Renewables predicted to beat coal for the first time in US later this year | Hacker News Reader

Renewables predicted to beat coal for the first time in US later this year

qz.com

185 pointslxm73 comments

Renewables continuing to grow in output is great news. Yet that's only part of the story.

Coal, at least domestic steam coal, is still being actively displaced by natural gas. That's also a significant factor in the downward trend this projection shows. This is covered in more detail in the original source [1] the linked QZ article draws from.

1: http://ieefa.org/ieefa-u-s-april-is-shaping-up-to-be-momento...

And while switching from coal to natgas is an improvement in our emissions profile, natural gas cannot be a meaningful part of any long-term climate strategy.

On a long-term, 50% of the emissions profile of coal is still 50% too much.

(Also - and this is a bit off-topic - in the EU, natgas comes from Russia, which adds a political problem, on top of the climate problem.)

Natural Gas is a much better fit with renewables than coal. So, until cheap grid storage or massive over supply of renewables shows up it’s still a great short mid term solution.

Aiming for 20% from natural gas is 1/5th the green house emissions of 50% coal. That’s a massive impact and meaningful change even without vast grid storage.

Nuclear would be the other long term solution as an alternative to cheap storage.

Nuclear and gas fit into different niches. Nuclear makes sense up to the point where installed nuclear capacity is sufficiently lower than the lowest demand on the grid, eg. 4 AM demand. Gas fills in for renewables when available solar/wind is less than demand at high-usage times, eg. 10 PM demand. If energy storage is expensive, it makes sense to have both.

The issue is Wind is vastly cheaper than nuclear power, but makes demand less predictable. As you add more wind power you get a random unmet demand and oversupply, but are paying less than half as much per kWh.

Nuclear can fill in the gaps assuming you design for it, but at extreme cost.

At least where I live you either burn it in a power plant (or gas furnace) or you flare it at the well head. It's a by-product of frack oil. Until that changes, we may as well generate power with it.

The article doesn't even get the units right. Generation is megawatt-hours per day, not megawatts per day. The source data from EIA shows this here: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/data/browser/#/?v=22&f=M&s...

Also, the unnamed strawman coal proponents are probably correct that short-term variations are unimportant. What matters is the long-term trend. And the long-term trend is more renewables and less coal.

Wow, I just assumed it was megawatts peak per day (which would be a much less impressive win over coal).

Maybe that book should have been called Physics for Future Presidents (and Current Journalists). Broaden the market a bit and do us all a favor in the process.

I'm slightly confused, but I think "beat" in this context means "generated more megawatts in a single day than coal did on the same day".

That's encouraging I guess, but looking at their chart it looks like coal will still remain dominant for a few more years. Also, price isn't mentioned at all.

> “Coal’s proponents may dismiss these monthly and quarterly ups and downs in generation share as unimportant, but we believe they are indicative of the fundamental disruption happening across the electric generation sector,” ...

You only need cheap renewables to apply pain to coal long enough for the economics to fall apart for coal (as occurred for nuclear, requiring subsidies in Illinois and New York for continued operation), regardless of time of day of peak generation for solar and wind. Natural gas and then batteries will naturally fill the gap as the economics develop.

Natural gas generation stranded assets is another discussion entirely, but those investment losses are someone else’s problem. Pick better energy assets to invest in.

Too bad you can’t harness snark as a power source.

Renewables are subsidized no?

Yes. As they should be. Utility scale batteries should be subsidized, and there are some efforts to implement policy to do so.

I take no issue with existing nuclear subsidized until renewables and storage can bridge the gap. Just don’t waste money on new nuclear that’ll never be cost effective, and will take decades to build. Also set funds aside for nuclear decommissioning and ensure it isn’t misappropriated.

I don't see how utility scale batteries could ever be a good idea when you can get dual use out of EV batteries. Not only can you dispatch demand (smoothly scale up and down charging to suit the grid), you can use the cars as storage and inject power in to the grid.

If the Model 3 battery is claimed to be good for 1 million miles, it is more than capable of fulfilling this role over the lifetime of the car. A high end Tesla contains enough energy to power the average US household for 40 hours last time I did the calculation.

