US Electricity Markets Aren't Designed to Handle 100% Clean Energy
forbes.com
forbes.com
Most of these markets have a 24hr-ahead clearing price for energy. I think you aught to be able to expose retail consumers to fluctuations based on the day-ahead market to let people make their own choices for energy usage. Given that exposure, enough consumers will change their behavior to soften the variability in price. It might also make distributed energy storage Just Work (TM) if individual battery owners have a vector to profit from supporting the grid.
Yes, absolutely this is the way to go. It works well for gasoline, for instance.
What prevents an electric company from significantly raising prices for a day to catch people off guard? I can't exactly switch electric companies to punish them.
So if the extended market prices are high enough, then this acts as a signal to add generation and/or distribution capacity. Likewise, if the extended market prices are low enough, this acts as a signal to retire capacity that has a higher operating cost/lower profit margins.
It also gets harder to game this system as distributed generation gets better penetration. The optimal thing to do as a residential energy provider is also naturally stabilizing for the grid. If a cabal of generators acts to restrict supply and artificially raise the price, then everyone who isn't a member of the cabal makes a killing selling energy into the market.
Its also hard for a cabal to squeeze residential providers out of the market through lower prices. Distributed generation is a small fraction of any individual provider's income. In most cases, a residential provider is paying for their system over several years. So in order to squeeze them out, a cabal would also have to sustain a campaign of artificially low prices for a span of years in order to have an impact.
Distributed generation means that there is a pool of small independent suppliers whose rational choice always acts to counter the actions of any oligopoly that attempts to form.
You don't have to allow the utility to control your consumption automatically, but then you'll be exposed to the real time price of power (not a regulated average as occurred in the past because of dumb meters).
[1] https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9244031?hl=en (Google Nest: Learn about Rush Hour Rewards)
IE, I have it at 72 deg, a 'energy rush hour' is declared, the nest automatically turns my thermostat to 70 deg an hour or two before, then to 75 deg during the rush hour.
If you still "really don't want the power company to control my thermostat" after seeing your potential savings, that is.
So much legacy technology and machinery, buildings, installations, infrastructure not to mention the fact that neither wind nor solar and not even hydro are anywhere close to being able to provide that it's only a few percentages of world energy usage and have upper limits.
In my view the only real fundamental progress when it comes to energy, within sight (and it's still far away if ever) is Thorium and Fusion.
Furthermore the externalities of things like wind and solar isn't calculated today and would make two things very clear. You can't have wind and solar without the backup of oil/nuclear/coal and they will never be able to provide us with enough energy to meet our needs to not talk about meeting our future needs (which will be many times higher than it is today)
I am all for green energy but i share your pessimism.
I do agree that fusion would be the ultimate form of power generation and would have the least impact on the current grid. But regardless, the future of energy generation is in diversity of sources.
Otherwise, it will come down to economics. So I agree we will diversify but fossil fuels aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
63% of power generation comes from "fossil fuels", but half of that comes from natural gas. If we focus purely on carbon emissions and ignore implications of fracking, natural gas can be considered "clean". Also assuming all renewables are zero-emission, this means roughly 30% of our power generation has the potential for carbon emissions.
By simply instituting a carbon tax, or even requiring coal plants to sequester emissions would make burning coal expensive enough that other forms of power will become cheaper, and thus the market would align appropriately. These are things being talked about right now, so its not unrealistic. The coal lobby won't like this of course and will continue to push us away from that, but I believe in 50 years when Miami and New Orleans have turned into Venice and the new generation of people won't be working in coal, American conservatives, as well as other nations, will stop complaining about the coal industry so much. All that has to happen is a few percentage points in a certain direction and the machinations will start to work.
We get these rosy images of how far we are with renewables when in reality once you dig into it you realize we are nowhere near anything that can replace our current primarily fossil based system.
We don't appreciate how much fossil fuels are making our lives more livable and how little alternatives add to this livability.
I understand the potential CO2 emission risk etc, but we are safer because we use fossil fuels, not despite of it.
And we are not just talking for energy here, we are talking plastic used in more or less any industry you can think of from healthcare to textiles to toys. We are talking for greasing, we use it for fertilizers which makes it possible for us to produce the amount of food we do etc. Which means that oil will play a very very very significant part of our lives for many centuries unless of course some completely new material shows up with as much versatility and application. And now that we are drilling for the oil anyway....
I understand that this isn't what we want to hear, but that's the reality and there isn't currently much of an alternative.
However, for everything we make in plastic, there is a potential alternative. In many cases that alternative is more expensive than plastic for its specific purpose. Much of the reason plastic is cheaper is (conjecture here) because it is subsidized by fact that we use so much oil for energy. If all (or most) cars were electric, demand and production of crude would go down, and so would the economies of scale, possibly making plastic more expensive than biodegradable alternatives.
People will continue to use the materials that are cheaper. However our economy is not set up to internalize the costs to the world and to its biosphere. In that sense fossil fuels are very expensive, and we are incurring a debt. At some point its going to be time to pay the piper, and the alternatives will become cheaper by comparison.
