In the US, it's cheaper to build and operate wind farms than buy fossil fuels
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This is currently HN's title, and the article's subtitle. But the article makes no statement to prove this assertion.
It does not even make sense to me. I guess the author meant that for firms that have high energy needs. But it is stupid to imply that the electricity provided by fossil fuel can always be replaced by wind turbines. If the need is for regular bursts, high volumes on short periods, wind won't be of much use.
Moreover, the article is a digest of a report that is less emphatic. The US Department of Energy expects a slow-down of wind capacity after 2020, once the tax credit will end. For a project that would start now, there would be no tax credit, so it would be hard to reach a competitive price.
Just on this point, the article talks about curtailment:
At times, strong winds can cause wind farms to produce an excess of power relative to demand, causing a farm's output to be reduced. This process, called curtailment, remained a small factor, with only two percent of the potential generation lost this way. Put differently, if the curtailed electricity had been used, it would have only raised the average capacity factor by 0.7 percentage points.
It sounds like 'short bursts' is really not a problem.
However now, in that case actually no renewable source of energy - wind, solar, geo thermal.. (other than perhaps hydro) can fulfill the need of sudden burst of energy - wind is like any other.
You would have to incorporate assumptions on lifespan, maintenance and/or amortization.
Wind or solar is actually often commissioned using a power purchase agreement for a certain price per kWh, guaranteed over a certain period.
They do make a statement, I think you might have missed this paragraph:
> That puts wind in an incredibly competitive position. The report uses an estimate of future natural gas prices that show an extremely gradual rise of about $10/MW-hr out to 2050. But natural gas—on its own, without considering the cost of a plant to burn it for electricity—is already over $20/MW-hr. That means wind sited in the center of the US is already cheaper than fueling a natural gas plant, and wind sited elsewhere is roughly equal.
The implication of this claim is that in operation it’d be cheaper to build both a gas plant and a wind farm, to reduce the amount of gas that you burn, rather than just building a gas plant. If that’s correct your discussion of intermittency wouldn’t be relevant.
> Wind is even cheaper at the moment because of a tax credit given to renewable energy generation. But that credit is in the process of fading out, leading to long term uncertainty in a power market where demand is generally stable or dropping.
Or from the government report itself:
> The magnitude of growth beyond the current PTC cycle remains uncertain, however, given declining tax support, expectations for low natural gas prices, and modest electricity demand growth.
So what is it? Is wind power cheaper or was that a tax subsidy effect?
This means wasting a significant percentage of wind generation is still a net savings. Currently curtailment aka excessive wind production is relatively low percentage of generation, but based on current prices it’s cheaper to build more wind just to offset more natural gas use.
You end up needing to pay for the generators either way. So, currently the breakpoint ends up being when 1/2 of all wind power is wasted resulting in 2 x 10$/MWh your at breakeven with fuel costing $20/MW-hr.
However, current natural gas prices are market driven. Reduced demand will lower prices, but that’s still a net win for power companies. In the coming years as new wind power comes online the economic situation will change, but for now massive investments look like a very good deal.
Natural gas has negative pricing right now due to being stranded in production!
The article translated whatever the price was when they wrote it into 20$/MWh. I assume it’s still reasonably accurate as it was published yesterday and the price has been fairly consistent recently.
Just because there stranded natural gas exists doesn't mean the market prices are below zero.
Since fossil fuels are energy dense, it would be interesting if we come back full circle by producing hydrocarbon fuels for energy storage by recycling atmospheric carbon using cheap renewable electrical energy.
Edit to clarify, there are more energy dense substance than hydrocarbons (ex. Hydrogen), but hydrocarbons would have advantage of having ability of being useful in existing infra (IC engines, gas pumps, storage containers, etc.)
Yes, but the point as mentioned in my edit is for usage of renewable energy without much modifying existing infra.
It's complicated and expensive to store (pressure tanks or cooled liquid) and hard to contain (due to the small size it leaks out of everything).
Ammonia—a renewable fuel made from sun, air, and water—could power the globe without carbon
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fu...
Excerpt:
Ammonia's energy density by volume is nearly double that of liquid hydrogen — its primary competitor as a green alternative fuel and it is easier to ship and distribute. "You can store it, ship it, burn it, and convert it back into hydrogen and nitrogen,".