There's no question we have to transition to EVs, and battery capacity is by far the bottleneck in this transition. A grid powered by renewables is going to need a massive amount of storage. Any policy that artificially silos batteries to only be used for only one of the two requirements is a bad policy.

Because batteries will get cheaper rapidly as we start making millions of EVs per year, negating the requirement (but not the capability) of using EVs as distributed storage (instead of simply as distributed load).

Battery production is going to be a bottleneck for a very long time. There are 1.2 billion vehicles in the world.

Renewables are already starting to produce enough power that storage is already a necessity - famously in the case of the Tesla SA battery.

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

Separately subsidizing EVs and grid storage in this circumstance is insane. You're only getting half the use out of the very expensive batteries you're purchasing today.

At some point, batteries are cheap and plentiful enough that you don't have to attempt dual use, but at that point you're not subsidizing them any more, so that's not relevant to your original argument or my response to it.

(Though my wording was poor; the "ever" was meant to refer specifically to subsidies on grid scale storage, which I believe will never make sense.)

I take great issue and do not agree at all that energy should be subsidized.

Renewables are not going to provide us with the energy we need, not even by a longshot. It's less than 1% of the worlds energy needs, will only be around 3% in 2040.

Renewable energy is a linear solution to an exponential problem.

I don't think your numbers make sense. As far as I now the world needs around 22000TWh a year and Germany produced around 220TWh just with renewables alone which is enough to reach your 1% claim.

You are welcome to find better sources.

You continue repeating this number, despite being politely corrected numerous times.

You are welcome to find a better source.

So is coal

Yes and none of them should be.

Probably a good time to mention the UK's coal-free generation timespans: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/uk-breaks-coal-...

(Dark irony is that due to global warming the winter need for energy has gone down. Of course, in the summer, the AC need is going to go up...)

Tony Seba has an interesting perspective on "Clean Disruption of Energy & Transportation", with one of the main takeaways being as options like solar become more viable, their takeoff could be exponential rather than moving up gradually in a straight line.

https://tonyseba.com/portfolio-item/clean-disruption-of-ener...

Also, more immediately interesting is how first world reliance on the grid could be changing. "Distributed Energy Poised for 'Explosive Growth' on the US Grid"

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/distributed-ene...

In third world countries, there could be a complete bypassing of the traditional grid; e.g., consider Zola Electric.

http://zolaelectric.com/blog/zola-electric-announces-infinit...

P.S. One of the companies in the solar space I follow closely is Enphase Energy.

https://enphase.com/en-us

There is a cool little demo a solar installer from Australia made to show Enphase's upcoming off-grid microinverter in action.

https://www.reddit.com/r/solar/comments/b3sgec/demo_clip_of_...

Also, an interesting talk from Sunnova Solar CEO dealing with future of the grid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2915&v=6Dx0U2y-Y...

Coal is dying in the US. There hasn't been a new power plant built in years, and facilities are getting retired early because it's cheaper to build new solar/wind than to run on coal.

The bad news is that many of the coal plants are getting converted to natural gas rather than being replaced by renewables. And when it comes to climate change, gas is only marginally better than coal. (Though when it comes to air pollution, gas is much better.)

A tiny coal plant recently opened in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Good to know about the natural gas. It now costs less to make a new solar or wind plant than it does a coal plant for the equivalent energy. However it costs less to maintain an old coal plant than it does to replace it with a new solar or wind plant.

If anyone wants to get a really good view for year to year changes in fuel mix by region, just look for your RTO or ISO's website.

ISO-NE, PJM, MISO, SPP, ERCOT, & CAISO all track this in real-time and do regular reports on it. These are the entities that watch over large sections of transmission and generation and act as "air traffic controllers" for the grid. They also run the optimization software that chooses which generation runs each day based on minimizing production cost while maintaining reliability.

You might have to Google a little bit. In the SPP region, they've seen massive wind penetration and coal has decreased considerably in the last 4 years.

For example, here’s the CAISO report for today (there are other reporting options as well):

http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx

Here's what it comprises: https://imgur.com/a/BZDJ4wT

43% wind, 38% hydro, 10% solar.

