Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? (2020)
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
One big reason renewables became so cheap is because around 2008 Beijing Olympics, China decided that they were done with air pollution in the cities. IIRC at that time coal power and other industrial production had to be stopped for a couple of months in the surrounding provinces to make the games happen and people (importantly top bureaucrats who lived in Beijing) decided they liked the clean air.
China doesn't have any substantial deposits of fossil fuels that give get clean air (like gas that US has) and Oil and Gas has to be largely imported leaving them at the mercy of international market prices and currency fluctuations. So they started heavily investing in renewables production capacity, first in wind (China's installed capacity started doubling yoy around then) and then Solar from 2010/11 even if they were expensive then and it wasn't clear how much of a learning rate benefit there would be. Similarly massive electrification of public transport and introducing subways later in the decade again to reduce pollution in the cities. Now i believe they have 3X the installed base of the next biggest country (US) and still accelerating.
Later on the Paris Climate treaty just added extra momentum with the climate change and carbon reduction angle. But it was originally a political decision that took political will - to get cleaner air in the cities even at a possibly higher cost.
The scale and transition is crazy and rapid. The savings on fuel alone easily made the upfront cost worth it; growing a new industry and cleaning up the air were nice bonuses
I.e. you can pragmatically already use electric vehicles in many places.
But transition away from coal power plants will still take quite a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics#/media...
The slight price bump around 2002-2005 relates to them starting to be financially viable with subsides resulting in a shortage, but factories where being spun up worldwide to meet demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics#/media...
While panel costs have continued to drop they stopped being a significant issue for adoption years ago. Prices that used to be incidental such as labor, inverters, and grid connections now make up an increasing share of insulation costs.
On the one hand, cheap chinese solar panels is a good thing for the environment. But it can be terrible for solar panel manufacturers in the US and EU. At the end of the day, industry/jobs always trumps environment.
Some US and EU manufactures where able to keep up with the price drops and they would have reached similar price drops with or without any involvement from China. Completion and increased investment (Ed: and arguably dumping) did result in a short term drop in prices, but current prices are in line with trends going back to the 1970’s.
For example LG Solar, a South Korean company, is manufacturing 500 megawatts of solar panels annually in Huntsville, AL cost competitively. SunPower a US company manufactures some of the highest efficiency mass market solar cells in Malaysia and the Philippines etc.
People want to simplify things and say country X did Y, but it’s far more complicated especially when you look into how long it takes to bring new manufacturing methods to market.
The consensus is that China is what really accelerated the price drops. Not sure why basic facts are being disputed lol
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-china-is-domi...
Put another way if they had been 80% cheaper than the rest of the market a 30% US tariff would have been meaningless.
That has been true in China.
As to the second chart not being log scale that choice was made by Wikipedia, you can easily plot it on log scale, but it looks even more like a strait line.
Further that article is from 2016, it’s hyper focused on a specific shift in manufacturing while things continued to evolve over time.
You can sell some custom panels for $50,000 a watt and scale production the next day to $5,000 a watt - if volume didn’t change and price per watt was purely due to technological advance it isn’t relevant.
Find a chart that controls for panel tech, go look at who is buying said panels of said type and it’s obvious why and who is causing the price drop.
So I am saying the opposite, the price drop after solar became cheaper than coal is largely irrelevant. Once it was cheaper than coal anywhere without subsides it demand would skyrocket and prices would continue to fall as adoption increased.
Before that point PV was still useful for an ever wider range of niche applications, satellites for example can’t connect to the electric grid. Various applications where connecting to the grid was expensive or inconvenient swapped to solar at various points on that cost curve ex:sailboats. That was sped up by subsides, without which panels might still be 50$/watt and mostly used for calculators etc.
After bridging the vast technical gap to become cost competitive with coal adoption was going to increase dramatically, no subsides needed. So sure without China panels might be 20-50% more expensive, but that simply isn’t a big deal because PV would still be the cheapest option.
was. LG is shutting down solar panel manufacturing https://electrek.co/2022/02/23/lg-electronics-is-going-to-st...
So the initial boost came from Germany (and a green-social-democrat goverment), that enabled the mainly Chinese manufacturers to continue the constant cost reductions ever since.
