this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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What viable solution we have for i.e. a week worth of energy in worst case scenario? Let's take Slovenia for example with yearly consumption of 12.95 TWh, a week worth of energy would be 248 GWh. And during winter this number is probably higher. How would you store it? Note that US consumption is twice as high and population is x150.
Slovenia is fairly high solar production with mildish winters. But winter heat needs storage.or heating fuel. A storage solution is hot water, and hydronic floor hrating, and heat pumps. But traditional heating fuel, can offload power requirements in low seasonal solar production.
A scenario where you get zero production for a week is very unlikely - broadly speaking, you cope with this by building out production to produce a massive surplus, with various industries that can at variable rates use up the massive amounts of cheap power in the base case, then you build up storage to cope with the most likely scenarios of capacity reduction/smoothing out the price curve throughout the day.
It's also important to note that demand is far from static - people can and will reduce their usage when incentivized to do so, usually in the form of raising prices in low capacity scenarios. It's already starting to become quite popular to do so today, with spot price electricity plans allowing people to pay ridiculously low rates by aligning their energy usage with capacity availability - things like charging EVs/running laundry/running dishwashers/storing up thermal energy.
This sounds like quite a rube goldberg machine to avoid simply supplying a predictable baseline with nuclear. If you try to out-surplus increasingly common climate catastrophes, you're going to be in for a rude awakening.
Any surplus or pricing plan will be gamed by power hungry datacenters or other wasteful capitalist scam-de-jour. Like you said, demand is elastic so any spare watt will eventually be sucked up as the price curve is optimized. The combined fluctuations on supply+demand is not what you want for a stable grid.
I predict a scenario where storage has to shore up that instability; much more storage than people think. The potential for a zero-supply floor (independent of demand growth) with massive surplus peaks requires building out an equally massive buffer. What will that ecological damage will look like? Will our current projections and efficiencies hold true at that scale?
The cheap energy -> increased demand -> increased storage -> more surplus cycle will cement our reliance on cheap energy, which requires more stability which means more storage, etc...
Let me clarify here that renewables are important for planning a responsible energy future, but only chasing cheap energy isn't the solution. It's not possible for us to out-produce the over-consumption that got us here.
That's why I wrote "worst case". Imagine a winter rainy week with short days when heat pumps are running like crazy. But again, I have yet to see real energy storage solutions or real such scenarios.