Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear. Coal plants are shutting down as fast as replacements can be built, and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now.
The cost of PV solar has dropped over 80% in the past decade, and wind like 50%, due to engineering improvements in operation and economies of scale in manufacturing. But it's a reasonable question how much farther their prices will drop. It seems unlikely to me that we'll see another decade of such radical price drops.
Gas, on the other hand, is vulnerable to markets and availability. How long will it stay so cheap? And what happens if a politically progressive government gets serious about carbon taxing? On the other hand, it's a lot cheaper up-front to build a gas plant, and a lot less painful if it closes early.
How? My understanding is that most of the cost of nuclear power comes from building the plant and decommissioning it. Running existing power plants for as long as they can seems like the most economical choice.
Nuclear that's already built is very cheap AND has a very high capacity factor (i.e. doesn't need storage--although its value can be extended with storage).
This example explainsa lot of what's happening: [1].
By way of a brief explanation, wind is expanding so fast in a lot of places that the combination of wind+LNG is just too cheap to compete with. Iowa is particularly bad, because wind is not "unreliable" in Iowa. There's a lot of wind and it's almost always blowing. So they aren't even using those LNG plants that much. Which only lowers the price to consumers even further.
In some states the government has stepped in to protect the nuclear industry. Sometimes with things like carbon credits, that are given for generating power without generating carbon. Then the nuclear plants sell those credits on the free market to raise funds. But in some places government has had to be a good deal more draconian. In Georgia, they've basically made it illegal for anyone in Vogtie's service area to switch away. That's the only way they could get the math to work. (And it still doesn't work. The federal government is still pumping billions in cash into that project.)
[1] - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/iowas-only-...
Now, if you were doing the risk analysis on financing for a multibillion-dollar nuclear project, and you just saw the cost of a major competitor (solar) drop 80% in a decade... well, how would that factor into your risk analysis? How much would your interest rates increase?
The only safe way to finance a reactor is government-based guarantees for price regulation - the nation will consume X megawatts for Y dollars, no matter what the market thinks the price should be. And do it in such a way that some government two generations down the road can't just throw it all out and screw you.
No one-off construction, flexible siting due to no water cooling, underground for security, and meltdown proof. Just walkaway safe electricity at five cents a KWH or less. :-)
terrapower.com thorcon.com x-energy.com
But they aren't, not today, and they won't be for at least a decade. I don't want to wait, and even if I did, the market definitely will not.
I don't see this happening. Relying on new reactor designs to save nuclear power isn't going to solve the problem in time. Right now governments are busy with massive power plant designs that suffer from multi billion cost overruns. After that experience they will probably stop building more power plants and funding for new reactor designs will be reduced.
Vs solar or wind farms where default is much more likely to be 'soft'. Maybe the plant defaults on it bonds, but it still produces power. Which is preferable to both defaulting and shutting down.
50 years doesn't sound like all that long a timeframe when people are talking about 100 year bonds, and the idea that capital is scarce and expensive doesn't quite seem to apply when $15 trillion in global debt pays negative yields.
If that energy produces zero carbon then I'll take the later. But we're also only talking a difference of 7c for PV and 10c for nuclear and competitive prices for coal and natural gas. I'll gladly pay more for the nuclear than pay less for coal and natural gas.
Solar can generally just be left alone for weeks or months at a time. Nuclear however needs security guards, regular maintenance, a highly trained workforce, large insurance premiums etc. On top of that it also needs some fuel.
What’s happening with Nuclear is these older power plants occasionally need a significant overhaul and it’s at that point where they are considered too expensive.
Alternative energies can provide some of that, meaning that plants need to shut down because outside of providing base demand, they're incredibly expensive to make power from.
Whatever seems "obvious" to us, the hardnosed managers responsible for the actual financial decisions are pulling the plug on dozens of reactors. If it seems irrational to us, it's because there are other cost factors we don't understand. That's why I like to look at the end, rather than make assumptions on what I think I know about the means.
Since they are shielded from almost all liability by law (something like $150 million liability cap + $12.5 billion industry fund; plausible disasters could reach $1 trillion+ depending on winds), it seems like there would probably be even more shutdowns if they had to pay for real insurance.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower/u-s-to-e...