So, neglecting geothermal?

So, neglecting ocean wave power?

Does anyone have any links to good statistics on the comparison of costs of different forms of energy generation before government interference? All I can find is either after subsidies or about total generation and not cost.

The assumption buried in this question is that subsidies are only applicable to clean energy. It's a wrong assumption.

The reality is that coal, oil, and gas sectors are heavily dependent on subsidies, tax benefits, federal programs for building pipelines, and in some cases very expensive military interventions (e.g. most conflicts with US involvement in the middle east). Arguably the amount of money involved with that is far more than anything dedicated to clean energy currently.

Has anyone made predictions for what future decades of energy generation might look like? Specifically any ideas for how big if any a return to nuclear will affect everything else?

This is what transmission planning engineers do for a living. Distribution planning engineers do it on a smaller scale.

Back in the day, the utility would look at population growth which correlates well with electrical demand growth and did 1,5,10, & 20 year projections which told them if they needed to build new generators or transmission lines. They looked at expected fuel costs and federal/state policy changes too. One common simulation they run is called "contingency analysis" or "CA" for short. You start with a model of your grid at peak winter and summer loading. You then take each transmission line out of service in the model (1 at a time) and then run a loadflow calculation for the modified model(basically solving a massive set of nonlinear equations) to determine the amount of power flowing over all equipment. Any overloads are logged in a master list and studied to see if they can be fixed. There are also studies to look at voltage and many other things.

Today, studying the grid is a lot more complex and time consuming due to things like renewables and energy markets. For example, a long time ago before optimization software was available for large models, you would probably most likely have a list of which resources to run when and it didn't deviate much throughout the year. You would simply call on a gas plant to help you get over peak and that is about it. Now, things like probability are becoming very deeply ingrained in planning in a way they never were before.

In essence, folks working for utilities, government entities, state commissions...etc do this all the time.

sorry for the nitpick, but what part of a load flow study is non-linear?

Not a nitpick at all...I wish I could talk about this more! Let me know if you want a good book list on this. There are several out there with full Matlab code to accompany the equations.

It has trigonometric identities in all the equations (sin & cos) if you do the full AC method. We all generally use the Newton-Raphson iterative method for the large sparse models we have. Gauss-Seidel is great for small models, but takes ages to converge as your model size increases. There is a "Decoupled" version of the Newton-Raphson that zeroes out some terms that usually don't matter in the Jacobian to speed things up considerably. There are some other solver types being researched, but Newton-Raphson is fast, good at converging, and is well understood. The last and very popular method is the DC loadflow where you make a lot of assumptions and linearize the entire thing. This isn't used for important studies by itself, but is embedded in lots of things such as market commitment and dispatch as it is extremely fast and almost never diverges. There are also other useful sensitivities to derive from it.

> what part of a load flow study is non-linear?

Sorry to give you a wiki reference, but I had literally just read the power flow study page [1] earlier today:

"The problem is non-linear because the power flow into load impedances is a function of the square of the applied voltages"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-flow_study#Model

Yea...you have a V^2 term as well from the voltage magnitudes I think...thought about adding that to my answer below afterwards, but didn't.

Ramez Naam likes to make predictions like this: http://rameznaam.com/2019/04/02/the-third-phase-of-clean-ene...

So it's still an "estimate" not hard data yet? Does that mean anything?

From the chart it looks like coal will still be cheaper for most of the next two years, at least the majority of the time. But it looks like intermittently renewable energy will be cheaper, which is good news. Which hopefully also means renewables are getting cheaper, not just coal getting more expensive.

That chart is generation, not cost.

/edit/ thanks for updating the headline.

The title seems misleading. I suggest changing it to:

"Solar, wind, plus other renewables predicted to beat coal for the first time in US later this year."

It's clear from the chart that the trend of coal generated power decreases later in the year before increasing again. The reverse is true of renewables. It's during this time where renewables generation is at it's annual high while coal is at it's annual low that this predicted event is expected.

The title is misleading even though it is welcome news.

Ok! changed.

