Electricity over $900/MWh in most of Western US now
caiso.com
caiso.com
When there's a sustained negative-degree-weather event for over a week, many people start plugging in extra space heaters or run their electric central heater longer, which places a huge amount of strain on the grid.
Luckily there are many in the midwest who use gas for heating, since it's way more efficient in the long winter months.
There are other factors too, like some plants not being maintained to a level where they can operate at full capacity in freezing weather for weeks at a time (many can, but some are not maintained to that standard—see TX), so those plants can't just pop online like they normally would during the summer.
According to the utility, shortages are not anticipated in Arizona, but conservation will help maintain the interstate pipeline system.
https://www.kgun9.com/news/local-news/southwest-gas-asks-cus...
Parents got ~10" of snow yesterday night. But it's just business as usual.
Someone else speculated that this is due to a rise in Natural Gas costs. This would make some sense given that the rise is uniform across the region.
Disclaimer: I work in the energy space. I know nothing about what is happening here and these are personal opinions.
Anyhow, the legal effect may be irrelevant if the gas producers wouldn't bother trying to export. I would imagine that producers are having trouble just delivering on their long-term, fixed-price contracts in Texas. The short-term prices might be so jacked up precisely because there's little to no surplus to export, period.
Essentially, they are willing to burn all sorts of rules and regulations in order to beat a neighboring state to attract businesses and individuals. They then make up for this loss by drawing federal dollars that are usually paid for by people and companies in those same states they drew people and businesses away from.
But they are absolutely willing to regulate where it helps them individually even if it is against purported principles.
And then, of course, there’s the annual hypocrisy where red state senators will decry any funding towards blue states (for example, emergency funding to California for fire disasters) but jump right into demanding as much money as they can get when there are disasters in their states.
Texas’s energy supply bounties hides this there but it’s evident all over the remaining red states.
"Northern California is the home of the first successful opposition to the promotion and development of commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S. In the 1950's northern and central California's privately owned utility company, PG&E, was planning to be one of the giants in the new field of nuclear energy."
I suppose Mexico might be cheaper as Nevada lacks water, particularly in remote regions where there'd be the least local resistance. Baja California has the Pacific and the Gulf of California; Sonora has the Gulf of California.
California's unique history of opposition to nuclear is unfortunate, but there are larger dynamics that are also suffocating nuclear in California; dynamics that at most are only marginally stronger in California as compared to elsewhere in the United States. Oregon or Washington could also build more nuclear plants. They already export a significant amount of electricity to California, especially to Southern California. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie) Nuclear is disfavored everywhere, and even where it's allowed and nominally profitable the RoI still sucks, so it doesn't take much friction to shift investment elsewhere. We need change at the national level to make nuclear practical again.
Though, now I'm genuinely curious why Mexico doesn't have more than its current two nuclear plants. PEMEX? (Note: Not that I think that Mexico is some third-world country bereft of regulations and organized opposition. I'm sure many of the reasons are similar as elsewhere. Still, I bet therein lie some interesting and informative stories.)
On the TOU plan in NV, weekdays in June thru Sept, from 1PM to 7PM, it's ~0.45/kWh -- but rest of the time it's under 6c/kWh -- comparable [or less] than your rate.
Hard to believe we haven't figured out efficient, reliable, & redundant long-distance electricity transmission at this point.
I generated almost 100kWh today & have used ~half that; it sure seems like transmission is almost as big of an issue as storage.
Nuclear compete with energy generated from fossil fuel, either locally or bought from neighbours, and future battery technology. The waste problem of nuclear is a problem, but not as big as the waste problem of fossil fuels.
> It didn't have to be this way :(
And, it's not! The claimed price is in the ballpark of double the actual price.
Lowest rate is $0.25/kWh and most usage will land at $0.32/kWh. Or so you'd think reading that PDF.
I divided my total electric bill by my total usage and got $0.44/kWh. There was a lot of usage in tier 2 because I don't live in the cold and dark. I use a computer and refrigerator. The various confusing surcharges and credits make knowing what any given kWh will cost very difficult.
We're getting fleeced.
No, the federal Energy Information Agency and Bureau of Labor Statistics are not wrong.
> Please take a look at an actual PG&E bill.
Looking at an actual bill will tell you what you pay, not what is typical in the state. And if it's a PG&E bill, it will tell you a significantly higher number than is paid in non-PG&E areas (which make up a majority of the state, and which include significant territories throughout Northern and Central California, including parts of the Bay Area, as well as pretty much all of Southern California.)
The parent provided a figure: 16 cents.
Forget “the rest of California”, that's extremely high for the Bay Area. Last year, SF Area average retail electricity prices by month ranged between 22.9 ¢/kW and 24.0 ¢/kW.
https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/averageenergyp...
Most of my usage is in tier 2 at $0.31443/kWh. In practice the actual bill comes out to $0.44/kWh because of all the random other complicated cruft.
Check out slide 28: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/uploadedFiles/CPUCWebsite/Content/Ne...
[0] https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra...
To add, Santa Clara city is served by Silicon Valley Power which I believe has substantially lower rates than PG&E.. there may be other such local providers..