Wind is cheap because when the wind blows, everybody is trying to sell their wind produced energy at the same time and the country often overproduces. In Germany, we even see negative prices when the wind blows; The price is low not because it does not cost a lot, but because it is heavily subsidized (wind is 60% of subsidies in Germany, for only 18% of the production) and needs to sell fast otherwise the fines and costs for overloading the network are massive.
That's the best argument for the battery storage market I've seen yet... (And really, it makes sense. Generate surplus when the sun is shining or wind is especially strong, run from storage when demand exceeds supply, build both until there's enough. As long as the costs are less than current baseline systems, which seems possible, then it wins.)
Assuming that's true, I assume they'd also shutdown to protect thier pocket book.
> Generate surplus when the sun is shining or wind is especially strong, run from storage when demand exceeds supply, build both until there's enough.
That's the idea, but the battery capacity required would be enormous:
https://www.oulu.fi/blogs/how-much-storage-does-the-energiew...
> As long as the costs are less than current baseline systems, which seems possible, then it wins.
Batteries don't seem likely for a cost-effective replacement, but alternatives may develop down the road.
that link is kind of unrealistically dismissive.
If you want to go "mostly renewable" and do the buffering e.g. with natural gas as it is currently done, that's of course a far more plausible scenario.
In the other direction, if there is not enough, the grid operators will disconnect power consumers, so in that case it's in the best interest of generators to prevent people from consuming power, thus raising the price dramatically.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/11489188
But renewables have made this worse by unpredictably flooding the market with cheap power. They don't really care if the price drops to near zero as the wind and sun cost them nothing. But jeeze it must hurt to be selling electricity for less than it cost you to dig the coal out of the ground. I'm pretty sure that's one of the things driving the early retirement of coal and nuclear.
But the floor for (unsubsidized) solar may be a lot lower than that. About $14/MWh: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-u...
And we're already seeing bids nearly that low: https://www.pv-tech.org/news/brazil-auction-sets-record-low-...
Wind is also super cheap.
And battery costs are coming down too, and I think that curve looks more linear, but its coming down.
One of the issues is that these costs are so capital intensive that the financing costs drive a lot of the price drop. With near zero or negative rates in so much of the world, I think its hard to tell what the real rates would be.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but the "alternative" energy storage systems you mentioned have about 80% or more round-trip energy efficiency: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/energy-storage-2019#2
I quoted alternative because pumped-storage hydro accounts for 95% of grid energy storage in the world.
edit: There's enough variation in wind farm output to maybe make some storage financially beneficial - production costs could actually go negative when there's enough wind.
ETA [1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/01/02/utility-scale-solar-p...
Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment.
What's happening is that countries migrating towards wind turbines like Germany also adds coal plant to the same capacity in order to compensate for when the wind doesn't blow. For each GW of wind one can find a GW of coal or gas being installed.
Then, if we are talking about adding batteries into the mix to make it work, solar and wind become far from carbon neutral, and endangers us way more than nuclear.
Also, to make this work best, appliances need to be connected to the internet and the power companies need to have an internet ABI where the current power price can be extracted by those appliances.
At last, an actual use for internet connected appliances!
Look at it this way. With enough variation over the day, you create a market for storage. Let's say stored electricity costs twice as much as direct, but the price of direct varies by 3x over the course of the day. You've now created an arbitrage market for buying cheap electricity during the day, and selling it at night.
Of course, the more storage gets built, the more the load (and thus cost) increases during the high-availability times, and the lower the selling price during demand spikes. And thus the market attains equilibrium.
The law of supply and demand is a marvelous thing sometimes.
Nope, I talked about incentivizing consumers to shift their demand based on a volatile price. I pointed out that much of this can be accomplished without need of batteries.
For example, have the hot water tank heat up water higher than normal when electricity is cheaper, and lower when electricity is more expensive. Hot water tanks lose heat very slowly, this could result in never needing to heat water during the expensive times.
It's a heluva lot cheaper than having a battery do it.
Second, it's not a single location. Wind may be lower in one location, but strong in another location 50 miles away. The idea that wind goes completely dead all at once across statewide areas is not how wind actually works.
The idea that wind currents are uncorrelated across geographical areas, even on the scale of states, is not how wind actually works.
Yes, the demand for HVAC is very high when the winds are low.
Electricity bill is on average $100 per household per month. People won't shift their usage because electricity is too cheap anyway. 1.6% of your revenue === 1.6% of your saving effort.
