Right now, intermittent renewables actually drives up the cost of fossil fuels! Renewables do wacky things to the spot price of power - sometimes electricity is free or even has negative value, sometimes it's expensive. Ideally fossil fuel plants would only spin up when they could sell power at a profit, but they can't dispatch so quickly, so they end up selling power at a loss for minutes or hours after the solar panels or wind turbines kick back on.
This is producing market conditions that are favorable to batteries and super-capacitors, because they can dispatch in seconds, or milliseconds. Arbitraging between times of cheap power to times of expensive power can already be competitive with fossil fuels some of the time. And batteries are getting cheaper, too.
There's some question about what the ideal mix of generation vs storage will end up being. While storage is expensive, we'll tend to over-provision wind and solar, and end up throwing power away... unless we can come up for some use for it when we have moments of surplus. There's some talk of using it for things like ocean water desalination, but most of our machinery has such a high investment cost right now that the cost of electricity is not the biggest expense, so we don't actually have many machines that we idle until power gets cheap. Maybe that'll change eventually.
In the grand scheme of things, this is like refusing chemotherapy for cancer because it makes your hair fall out.
Climate change is a huge issue. You have to be willing to sacrifice what would normally be valid environmental concerns to address it. You either believe it is an emergency or not.
Decrease lake outflow when solar and wind are producing power. Increase lake outflow when they are not.
No, it says "that without building a single new dam" [hydro could roughly double its existing capacity in the US].
I'll assume you just misread that, but in any case that's pretty different to building new dams, or utilising tech like mines, or at-sea pumped storage.
No, that's not what it says. It says:
> The report estimates that without building a single new dam, these available hydropower resources, if fully developed, could provide an electrical generating capacity of more than 12 gigawatts (GW), equivalent to roughly 15 percent of current U.S. hydropower capacity.
Without constructing any new dams, you only increase it by 15%, not double it. Also, consider that 12 GW is 105 TWh per year. US consumes 4100 TWh of electricity per year. It would sure be nice to increase non-fossil electricity production by 2.5%, but that's clearly not very much. If the plan is to use hydro to cover the shortfall when the renewables are not producing enough, you need much more generating capacity than 12 GW, and more than 65 GW your link suggests could be potentially built. Finally, 2.5% is on the order of our annual growth in electricity consumption, which will in fact accelerate as we move off fossils. Thus, building out all possible hydro will only buy one year of growth in consumption.
My error was confusing the "7% total capacity" and "15% existing capacity" not being off the same baseline.
Even huge hydrostorage plants have only a few GWh.
New Zealand has about 4 TWh, but they are considering adding an additional 5-12 TWh with one single storage project:
https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/central-otago/scientific-thoug...
Hopefully civilization will not collapse first, from refugees driving fascist governments into power, and former democracies self-surveilling themselves into locked-in dictatorships.
On the upside, collapsed civilization will have lower energy demands, and will find carbon extraction and transport harder to organize.
Maybe Carbon sequestration?
Yes, provided you ignore the cost of balancing an increasingly volatile grid, a volatility that is created by renewables. Also provided you ignore the cost to provide energy when said renewables aren't generating any.
Claims to back up your statment, such as from Lazard, are horribly flawed because they use the metric of LCOE - levelised cost of energy - to claim that renewable energy is cheaper. It is, provided you ignore the slew of costs that are not borne by renewable generators but which ARE borne by consumers.
Yes, batteries are getting cheaper but not at the scale required for the grid. Before you quote the Australian Tesla battery, remember that it can only provide energy for minutes - yes, minutes.
What is needed today for a low-carbon future is nuclear and hydro. Renewables will get there one day but that day is not tomorrow or next year.
For context, the US consumes ~12TWh of electricity daily, so 500 GWh per hour. Global lithium ion battery production is around 300 GWh per year. While it's true this is projected to rise exponentially, the amount dedicated to storage is minuscule compared to the scale required to fulfill even one hour of energy storage [1]. This has prompted people to propose more exotic forms of storage like hydrogen, methane produced through the Sabatier process, or thermal storage. But none of those have been deployed at any significant scale, and their feasibility remains unproven.