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
16.89 ¢/kW in 2019. Where did you get 30-40 ¢/kW?
I love my municipal utility.
The cheapest possible PG&E (Silicon Valley) rate is off-peak (after midnight) winter rate. Looking at my January bill here right in front of me, that rate is $0.16675 for transmission + $0.05525 for generation. So that's 22.2c/kWh. That's the cheapest it ever gets.
The most expensive tier is peak (afternoon to midnight) in the summer, 62c/kWh.
And IIRC, electricity in Hawaii is so expensive because they generate most of it with diesel.
[1] https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/clean-energy-hawaii/integra... (red = saturated local electrical infra)
There's also this bit:
> Additional concerns and opposition to the plant have been raised by Native Hawaiians, who view all forms of volcanic activity as manifestations of the goddess Pele. To the Native Hawaiians who revere Pele, geothermal wells and energy production are a desecration of her body and spirit.
Fortunately there are still people working on it.
I think most research is focused on utilizing less unique space- rooftops, open plains, open ocean. Shorelines are tiny spaces for how ecologically unique they are, plus they tend to be highly desirable for other human uses as well.
I think it was somewhere in oceania that they were installing the protoype in. The unit looked sort of like (this)[https://imgur.com/a/ymulbWF] but wider and in hd of course.
By wider I mean it looked more like a catamaran style boat and the one in the imgur link is more like a monohull boat. The one in the video which they deployed maybe 15-30 yards off shore from a beach was where they installed it and it had branding from their company on the side and some bright yellow accents.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/audit-of-hawaiian-electric-...
> Contrary to stakeholder criticism, Hawaiian Electric's support of Hawaii's groundbreaking 100% by 2045 renewable portfolio standard (RPS) has been strong, the audit found. "It has exceeded its mandated obligations" and criticisms "appear to be largely unfounded."
> The problem is cost, it said. Meeting the RPS and the challenge of integrating rooftop solar have led to increased workload and costs, the audit recognized. But Hawaiian Electric increased staffing "with little evidence of any business cases supporting these additions."
For example, my own solar doesn't factor into the percentage of power generated in California. No one can tell you the price per kwh.
All PGE knows is that sometimes they send me power, and sometimes I send them power. They have no idea what my internal usage and costs are.
Everything comes to Hawaii by boat or plane, and boats run on diesel. So our power plants burn diesel, instead of coal, because coal, while cheaper per unit energy, would be a whole additional supply chain just for power plants.
And yeah, there's more solar and wind every year, but not nearly enough to provide the overprovisioning and storage necessary to use it for baseline power.
This isn't an issue. There are coal ships, coal trains, coal trucks, you name it. Storage is easier too, you just dump it.
The other islands burn diesel, from the refinery on Oahu.
The ships also burned heavy fuel oil until this year.
Each island is also its own isolated electric grid, so reliability is not great and shifting renewables to other islands isn't possible currently. Unfortunately, the ocean is deep between the islands and connecting them would probably cost close to a billion dollars all in. A bit of a stretch for our small state.
$0.50 a day for more reliable power.
I've been in countries where cooking 1 dish on electric oven will cost you $1.
Much of Europe has price hovering in between 30c to 50c during day hours normal usage, and easily more than double of that during extreme peaks like ones you have in Texas now.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Again, I specifically mean day time office, and residential "retail" price, which is 2-3 times bigger than wholesale.
In France its 18c during peak hours and 12c at night. Retail obviously.
It's a bit higher than i remember, but still.
Which countries in Europe charge their electricity to consumers based on 'extreme peaks' at between 60 to 100 cents? https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
I see 17 and 15c off peak. Part peak is 23 for EV-B.
You can visualize at http://www.energyonline.com/Data/GenericData.aspx?DataId=22&...
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Also note that the site contains not just "real-time" prices but also day ahead prices (selected by default) which due to instabilities are quite a bit higher then real-time prices.
[^1]: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-donnees-de-marche
In 2020 the highest wholesale electricity price spike in the US seem to have been $127/MWh with an average of $38/MWh.
>Spot electricity prices at the West [Texas] hub have soared above the grid’s $9,000 per megawatt-hour cap
That's 10X more than even OP headline price.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Texas-Freeze-Rais...
This is marked up 10x for the consumer. Texas has a lot of competition and is usually marked up less that 2x.
Not great. Not terrible.
The day-ahead contracts are high ($900) but the 15 minute and real-time prices are only $900 in a smaller region.
Still not great.
It's tempting to single out technologies or particular energy sources here as the problem or solution. But the bottom line is that this is fundamentally a policy failure and not a technical problem. Price incentives and signals are probably part of both the problem and solution here. Although none of that will matter this winter of course.
The long term effect of this kind of price instability becoming a regular thing combined with frequent blackouts are going to be interesting. IMHO it's a great opportunity for technology that is basically proven to be highly effective both in providing grid resilience and cost reductions; i.e. clean tech. Nothing like 10x spikes in bills becoming a regular thing to cause people to look for solutions.
In my country, where I live, the per unit prices are fixed and any increases are announced. I doubt whether people anywhere could keep up with 10-30x changes in prices.
