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.

  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    Op believes that energy storage shouldn’t be necessary. At all.

    Yes, that is one of the ludicrous arguments that I acknowledged OP is making.

    Storage - or a buffer if you will - is simply a requirement of many systems.

    Agreed. As I said: “Yes, we need storage to match the imbalance between generation and demand. But it is far more important that we minimize that imbalance first.”

    Demand shaping when we’re taking about the grid is largely the result of seasons,

    No. You are describing one type of demand shaping, but it is not the only one, and it is not the type I am referring to. “Time of use” plans are another type that consumers are more aware of. I’m referring to the industrial version of TOU rate plans.

    I am saying that these varieties of demand shaping are currently setup to support traditional nuclear/coal baseload generation, rather than solar/wind. They are currently designed to increase the minimum, overnight load on the grid. They are currently used lower peak demand, and raise the trough.

    Those TOU plans need to shift to driving consumption to daylight hours: To maximize the amount of power consumed as it is generated, and thus minimizing the need for storage.

    for them to be right we’d need to live in some utopia with vastly different technologies that we have presently.

    Only if we are trying to get every consumer to participate. We don’t actually need to do that.

    This is just factually ridiculous.

    Filling a reservoir during the day to run a steel mill overnight is a complete waste of a reservoir: move the steel mill to daytime hours and you don’t need the reservoir.

    This isn’t a logical comparison.

    Dude. We are already doing exactly that. We have grid storage facilities being charged by solar power during the day and discharging overnight. We also have steel mills and aluminum smelters paying lower rates to operate overnight rather than during the day, to meet the needs of baseload generators.

    But ultimately, the solar, nuclear/coal, storage, and steel plants are all on the same grid. So we are, effectively, doing exactly what I said: running the steel mills with stored solar power. Yes, there are legitimate reasons for doing it this way, but those reasons are ultimately based on legacy issues.

    To continue the shift from traditional coal/nuclear baseload generation to solar/wind, we either need enough storage to run the steel mills overnight, or we need to shift the mills to daytime operation.

    Again: Storage is important, yes. But, demand shifting is far more important.