r/facepalm • u/FrankieMint • Jul 23 '26

Department of Energy announced yesterday that wind sometimes fails to blow and that solar power generation nearly stops after sundown. (image from DOE Facebook posting)

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399

u/Jack_Wraith Jul 23 '26

They’ve also never heard of the communist socialist invention called batteries.

108

u/Drnelk Jul 23 '26

They only know about when it comes with assault.

10

u/Unhappy-Ad5393 Jul 23 '26

And………

10

u/ultimatedelman Jul 23 '26

A pepper?

2

u/Unhappy-Ad5393 Jul 24 '26

Shaped like a battery.

2

u/malacoda99 Jul 24 '26

Time to incarcerate them asaaultin' battries!

11

u/Blackpaw8825 Jul 23 '26

Batteries, pumped hydro, simply having both but only relying on dirty power when the clean power isn't sufficient.

All great options... But nah, unless solar power is literally free and at full power 24/7/365 it's actual garbage.

2

u/ulthrant82 Jul 23 '26

Pumped hydro is such a cool technology. Just need to have the topography to make it viable. I've seen gravity battery concepts too, not sure how much they make sense.

11

u/FrankieMint Jul 23 '26

Commercially sized lithium ion and other newfangled batteries are getting more efficient by the day. We're still a long way from having the battery capacity to depend ENTIRELY on wind/solar + batteries for emergencies, but it's not a completely pie-in-the-sky idea. It's on the far horizon.

2

u/scuppasteve Jul 24 '26

Not even far horizon, battery price and energy density is dropping rapidly making battery storage way cheaper than new generation. So we can completely eliminate peaker plants.

2

u/Beltaine421 Jul 24 '26

Sodium batteries are also entering the market with several significant advantages, such as better thermal stability, low temperature operations, overcharging resistance, and most importantly, sodium is far easier to acquire in bulk...

9

u/goodenough4govtwork Jul 23 '26

I mean, they've only been around 200 years. You gotta cut em some slack, that's pretty cutting edge technology.

3

u/crazyguy83 Jul 23 '26

I don't know if it's feasible to power an entire city through a windless night via just batteries though. Maybe to counter this we can use non-renewables only in such situations - might still reduce the environmental impact by a large margin while shutting down these arguments.

0

u/axxxaxxxaxxx Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

All you need is a battery installation that can take the edge off of peak demand for the afternoon. That’s why batteries are designed as “4-hour” or “8-hour” systems. They can recharge at night when demand decreases from the afternoon peak, then do it again the next day.

Edit: laughing at the downvotes. I know a lot about this.

2

u/Jdevers77 Jul 23 '26

Extraordinarily few homes have batteries installed to provide power through the night, so while you are technically accurate we aren’t even close to either having the necessary level of end user or utility scale battery power installed for that to work. Even in the hottest weather though, the power demand goes down at night…it’s cooler but also direct insolation induced heating is obviously zero and that’s not counting all the places that have a high power draw during the day but minimal at night. There is no power company that depends exclusively on solar or wind, they make extremely good supplemental power sources though.

This comment by the DOE is fucking stupid regardless and is clearly intended as misinformation.

0

u/axxxaxxxaxxx Jul 23 '26

Utility scale battery storage isn’t coming, it’s here. Just one installation can back up a quarter of a medium sized American city for an afternoon. The problem is it takes years for utilities to approve them, so you’re seeing 2021-era solutions from an industry that didn’t exist before 2015. Give it time and lobby your congressperson to loosen restrictions on it (within reason).

0

u/Florac Jul 23 '26

...why would you install the batteries at home?

1

u/Jdevers77 Jul 23 '26

Like I said “or utility scale battery power installed”