Given that this are wholesale prices it about how much the company selling electricity to end-users pays for it to (simplified).
Day-ahead contracts are high because uncertainty is also high.
15 minute and real-time prices are an order of magnitude lower, despite the sun being down and electric heaters presumably consuming a lot of electricity.
Energy companies need to decide how much of their capacity they want to lock in at the high $900 rate for tomorrow, and how much they want to risk on the shorter interval contracts.
This does not mean that every MWh of electricity costs $900. It does mean power companies are doing a lot of risk management calculations right now, though.
Not everywhere. I'm seeing prices exceeding $900 when I select real-time. Perhaps I'm reading it wrong but take a look at so cal.
In much of Europe, residential, and office will pay $0.3-0.5 during normal use in winter, but dramatically less in off-peak hour in countries with "smart meters."
This way you get seemingly sensible $0.1-$0.2 per kWh averages, but drop your jaw when you see your electricity bill.
But in all seriousness, this is why the entire world interconnects their grids as much as possible: arbitraging energy needs (/ cost).
It's not implausible something like this could be economically worthwhile, though as sokoloff points out it's not close to being there at current prices. Trucks full of portable generators and diesel fuel are also a potential competitor.
Just saying that it's fallacious to argue that relying on an emergency solution instead of improved infrastructure to handle extreme cases is per se more expensive, without considering how often the extreme cases are hit.
Plus, being interconnected gives you the opportunity not just to prevent grid failure, but to sell and buy electricity to arbitrage the price, which will be increasingly important in the future due to renewable energy intermittency.
Loaded to the weight limit, you can ballpark 48K pounds or 174 Powerwall 2s. Those would hold just under 2.5MWh, or just over $2K of electricity at $900/MWh.
If you figure the truck costs you $1.50/mile on the low side, it would cost you at least $1500 to drive Pensacola to Houston and back.
Probably not a retirement plan to (Power)bank on.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that isn’t being done by the authorities to help make up the shortfall
It’s funny seeing people in this thread jumping right past the root cause and suggesting elaborate solutions like nuclear power. And before you say it’s not feasible to upgrade hundreds of millions of buildings in the USA, you should be aware that upgrading homes to be more energy efficient actually pays for itself (albeit in the long run, which is why most of us have not bothered doing it).
The root cause is extreme weather events which will will get more of. Non-renewables are not affected by the wind and sun. Since we don't want to go extinct by pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere we are left with nuclear.
I don't understand how people can want to return to feudalism where land is the only way to extract energy from the sun. But given how NYC and SF treat workers perhaps I do.
Upgrading buildings would massively reduce emissions, and we’d never have to generate the electricity in the first place. It pays for itself.
Meanwhile people spend a lot of effort on predicting Solar and Wind and yet their expectations were more pessimistic compared to the actual energy production capacity that is online.
Ok, show me.
Water during the CA droughts a few years ago is a perfect example. Water agencies asked people to conserve water. So people did. A lot. Water agencies promptly freaked out because their revenue decreased. Of course it did, people were conserving water.
So they increased the base rates (the amount they'll bill you even if consumption is zero) to compensate (and then some). In my town, base rate went from a few dollars to almost $80.
So even though my consumption went down about 20% from my efforts to conserve, my monthly bill went up from around $40 to near $100.
So what's my incentive to conserve?
It is quite a gut punch to then have the water bill increase more than 100% because the water agency is solely focused on how much profit they are making, instead of caring about conservation.
That's exactly the behaviour we (society) want - overall, water is conserved.
Increasing the base rate (making water a fixed cost regardless of usage) has the opposite effect. That was clearly a mistake on the part of the water company.
That would incentivize conservation. Unfortunately the water agency only cares about the profit they make and could not care less about conservation.
Unfortunately, because our buildings are not built by the parties that have to pay for consumption, that's not enough to incentivize energy efficient / green building construction.
There's probably some costs that need to be shared including leaky pipes and fire departments that increase in times of heat, but that seems unlikely to account for a tripling. Your water department probably charged that way because there are water hogs that create jobs/food/etc. who wouldn't be able to foot the actual bill of their water use, so while they wanted to incentivize conservation they also wanted everyone to share the bill. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; we're in this together and need money and food.
In some places (like here in the Bay Area) it's ridiculously difficult and expensive to build anything, so much of the building stock is untouched since the 1950s and simply rots in place.
We'd do well to be as good at home construction as Japan.
Well, why not?
Japan effectively rebuilt its entire housing stock few times over since WW2, and so did Britain, Germany, and ex-Union countries.
I believe USA has more money than the broke USSR did
20 year timelines is easily achievable for USA as a wealthy, and still relatively industrialised country.
Note that this doesn't really matter. It especially didn't matter back then in a less globalized economy. The USSR being poor doesn't change anything about their domestic labor pool, which is what is relevant for construction work. The laborers simply charge less.
This is same fallacy that leads people to believe we'd magically have more of everything if money hoarded by rich people was distributed across the populace. At best stuff will be distributed better. But bakers won't start baking more bread, nor will car manufacturers be able to start making more cars. Assuming unemployment stays the same, the economic output of goods won't change.