Very misleading headline and article. Wind and solar are hardly renewable. Most of the time they produce zero energy and are backed by gas turbines.

They generally produce power when it's needed most. Also the percentage of energy renewables produce on a given day follows a nornmal distribution. There will be a few extremely bad days and a few extremely good days in a year but most of the time they produce exactly how much they should. So why does it matter if they have to use gas as backup power if it is only needed for a few days in the year?

> Wind and solar are hardly renewable.

How so? Of course one day the sun will die, but for now I think they're close enough.

Yet wind and solar is less than 1% of the worlds energy consumption and even in 2040 its not going to be projected to more than 3%.

It's pretty important to understand the difference between electricity and energy. Electricity is only a small part of the entire picture.

Poor countries can't afford the rich mans toys and they are the ones who will be increasing their energy consumption dramatically.

So it's the classic of winning the battle but loosing the war.

We should hold war tight.

Which projection are you using? One of the ones that is wrong (on the low side) every 3 years?

IEA

https://www.iea.org/weo/?fbclid=IwAR0IEeDUoV-VGjztxl5JKYaJWZ...

Current energy usage is not projection and thats less than 1% globally.

Given their electricity projections are so awful, why would we trust IEA for energy or anything else? They consistently underpredict renewables each year.

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/06/iea-gets-hilariously-sl...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/05/iea-accu...

Awful compared to what? Whats your better data?

Was driving on a back country road. Those living in the area lived in a beautiful place, but in poverty.

The beautiful mountain views were marred by the windmills put there at the behest of elites living in far off cities. The quiet of the countryside was broken by the constant thrum of the windmills. I really couldn't imagine living there with that constant low frequency noise.

With the best of intentions, these poor people were robbed of one of the very few perks in their lives - the beauty of the area they lived in, and the peace and quiet they once had.

EDIT: given the area of the country, it is highly likely that a large number of these people had formerly been employed in the coal industry.

All resource exploitation has externalities, and sure, those are real costs and worth discussing. If you want to make a case that the externalities of wind power are more expensive than those for coal extraction and power generation, then you go ahead and make that case.

But cut the hyperbole and poetry, dude. I see your "marred views" and "constant thrums" and raise you a bunch of fucking removed mountaintops, an acid rain epidemic and generations of health problems we're still paying for.

"Marred views", sigh...

Was driving on a back country road.

The beautiful bush views were marred by the coal mines put there at the behest of elites living down in Sydney. The quiet of the countryside was broken by the constant thrum of machinery. I really couldn't imagine living there with that constant coal dust and noise.

With no good intentions at all, these poor people were robbed of one of the very few perks in their lives - the beauty of the area they lived in, and the peace and quiet they once had.

I can't imagine thinking millions or billions of people getting displaced and potentially losing secure access to food is less important than having to look at windmills

> EDIT: given the area of the country, it is highly likely that a large number of these people had formerly been employed in the coal industry.

I'm not following the logic of this.

My small British village has a wind farm right on its doorstep. When it was built the utility company had to set up a grant worth millions to fund local projects which immediately benefitted the local area, and I believe we get an ongoing subsidy from it until a predetermined date.

Is this not the case where you're from?

Incidentally, I've walked through it many times and never heard a "thrum". I've never heard them from my house at all and they're less than half a mile away.

Windmills do have controversy surrounding them, and whatever the case may be, I would neither want to live by a coal plant nor a wind turbine.

Adverse health effects of industrial wind turbines

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653647/

Does living near wind turbines negatively impact human health?

https://phys.org/news/2018-06-turbines-negatively-impact-hum...

Can Wind Turbines Make You Sick

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/can-wind-turbines-make...

Vermont Sets New Noise Rules for Wind Turbines

https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/vermont-sets-ne...

You should go spend some time in the South Pacific then. And talk to the locals about the impending devastation of their countries and entire way of living.

Or how about go spend some times in hurricane or snow affected areas around the US which have been devastated by the increasing instability of our climate.

Most of these people would kill for a stable climate and some low frequency noise.

Oh, the irony. I presume you are referring to those mountaintops which still exist.

If you hate what windmills do to the view, you should see what mountain top removal does to it.

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