Plastic today is a highly versatile material it can be almost as hard as diamonds, it can be ultra precise like lego and so soft it's weaved into our textiles.
You've seen the sorry substitutes for straws? They can't even make that.
You won't find alternatives for that and again ex. wind and solar are subsidized without providing any of those benefits.
You last comment is speculation and your conclusion even if it was true isn't the only alternative. There are many others. Some of them include us developing methods to deal with CO2 if it turned out to be a problem and you are forgetting the most important thing here.
People who don't have access to cheap and plentiful energy are already incurring a debt to survive and paying the piper. There is a cost to NOT using fossil fuels, one very few are ready to make. I for one am not ready to exchange things like food security for the risk of some speculative consequences we dont even know and to the extent we know isn't something we can't deal with.
The more wind/solar you build, the more backup from coal/nuclear/wind you will need.
But the way to make us all better off is to make energy cheaper. There is a 1-1 correlation between energy usage and then rich, advanced, safe, clean and flourishing societies.
Wind and solar will only go as far as the political goodwill will take them. They are IMO unfairly promoted and that will incur a cost on their fundamental ability to be a solid enough energy form IMO. They are great as plugins to the existing system but the idea that we should build a smart grid because of their inabilities to provide on demand is not sustainable at the end of the day.
So my basis is based on part speculation, part knowing the limits and true cost of wind and solar and other alternatives.
Only Fusion or Thorium or maybe if we are lucky, fuel cells, will be actual progress which will also be economically viable. But this idea of a giant mix all handles by a smart grid is the not how it's going to play out as the upside of the usual alternatives simply aren't enough to outweigh the downside of cost and complexity they will incur on society.
But it's just my personal opinion of course. Each to their own.
The more road you build, the more rail you will need.
Right now, in my area, we have a Nuclear plant that handles the base load, but we tend to keep it at "not full capacity" most of the time, because nuclear is harder to ramp up/down in response to load.
In the video, he shows how renewables can pick up the slack in many ways... but I was thinking, why not run our nuclear plants at something like 90% capacity all the time and store the excess energy in utility scale batteries?
It seems like these devices could have a far greater impact than renewables could, and they can harness existing investments in nuclear. It's too bad we can't just pump water uphill into reservoirs from nuclear plants and dump that through turbines when needed. Such a setup is obviously a huge investment and you can't really build a reservoir next to every nuclear facility.
My high school electronics class took a field trip there and I found the scale and design simplicity truly awe inspiring.
https://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2016/12/02/northfield-mounta...
also known as 'who cares, we won't be here'
edited to add links
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-does-the-us-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/05/31/new-map-...
That's a large part of the reason that it likely won't be a part of the future mix. Because no investor groups want to "put their money on it". Nuclear is expensive to build out, it needs investment. The problem is that everyone sees the shit show that Vogtie has become. Also, energy investors can see what's happened to nuclear in places like Iowa where it almost seems as though every guy able to even get a USD100,000 loan has gotten a group of his buddies together and slapped up some windmills. (Seriously, have you ever driven through Iowa lately?) Anyway, what investor group wants to put up the USD4 Billion to compete against all that? Harsh reality is that, assuming all they care about is generating more money, there are better places for their money to go. That's why we need government investment.
I've been saying for a while, we've reached the point where if we want nuclear to be a part of the future mix, government is going to have to step up in a big way. You could argue that the problem with Vogtie was that the government was unrealistic in expecting private industry to be able to pull that off with the provided level of assistance. (And yes, that also implies that private industry was just as unrealistic in believing they could pull that off without additional assistance.)
It's not expensive, financially, compared to Solar and Wind.
But it is expensive politically. For whatever reason, Nuclear is toxic in the public's eye. To shift public opinion is not going to be cheap.
Some Nuclear plants were stopped before starting their energy generation due to the public opinion shifting against them.
> government is going to have to step up in a big way.
We have agreement on that but how that's done is difficult.
Let's remove all regulations for everyone. Wind, solar, nuclear, everyone. A nuclear plant is still going to run you north of USD1 Billion. Not only that, but you won't start seeing any return for 5 to 10 years. And that's doing everything in a headlong rush, on the cheap, with no regard for safety. Now someone would need to come up with that money.
Contrast this with throwing up windmills. You need, (again, no more regulations here), around 500 g's. You start generating income on that outlay inside of a year. Worse, because the prices are so low, enterprising people who would never have been able to compete in the energy markets before, all of a sudden are able to slap up windmills too. It can just snowball into a free for all. What happened in Iowa was a bit more controlled than that, but you still ended up with runaway growth in wind generation capacity. And now their nuclear plant is literally closing down. It can't even compete. One nuclear plant can out generate one windmill. But if everyone and his mother is gonna try to get a piece of the wind generation pie on their family's farm, well, that's an awful lot of windmills.