Money doesn't produce anything, people do. Money is a tool to guide labor in the right direction and distribute goods.
Which means that in order to build more, the USA would either need more construction workers or become more efficient at constructing stuff. The first can be achieved by diverting money and making the job more attractive, the second by creating a competitive environment.
I simply don't see anything much profitable left for USA to produce. No more expensive stuff left to make.
You mean... like the central bank dropping interest rates to an all time low?
The low CPI inflation also suggests an underutilized labor force.
https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/report/united-states-b...
We'd do well to shorten timelines and costs by removing permitting requirements for most types of work and loosening control over building. We also need to reduce costs of living so a broader occupational dynamic range of people can live in any area. That would expand the labor pool for doing work in urban areas.
I don't know anyone who has managed to accomplish nontrivial work on an existing home in Palo Alto in under two years and for less than half a million dollars. One friend has been trying to fix a leaky structure there for ~5 years.
There needs to be a financing system that packages all this together and offers homeowners a simple low-interest construction loan that is cheaper than their energy bills.
Even in California, natural gas prices are an order of magnitude higher than usual. Prices appear to have hit ~$90 per quadrillion BTU, versus a typical price of ~$2 per 10^15 BTU
https://www.naturalgasintel.com/data-snapshot/daily-gpi/CALR...
https://www.naturalgasintel.com/data-snapshot/daily-gpi/MCWM...
(I was curious and it provides a Midwest data point)
https://www.misoenergy.org/markets-and-operations/real-time-...
Roughly $100.
I think this misreads the abbreviation MM BTU (where M in this case is the Roman numeral thousand or "mille" rather than the metric million or "mega"). 1 MM BTU = 10^6 BTU, not 10^15.
A therm is 10^5 BTU. Last month I paid $77 for 117 therms, or about 66 cents/therm. This would be $6.6 per MM BTU.
By the way that was 126 ccf (ccf = 100 cubic feet) or 12600 cubic feet (357 cubic meters).
As you say, $90 wholesale for something I'm used to paying less than $10 for, is a big increase.
I hope your fish make it.
And now you know the value of camping gear :)
So that leaves Nuclear. But we just need to get it right this time -- i.e. don't build them near earthquake/tsunami zones, don't play games with the control rods and these days we've gotten pretty good at control systems. I think it's about time to look at it again.
Wind and Solar is pulling above planned generation right now.
If you believe your logic, time to go all-in on wind + solar.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/EEbf5lM.png (screenshot from EIA, original data here: https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/e...)
Your first statement is partially true. The ERCOT "planners" expected their gas capacity to basically always be there, and the fact that 30 GW of thermal capacity is offline for various weather-related reasons is the primary reason the power is out.
But the remaining gas is pulling almost all the weight keeping people alive so we shouldn't neglect that.
I think wind can play a huge role in fixing this. Check out: https://www.windy.com/?37.539,-94.134,4
And you've got plenty of massive offshore wind resources on both sides of the continent that are blowing right now (Feb 17th 7:49pm PDT) if we had installed capacity.
We need to keep our nuclear fleet (20% of electrical generation) and invest in a TON of transmission.
If we had this electrical grid, we'd be doing far better: https://twitter.com/Sammy_Roth/status/1356442256866037766
https://www.vnews.com/northern-pass-eversource-hydroquebec-2...
I do like the idea (from the linked tweet) of underground transmission lines (underground alongside railroads is probably mitigates the NIMBY objections):
https://www.volts.wtf/p/transmission-fortnight-burying-power
Best way to do it is to go: 1. All underground transmission. 2. Expand the natural gas pipeline permitting process (which is controlled at the Federal level and already overrides state's jurisdiction) to include underground electrical transmission.
Like it's pulling a lot of weight because it's 80% of the capacity if nothing's going wrong! If it was 100% then maybe 40 GW of thermal capacity would _also_ be offline.
ERCOT assumed 0% from Wind. Instead we're getting 25% They assumed 100% from gas. Instead we're getting 50% (or 70% or whatever). You look at that and tell me gas is what's performing well here, and the segment that should be expanded. (EDIT: Sorry, I think your original thing was "all in nuclear." I think I read nuclear was also having some issues but it's at least not the "more gas is the solution for a situation where gas is failing" narrative)
I get that wind + solar can't cover everything, but right now what we're seeing is massive failures from gas. In a universe where we had more wind + solar, there could likely be more energy going around right now.
> https://twitter.com/Beazy_Rampezy/status/1362043827800977414
Go to here: https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-vi... , select "daily" view and put in 60 days to get a more representative sample.
on 12/19/2020 -- looks to be a fairly typical Texas winter day
natural gas production was 331660 megawatthours
wind was 191415 megawatthours
for a ratio of 1.73 gas/wind
this appears to be fairly typical numbers on a daily basis over the winter -- actually on a number of days wind surpasses gas
on 2/16/2021
natural gas 692091
wind 90087
for a ratio of 7.68 gas/wind
natural gas 2/16 vs natural gas 12/19 is ratio 2.09
wind 2/16 vs wind 12/19 is ratio 0.47
so as expected during an inclement weather event natural gas ramped up and wind ramped down. natural gas just didn't ramp up enough to pick up all the slack from increased demand and ramped down renewables.