Note that the periodicity of wind blowing is days and weeks, so it's too long and too intermittent to align daily routines on it. Forget about charging your car or hot water aligned on it, the only solution we have scaled to use this wind energy is reversible dams / potential energy, and of that we have no more unexploited geography to support wind turbines. Feb 2019 we produced in Germany 10,000GWh with wind versus 3,000GWh in July 2019. And between 2 consecutive weeks, it can be a factor of x10 of difference. http://energynumbers.info/capacity-factors-at-danish-offshor...
That's not necessary. The utility can make the current price available via an internet API. The water heater can be connected to the internet and can read that data. Heat the water to 130 or so when electricity is cheap, heat it only to 100 or so when it is expensive. From personal experience, the water remains hot enough for a comfortable shower 3 days after the power goes out. This is more than a workable system. The hot water itself becomes the "battery".
And that's only the hot water heater. You can do it with the HVAC system (the thermal mass of the house becomes the "battery"), and with charging your car.
Right there it's a huge chunk of one's electricity consumption, all without needing grid storage batteries.
Wind just doesn't stop blowing across the world all at once. When one place is in the doldrums, another is likely windy. With a sufficiently connected grid, a large deployment of wind turbines can smooth out production in ways smaller, regionally focused deployments cannot. I posit that a global distribution of wind power is _more_ available than a regional one, not less, as your comment seems to imply.
Those sources are slow to ramp up and down - that's why the time-of-use power prices I face right now are at their lowest overnight (so I currently time shift as much load as I can to those times).
True, but the story is actually worse than they paint it. Electricity from renewables + storage is now cheaper than electricity from a new coal or nuclear plant. As those old plants close, they won't be replaced. https://www.abc.net.au/news/11495558
In the tussle between renewables vs fossil fuels it's all over bar the shouting, which is to say all we will have to put up with the coal and gas industry screaming how unfair it all is until the last of them die off.
But it's is just as well renewables do cost less because if someone had to plan on losing money to save the planet it would be a gonner.
In general, renewable energy investments right now are completely irrational in terms of the environmental impact, as they cost up to 10x more than the total social cost of the carbon emissions they are displacing. (And also much more than _current_ carbon sequestration tech!) [0]
[0] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFIEPIC_WP_20196...
A quick Google search suggests that Solar PV efficiency is 11-22%. Could it be 20-35% in 2029?
Natural gas has the advantage that it can be spun up and down pretty quickly, which has meant that it is used primarily for "peak" load, which I think used to be covered a lot of the time by things such as diesel and oil plants and have basically been supplanted at this point by natural gas.
Solar and wind have the trouble that they are unreliable, which means you need something to smooth out demand. This is something coal and nuclear are poor at, meaning if you are bringing solar and wind into the mix on a large scale, natural gas becomes even more appealing since you can spin it up / down to balance capacity.
A thing I don't see mentioned very often is the relative density of each power source. One of the things nuclear and coal have going for them, is that you can supply a lot of electricity in a fairly limited footprint.
Wind and solar a much less dense, meaning you need to cover a much larger area, and you need it to be more distributed rather than all concentrated in one place.
All of this is to say that I think everything is inter-related much more than people realize. Shifting to using more solar / wind creates a pressure to move away from coal / nuclear even without considering the "clean energy" aspect.
I think the "with storage systems" part is crucial here.
It doesn't mean that we've found a solution for base load yet.
The fact that gas saw a big cost cut around the same time is just accelerating the inevitable. But getting off carbon will require that wind/solar become significantly cheaper than gas as well as coal/nuclear. Which may be what happens over the next couple of decades.
I think Three Mile Island and Fukushima also had issues with getting rid of residual heat during a shut-down that at a minimum damaged the fuel and resulted in a loss of the unit at TMI and a melt-down and major cleanup at Fukushima. It seems to be the basic safety issue with fission and not one that can be dismissed so easily. 6-10 hours for a controlled shut-down seems to be the minimum safety margin.
I think it had something to do with there being a salt plug that would melt if things got to hot, at which point everything would drain into a vessel designed to stop the reaction getting out of hand. So the cooling systems have to actively keep operating temperatures in range otherwise the plug melts and it goes into safe mode.
This is in contrast with what you describe where "shut down" is an elaborate process that takes time and correct order of operations in order to occur safely.
