramping supply to meet peak demand and general generation during non-solar hours that still have to be addressed.
Each have interesting proposals on how to solve them, but they haven’t been developed to the point that they’re ready to be put onto the grid at a large scale.
Piggybacking on your grid stability point, another issue I don’t see getting addressed here is ramp rate.
If we install enough solar where 100% of our daytime load is served by solar, that’s great. But what about when the solar starts to drop off later in the day?
A/Cs are still running while the sun is setting, the outside air is still hot. People are also getting home from work, and turning on their A/Cs to cool off the house, flipping on their lights, turning on the oven, etc.
Most grids have their peak power usage after solar has completely dropped off.
The issue then becomes: how can we serve that load? And you could say “just turn on some gas-fired units, at least most of the day was 100% renewable.”
But some gas units take literal hours to turn on. And if you’re 100% renewable during the day, you can’t have those gas units already online.
Grid operators have to leave their gas units online, running as low as they can, while the sun is out. So that when the peak hits, they can ramp up their grid to peak output, without any help from solar.
There are definitely some interesting solutions to this problem, energy storage, load shifting, and energy efficiency, but these are still in development.
People expect the lights to turn on when they flip the switch, and wouldn’t be very happy if that wasn’t the case. Grid operators are unable to provide that currently without dispatchable units.
I’m adjacent to this problem, so I have a little context, but am not an expert at all.
To my knowledge, we don’t have granular control over panels. So we can shut off legs of a plant, but that’s a lot of power to be moving all at once.
Instead, prices are set to encourage commercial customers to intake more power incrementally. This has a smoother result on the grid, less chance of destabilizing.
A customer like a data center could wait to perform defragmentation or a backup or something until the price of power hits a cheap or negative number.
Yup, I did some on-campus IT work while I was in college and it was super trivial to detect when people would have their own networks in the dorms
I spun up a MQTT/Aedes/MongoDB stack on my network recently for some ESP32 sensors.
Fantastic protocol and super easy to work with!
Venti water, extra ice, room for creamer should do it
Yea my Adblock Home (pihole alternative) blocks the ads on my Roku home screen. Now it’s just a big blank box.
Hawaiian Electric's modeling suggests it can reduce curtailment of renewables by an estimated 69% for the first five years thanks to Kapol Energy Storage, allowing surplus clean electricity that would otherwise waste to get onto the grid.
Can’t comment on Linux compatibility. But on my windows PC I use a Gulikit King Kong 2 Pro. Really like it so far, no major issues, pretty good battery life.
The Framework laptop brand gives me hope.
Unfortunately they still seem have a relatively high cost for their performance. But you can’t beat the modular design.
Also the current Linux offerings for Apple Silicon (M1/M2) are very much “Beta”. And have some serious battery efficiency issues, don’t currently support audio drivers, have some peripheral problems, etc.
Looking forward to using one once they get them up to speed though.
I’ve been thinking of replacing my Synology with one of these!