"I get that wind + solar can't cover everything, but right now what we're seeing is massive failures from gas. In a universe where we had more wind + solar, there could likely be more energy going around right now." -- Wind is failing much worse than gas from an objective power generation standpoint. All wind has going for it is the tyranny of low expectations.
So my logic is go Nuclear, like France. Keep the natural gas for heating (since it's relatively efficient and cleaner than other fossil fuels). Supplement with solar/wind where & when available.
North East US is running about 28% nuclear at the time I viewed the fuel mix chart.
And the blame doesn’t lie on natural gas but on the idea of shutting down baseload-capable sources like nuclear in favor of renewables.
What nuclear has been shut down in Texas?
As Princeton engineering professor Jesse Jenkins points out, the real primary culprit was the mass failure of nuclear, coal, and natural gas (or "thermal") power plants. At the peak of the blackout something like 27,000 megawatts of thermal capacity were offline — or nearly 40 percent of Texas's entire thermal capacity.
https://theweek.com/articles/967062/what-texas-blackout-reve...
http://www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/uploads/publ...
A 10GW solar farm is already in the pipeline for northern Australia:
Take a look at France:
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
They generated 71% of their 582 TWh in 2018 from Nuclear, with the bulk of the remainder coming from Hydro (12%) Natural Gas (5%), Wind (5%) ... (solar was only 2%, same as coal).
They are a net exporter of power and that generates about €3 billion/year of revenue.
As long as we need peakers or other dispatchable powers supply, I like solar and wind over nuclear to provide the main quantity of generation vs nuclear. I don't see nuclear catching up to renewables on cost terms at this point.
You need electricity produced at the right time as well as the right place. I don't understand how people can get that producing electricity in the middle of the Sahara is useless, but producing it at 12pm on June 15th when you need it today isn't.
The problem at the moment is that none of the sources for Texas was prepared for a cold winter, renewable or otherwise.
Quebec is 99% renewable[0] (95% hydro, 4% wind) and runs through the coldest of winter just fine!
> With over 40 853 MW of installed capacity, hydroelectric stations generate about 95% of Quebec’s electricity.
> Wind is the 2nd largest source of electricity generation in Quebec. In 2018, wind capacity reached 4 096 MW and accounted for 4% of the province’s generating capacity
[0] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
Russia built a floating nuclear power plant in the remote city of Pevek in the polar circle where hardly any wind turbine or solar panel will be able to generate sufficient amounts of electricity.
The issue isn't about the type of fuel, it's planning for cold weather events.
Comparing hydro to wind and solar is unreasonable.
Hydro is a battery, wind and solar are not.
Hydro is easily comparable with wind/solar assuming the scheme has a steady inflow (river, rain, snow etc)
Hydro has huge impacts on the environment and can only be built if you have mountains and large amounts of water.
Oh, and it’s one of the dealiest sources of energy. The Banqiao dam disaster in 1975 killed as much as 250.000 people while there are less than 50 deaths attributed to Chernobyl according to UNSCEAR/WHO.
If you think about the danger of renewable sources of energy, know that there is not alternative because we have no alternative planet.
Betwwwn 250,000 accidental deaths and billions of suffering people, I choose the former.
1. Chernobyl was an old, unsafe design, and the disaster was human error. There are better safer designs.
2. The true toll of Chernobyl is the hundreds of thousands of people killed due to pollution from coal plants (52000 per year in US alone). Lives that could be saved if countries had shifted to Nuclear more aggressively.
I don't know why you think billions are suffering from Nuclear plants. About 20% of total power generation in US is from Nuclear. Can you tell me how many millions are suffering from it?
Those were your words, so I'm asking you about the billions.
The source (ii) should be able to be ramped up and shut down quickly, which is a requirement where nuclear flat out fails.
The baseline concept of a power source that is steady and cannot be quickly shut down or ramped up (i.e., nuclear or coal) really does not make sense in a world where you have access to very cheap but somewhat unpredictable sources of energy.
Ideally, source (ii) would be electricity storage. This is not available now at the necessary scale (but it is getting closer and closer to reality). So the other alternatives are hydro (ideal if available in your environment, but not always available) and gas.
Nuclear doesn't enter into it. Starting up and stopping nuclear reactors is a difficult time consuming process that cannot be done on demand.
And yes Gas is falling on its face right now, but that is not due to any fundamental limitations of gas. It is because a lot of the US nat gas is mined and transported in Texas and the Texans did not winterize their equipment.
I expect renewables will keep increasing in combination with gas, until power storage becomes available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
But at the end of the day, it uses more energy than it generates due to the inefficiencies of pumping water up to the top of the mountain (basically, it's playing arbitrage with spot electricity pricing & demand).
Also, it is very good for intermittent generation, because when you stop it, you can fill up the water in the reservoir and give yourself potential energy for the next time you start it up. It does in a way store energy, it stores the energy of rivers, not of electricity.