I can also say that there is a resistance to implementing new reactors and storage methods because they "aren't proven". I'll let you decide the irony to that statement.
I'm not sure. Because that's exactly what control rods do. The carbon is a neutron moderator. Neutrons are the "heat" in the reaction (that creates actual heat). Less neutrons the colder the reaction is. You'll find this in any elementary nuclear or atomic textbook (which I have read).
As for Chernobyl the show actually got a lot right. But there's a lot of important things that get glossed over because it's dramatized. Like the fact that it had a positive void coefficient and no other reactor operates that way because everyone knew it had a chance is blowing up.
Similarly there's a lot wrong with your analysis about three mile and Fukushima. Both of which killed zero people btw. I'd listen to the experts on this one.
Better to curtail the wind and solar or find ways to store the excess energy in batteries, hydro, or fuel.
EDIT: Perhaps you mean something else by "spin up and spin down" but the usual sense of the words implies a complete shut-down. Nuclear reactors do have a normal operating range which can safely be reduced to half-power on a diurnal cycle (typically at night, but could just as easily be during the day.)
Edit: you also replied to me twice.
https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-shut-down-a-n...
https://whatisnuclear.com/decay-heat.html
"In risk assessments, loss of decay heat removal accidents are usually the highest-risk scenario to release radiation to the public."
2) The headline result can be true even if solar/wind/storage have significant annual gaps in availability. If a gas plant was originally built on the assumption that it could run profitably for 5000 hours per year, but in the future there are only 2000 hours a year it can run profitably (due to more solar/wind), it can be financially "crushed." At least in competitive electricity markets. There could be large writedowns as plant load factors decline. Since gas plants are much less labor intensive to keep running than coal plants, I don't expect to see gas plants mothballed and demolished quite the way American coal plants have been over the past 5 years. They may still be profitable to run in the peak-demand season each year even with much more renewable capacity deployed. But they'll make less revenue and profit, burn less fuel, and emit less CO2.
The growth of gas capacity is alarming to many environmentalists; the phrase is that we're "locking in" decades of high emissions from gas fired electrical generators. But gas plants release the vast majority of their emissions during operation, not construction. Diminishing the plant load factor of gas plants is as good from an emissions-cuts standpoint as tearing them down. What do you do when the wind isn't blowing, the batteries are discharged, and it's night time? Burn gas. But the number of hours per year where at least one of {batteries, wind, solar} can bid below gas will go up year after year, whereas that number was essentially holding steady at zero through the whole 20th century.
This brief sketch is most applicable to deregulated electricity markets. In markets with regulated utility monopolies, unfortunately, gas plants will be subject to less competition even if the cost of storage-backed renewables keeps declining steadily. The majority of US electricity consumption now takes place in deregulated states but it's far from universal.
https://www.electricchoice.com/map-deregulated-energy-market...
Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.
If it is a low-wind evening and prices on the grid are higher than normal what fraction of people are going leave their electric cars with depleted batteries instead of charging them? Say a charge takes say 8 hours, there isn't a lot of room overnight to shift the load around. How many people will refrain from charging because it is going to cost you $50 instead of $10? I think the answer to that can be seen from how much people refrain from driving when fuel costs go up. Given that traffic never gets better I would say none!
1) electricity is cheap. it will have to get a lot more expensive for anyone to care enough to change the way they are using it 2) a lot of the demand is inflexible, regardless of price. lights are going to be on, dinner is going to be made when kids are hungry, car is going to be charged overnight because must go to work tomorrow.
there is going to come a point where all wind and solar must have a certain amount of firm capacity - say it has to be able to deliver 50% of nameplate rating for 5 days straight - and this is going to significantly add to the $/MWH cost of renewables. Then after 5 cloudy days in a row (unthinkable!) the output of the solar farm is 10% of nameplate until it is sunny again.
People who have those tariffs do tend to alter behaviour to suit them - it mainly makes sense for homes with electric space and water heating, where it's more "set and forget" (and people also do change behaviour by eg putting washing machines or tumble dryers on late at night when the cheaper tariffs apply too).
Over time I imagine we might see more dynamic algorithms in use to pick and choose times when electricity is used together with more dynamic per-unit pricing.
These measures in the U.K. were put in place to shift demand due to constraints in total system capacity - total generation, total transmission, total distribution capacity. Eg a substation transformer couldn’t handle normal daily loads plus heating, so heating load is shifted to night.
