As for Cali’s duck curve issue, desalination is a great idea, but expansion of renewables and storage should really come first. Keep in mind that the current Cali grid generates much less dirty power during the day, where solar covers a majority of demand. Should we divert that solar power to desalination, we would need to ramp up dirty power generation during the day, and we would continue to generate dirty power at night.
I’m not talking about using solar to make fresh water. I’m talking about using the excess power to make fresh water as to not put more power into the grid than it can use. The duck curve is often used as a sticking point for why nuclear doesn’t work, because nuclear needs a base load and the duck curve is a base load nuclear can’t accommodate.
Obviously more storage to use more renewables but also, just use the excess for something. Nuclear can boil water to desalinate, use excess electricity to desalinate via RO. Given the infrastructure you could even use this to water California’s immense farms. (But power companies like making profit so… no times of free power, climate change instead please)
While I agree with you, we also have to consider what this would do at scale. The 70% of excess power that you lose here translates to wear on the solar panel systems that is never realized into power. That is, the systems will wear at the same rate, but the amount of power you can utilize over the lifespan of the systems is decreased. It’s still a better solution than not implementing these at all, but I’d be wary as to how reluctant our society would be to the spending, especially if the ratio of cost to utilization(?) becomes skewed.
With how cheap PV panels are per mW it is not really an issue about how efficiently the power is stored. We’d obviously want to recycle them but generally the fact that you don’t pay for fuel means eventually the power is free. There was a study done in LA where if you covered just the parking lots with solar you could provide power for the entire city (if storage was available obviously)
A chemical battery will be somewhere like 80% or more efficient but they can’t hold that for weeks, months, or years.
Pumped Hydro is ideal, the Hoover Dam produces 4.5 billion kWh of electricity a year. With pumped hydro you can effectively do the same thing in places rain doesn’t do it for you. Bath county for instance has 24,000mWh of capacity. They’re obviously really dangerous if they break and also damage ecosystems.
But green hydrogen can be done mostly anywhere, stored more easily (obviously not as easy as fossil fuels or well most things) and can be transported.