Of course whether you can access it depends on your environment. You have to have convenient rivers to dam up, and you have to have no water shortages. In a case of water shortage the decision to let water out or not is usually made based on water needs, not electricity needs.
Hydro only plays a large role world-wide in countries with low population densities such as Norway.
That’s a lie spread by the renewables lobby.
Of course, there is always a certain level of electricity generation that is needed as most people like to use their fridges, AC and computers 24/7.
And then you have things like traffic infrastructure, hospitals, gas stations which operate 24/7.
I don’t know about the US, but in Germany only 25% of the electricity is consumed by private households, 75% by industry, traffic and businesses.
The result is that in Germany the demand never goes below 50 GW and normally peaks at around 75-80 GW. The demand function pretty much oscillates like a sine function.
This is true but let me summarise my understanding which might be incorrect, and is based off this article and similar ones. I'd like to know where it's wrong?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-10-12/renewable-ene...
Basically, there is a minimum amount of power a traditional power plant can generate before needing to turn off, which is slow and costly.
"Base load" is this minimum amount that is generated onto the grid and it is priced accordingly at off-peak times so demand will increase and consume it without power stations losing money by burning fuel to waste power, or having to turn off.
With renewables in the picture, they eat into this base load demand. Now when demand is lower, renewables might still be outputting power at little to no marginal cost, and homes are not pulling from the grid. The traditional plants are burning fuel but they have to sell it at a loss or dump the power (maybe batteries can help them here).
This means that, as we get more and more renewable sources online, traditional plants are actually bad for base load (in the modern use of the term) generation. A lot of the time they can't come online fast enough to fill a slump if renewables drop, which means they are idling and losing money the rest of the time when renewables are flourishing. This means we need rapid response sources, like batteries (seconds) or gas (tens of minutes) rather than the traditional sources (coal) which take hours.
This way a traditional fossil fueled power station get paid to maintain capacity regardless of current demand, and the response time is kept low in case of changing weather.
From the perspective of the government, they are simply paying for a reliable power grid. From the perspective of renewable energy plants, they can sell energy at a lower price than fossil fueled power plants with smaller investment. From the perspective of the fossil fueled power plant they get paid twice, once for being backup and then any power they then happen to sell when the price goes up because of the weather. From the perspective of capacity, both renewable and fossil fueled power plants tries to have capacity close to 100% of demand and thus get invested and built accordingly.
From my own perspective I am not sure this is the cleanest, most stable or cheapest way to run a power grid.
Hydro power is a great alternative, but we are already at peak utilization. We actually need to tear down some in order to save red listed species and restore the environment for animals that need to have unobstructed rivers to reproduce. As the capacity has been increasing, hydro power has been mostly static in term of growth.
There is nuclear and the political situation of that. The government and the green party (who is part of the current government constellation) are promoting the "on call" as a favorable strategy over nuclear. Their main political argument is that everything is good as long we produce more green energy over the whole year than we consume coal energy during the winter. Historically the political right has been pro-fossil fuels, but given the current situation there has been some movement now where some parties is looking to move into opposition.
And last we got battery technology. So far the only installations that I know globally that operate by generating solar energy and putting them into battery is Tesla. I don't know how economical that system has been. There exist to my knowledge no wind park operating through Tesla batteries, and I do not know why that is.
If the patents are to be believed, then Lockheed-Martin's Skunkworks has developed a portable fusion reactor the size of an intermodal shipping container. I'd like to see those scaled up significantly for usage around the world, for a variety of reasons... extraordinarily cheap power for one, but far more manageable nuclear waste storage for another, and more important, reason.
Source?
And https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...
I admit I myself am highly skeptical of this project... but I welcome it with open arms if its true.
Though it wouldn't surprise me if deaths+birth defects+other health problems was still a lot lower for nuclear than for coal and oil.
Most of those places are not affected by blackouts being a regular thing. I can't remember the last one in Germany, which has lots of wind. I can't remember a single power outage lasting more than a few minutes/seconds, ever. I'm 46 and I only experienced only a handful of those. Just not a thing in Northern Europe. We have interconnected grids and coal/nuclear are basically disappearing rapidly. I believe the UK had an interesting cascading failure on its grid last year and that was big news because it is so unusual. That only lasted for a few hours.
If you look at the economics, it's pretty straightforward. Texas was an early adopter of wind because it's a cheap option for generating power and it takes power to produce power. So a lot of that Texan wind power is actually used for oil and gas production and was installed primarily for that purpose and payed for by very much for profit oil companies. Probably with the help of a lot of tax money because big oil basically owns the local politicians.
Ironically, the thing that's currently driving up the prices of gas in the US, is basically oil and gas production being affected by the sudden demand for gas for heating. As demand spiked, gas production capacity started dropping because the electrical grid got disrupted (which is of course about 50% powered by gas plants in Texas). Probably Texas is more reliant on gas now than in the past, which is probably a big reason for the current issues.
Yes, some older wind turbines are not capable of dealing with cold weather. Texas of course has lots of those as it was an early adopter and is not commonly affected by cold weather like this.
