Hacker News Reader

Comment by shoguning | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I'm missing something but the capacity factor for solar tends to be around 20%, meaning that 10GW of nameplate capacity generates an average of closer to 2GW in practice. I didn't see it addressed in the article, so I'm assuming the number is nameplate capacity.

View on HN

It's true solar capacity factor is between 10-25%, so nameplate isn't terribly useful. With that said, the rate of solar being installed isn't slowing down, and more fabs are coming online each year.

I would be shocked if there's any fossil fuel generation online in 10 years, 15 tops.

https://www.pv-tech.org/editors-blog/global-solar-pv-manufac...

https://www.pv-tech.org/editors-blog/planned-solar-manufactu...

https://www.power-technology.com/comment/global-pv-capacity-...

Solar and oil (and natural gas) supply different markets and compete mostly at the margins.

When I say fossil fuel generation, that's peakers (single cycle natural gas or fuel oil/diesel/heavy oil) or baseload coal or natural gas.

Maybe I'm mistaken by what you said? Solar and wind are already pushing coal and nuclear into unprofitable territory; you don't have to push them out entirely before fossil generators are no longer economical to run. You only need to push hard enough to create a downward spiral which causes utility scale battery storage to be cheaper (by soaking up power when prices are at zero or negative, and then discharging when there's demand). Large fossil generators can't run only half the day and still make money.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-02/renewable...

https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-...

Natural gas killed coal and nuclear because natural gas plants have a) much lower capital costs. b) Can sell into the intermediate load market. c) natural gas is cheaper per MBTU than coal.

If you wonder why the Koch brother hate solar it's because Solar directly competes with natural gas in the intermediate load market. Which is where all the profit is.

Natural gas does have lower capital costs, but its clear the demand isn't there. Witness GE laying off large swaths of its gas turbine division [1] (and as Bloomberg puts it, "Gas-turbine maker hurt by slowdown as renewables gain ground").

Natural gas is cheaper than coal currently [2]. Depending on demand and fracking, it may not stay cheap. That spot market price spike is when batteries will make in roads.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-07/ge-is-sai...

[2] https://ycharts.com/indicators/natural_gas_spot_price

> but its clear the demand isn't there.

That's because the cost of solar and wind are dropping fast creating the following cost hierarchy

Wind -> Solar -> Nat Gas -> Coal -> Nuclear

I downed this comment because u wrote: “Koch bros hate solar”

Ur repeating something, I guess... but it’s totally not sourced. I read a rolling stone article before posting this message that suggested they fund ALEC, but that same article seems to hate on "profit" in a way i have difficulty relating to. I’d bet even SolarCity funded ALEC.

> ALEC

You brought that up not me.

My source is a lawyer that used to work on utility regulation for a state I'm not naming.

With uncontrollable sources like solar and wind, aren't peakers even more necessary?

Hydro with a reservoir is a good peaker, which often happens to be more plentiful in roughly the same areas where solar and wind are also abundant.

I wouldn't make predictions like that until there were similar investments into storage or international/continental transmission. It could be done, but we're not doing it.

Storage and transmission are both self-fulfilling prophecies based on market economics. If it's cheaper to store or transmit clean renewable power than it is to use expensive coal or nuclear plants, the investment will be made (I discount distributed/rooftop solar for this argument, but it is important to note that distributed solar reduces the need for transmission).

Transmission lines are currently being bid out and built to bring cheap East Texas and Oklahoma wind to load centers [1]. An enormous amount of lithium battery manufacturing capacity is coming online worldwide to satiate EV manufacturing requirements. Those facilities will also produce stationary storage.

[1] https://www.elp.com/articles/2018/02/miso-taking-proposals-f...

Certainly it will, but to reach the storage levels required we're going to need 10 more gigafactories for batteries alone. Any alternative storage tech (molten salt or whatever) is 10+ years away. Clever distributed solutions such as using EV car batteries will require massive renewals of smart grids (which will move glacially)

It's going to take more than 10-15 years. Way more. It'll take 10 years from the date that we see massive investments on the scale of the OP into storage as well as the panels.

I'd say optimistically, in 10 years we'll have enough PV installed that the problem of PV overproduction (and negative prices on the market) will finally be big enough that it will cause mass-adoption of storage to begin, which will then take another 10 years to get going.

I think I fall between the two extremes of the parent and grandparent comments.

I think there are at least 10 gigafactory scale battery plants in the process of being built, so that's a positive sign.

I also believe that EV batteries will benefit the grid with basically no added infrastructure. Let someone sign up for a special tariff that gives them cheap power at certain times and let the computer in the car decide when to start charging. Already happening today with dynamic info from the net on carbon intensity predictions.

Finally, overproduction of solar and wind are not problems in themselves, nor are negative prices a problem. People repeatedly stating they are a problem is a bigger problem for renewable energy than the so-called problem.

As you correctly go on to imply they are an opportunity for storage and demand response but the bottom line is that wasting energy is not s problem as long as the costs (financial and environmental) when divided over the energy that is used, is lower than the next best alternative.

