Quote:
Originally Posted by corporatejay
There was someone on here awhile ago that mentioned that as good as solar can be, it can't be "stored" and pulled on demand to meet things like power spikes. Perhaps someone remembers that?
|
Yeah, that's definitely an issue, but it's more a problem with the way that our grids are set up, as opposed to anything inherently wrong with solar power. Grids simply can't store power: you basically need to produce energy when it's needed. But it's much easier to control coal or hydro or nuclear or even wind to match spikes than solar. It's more of a problem for a cool climate like ours, where peak solar energy periods tend to also be low consumption. For this reason, even if solar power was cheap and insanely high efficiency (which it's not), it could never be anything more than a supplementary source for a city like Calgary.
In the next fifteen or twenty years, there will be massive changes to the way that power is used on a grid, and we should start to see what are essentially power batteries, especially in grids that use a lot of solar or wind. Some of these are really cool technologies, like where a wind farm can use it's surplus energy to pump compressed air into a reservoir such as an empty gas well. And then when there's no wind, the compressed air is released into special turbines which generate power; if even half the energy that was currently lost within the grid was captured and stored and turned back into power when needed, the increased efficiency would be more significant that decades of solar power advances.