But there are lots of regions with extreme weather that have large deployments of wind turbines that reliably produce power through very extreme conditions. E.g. Antarctica has wind power. So does Iceland, Norway, or Alaska. Ice proof wind turbines is a high tech business and a fairly recent development. So, wind is basically part of the solution here and not part of the problem.
In this current Texas disaster those base line thermal generators like coal, gas and nuclear have also fallen victim to these low temperatures.
For scale, at this time of night I’d expect my power to be priced at ~ 0.8 c/Kwh. Right now we are sitting at 15 c/Kwh.
Why is it your power can be 0.8c/Kwh?, that seems really really low.
I put the hourly numbers on a couple of dashboards around my house populated by this api https://hourlypricing.comed.com/hp-api/
300 kWh @ $0.148799
288 kWh @ $0.108297
tiers are .24/.31/.39 per kwh
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
So natural gas spot prices have gone from around $3-MMBTU to like $350-MMBTU and there is 30GW of electrical generating capacity offline.
There must be lots of generators making bank.
Where most people are paying enormous rates, I purchased my whole tank of gas for $940, plus delivery fee.
I have strongly recommended to my friends to have generators installed and to buy their own natural gas storage tanks to power them. While my personal setup was about $20,000 fully installed and hooked up, you can easily get a 24kW model that would power most homes 2000-2500 sq. ft. easily, for about $7000-$9000.
Best part is, many whole home generator providers will allow you to finance if the upfront costs are too burdensome.
(edit: found a Bloomberg article confirming it for Monday)
That way you can slip on the snow and fall onto not just the snow, but the compacted snow that's now become ice, and not just ice, but the incredibly hard concrete that is your driveway...
Yeah I don't see that ending poorly at all.
Likely, no, as your rates have been set some time ago.
However if you sign up for a service like OhmConnect, you can get paid to lower your energy usage at times when prices are high (which tends to coincide with use of the dirtiest energy). They warn you a day ahead for the time period, usually an hour but sometimes two, and you get credit for being under your typical usage for that time period.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Tex...
I don't think they do where I live, because the rates are regulated and the power company needs permission to raise them.
In Texas and other deregulated markets, you can be on either a fixed rate for n months or on a variable rate. If you're on a variable rate, the rate will be much higher than normal for the next few months. If you're on a fixed rate you're fine for now, but keep an eye on when your fixed rate expires. This assumes that your supplier is still in business after the next few months (many suppliers will go bankrupt because of this). For the suppliers, they're going to be hit hard by people who either decide not to pay their supplier next month, or have people who switch to budget billing. They're going to suffer a cash crunch for a bit.
If you are in a regulated market or are using the regulated utilities like ConEd in NYC, you'll see limited rate increases to deal with the increased cost to supply. These rate increases need to be approved by the state's Public Utility Commission.
If deregulated suppliers are having to raise prices to cover costs, wouldn't that apply to regulated suppliers as well? Unless they have enough cash on hand to ride it out, then they will have to raise prices or go bankrupt. I would feel like the risk of bankruptcy would be higher if they have limited ability to raise prices.
I'm assuming regulated and deregulated suppliers operate similarly. I don't know if regulated suppliers are required to have some sort of backup for this situation.
What has been a recent trend is generator companies purchasing supplier companies (for example Calpine purchased Champion Energy and Noble Solutions)
Basically the regulated suppliers will probably see some rate increases but they will be more gradual and certainly won't be as wild as rate increases by deregulated suppliers.
PS deregulated supplier is a bit of a misnomer. They are still regulated by the state Public Utility Commission, but they are less regulated than the utilities that also do distribution.
Wont it be normal in a few days when temperatures get back to warm?
I don’t know what the smart meter situation is like in Texas but there might be some people on price-linked tariffs who would be exposed.
https://www.bchydro.com/energy-in-bc/operations/power-tradin...
BC Hydro, via Powerex, trades energy within this region [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interconnection
[2] http://www.caiso.com/Documents/PowerexWillJoinWesternEnergyI...
PG&E has been raising rates for <plausible-reason-this-week>
for weeks → ∞
As we shift to more renewables and start to install more and more grid storage, and even home storage, reliability will increase massively. Those people with solar and batteries that can island their homes are completely fine the past few days.
We have a much more modern, cost effective, and scalable set of technologies now than we did in the 1970s. I don't see how nuclear can compete on any level, as it's incredibly inefficient and has proven that it can't scale in the modern world.
Solar photovoltaic and wind are much older technologies than nuclear, to be fair on the "modern" quip.
To be completely fair, the development of nuclear power took governments and would have been impossible otherwise. Solar and wind, not so much. The problem with nuclear is only cost, not NIMBY and before it is said so, it certainly is not the regulations jacking the cost of nuclear so high. If nuclear power was economically viable, you could not beat off the investors. The trouble is, the investors don't want to pay the $15B or so it costs to build a single plant, nor the cost of decommissioning, nor for the cost of storing the waste effectively forever, plus the cost of securing that, and certainly not for any accidents, as improbable as they may be. They just want to sell electricity and profit, and leave the government with the responsibility of paying for all the things.