For primary energy consumption the share of solar enery was 1.7 % in 2021.
Source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Primary energy is thermal energy before conversion to work. PV's output has already been converted to electrical energy. One kWh of PV output displaces several kWh of primary thermal energy.
One could argue that that is what the market should do with non competitive players.
But on the other hand more jobs were lost in solar than are now being saved in coal with massive subsidiaries (on the scale of 80k € per job in the coal industry towards the companies in that market if I remember correctly).
While I as a consumer have to pay around 1/3 of my gas price as 'tax' for the development of eco friendly tech.
Were the solar subsidiaries still in place when we bought and remodeled our home we would have gone more solar than just a little bit for hot water. It just didn't calculate for a two person home on the timescale of 30 years. And solar panels back then had an estimated lifespan of 15 to 25 years.
But that is just anecdata
This is the biggest road block in the US (that and utilities not wanting to let people pay them less money). In Europe prices are typically around €1/W for a residential install - and even less if you include incentives. In the US prices are typically 2-3x that.
Utility-scale PV just makes so much more sense than grid-connected residential solar. It's easier and cheaper to install. The objection that it uses more land is without merit in the US, where land cost is largely negligible.
- It would probably be what hurts Russia most
- It might have pretty good long-term effects
- But it also would hurt the EU a lot, especially eastern EU countries, like the _huge_ majority of heating (both rooms and water) in Germany is done by Gas (through also by house-central gas powered heating units in many cases). Also gas-powered ovens and stoves are still pretty common, too. This is not something which can be easily migrated, even less until next winter. So doing this decision will lead to quite a bit of civil hardship and even death next winter... It might still be the right thing to do. I just don't see it happen tbh.
EDIT: Maybe I should add a bit of context: Even if Gas can be filled in from other sources there are limits and the price will hike quite a bit even if there is enough. Furthermore it's unlikely that Russia will take it lying down, cyber attacks on infrastructure for deviling Gas are to be expected and maybe even physical sabotage. At the same time to safe money many Countries have kept increasingly smaller Gas reserves in recent years.
Shares of EU imports as of 2019 from Russia where as follows:
Coal: 46.7 %
Gas: 41.1 %
Crude oil: 26.9 %
Source: Eurostat at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/energy/bloc-2...
Stores will get Hermany over the winter. No matter what happens, there will be a major push to improve efficiencies. Next winter might also see a return of COVID-era home office policies, allowing offices to shut down and reduce demand.
I am not sure how easy it is to repurpose newer air conditioners that have a lot more electronics. Also keep in mind that in order to use a heat pumps efficiently, your heating system must be designed to work with relatively low fluid temperatures (mine runs at ~37 degrees centigrade). What worked best for me was a heated wall + fan convector for the living spaces and oversized radiators for the bedrooms.
Death? Hardly. Most German homes are well isolated and can be heated quite efficiently. If gas cuts out one can use an electric stove. Same for cooking, one can use an electric hob.
So hardship—yes, especially for the poorest living in undermaintained homes and no resources to upgrade. Germany will certainly put in support programmes for those affected.
That statement seems to conveniently ignore the reality of how electricity is generated and how much of it is available.
Cut off the gas supply without adequate notice, and the power grid will fail.
By the way, is the German power grid really reliant on gas to such an extent?
I think this undersells the demand for clean air. It's a huge political issue in China, one which animates people on the street even though the people of China are legendarily passive on political questions. If the government saw any way to clean up the air without impoverishing the country, they'd be all over it. You don't need to face reelection to appreciate a free win.
A brief experience of clean air in Beijing is a small thing compared to the constant massive demand for cleaner air everywhere.
E.g. many wind turbines instead of one huge power plant.
This means that adaption over time can happen much faster and can potentially happen during the implementations of larger long term projects (e.g. huge off shore wind farms).
It also means prototyping cost tends to be cheaper and it can be easier adopted by smaller groups instead of needing larger consensus.
While I used wind turbines as an example it's also true for many other aspects like Geo-termal power, solar energy, solar powered water heating, etc.