..he shows off one of the devices, about the size of a hockey puck and clad in stainless steel. Two plastic tubes on its backside feed it nitrogen gas and water, and a power cord supplies electricity. Through a third tube on its front, it silently exhales gaseous ammonia, all without the heat, pressure, and carbon emissions normally needed to make the chemical. "This is breathing nitrogen in and breathing ammonia out,".
Companies around the world already produce $60 billion worth of ammonia every year, primarily as fertilizer, and MacFarlane's gizmo may allow them to make it more efficiently and cleanly. But he has ambitions to do much more than help farmers. By converting renewable electricity into an energy-rich gas that can easily be cooled and squeezed into a liquid fuel, MacFarlane's fuel cell effectively bottles sunshine and wind, turning them into a commodity that can be shipped anywhere in the world and converted back into electricity or hydrogen gas to power fuel cell vehicles..
https://amer.mhps.com/world’s-largest-renewable-energy-stora...
edit - For example; 'A battery of batteries of batteries of cells.'
It's relatively sparse on technical details, but it does mention:
- Renewable hydrogen
- Compressed Air Energy Storage
- Large scale flow batteries
- Solid oxide fuel cells
Seems like hydrogen is not actually used as a storage mechanism. They convert to hydrogen on demand to power turbines.
But it might (big might) be worthwhile for a transition period.
ICEs are my pet peeve, mechanical engineers keep coming up with all those ways of improving efficiency, and to be fair, in the last 30yrs they got it to be "good" but the actual % numbers are awful regardless.
For an ICE, assuming combustion temperatures of 550K and assuming the radiator can cool the system to 50C, the Carnot efficiency is (1 - Tc/Th) = (1 - 333K/550K) = about 40%.
That's a hard theoretical limit that assumes all processes are reversible. Real engines have irreversible thermodynamic processes so the Carnot limit can never really be attained.
In other words, your complaint isn't with the engineers, it's with thermodynamics.
(note: ICE engines are modelled using the Otto cycle rather than the Carnot cycle, but that's a bit more complicated and leads to efficiencies that are even worse. The Carnot efficiency is an upper limit for all heat engines, including steam engines, Stirling engines, turbines, etc.)
Best way of making a gasoline car (not the engine - the car) efficient is taking the throttle of the engine out and attaching a hybrid/regenerative generator/motor to it.
Maybe the electric scooters/mopeds are the solution?
That’s like ~1850k assuming 2900F was rounded.
https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/ShaniChristopher.shtml
https://www.quora.com/How-much-heat-does-it-take-for-gasolin...
https://www.quora.com/Which-engine-has-higher-temperatures-a...
But, for very long term storage efficiency is not that import. If you’re buying at an average of say 1c/kWh and selling at 20c/kWh in 6 months it’s mostly a question of what your storage costs per day as well as maximum output is.
At the point there is no need to use salt. You can use a referable electrically driven gas turbine and get about 70-80% round trip efficiency.
Not in this case. These particular improvements were held back intentionally by megacorporations like Exxon, who spent billions telling lies to the US government, to American people and the rest of the world. Huge efforts were undertaken to ensure that this kind of technology - renewable through wind and solar - would not take off as quickly as it naturally would otherwise.
The 'free market' only works at setting prices if the market knows the risks. In this case, the market not only had the risks actively hidden from them, but they were directly lied to about the risks.
If the market had understood the risks of this technology in accordance with basic economic understanding (which is obviously flawed but hear me out), then renewable energy would have been cheaper than non-renewable energy a long time ago.
That's not to mention the direct oil subsidies provided by the US and Canadian (and other) governments over the last many decades.
Meanwhile, I am confident that the point wind energy becomes cheaper than fossil energy was within reach much earlier than that. Note that without peer-reviewed research - which I am not providing here - this is just my opinion. But I hope it counts.
Dinorwig in Wales operates a 9GWh capacity at 1.7GW. Far from insignificant, much cheaper (and safer) than the equivalent lithium cells.
To be clear, Dinorwig is not only powered by green methods, but it could.
Now it looks like the plans for new ones are entirely dominated by China. (Or were projects in other countries just not researched/included?)
China has two advantages: One it's fucking enormous, there are bound to be places with mountain lakes that weren't needed for anything else more important. Two under an authoritarian government there's no prospect of protest against the plan even if it's catastrophic for some groups.
‡ NIMBYs but more so, Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
Pumped storage "batteries" have one disadvantage though, they are nowhere near as reactive as solid-state batteries can be - think of milliseconds instead of dozens of seconds.
