Fire Chief Joel Mendoza of the North County Fire District said at this point, most of the fire had gone out. A water-based mitigation system did not work as designed, Vistra's senior director of community affairs Brad Watson said at the conference. Earlier in the day, a Monterey Sheriff official had said there were no active fire suppression efforts going on, "as the best approach, according to fire staff, is to allow the building and batteries to burn."

Yeah, I think massive chemical batteries for storing excess electricity to facilitate a contrived green energy market is a bad idea.

  • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOPEnglish
    316·
    1 day ago

    Abandon the model of buying and storing electricity when demand is low and reselling power back to the grid when demand is high. Instead, electricity should almost always be generated in excess of demand with the difference going to hydrogen and oxygen production for various medical, industrial, agricultural, and transport applications. If we ever run out of storage, they can be safely vented to atmosphere.

    • gens@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      7 hours ago

      Electrolisis is relatively inefficient and wears down the electrodes. While not as bad on an industrial scale, those are still problems. And then you have to convert it back, that is even less efficient.

      Good in theory, barely passable in practice. Growing sugar cane and making ethanol would be better, like brazil does it.

      • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOPEnglish
        1·
        35 minutes ago

        What do you mean by “convert it back”? Convert it back to electricity for the grid? No. We need the hydrogen for important things, like making steel and fertilizer.

    • Yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 hours ago

      You’re hard pushing hydrogen / oxygen pretty blindly. Do you happen to know what the best efficiency of it is? It’s not great. And it gets worse when you have to harvest it (typically electrolysis which is brutally energy intensive.) Worse still when you need to compress it - and don’t even start me on energy density. Oh and that compressed gas needs to be kept cold. More energy.

      Hydrogen cells have been around for ages and are still functionally worthless until the storage and generation problems are solved.

      • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOPEnglish
        1·
        39 minutes ago

        As I’ve already explained, we need hydrogen. We need it not for energy storage, but as a useful, important product. Electrolysis of water is pretty much the only way to get it without emitting greenhouse gases. Therefore, the efficiency of it doesn’t really matter, especially if the energy to do it would otherwise go to some dangerous, battery based buy low/sell high scheme.

    • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      Before you can can do that, you need enough renewable generation capacity to exceed peak demand. And of course that will never happen because of the bottomless appetite of AI and bitcoin mining for electric power.

      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
        11·
        14 hours ago

        AI and Bitcoin miners can be a part of the solution rather than the problem.

        There are disincentives to overbuilding solar, wind, tidal, wave, and other passive energy collectors. If we overbuild, the lower output from suboptimal production is still enough to meet demand. But, under normal conditions we will have far more power than we can use.

        We already have periods of time where power prices go negative: generators are forced to pay to dump excess power. This melts the return on their investment, and stifles further rollout.

        We can justify overbuilding such sources if we can adjust our demand to meet whatever we can supply. That means turning on additional loads when the sun shines, and turning off loads when the wind stops blowing.

        Data centers can be put on highly variable rate plans that are at or even below costs during ideal generation conditions, and wildly expensive during suboptimal generation conditions. Data centers on such plans will halt processing when power is overly expensive, and only draw on the grid when it is profitable to do so.

        Data centers aren’t the only industry where this can be done, and this isn’t a novel concept. Steel mills operate overnight to increase the load on baseload generation like nuclear. Baseload generators need the daily demand “trough” as high as possible, and the “peak” as low as possible. They need the curve as flat as possible, so they offer incentives to heavy industrial consumers to shift their demand. As we continue to shift to passive collectors instead of traditional generation, we need to reverse these old demand shaping practices to match the capabilities of new generation methods.

      • CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.workOPEnglish
        211·
        1 day ago

        We need an authoritarian figure to nationalize the energy supply, shut down these wasteful expressions of late stage capitalism, mandate rooftop solar, and build out our nuclear fleet.