Nobody generates more than 20% of their electricity from solar. Denmark is the only country that generates over 30% of its power from wind, and Germany is the 3rd highest at 24.7% [2]. By comparison plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from nuclear power: Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Belgium, Hungary, Ukraine, Slovakia, and France. And the last 3 all produce the majority of their electricity from nuclear. [3]
Fossil fuels didn't kick off the industrial revolution, it was the heat engine. The ability to translate thermal energy into mechanical energy. Heating a fluid, turning a turbine, which turns a dynamo is something we cannot easily replace. Replacing the source of heat with a carbon-free source represents a much more modest refactor as compared to trying to migrate modern societies off the the heat engine. Renewables make sense as mitigation: just slap down some solar or wind, don't bother with storage, and shave off daytime carbon emissions when it is producing. But not as the backbone of a carbon-free energy sector.
1. https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable...
I'm confused, there's no downvote button in HN.
Let me put it more bluntly. Renewables are indeed cheaper on a per-watt hour basis. But that's more than offset by the need to deal with intermittency. Batteries are great for cars, but they exist at nowhere near the scale required to decarbonize with a wind and solar generation base. More exotic proposals like thermal storage, hydrogen, or the Sabatier process remain in prototyping and academic stage. The cost of storage is a non-answer, because there's no real plan to build this storage.
Renewables make in a stopgap mitigation plan but we have no feasible way of building a grid that's powered completely or even mostly by renewables. If our plan is to decarbonize the energy sector, renewables do not offer a solution. Hydroelectricity, and geothermal power do, but those are geographically limited. Nuclear energy is the only source that can feasibly replace fossil fuels as a consistent, geographically independence, and carbon-free energy source.
TL;DR:
* Industrialization happened because we figured out we could heat water and push a piston (and later, spin a turbine). Modern society is built off the ability to produce mechanical and electrical energy from thermal energy.
* It's a lot easier to heat water and spin a turbine with a carbon-free source of heat, than to try and capture energy from sun and wind and store massive amounts of energy to overcome intermittency.
Batteries provide fast response
Pumped hydro is what is being used on a lot of networks and in future network planning. Ironically old open cut mines are often perfect locations for them.
This paper discusses an algorithm used to find pumped hydro sites - there is _a lot_ of capacity out there waiting to be tapped
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...
There are already numerous draft or under constructions plants that are "triple" projects with a combination of solar/wind + battery + pumped hydro
Eg, Bath County Pump Storage is a 3GW plant[1] although ironically it is often filled using nuclear power because the hydro station can adapt better to rapid changes in demand.
In the US there is 22GW total pump hydro storage already (compared to say 98GW total nuclear power capacity).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
"The perception has been there are limited sites for pumped hydro around the world, but we have found hundreds of thousands."
https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...
Some depend on geography, particularly pumped hydro and mineshaft gravitic, and to a lesser degree compressed air. Catalytic improvements will bring rapid cost decline in LH2 and ammonia production. And, finally, battery technology, still the most immediately practical for home systems, is still improving fast. Any breakthroughs not anticipated only improve the picture.
The cost for utility-scale solar is many times less than roof-mounted, battery-backed home systems, but in places where distribution is expensive (rural) or unreliable (3rd world and California) it has strong appeal.
The reality is it doesn't matter how you word it or what you think should be simpler. Its what the economy can actually build, and including risk, buying solar panels which have no moving parts and last for decades are currently the more efficient way to add a watt to the grid.
Your "blunt" assertion where you predict the capacity of the grid to accomodate renewables and the quantity of battery storage and the feasibility of every potential upcoming storage technology probably requires a few sources to be taken seriously as well.
The point is, just adding watts to the grid is not a solution. You needed watt when they're needed and where they're needed. And doing that with renewables is a lot harder, hence why we're really just supplementing fossil fuels with wind and solar not really working towards full decarbonization.
My assertions about the capacity of battery production were indeed backed by sources of predicted growth of battery production. In case you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25283498
This is an extremely odd comparison. No one is proposing a completely solar generation strategy - it's renewables vs whatever.
Plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from renewables.
Search for “overbuilding renewables,” e.g. https://energycentral.com/c/em/overbuilding-curtailing-renew...
This still leaves room for hydro and nuclear.
The negative costs are borne by the owners of generating units that generate excess power when net demand falls. Solar can ramp down in milliseconds, windmills in minutes, CCGT can take hours, and nuclear takes days.
But what if we did add long distance transmission? Look at the US west of the Mississippi. I once estimated the capital cost of powering today’s demand using 100% renewables without storage.
That’s approximately $200bn in generation + $100bn for overcapacity.