The odds of having enough energy storage in place in 10 years to eliminate fossil fuel energy production approach zero. Solar and wind are great production methods, and are proving more and more econoimcal every month, but neither con produce energy on demand in all conditions.

Without a huge national grid to compensate for weather patterns (problematic due to transmission losses), or a massive increase in storage capacity and technology, we just can't eliminate fossil fuel energy.

My understanding is that the high voltage transmissions have little resistance, and that the biggest problems with a national grid is not transmission loses but the cost of building thousands and thousands of miles of high voltage electrical wiring to connect existing subgrids together.

Do I have a misconception?

Adding wiring is fairly cheap per mile, connecting different electric networks via substations is the more expensive bit.

The larger issue is capacity needs to be used regularly to be cost effective. If you want to send 10GW for 24 hour a day or 15 minutes they both need the same infrastructure.

Not to mention the millions of homes/buildings using fossil fuels (natural gas furnaces) for heat.

If we care about eliminating fossil fuel usage, we need the gradient in the renewable uptake to high enough to cause a catastrophic shock to the fossil fuel technology and delivery chain. If it is too low, it renewables will drive down the price of oil, causing a jevons paradox follow on effect, where the price of oil falls, but because the infra structure is already in place, it is easy to use (infra can be useable but decay over time). Worst possible outcome is that the oil supply redirects to the developing world and millions of lawn mower style engines are put into high utilization.

Fossil fuels need a total shock to the system to end their use, otherwise we will indeed burn everything that is in the ground.

>Worst possible outcome is that the oil supply redirects to the developing world and millions of lawn mower style engines are put into high utilization

This is exactly what will happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=8PavA4rUypE

Really? That's the worst possible outcome? I would have assumed that the worst possible outcome would be that the oil supply didn't redirect to the developing world and the developing world would be left with no cheap energy that they had the infrastructure to exploit at all.

Which would be a great way to ensure that it never reached "developed", although I suppose it would stop it from developing...

If markets would have developed the developing world, a resource rich paradise, they would have done so by now. Instead, they imperially marched in and stole everything they could for the benefit of their masters back home. Markets don't sell to poor people, they sell to middle-income and rich people. They steal from the poor to give to the rich. That's the whole idea.

I don't know if you'd noticed, but the developing world has actually gotten smaller. Take just one example: in 1957, South Korea had a lower per-capita GDP than Ghana, and no natural resources to speak of. And speaking of imperialism, the US and USSR throwing their weight around fighting proxy battles and ripping the top half of the country off hadn't exactly helped.

Now they're a trade and manufacturing powerhouse, and when South Korea blinks the entire world's supply of memory fluctuates.

Remember that one time where everybody always buys things from a market, regardless of whether you call their country “developed”? Remember how class has nothing to do with supply and demand? I do.

Perhaps it’s me, but ur comment’s anti-imperial skew makes me think you’ve gotten an imperial education.

>...I would be shocked if there's any fossil fuel generation online in 10 years, 15 tops.

The odds of that actually happening are zero.

For example, the National National Renewable Energy Laboratory, tried to model what it would take for California to get 1/2 its power through solar.

>...Those can only go so far, though. To meet the 50 percent photovoltaic threshold economically will require energy storage. The state already has 3,100 megawatts of pumped storage, with 1,325 megawatts of additional storage set to be deployed by 2020, per the state mandate. Under the most optimistic flexible grid scenario and with PV prices falling rapidly to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, California will need another 15 gigawatts of storage by 2030.

>That’s more than 11 times the amount mandated currently in California, and 66 times the total megawatts deployed in the U.S. last year. And any delays in the price declines of solar, or the rollout of EVs, or the flexibility of conventional power plants, will raise the bar on the amount of storage required.

>That sounds daunting, admitted NREL Principal Energy Analyst Paul Denholm, who co-authored the research with Robert Margolis.

>“Storage costs are going to have to come down,” Denholm said. “I don't want to sugar-coat it: we're not there yet.”

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-much-energy...

As Bill Gates said in an interview about this kind of advocacy: "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...

Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.

China is investing a lot of money in solar, but they don't pretend that will solve all the problems of producing power. China plans to have 1400 GW of nuclear power by 2100, so they also realize that the situation will require a multi-faceted approach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

> I would be shocked if there's any fossil fuel generation online in 10 years, 15 tops.

What? Fossil fuel usage has increased not just in china but around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bp_world_energy_consumpti...

It's far more likely that solar will disappear than fossil fuel usage especially with china wanting to urbanize another 500 million people and India, ASEAN and Africa looking to industrialize.

> the rate of solar being installed isn't slowing down

It has slowed down tremendously. Seems like you haven't been paying attention, but the solar industry has collapsed around the world. Elon Musk even had to bail out Solar City.

What's with the ideologues. It's either the peak oil fanatics or the renewable evangelicals.

The only way we aren't using fossil fuels in 10 years is if civilization collapses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com