What happens when power at night becomes more expensive due to increases demand such as car charging or low supply such as high renewable penetration and no wind?
It’s all about having the firm capacity to deliver power for hours on end. So the $/mwh of wind or solar power has to go up because grids are going to say you can only have more if you can supply firm capacity. This is already happening in Hawaii.
I implemented hot water tank load switching through smart meters on at a town with its own power plant of only 850 kw so they wouldn’t run out of power at dinner time when the river was low (and we didn’t have to fire up the diesel either)
One way this could work is that you have eg a smart heating thermostat which plans which hours of the day/night to turn heating on and then buys power to cover that in a day-ahead market, with the aim of minimising cost on that basis.
Wind and solar power are relatively preditable a day out so you wouldn't be paying too much to power traders for providing day-ahead liquidity vs on-demand pricing.
Likewise, EVs all end up parked somewhere during the day - the challenge is ensuring that as many of those places as possible (car parks, workplaces, etc) have charging points too; you could do something very similar there with an algorithm deciding whether to charge based on a spot price and how much is in the battery (say, owner programs car to top up to 65% and then only continue charging if power is cheap).
The beauty of this type of approach is that it can be done by incrementally building on things which already exist.
There's already an electricity market, including day-ahead pricing in most pools. Professional power traders already trade these markets. Smart meters already exist and are capable of dealing with pool prices not just flat rates. Smart thermostats already exist. EVs already have the capability to stop/start charging based on more than just whether they're plugged in or not. Even better, most of these already have standardised APIs.
What's missing is the software stack which ties all of these together - and that can be done incrementally, device by device (on the load side).
Are you honestly trying to argue it doesn't have any effect? "What day of the week is best to fill your tank" is like an age-old question. Obviously within reason. Not if your tank is empty and you have to be somewhere. Less so for people who think this to be beneath them. And probably also less so in places with cheap fuel (US i hear?). But it certainly changes behavior and is a good & easy first step.
I live near Vancouver which features the most expensive gas in North America, and decent public transportation, and I believe traffic is the only thing that keeps people from driving more, not cost. So demand seems inflexible over the long term, and with electric cars I think you have even less flexibility to choose your time and place to charge, unless charging becomes ubiquitously available.
I think the more realistic scenario is that people charge less if the power is expensive, to full otherwise. Managed by a programmed policy.
Also, commute length will start trending down as we leave the cheap-gas phase of history behind - EVs are also too CO2 intensive to sustain the car based lifestyle.
I think your examples are actually all flexible use cases. Car can be charged any time, if price is unpredictable you won't leave your battery empty on a work night. But also you don't necessarily need a car. Lighting is a silly example because it consumes negligible energy, but if you look at history it's actually very flexible. Dinner also takes negligible energy but it's also very flexible (see how people cook in places without cheap eletricity - biofuels).
As heavy industry has declined in the West though, we have less of that than we used to.
This was the idea of "smart grids", which we seem to hear rather less about than a few years ago now.
Sounded terrifying.
Mark my words.
Also, keep in mind that wind is much, much steadier 200 feet in the air than it is on the ground, where it's subject to all sorts of disruptions and irregularities.
That pretty much means nothing. How close is that guaranteed minimum to the maximum deliverable or expected daily average power?
Such numbers would be useful for determining a theoretical floor for gas, nuclear, etc providing baseline capacity.
As you surely know, that's been said before, mostly about nuclear fusion and fission breeder reactors, both of which have inexhaustible resources. What's different this time? There's still absolutely massive amounts of major equipment needed in a wind/solar dominated energy system.
Probably not, though...
In this part of the world many critical services like hospitals run on back up generators if the main grid goes down. It was part of the main grid that went down
There was surely chaos some places where traffic lights weren’t on backup power, but otherwise the worst things that would happen were maybe you have to close up the office or the worksite for the day. Transit was down but not much else could be done anyway.
It was bittersweet. I’m sure there were problems. I’m also sure that many people who’d never seen a star in their lives saw the sky unfolded like they might never again. It was a stark reminder how much we’ve drowned out with things that “matter”
> “Our story for gas plants is, if you build it, they won’t run -- they won’t run at their expected capacity factors,” said Mark Dyson, who co-wrote both reports. “And that filters down to pipelines, too.”