And really to be fair, the cost of R&D for nuclear power has never been paid back. Pay the US and UK taxpayers back for the R&D and you can have all the nuclear power plants you want.
Similarly, we know that serial construction of standard nuclear is cost effective from the examples cited.
If nuclear power was economically viable, no one could stop it. But investors do not want to pay for plant construction without massive subsidies that are now absent, nor for the decommissioning, nor for the storage of spent fuel; they just want to sell electricity and keep the money without any overhead. Where are the private investors! Bring them on and get it done! They're simply not interested. "Electricity too cheap to meter" never materialized. Renewable energy is a far better return, and today, nuclear power can not compete against renewables. Consider that if a tiny portion of the investment in R&D for nuclear energy had instead been invested in renewables, nuclear energy would have died in the 1960's.
The costs also do not rise per unit power. As with anything, the more you install, the cheaper it gets to install them.
The costs are always inflated by the anti-nuclear movement, but when you talk to actual nuclear engineers you will learn that these costs have never been a problem.
I have visited multiple decommissioned nuclear plants in Germany and the guides talked about the decommissioning costs which were 6 billion Euros for the two plants of former East Germany.
And keep in mind that a single nuclear reactor produces electricity worth more than one million Dollars - per day - with the NRC already having licensed plants for an 80-year lifetime such as the Turkey Point station.
And don’t forget that solar and wind will _always_ need a backup solution such as natural gas. You have to include these when comparing costs.
That’s a blatant lie.
According to the Bundesnetzagentur which is the local regulator for the electricity grid, the number of times where they have to intervene on the electricity grid to stabilize it has dramatically increased due to the higher share of renewables:
> https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Sachgebiete/Elektrizitae...
Germany’s energy sector causes 350 million tons of CO2 annually, 50 France’s just 50 million tons CO2 annually.
> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
> https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
The kWh in France costs 17 Euro Cents, while it costs over 31 Euro Cents in Germany.
> https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
France has 70% nuclear, Germany 50% renewables.
I have no idea why some people on HN keep spreading such lies about nuclear and the so-called Energiewende in Germany.
You should get your facts straight!
I can't read your link, so I don't know what you mean by "intervene to stabilize," but that actually sounds like a good thing, since the German grid has the least amount of downtime of any of its neighbors and is far better than the US. Here's an IEEE article:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid...
> Germany’s energy sector causes 350 million tons of CO2 annually, 50 France’s just 50 million tons CO2 annually.
What is the relevance here? Germany has always burned lots of coal. Adding renewables, just like adding nuclear, reduces that.
> The kWh in France costs 17 Euro Cents, while it costs over 31 Euro Cents in Germany.
Again, what is the relevance here? Germany bought a ton of solar when it was super expensive, driving the industry forward and permanently lowering costs for everyone. It also charges residential consumers a lot more in order to subsidize industry.
>I have no idea why some people on HN keep spreading such lies about nuclear and the so-called Energiewende in Germany.
>You should get your facts straight!
I would insist that you do the same. Misrepresentations and cherry picked bad numbers are not helpful or informative.
Germany is closing nuclear plants and replacing them with gas plants. Guess which one emits more CO2.
Coal plants will shut down very soon and that will "surprisingly" make Germany look much better.
After all, the strategy that is currently being pursued is very erratic. The emission reductions are not going to follow a smooth curve like the CO2 emissions in 2020 showed. It's very difficult to make sense of what is going to happen. An us vs them comparison might not show the whole picture.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
Ideally new ones would be designed better to avoid this possibility, but new nuclear plants take a minimum of 5 years if you're really sprinting. It's probably the most difficult, expensive, and time-consuming option compared to weather-hardening existing power plants and building new wind, solar, and storage.
> https://twitter.com/Beazy_Rampezy/status/1362043827800977414
The average capacity of nuclear across the US is never below 90% which is far better than any other source of energy.
Wind is 25% capacity factor on average, solar 10% and natural gas around 50~60%.
So while the tripping of STP1 was unlucky, the plant was just offline for a short time providing how extreme reliable it is.
Sucks for the regular folk, though...
Rick Perry just said this in response to the White House pushing infrastructure spending after this disaster: “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business”
But it was alright when Trump wanted to launch 'infrastructure week'?
And it's totally ok to send in FEMA and a lot of other government assistance?!?!
BTW tangent why hasn't FEMA sent in the ships that can provide power? I think the nuclear ones can and maybe even the Comfort but i'm not sure on that specifically
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5qC1YGRMKI
You might also be interested to know that former Enron CEO, Jeff Skilling, is no longer in prison and was reported to be starting a digital energy marketplace.
https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2020/06/05/former-e...
Like that comment was dripping with irony and schadenfreude, sure, but is not flamebait!
Enron was real, and they fucked things up for good!
If you remember those days, this should chill your blood. It sounds like a fictional movie, but it was very real.
Tapes: Enron plotted to shut down power plant https://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/03/enron.tapes/
Texas lost 28GW of natural gas. It's a catastrophe. https://twitter.com/JesseJenkins/status/1362160723552579595