Design, material, manufacture, deployment and operation of very large blades is both critical and hard.
A key operating constraint is keeping blade-tips below the speed of sound. To design the monsters that are currently being deployed, computer modelling would not have been adequate even fifteen years ago.
Similarly, carbon fiber is finally getting scale economies from more than one industry. But it couldn't have been cost effective in the 1970s.
These days, when the alumni mag from my school arrives, I have to ruefully smile about all of the 'green language' in it, now that it's trendy. What a damn shame.
I think this part is particularly relevant to the HN community. As we reach higher and higher penetration of renewables on the grid, we will need to dead with the intermittency more and more. A common phrase I hear at utility conferences nowadays is, "We used to forecast load and deploy generation, but in the future, we will be forecasting generation and deploying load."
I think this area will be the next wave of innovation that needs to happen in the energy transition, and it's going to be primarily software driven. Smart load management will be key to avoiding huge storage and infrastructure capital expenses. For example, in Hawaii, they are starting to explore new utility business models that don't just rely on a fixed rate of return for capital spent.
Anyway, as we cross 50%+ penetration of renewables, I think software is going to take a leading roll in connecting and managing everything so we can have the flexibility we need on the grid.
Up until now, the typical pre-approved business model was where the utility would go to the commission and say they needed to build something (e.g. a new substation), the commission would approve it, and the utility could then charge their customers for the cost to build plus a fixed rate of return (e.g. $300m + 7%).
However, that business model breaks down when you start moving away from a centralized grid, since customers are able to start using alternatives to your infrastructure (e.g. solar on their roof and batteries in their garage).
So, commissions are trying to figure out new business models that will ensure the continued operation of utilities while still imcentivizing reduction of carbon emissions. One way being explored in Hawaii is called "performance-based ratemaking" but is still being figured out. However, the interesting going (to my company, at least) is the increasing need for software and communication in these new business models. For performance-based returns to happen, you need to measure performance, which means software.
Anyway, it's a very interesting time in the utility sector, and I think there's a lot of opportunity for the tech sector to come in and have a big part of it. Unfortunately, most tech entrepreneurs are allergic to regulated sectors.
At first you get caught out without the right ingredients for lunch or wine. Or maybe just want to go get stuff. But after about a year I really came to value this. A day where everyone was off and you couldn't go shopping or get distracted with a bunch of consumer stuff that doesn't matter so much.
I doubt it ever will, but if like to see Sunday or Saturday trading halted again. It's good to have a day off.
The results are mixed. Our highly overworked society only has time for shopping during the weekends, so slashing half of that caused a great deal of chaos.
On the other hand the next day traffic is minimal, so it's a great opportunity to visit friends who live further than public transport can efficiently take you.
Development is a ratchet, but there's diminishing returns. Eventually costs can seem to outweigh benefits in specific areas.
It turns out the optimal reliability/cost tradeoff, from the consumers' points of view, isn't necessarily what the entrenched incumbent producers want to provide.
There should be a minimum percentage of positive news every day :)
There are a quite a few industrial processes which have energy as their primary cost. Aluminum is one example.
If a region needs 10GW average, one could build a wind installation with 10GW average output and a lot of storage to match supply and load.
Or one could build a 100GW installation, a little bit of storage and an aluminum smelter. During normal operation the smelter gets 90GW and the region gets 10GW. During peak operation the smelter gets a lot more than 90GW. During a trough the region gets 10GW and the smelter gets nothing. You'd still need storage or a peaker to handle periods when there is absolutely no wind or low wind and high demand, but those needs would be much less.
I don't know if aluminum can operate with such fluctuating power, but there are processes that can. At worst, bitcoin.
In case you're curious, this came up a few years ago in a discussion and at least at the time I checked a typical Hall-Héroult electrolysis smelter could last without power for something like 4 hours or so, maybe 5, and some countries did in fact use them as part of their electrical grid control. But they can't have power interrupted indefinitely because the pots are permanently damaged and require replacement or extremely expensive repair if the liquid metal completely solidifies in them. The molten state represents a significant thermal mass hence the hours of lag time, but it can't just be remelted from total cool down either.