I suspect that the demand for electricity will mean that we'll need gas plants much longer than the article believes.
This will be a good thing, because electric cars and heat pumps running off of natural gas generators is much less carbon than gasoline cars and natural gas furnaces.
Civilization grows with available energy. People would start desalinating the oceans to green deserts, speed-boat cargo around the world, grow staple foods indoors or pull carbon out of the air if energy were truly free.
So even if it were free to generate electricity--solar panels and batteries were free--you would only see a 40-45% decrease in your electricity bill.
Ironically gas and solar / wind sometimes go together with gas filling gaps in generation on a more flexible basis. Interesting to read here that gas will be "crushed". That will need some huge battery capacity - not saying its not possible but...
Coal though - if article was coal is going to be crushed - sure.
I expect they made the mistake of not taking into account the increase in cost due to a primarily renewable grid. Such massive changes in the type of generating supply will yield massive changes in the costs to supply power. As you remove all the dispatchable power sources (power generators that you can put on line at will) you have to build really big heat or electricity storage and would have to have emergency generating capacity for the potential of extremely low wind and sun for days and weeks at a time. Basically, you'd have to have all the natural gas generators and pipelines for the eventuality of bad renewable conditions. Who will pay for that? Just leaving them idle 95% of the time is not the best use of money and it's possible the government may have to pay for renewable's storage problems.
Geography is also a serious concern. Texas will have vastly different economics than than Washington or New York.
Ideally the operators of facilities that tackle the storage problem with power-to-gas technology. It's by far the most scalable storage option and the discharge part of the cycle is already up and running.
There's also a lot of other businesses that exist for building/maintaining/repairing plants and equipment that are non-OE and their futures seem grim.
This is a typical pattern during the dog days of August. Winds lull during the late afternoon, and pickup after midnight. Winds farms, on an annual basis, provide 22% of Texas electricity generation. However, during these peak demand hours, natural gas contributed about 50,000 MW, with coal and nuclear distant second and third place. If Texas wind farms are to displace the gas-fired plants, there will need to be 10-fold increase in their numbers, or somehow solar and battery storage will have to step in.
Saying that wind is going to crush gas, is only half true. Currently, the pipeline of new generators being built in Texas has slightly more wind (capacity factor ~ 40%) being installed than gas. Solar, during the next 5 years, is being built (allowing for capacity factor ~ 20%) at about the same rate (~12,000 averaged MW). You could call these technologies the 'three amigos', as they will be appearing, as new generating capacity, in (very) roughly equal amounts. Nevertheless, gas plants are a unique, and necessary part of the future, due to their dispatch ability. They can literally be called upon to deliver electricity 24/7/365.
Importantly, one hour of generation during these peak periods costs 450 times the average generator's fees for electricity. In other words, one hour of a natural gas plant's output, during these near-black-out conditions (properly termed Energy Emergency Alert), earns them as much as running those plants, non-stop, the previous 19 days. These extreme spikes haven't happened in Texas for a few years. Still, there is lots of opportunity for the gas plants to be the 'high rollers' of the Texas grid during their expected 30+ years of operation.
Peak usage week: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/August_PUC_Pre... Energy Emergency alert: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/EEA_OnePager_F...
"Can more solar help Texas meet peak demand?"
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/08/13/can-solar-help-ercot-...
There is a truly awesome amount of solar on the way in Texas, with ERCOT’s July interconnection report showing 62 GW of solar projects. And while given the highly speculative nature of project development most of those will likely not be built, there are nearly 9 GW of projects that have interconnection agreements, including 3.2 GW that have a full interconnection study completed.
Those projects that can secure financing and get built will come online over the next few years. It is difficult to say which ones will be online by next summer, but a June ERCOT report identified 1.3 GW of projects with interconnection agreements and financial security posted that are expected to come online later this year, a number which should grow as the year progresses.
"Developer eyes world's largest solar+storage facility for Texas"
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/developer-eyes-worlds-large...
"Energy Storage Developer Buys Texas Windfarms With Major Battery Retrofit Planned"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnparnell/2019/08/24/energy-s...
"GlidePath Builds Merchant Battery Plant in ERCOT, Bucking Industry Wisdom"
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/glidepath-bucke...
https://rmi.org/insight/clean-energy-portfolios-pipelines-an...
