The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout

You are being intentionally obtuse - as I said there are settings to control how much or how little of the battery's energy can be sent out to the grid. The owner is paid for any energy exported so if they wish they can decide to keep it all or set a limit that will guarantee an acceptable amount remaining in the battery under any conditions.

That option will become less effective as a greater proportion of the supply is generated by renewables. Dropping the load may also drop a significant proportion of the supply from local solar and wind sources.

Ok, so authorities will have to push to build energy storage fast.

How? Solar and wind sources are free-standing generators. They don't need any power input from the grid. They do need timing information - to set the phase of the AC current that they feed into the grid, but they can get that from radio transmissions, and - less directly - from GPS signals.

You are /completely/ disconnected from reality.

How many potential car customers read books like that? 0.01% ? Maybe

People's thoughts on what is "right" - morally, environmentally, politically, religiously, etc., - are based on what they hear from friends, what they see on TV, Youtube, Tiktok, and the like. Books are a tiny, tiny proportion of the influence - or rather, an influence on a tiny, tiny proportion of people. And all these sources of influence can be highly biased, present a distorted view, or be completely wrong. Books are not immune to that, though they are usually be more factually reliable than Tiktok.

Once a potential customer has decided on their idealistic stance - they want to "go green", or they think climate change is all a conspiracy theory from the Chinese - they look at the practicalities and the economics. And those override the idealism nine times out of ten - idealism typically only matters in the event of a tie.

Those small proportions do add up, gradually. If one in ten buyers chooses the environmentally better option, then that will lead to greater availability, better infrastructure, lower prices, and more investment and development in the field - making it a more practical choice for others.

None of this is, however, affected by books by journalists "revealing" the "truth" about some industry. Very occasionally, some politician might have read the book and ask challenging questions in parliament, or the author will appear on a panel show or debate show and raise awareness. But that's rare. Virtually all such books generate a few inches of newspaper column (for those that still read newspapers), then migrate to airport bookshops. Most copies that are bought are unread - and for most that are read, the reader will think "that's interesting and thought-provoking" - then forget about them. Again, the tiny levels of influence do add up, slowly, and it is a good thing that these kinds of books are written and published. But to imagine that they directly affect companies' bottom lines through "informed customers" is ludicrous.

I say all this as a person who reads such books (though not those particular ones you happen to have read) - and who tries learn from many sources.

Of course companies care what their customers think, and what influences them! That is why they advertise. But they do not care what books they read, because the influence is totally and completely negligible.

Yes, it is nonsense.

The reality is that in sunny places, people can get cheap (in amortized costs over time) electricity by putting solar panels on their roofs and such installations might include a battery so that the solar-generated energy is available through the night. Other installations don't have a battery - they simply sell the solar power back on the grid, for use in industry and other customers during the sunlight hours.

People choose to have solar panels based on the cost - comparing the cost of installing them to the amount of electricity they will generate and the cost (or sale price) of that electricity. And of course that requires that you own a house and live in a sunny place.

People choose to have a house battery based on the capital cost, the differences between electricity prices during the day and night, their electricity needs, and the reliability and stability of their grid-supplied power.

People choose to have electric cars because of costs (including tax breaks, subsidies, etc.), where they can use them (such as in low-emission zones in cities, collective traffic lanes, etc.), and personal preference.

Of course there will be a correlation between these three things. In particular, if you have solar panels then it is quite likely that you will also have a house battery.

But the suggestion that "electric car owning households tend to have house batteries" is nonsense. It is probably fair to say that there is a substantial correlation in Australia, at the moment - but as a general statement, it is flat-out wrong.

Australia is a rich country with a high proportion of home owners and a high proportion of stand-alone homes (rather than flats). It is a very sunny country, and has high and volatile electricity prices. So amongst the richer segment of the population, you will get a lot of solar panels, and a fair proportion of these will have batteries. It is also amongst those richer people that you will see electric car ownership, probably in addition to fossil fuel cars. Thus you see a correlation. If and when electric car ownership spreads significantly in Australia, that correlation will disappear as people living in flats, apartments, smaller houses, etc., get electric cars - they will not have solar panels, or house batteries.

When you look at most other countries, the correlation was never there in the first place. (The exception might be the USA, where electric car ownership is mostly in California which has similarities with Australia.) Norway is the country with far and away the highest per-capita electric car ownership - perhaps 50 times that of Australia (though Australia's rate is increasing faster). Solar power, and house batteries, are very rare here - it is not the sunniest country on earth.

Australia's lithium mining is a noticeably less environmentally damaging source than many other sources of lithium throughout the world.

The key word here is "instantly". To instantly drop thousands of individual loads whilst maintaining their co-sited generation capacity, in a completely reliable way, may be possible, but we are nowhere near that at present. Emergency load-shedding consists of switching of big chunks of consumers but that is increasingly liable to switch off generating capacity in an unpredictable way.