I do wonder if an economical design could be made that specifically tried to enhance this aspect as a core design feature, some sort of vacuum insulation or the like perhaps to reduce passive thermal loss and bring outage time more towards 12 hours? But even at 4 apparently it can be good enough for moderation of some intermittent demand (which in turn means extremely cheap electricity). Using something like this as "energy storage" that is also directly economically productive seems worth pursuing though. Another possibility would be to investigate direct carbon extraction from the air, either for storage or to turn into fully synthetic net-neutral hydrocarbons. If the electricity is essentially free anyway, even enormously consuming processes like that could make sense.
At residential rates the cost is a few hundred a ton for energy. So not economic vs carbon reduction. But if you could get the energy for nearly free. It would be.
* Wind and solar, over-provisioned, will supply the generation.
* Batteries will provide peak-shifting and frequency maintenance.
* Grid upgrades / HVDC will even out regional variation in generation due to weather while flattening the duck curve.
* Variable pricing will lead to more even demand curves, both from residential BEV usage and industrial strategies for cost optimization.
The pessimist's case for a non-renewable economy are just hopeless at this point. All of this stuff exists now, is competitive now, and will only be getting better. It will take time to build out, but the economics are impossible to ignore.
If you think batteries, how long does the battery of your smartphone or laptop works? 5 years max? Maybe 10? Is this the timespan you plan your reliable infrastructure for? And how "green" is it to build these batteries?
If you think pumped-storage hydroelectricity, how much places do you have where you can have two pools (one uphill, one downhill) to store the water? How much energy can store in there?
The thing is, you'll build all these solar and wind farms and then still build and run the fossil plants, because you aren't able to store the energy to make it reliable enough.
The sun doesn't shine in a lot of places for less than 12 hours a day. In the winter, a lot of places have much less sunlight.
When men needed wind to sail the sea, there were situations when the wind didn't blow for weeks.
How much energy would your "well designed system" need to store and what is possible?
Yes, I read about that Tesla battery in Australia. Then I calculated how many Tesla walls a city like Munich would need to be able to survive for 1 week. I don't believe it is possible.
People rely on electric power. If the grid goes down in places like Germany like once every month, there would be uproar.
At least in Germany even large industrial energy consumers are for years now an active part of grid balancing. Either they can stop and resume production as needed or continuous processes serve a similar function as your base power plants. The silver bullet to get them there was money, it became financially viable and profitable and all of a sudden businesses jumped at the opportunity.
Disclaimer: Worked at two of these power hungry places and know of of another one making quite some money on the electricity exchanges by just timing his production runs properly.
Solar still works in cloudy weather, and you can compensate by building more than you typically need. You can transmit increasingly long distances. Here's a line working at 2300+km.
https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-worlds-...
Most weather doesn't span 2300km in all directions so I think it's possible to handle most situations and fill in the gaps over time.
You can use a Tesla as home battery. Charge at work or home, or at a supercharger, power your house at night.
Sure there are edge cases like far north where you need coal or nuclear. But I'd bet the bulk of humankind can be supplied well given another 10/20 years of innovation.
Some questions that might be interesting: What is the current downtime of electricity. What would be the desired goal for the new mixed / renewable grid? Given existing patterns of wind and solar generation, how much storage needs to be installed to reach this goal? How much would this storage be expected to cost at today's prices, and then with projected future savings from scaling (this could be used as a higher bound)?
The reason "running out" might be a valid concern is that the power grid is currently reasonably robust. Turbines are massive, with a great deal of inertia, meaning that even if something drastic were to happen, they can often cope with spikes in load long enough for extra production to ramp up. Wind and solar less so. Batteries presumably would be pretty great for ramping up, assuming we get enough of them on the grid. But then the economics needs to take into account the price of not just the renewables, but also generation.
Storage will happen, but it's a long way off.
In the long run energy storage techniques will come in which will displace some use cases for gas, how quickly that happens depends of technological development. As you say long term storage isn’t likely to be achieved by Lithium ion batteries, it’s more likely to be Flow batteries or Hydrogen production. Although Lithium batteries can shift storage throughout a day, and also balance the grid on near instantaneous timescales, which is useful.
Another possibility is overbuilding renewable generation, if solar is very cheap you could produce twice as much as you need in Summer in order to produce enough to meet demand in Winter. That can drastically reduce the need for long term storage, but depends on the properties and cost of the renewable technology in a particular location.
From an engineering point of view, this statement probably should be correct. Hydrogen in particular has such wonderful potential.
But, we have to consider future economies of scale in production. We don't know how long it's cost-performance may continue to improve, but of the three technologies mentioned, unfortunately only LiIon is currently on an improvement curve that makes it feasible for large scale storage in the short-to-medium term.