If the same amount of electricity is being supplied, why are conservation efforts needed? Has anyone downloaded the reports from Rocky Mountain Institute? They want your email address.
That's not the only dodgy thing either. Their proposal generates substantial excess energy throughout most of the year. In order to improve its cost effectiveness, they assume that excess energy has a value of $15/KWh and subtract that income from the cost of the renewable program. The actual value of this energy is probably close to zero; remember, we're talking about energy that has gone unused even after substantial use of demand shifting and storage.
At the rate our world population is expanding, I have to wonder if there is simply enough surface area we can turn over to power generation and lose it to things such as farming and other agriculture.
We are learning to farm land previously thought too arid for non-hearty crops.
The 48 hours of battery would last a really long time as typically only about 12 hours will need to be used, thus you'd get very long cycle life. A battery used so lightly could get 10,000 effective full cycles, so probably would last multiples of 25 years from a cycle life perspective (calendar life may be another thing).
EDIT: If you add in geographical diversity and diversity in sources like wind, hydro, and geothermal, then you need to throw away a lot less energy and you need a lot less storage. IMHO, we should just bite the bullet and install a bunch of transmission lines (which could be done in 2 years, enabling us to decommission coal power within about 2 years in the US).
Even in equatorial Africa 48h is not enough. Neither for actual usage, nor for battery life (and no one ever got marketing-leaflet-aka-datasheet-stated lifetime out of them batteries). Two years max, and hope either the project dies, or the company dies, or someone steals the batteries.
Source: been there maintaning solar offgrid.
And then --- geodiversity can only make it worse, never better.
But you are right. I would downvote if I was wrong and laughed at.
we added a wind turbine as well which was great since some of the rainy stormy days had lots of wind. I don't understand my original posts parent's comment about (geo) diversity not helping.
To make it work, it's cheaper to throw away about 2/3rds of your energy than to build 150 hours worth of storage. Some amount of "curtailment" is going to be optimal, and in my case, because solar is so cheap and my starting assumptions allowed no other energy sources, a LOT of curtailment is used. Literally most of the energy is unused.
If you ignore massive curtailment as a possibility, then yeah, haha, it's not going to work.
If solar + storage comes out cheaper than alternatives, it wins. Period. The market will insure that. If you don't think it is possible, you need to lead with actual numbers to support your case, not just gut feelings.
Many countries like Israel have black water containers on top of every home to heat their water, so it stays there warm for the night.
Storing energy can be made in diverse and original ways, mostly adapted to the local constraints.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjal...
(A comment someone else made and it got greyed out by the "we hate your poopy face!" crowd.)
And even if it IS solved. After outside wind and solar infrastructure is destroyed by the next continent wide Winter superstorm, how would having a few hours (or days) of storage help?
Plus stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit..., in use for well over a century.
So 10 miles a day would be more like 20%.
That said though, a quick search shows vehicle miles travelled per capita in the US is 10k, so closer to 30 miles a day, or 9 kwh.
However, vehicles can be charged off peak in a lot of places (hot places peak during the day in the summer) so can be charged at night.
The average monthly energy consumption per capita in the U.S. is about 1000 kWh[1], so in order to double that with electric cars every individual would need to drive an average of 110 miles per day.
[1] https://www.worlddata.info/america/usa/energy-consumption.ph...
If we did, there wouldn't even BE climate change alarmist hysteria poised to destroy entire economies.
genuinely curious
I suggest you have a second look at the HN guidelines [1].
I can think of a couple of other renewable resources: Geothermal and Hydroelectric, but Geothermal is geographically limited and Hydroelectric has proven to have more environmental impact than we would like. I have no idea on what the other three could be. I guess you could include Nuclear in the list, but the price points on that make it hard to declare it better than Solar and Wind.
Earthquakes -- there is some causality
Destruction of fish habitat -- salmon in Columbia river
In general, making water go slow when it used to go fast has a lot more negative consequence for the environment than one might expect.
I find this episode of 99 percent invisible to be really informative -- https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fish-cannon/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_reserv...
The biggest is the destruction of migrating fish habitat, sometimes reversible with specialized structures (salmon ladders), sometimes not. There is also some evidence for increased CO2 emissions from artificial reservoirs.
The impact of creating water reservoirs must be immense. Because we are dreaming about replacing hydro with vastly inferior power sources.