The transmission system was mainly built to serve the legacy coal generators, but that’s often not where the best renewable resources are located. I estimated $40-80 billion for transmission.
That sounds like a lot, but 25% of the generation has already been spent. The cost of fuel for the gas generators, which is part of the LCOE, is on par with those numbers.
My biggest criticism of the Lazard study you mention is that it understates the cost of hedging fuel volatility costs.
We should also keep in mind that this isn't unique to renewables, all power sources have to overbuild because systems get taken offline for repair and maintenance regularly. Sometimes it's even weather dependent as well, in a recent heatwave France had to shutdown nuclear power stations because the river for cooling water was becoming too warm.
If we're taking into account those kind of costs, shouldn't we also account for the cost emitting CO2?
Hydro is great if you have the terrain for it, but much of the world is not geographically suited for extensive hydro. Nuclear is extraordinarily expensive and often takes decades to plan and build.
Renewables can be built far cheaper and far more quickly. On grids that still have gas & coal fired power stations, every GWh of electricity produced from renewables displaces a GWh that would otherwise be produced from fossil fuels.
Or, to put it another way, every dollar spent on renewables will result in a significantly larger and faster reduction of carbon emissions than if that same dollar were spent on nuclear.
That's not necessarily true as countries like China are building new nuclear reactors in 4-5 years. Remember that nuclear is one of the few industries that designs for the worst case scenario which is part of the high cost. The other component of the high cost is often policy and overzealous bureaucracy.
>On grids that still have gas & coal fired power stations, every GWh of electricity produced from renewables displaces a GWh that would otherwise be produced from fossil fuels.
This is not true. A kWh from a wind turbine is absolutely not equal to a kWh from a coal/gas/nuclear/hydro plant due to the fact that the capacity factor for a typical wind turbine is around 20-30%. A hydro plant often runs at > 80% capacity factor.
No, a kWh of energy produced by a wind turbine absolutely is equal to a kWh produced by any other means.
You'd be correct to say that a kW of capacity is not equal. (ie: a 1 GW wind farm may not produce as much energy as a 1 GW nuclear plant, but 1 GWh of energy is 1 GWh of energy, no matter what source produces it).
For what it's worth, UK off-shore wind farms currently have load factors of between 39 and 47%, and these are predicted to exceed 50% by 2035. Source: https://renews.biz/55349/uk-offshore-wind-load-factors-to-ex...
Another effect is it makes these plants sit idle for periods of time.
It costs a lot of money to build a power plant. Every hour it sits idle is an hour you're not getting any benefit out of the investment you made. So it takes longer to break even on your investment. (Possibly, as a consolation, the plant lasts longer or has lower yearly maintenance costs.)
I’d expect a power plant to be the same with all the heat and whatnot.
Of course, the availability of renewables is an issue that has to be dealt with in planning the grid. If they are cheap enough, overprovisioning helps a lot, having larger grid interconnects help - even if there is not always wind in Germany, there should be pretty always be wind in Germany or France as an example. We still can change the way existing plants produce electricity - adding pumps to hydroelectric plants to convert them into storage, store the gas used in biomass plants rather than constantly burning it. And of course we need to build up additional storage. But that is just at the beginning of the learning curve, as most grids currently can just absorb all renewables as they are produced.
Batteries and electricity storage follow learning curves too One of the downsides of renewable sources is their intermittent supply cycle. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Technologies like batteries that store electric power are key to balance the changing supply from renewables with the inflexible demand for electricity.
Fortunately electricity storage technologies are also among the few technologies that are following steeply declining learning curves.
The only piece missing here is an internet-connected thermostat for the tank that inquires about the spot price for electricity and turns on when it's cheap.
The same thing applies to your HVAC system.
Finally aside from all that I heat my water and my home with natural gas.
For HVAC, you can heat/cool it at a minimum to the edge of the comfort range, which will make a big difference. You can take it much further by heating/cooling some thermal mass, and drawing on that mass when the electricity is cheaper.
That mass can simply be a pile of stones in a box with some ductwork added. It's hard to find a cheaper "battery" technology than a box of rocks.
Frankly, I think people are way too focused on batteries and are overlooking the rather obvious.
man, the beauty in our lives disappears. Imagine that heated by electricity (especially if during cheap period) instead of coal/wood, and how great it is to sleep on or right next to such a stove (my grandmother house had one :):
This is not a used-to-was thing. It's the norm outside of towns in my county.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating#Heat_accumula...