We've got to get serious and look at the energy markets in a realistic fashion. Iowans are not anti-nuclear hippies, they just don't want to get a bill for 15 cents a kWh instead of the bill for 2 cents a kWh. I don't blame them. Yeah, go wind, and fill in the gaps with whatever fossil fuel generation you have. It's cheaper for you. But we've got to get realistic about that fact and have government either pay for nuclear outright, or put it's finger on the scale like it ended up doing with Vogtie. Basically, telling consumers that you have to use the energy from the nuclear plant, you have to pay the higher price, and you're not allowed to switch away from it.
Like you said, that was not popular, but it is what it is. Those are the choices, we can't soft pedal this stuff anymore if we're serious about a carbon free future.
Even if there is a a few years until actually being fully operational. It is still a better use of capital, providing the situation you described (no regulations for everyone). Which, to me, would remove the substitutes to solar.
A nuclear power plant has lower upkeep than the 20-30 year lifespan of wind and solar. This is a large cost you aren't including.
Small nuclear is uneconomical the last time I ran the numbers but mid to large scale is.
1 GW Nuclear power plant uses less land, less resources in materials and labor, and is more durable considering the maintenance/upkeep. If you compared that to solar or wind, using the most economical price point, it wouldn't even come close.
But Nuclear has major problems, since your situation isn't realized, an investor could lose 100% of their investment just to be used as a political scapegoat. You don't see that often with Wind and Solar.
So, given the current environment, yes, Wind/Solar are more economical but give no regulations and no substities, Nuclear would be the most economical.
Per-megawatt, it might not cost more but:
1. The upfront investment is high. I can build a 1MW solar installation, or 10MW, or 100MW. Our smallest nuclear plant is around 500MW.
2. It will take many years to build.
3. It will take even longer to fully pay itself off.
Nuclear is fine if you have a massive amount of capital and know the market won't change in the next 50 year. But no rational actor in the energy market is about to bet on that stability when solar is a much more nimble investment that's cost-competitive.
Living only expecting things to go right means that cities don't need to worry about backups and hardened networks.
It's when things go wrong that you end up with an HBO series a few decades later.
Say that to France. Stop buying the propaganda. HBO series has warning signs. Chernobyl and Fukushima were grossly mismanagement and ignored the glaring issues. France has never had the problem.
With some notable high profile exceptions people don't go into things with the intention of completely screwing them up.
Which is why I provide France as a counter-example. They aren't mismanaging the potential issues. It's a solvable problem and France is continually demonstrating it.
If we started actually calculating wind and solars true cost (ex. backup power by coal, oil, nuclear) then it too would be extremely expensive.
If we added the cost of decommissioning which isn't added to solar and wind but to nuclear then that would increase the price even more.
Chernobyl was hampered by design flaws [1] that can be pretty well avoided these days, and it's not like light water reactors are the only / best option, either.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-23-mn-15781-...
I'm personally comfortable with the idea of nuclear power, but I don't really begrudge people who aren't too much. It's all moot anyway; for providing base load, natural gas is going to be the hands down winner for awhile. I could be mistaken on this point, but I'm under the impression that they're both cheaper and faster to get going, and easier to decommission.
You can be as smart and careful as you like, and still get bitten by something you had no idea was a possibility. If you're building a wind turbine, there's likely to be a reasonable limit to how catastrophic that totally unanticipated problem might be. If you're building a nuclear plant, the stakes are a lot higher.
It does bring to mind an oddly positive twist on the "you don't own it" of IoT. By signing up as part of a service cooperative of some sort getting a share of the generated income as compensation.
Probably not a winning move and if done by could rightfully get FTC involved by mixing in investing - especially if it id being run by the manufacturer who has potentially clashing incentives.
Paying for your electricity helps align incentives so that you can make the trade-off of investing to lower usage vs. just buying the power you want at market rate... and bearing that cost means you have the freedom to make that trade-off rather than it being made for you.
1) I lived in Iraq for a while, and they have free electricity. What happens there is that they have to implement rolling blackouts because when people do have electricity they turn on every appliance, light, tv, ... Having some kind of cost involved helps to limit this type of silly behavior.
2) At some point, someone is paying for electricity even if they don't send me a bill every month. Let's say the government funds free electricity for everyone. As someone who tries to conserve energy, my costs will go up while the guy next door keeps his 3k sq-ft house at 65 degrees all summer pays less than he does now. That does not seem like a good system.
Also, paying $0.10 per kWh makes us choose between using an air conditioner to cool the interior of an occupied building to 20 degC, or wasting power on mining proof-of-work cryptocoins.
There may be a case for having the first N kWh of residential household use in a month be free, and metering the excess at a higher rate. If I got unlimited electricity at no cost, I, for one, would have an aluminum smelter in my back yard--right next to the Moon-etching laser, programmed to write "CHAIRFACE".
There may exist theoretical alternate systems that can allocate more fairly than a market system. If one can do that with unmetered, no-additional-cost-to-the-consumer electricity, I'd be happy to hear about it, as I am not currently aware of any.