Halving costs need not be equivalent to doubling of economic capacity. It might just as well cause an order of magnitude or higher of increased capacity.
I would not be able to estimate those factors, but it's almost certainly incorrect to assume a linear relationship between cost and productive capacity.
I wonder if energy-intensive heavy industry is going to migrate to low latitudes in a solar powered world. Sorry, previously industrial Europe.
Your comment touches on topics outside the current article and its discussion. The reason is that Electrical grid balancing has been commented elsewhere; the economic operation of plants has also been commented in other discussions; if wind is blowing - there is energy left on the table without it being used; if operating a plant on fossil fuels, those fuels still have to be delivered. Wind energy is variable input, but review data on its variability over span of days.
Overall, having variable input of energy in an electrical grid is not the blocker. It is also an extensive - and ‘done enough for now’ area of research.
The variability is not what has slowed down wind energy deployments.
It has been subsidized in a lot places. And yes it creates a lot of variability which is currently mitigated by powering fossil plants up and down.
People think they buy solar and wind power and it works on paper, but in reality it only works because there are fossil fuel plants as backup.
For example, certainly for solar the cost and practicality of storage must be taken into account.
There are similar constraints with wind.
Overall, renewables can be used a lot these days but still have limitations.
Storage isn't all that feasible (yet) but they also don't build wind farms in places where the wind doesn't blow, and they don't build solar plants where the sun is inconsistent.
So? If we only halve fossil fuel use does that not mean its worth doing?
The article states that wind power is now cheaper than just the fuel for NG power plants, so its financially advantageous to move to wind whilst maintaining NG plants. And its environmentally advantageous even though we may not have all the answers right now.
I'm not even sure if there is a 'the' answer. The solution will be probably be a combination of all of the above, plus HVDC, plus smart grid type features.
BTW laptops and phones are the worst environments for batteries, they're hot and enclosed. Look at EV battery warranties, the Bolt is 8 years, the powerwall warranty is 10 years. The expectation, and experience is they'll last much longer.
I would guess that if costs keep dropping you'd get a certain amount of overbuilding for the low energy demand season so you'd have capacity there for some kind of clean gas technology.
I wish the boffins would start crunching the numbers though. If my gas boiler breaks today, should I replace it or fit a heat pump? If I replace my kitchen should I keep a gas hob or move to electric?? These are less than once a decade purchasing decisions and theres absolutely no visibility on whether gas to the home is going to be a thing in the medium term.
You are probably never going to get to a point where you're charging a battery now for use sometime in January. That's where some kind of bio gas would come in, because it is feasible to store it long term.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2019/08/14/tower-...
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity does need special places to be most effective, but we already have a lot of one-way dams littering our rivers, of which some might be upgraded. Deep mines that can be used for the lower reservoir, maybe something to be give depleted coal mines a new purpose?
Energy production will change a lot over the next years, there's no way stopping it.
It would be better to locate pumped hydro off rivers. Dams are terrible for the ecology of rivers.
Looks like the average US electricity consumption is close to 30 kWh/day.
As the renewable industry, you still have people depend on the conventional grid for the vast majority of power, while taking advantage of generous subsidies, tax breaks and other deals to convince people renewables are anywhere near a match for it at the moment...
Not to mention geographic distribution of grids levels it out.
At that point you may as well ask what if positive and negative charges repel each other?
That's not the headline. The headline is cheaper than natural gas, which is a relatively expensive fossil fuel, but also historically cheap at the moment.
However, natural gas is great at providing power on-demand and at small scale, which is exactly what you need to even out the highly volatile output of wind energy. Natural gas and wind energy are complements, not competitors.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/xcel-solicitation-returns-i...
”””The levelized cost of electricity, which eliminates the impact of incentives and subsidies on the final prices, places wind below $40/MW-hr in 2018. The cheapest form of natural gas generation was roughly $10 more per MegaWatt-hour. Note that, as recently as 2015, the US' Energy Information Agency was predicting that wind's levelized cost in 2020 would be $74/MW-hr.”””
Wind power experienced a renaissance due to subsidized infrastructure construction.
Natural gas is clean burning and a byproduct in most cases of crude drilling. If we were really wanting clean cheap energy we'd build bigger and better pipelines to move the gas to the major distribution networks. Instead lawmakers want to install more of these structures that ruin the view, obscure the horizon, and take massive amounts of harmful chemicals to produce.