When powered by heat pumps, I imagine this could be used for cooling in the summer as well.
To convert that to US units, that means a 3000sqft house somewhere were electricity is $0.15c/kWh would cost $600/year to heat from electric baseboard heaters. If you have a heat pump you could bring that down to $200/year - and that's before you even consider solar.
I live in a 5 year old apartment, and haven't even turned on the heating this season, but it's still a comfortable 20c/68F inside.
We, in France, have a very primitive system based peak / off-peak hours used in many houses, and I expect other countries to have the same kind of system since it is so simple.
Basically, you have an extra wire coming out of the meter. If there is voltage, it is peak hours, if there is no voltage, if is off-peak. To that wire, you connect a relay which sits in the breaker panel. That relay can turn a circuit on or off, often the water heater, so that it only runs off-peak. You can force it on if you know you are going to use more hot water than usual.
Such a simple thing, but updated in real time can already go a long way. In a more advanced system, the meter could tell you the price of electricity via PLC and you could have a relay in your breaker box that turns on a circuit depending on price.
Even smarter devices could receive the signal from the meter directly and do more things, for example, many appliances have a "delayed start" function. A "start when electricity is cheap" function would be a great addition.
The problem is that would require standardization. A standard protocol shared by utilities and electric device manufacturers. As for communication, PLC sounds ideal, it doesn't have to be fast, and it could also be the same signal used by the utility to remotely check the meter for billing (something that is being deployed in France, BTW).
That is like saying, "one of the downsides of using a cooked noodle as a fork is that it doesn't hold its shape". It's disqualifying until that issue is sorted.
The value of solar right now is that it provides energy at the hottest, most energy use part of the day. But there is a tipping point where marginal solar is not really valuable for a grid anymore. California and Germany are at that point.
Hopefully we get cost-effective day-scale energy storage, it's not going to happen in the next few years unfortunately.
Another step up in battery tech would literally level us up as a civilization.
And that is a very good problem to have.
There are any number of industrial processes that could easily put that excessively cheap energy to use. Aluminum smelting, for example.
People will keep saying it won't work long after it's already been done.
And people overestimate how much storage costs. In Texas, even with super cheap natural gas, there are more GW of storage in the interconnection queue than there are of natural gas plants. That's at today's prices, in a market where everybody competes on their own costs!
https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/
And greater than 95% of new solar projects in California include storage, and something like 25% of projects outside of California include storage along with the renewables.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hybrid-power-pl...
We don't absolutely need to deploy storage right now, but independent agents are still doing it, because they make money by deploying storage at current costs.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
But batteries get cheaper every year, so check back in 2021 for even cheaper prices. Most observers expect lithium ion storage to be cheaper than natural gas within a decade. And when you amortize the nighttime storage costs with the cheap daytime solar, natural gas is barely holding on in some markets. If we had a carbon tax that came close to internalizing the externalities, I don't think NG would be running for much longer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_...
There was a discussion few days ago about fossil fuels bootstrapping the industrial revolution(s), one of the theories is that without them we wouldn't be talking about renewable energy at all (except in very basic ways like running a watermill)
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/17/the-green-new-deal-...
That’s simply impossible.
The only reliable renewable enery is hydropower and maybe geothermal power.
Cure yourself of this tendency to jump to extremes. Your relationships and your career will benefit from pausing and moderating what you say.
To the content of your comment: -
There is a sizable menu of options to make wind and solar more reliable. Two technologies with nearly a century of history behind them are pumped hydro and CAES (compressed air energy storage).
Batteries have been technologically feasible for decades, and are on the cusp of economic feasibility (that is: being cheaper than the alternatives), thanks to the manufacturing learning curve that the OP makes so much of.
Better grid interconnections also help a lot and probably have an even more illustrious history than pumped hydro and CAES. Demand management (asking large users, e.g. pulp and paper mills to pause for a while), is also a venerable technique.
It is possible to use surplus power to make fuels to burn when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. This is still in its infancy only because we have never before had periods when electricity had a negative price.
These are just the things that sprang to my mind without thinking about it. There are others.
Seemingly complicated problems don't necessarily require complicated solutions.
You can do three easy things. Create bigger electricity grids with more decentralized generation (the whole earth receives a roughly constant amount of energy from the sun), overproduce energy or build some storage.