All of that is vulnerable to interruption (by Sod's Law, just when it is needed), Compared with just switching off a big load centre by pulling out a lump of metal, it is a complicated and fussy way to handle an emergency that needs an instant response.

I'm sure you like to think that.

Individual car customers may not read that kind of book, but they read newspapers and get exposed to the prevailing climate of opinion. Tesla's car sales around the world have dropped dramatically in the past six months, apparently because of his US- government activities.

Says somebody who doesn't seem to read enough of them, and is now making excuses for it.

It's easier to sue somebody who has published a malicious lie in a book.

I don't think that many people adopt any kind of idealistic stance, but they do worry if the people from whom they buy their consumer durables look to be unlikely to stay in business much longer.

It depends on the nature of "the truth" revealed. Ralph Nader had quite a lot of influence.

The fossil carbon extraction industry is spending quite a lot money on lying propaganda designed to limit the influence of some of those books. It would be ludicrous if it didn't work.

Without much evidence of success.

You may want to neglect it. The money spent on lying counter-propaganda suggests that companies involved don't share that view.

That's what used to happen in Australia, when there wasn't much of it being generated. As roof-top solar became more profitable it got harder to cope with it, and the utilities discouraged people from doing it - first by paying less, then by making it pretty much impossible.

At that point putting in your own battery became a decidedly profitable option. You pretty much stopped having to buy power from the grid - though you still had to pay for the connection. A friend of mine moved house recently, and put the whole package into his new house, and is now pretty much self-sufficient. He's still got an internal combustion engine car. If he ever gets an electric car, that may shift a bit.

Australia is pretty much all sunny. If you live in a flat, as I do, you don't have the option.

Around here it is well known that the battery is a profitable option, if you have the capital to pay for it.

Electricity is cheaper than petrol. Fuel cost isn't a big part of the expense of owning a car - depreciation is main expense.

If it is correct in Australia, it isn't flat-out wrong. It may or may not generalise to other countries, but as a trend I suspect that it does.

Flats and apartments don't have solar panels or batteries at the moment. There a certain amount of agitation to work out ways of making this possible. The building committee that control my apartment block isn't all that interested at the moment - they are still working out how to provide charging points for electric cars parked in our basement parking, but it's going to happen eventually.

Or sat least that's your guess.

It's not so much lack of sun as being close to the Arctic circle. The sun doesn't far above the horizon in winter, and doesn't stay above it for all that long.

Which has more to do with our greenies being a noisy bunch, by international standards, than anything fundamental.

Twaddle. Any real system is always complicated and fussy, and we've being dealing with them for a generation or two now.

"Pulling out lumps of metal" is very old-fashioned, and needed arc-suppressing hardware back when it was actually used.

You don't build it. You buy it, off the shelf.

Nuclear fission produces long-lived transuranic radioactive isotopes.

It is quite obvious that when a big nucleus breaks into pieces, the pieces will be smaller than the original nucleus - the fission of a uranium nucleus does not create a transuranic isotope directly. But sometimes one of these little pieces flies off and sticks to another big nucleus, and that can then give you an even bigger nucleus. Those big nuclei are sometimes long-lived transuranic radioactive isotopes. They come about as a result of the nuclear fission in the nuclear reactor.

Do you /really/ think the technical distinction you are making is remotely relevant to anything?

Here's an idea for you - instead of guessing randomly, try looking it up. Such information is easily available. Yes, many very heavy isotopes are unstable and short-lived. Others are long-lived.

It is entirely possible, and entirely practical - that is how molten salt reactors work. Of course they don't get everything out, they don't recycle everything, and there are technical and economic limitations. But the fundamentals were figured out in the 1960's, and recent developments have improved on that.

Yes, I have heard about it. The idea is nice, but the temperature needed to make it work is an order of magnitude higher than for D-T fusion, and no one can make that temperature stably or reliably. It is, I think, something that might come in the future - /after/ commercial D-T fusion. Perhaps there will be breakthroughs in containment that will make these high temperatures practical, in which case the H-B fusion's advantages would come into play. So I think it is good that research is being done in the field, but I am not holding my breath waiting for it to appear.

And on what basis do you claim to know what I have or have not noticed? Or are you really so naïve as to think momentarily generating more energy than you lose means that practical commercial fusion reactors are just round the corner?

Name-dropping makes you look pathetic. "I know nothing myself, but I did meet a relative of someone who did". It's like Trump claiming to be a scientific genius because he had an uncle who was a professor.

No, I haven't copied any "conservative tactic". Saying that fusion technology will take a long time to mature is not some kind of thin-air assertion, or "tactic" - it is demonstrable fact. Our best shot at real fusion power is ITER - which is a 10 years into a 20 year project to learn about fusion and get the basics working. Expect another 10 years of updates and improvements to get a solid understanding of making it economically viable and understanding the consequences and handling of waste material. Then it will be possible to start making the first experimental reactors that will actually generate power for the grid, taking perhaps 15 years to design and build, after at least 5 to 10 years of political arguing about safety and budgets. At the most optimistic, that's maybe 40 years before fusion is actually producing useful electricity, and perhaps 70 years before it is significant in the world's energy production.

There is always the outside chance that one of the many alternative fusion ideas will actually work in practice and give breakthroughs significantly earlier (say, the 20-30 year timeframe). It's a small chance, however. If you have the spare cash, then it's fine to bet some money on them - but not the future of the world.

I /have/ thought about it. I haven't naïvely swallowed the hype from some little startup with a cool idea. Nor do I accept some fossil fuel supporters claims that there is no alternative and that new technology will never happen.

So I fully support research into fusion - including the serious stuff like ITER and NIF, and commercial attempts like HB11 and Helion Energy. I am in favour of their work /now/, precisely because it will take decades for the technology to mature. I am in favour of thorium molten salt reactors, because that will be workable in a much shorter time-frame (10 - 15 years). I am in favour of solar and wind, because they are available now.

Imagining that someone will solve the world's energy needs in the next few years with fusion shows no more understanding or thought than imagining we should keep burning fossil fuels because fusion will never work, fission is unsafe, and the sound of windmills causes cancer.

How does the depreciation of an electric car compare with (e.g.) a diesel one? What is the battery life and does it have 'negative value' when it comes to disposal?

No, I'd prefer it if you were more realistic.

I believe I explained all that.

The drop in Tesla sales are partly due to Musk and his drug-fueled rampage, partly due to Tesla been left behind by other EV companies in terms of price, reliability and features, and partly due to a general dislike of the company and its policies (such as being aggressively anti-union, and having a tendency to sue their own customers).

I do not believe that Tesla sales are done because of some book.

These discussions would be a lot nicer if you stopped making up random s*it.

Are you giving that as a reason why books are usually more factually accurate than random videos online? If so, then I guess I can agree with you, though I don't think it is the most important reason.

That is a practical reason, and like other practical reasons is usually more important than idealistic reasons.

As I said, very occasionally books have an effect. Ironically, if your imaginary evil industrial masterminds have any sense, they will learn from Nader that the best way to deal with "revealing the hidden truth" books is to ignore them.

Sure, they lie and produce counter-propaganda. But they are not targeting books or book-readers, because those are a /tiny/ proportion of relevant people (customers, politicians, regulators, etc.). Customers don't read books or newspapers - they watch influencers on social media. Politicians don't even read the bills they sign into law, much less boring books that attack the industries that sponsor their political campaigns.

Even if some oil company released a counter-statement condemning one of your favourite books as incorrect, pretty much no one would notice because no one reads about that kind of thing.

Consider "Norway is not as sunny as Australia" as dumbing it down for you while giving the relevant information, rather than an astronomically and climatically correct detailed description of why solar panels are more useful in Australia than Norway.

It has more to do with where the lithium is found, in what form, and what is needed to extract the lithium. But you are probably right that environmental activists have more influence on reducing the damage in Australia than in many other parts of the world.

On average, the resale value of electric cars drops faster than for petrol and diesel cars. But make and reputation can have a bigger effect - a petrol Chrysler will deprecate much faster than an electric Toyota, and there is significant variety within particular brands. I would also expect variation between countries.

In the early days of electric cars, there was a lot of concern about battery lifetime - but it seems that those fears were overly pessimistic, and newer cars have better batteries. You can expect ranges to drop somewhat as an EV gets older, but usually not dramatically.

The scrap value of an old EV battery is going to vary hugely from country to country according to regulations, subsidies, etc. It is never going to have negative value - that would encourage dumping.

In Spain, they do.

First the association of owners decides how many panels to put with the goal of covering common usage, like elevators and passage lighting, with or without batteries. If there is still surface available on the roof, individual owners can install a number of panels that is virtually connected to their flats, with or without batteries. In the case of individuals, the generation can also compensate different properties of that person even in different cities.

It is just a matter of regulation. :-)

That's irrelevant.

On 6/11/25 6:06 PM, Don Y wrote: >> My solar PV system has battery storage and I subscribe to Tesla's >> Virtual Power Plant. When the grid is under stress I allow up to 50% >> of the storage to be used by the grid for which I get paid $2 per kWh. >

My batteries only get charged from solar (My account with PG&E does not permit charging from the grid as that as that would allow arbitrage).

I calculated the cost of the wear and tear on the battery is (very) approximately $0.25/kWh.

I only have 27kWh of storage (2 Tesla Powerwall units). In the summer I average 20-35kWh per day of surplus generated by solar. So if the battery has discharged to 25% (own use plus any exported) in the evening it can be fully recharged the next day.

The models are usually pretty accurate

A couple of times there have been emergencies where there has only been minutes of warning.

In general local solar is only seen as a reduction in usage - all that is seen is the net consumption.

There are various programs being tried here where get lower residential rates by allowing them to turn off your air-conditioning remotely. There are limits for how long and how much etc.