Even some classically "huge" projects like dams have smaller (micro) versions by now which as far as I can tell advance much faster in technology (often technology about micro-dams having less negative effects on the small-river they are build into, wrt. to fish but also sediment movement).
Add to this that research on many of the renewable energies is ongoing since quite a long time and that increasingly more people and countries realize the importance it's not too surprising I think.
It also touches a little on the installation time. Nuclear power stations takes years to build - even after the tortuous planning process. Wind farms are quicker to install. A solar array is almost instantaneous by comparison. The panels on my roof took a week - and most of that was dealing with scaffolding and my dodgy wiring.
If you can install solar panels day-after-day, you benefit from an increased learning rate. And, frankly, the training for how to do it isn't arduous. Nuclear might be the future - but it requires a highly trained workforce and constant maintenance. All of which are expensive.
It doesn’t work everywhere of course and requires some form of storage or offsetting by powering the grid during the day.
Are people obliged to eat at restaurants because it supports the local economy as opposed to buying from the grocery store and preparing their own meals at home?
But you’re going to pay either way. And you still benefit. That’s ok. If you can afford to have a fully self-sufficient power system you can probably afford the incidental costs associated with any other imposed utilities fees.
There is a reason why people pay taxes for things they think they don’t need/use. Tax dollars (not enough) go to schools regardless of if you have children who use the schools or not. That’s okay too. While the connection may not be 100% A to B on your returned value for the school you still exist in the society which stands to benefit from them and it still impacts you.
You are also still supporting your local economy (potentially to a lesser degree depending on where you buy the groceries) if you make food at home. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition here.
Edit: I take this back. It depends at least on where you live
Keep in mind, the top three states by population are California, Texas, and Florida. Heat pumps can meet the needs of housing in these climates, alongside rooftop solar. Produce where you consume when able.
How much battery storage do you have? What does that cost these days?
In the meantime, it behooves myself and others for battery storage to be installed in places where the grid is far dirtier (remote communities, islands) where storage avoids burning diesel or bunker fuel (versus cleaner but not zero carbon natural gas).
(your comment history looks like you’re pro nuclear/anti renewables, so while I hope my comment was informative, I’m not interested in arguing the merits of net metering, rooftop solar, or nuclear vs renewables).
It is probably a bit more clear to most people to just say that you produce more power than you use, rather than say you are fully self sufficient.
>...your comment history looks like you’re pro nuclear/anti renewables,
There is no need to misrepresent my comments.
It's quite possible for someone to produce enough energy for their regular use from rooftop solar, even if they drive an EV and don't have natural gas. If they're using an electric resistive furnace to heat a large, poorly-insulated house and have a small solar installation that's partially shaded by trees and they drive an EV long distances on a regular basis, then no, they probably aren't going to break even.
What do you mean by this? Our solar panels produce enough electricity that we never* draw from the local grid. We have a 4,000 sq foot home with 8 people living it. At least a few people are home all the time. We have 2 AC units and 2 furnaces. We have an electric water heater.
* Well, we surely do at night, yet we generate so much more than we use that the credits from the overage feeding back into the grid more than compensates for whatever we use at night. Our monthly electric bill is never higher than the $12 hookup fee.
And is your solar on the roof? Do you get up their and clear it off after it snows so you can get power? And what happens when you need a new roof? Did you factor in that cost?
When you add in the required extra panels (to account for charging and drawing power at the same time, and for overcast days), batteries, inverters, regulators, permitting, installation, and many other things, you start to realize that renewable power is a lot more expensive than just the panels. And if you have a system on your property, its a lot more hassle than just paying a bill.
The advice given is to check that your roof isn't going to need repairs before you get them installed. But a roof usually lasts decades and decades so doesn't feel that is a big factor.
Our panels definitely don't feel like hassle! There were lots of decisions getting them installed (no permitting where we are for they size of system we have), but now they are up there, they just do their thing.
An honest comparison would only judge the externalities of solar in the light of the externalities of fossil fuels it is replacing, and not in isolation as you are doing.
While solar may use the grid as a giant battery, fossil fuels are using the atmosphere as a giant garbage dump. One of these is obviously much worse.
There is more to power delivery than V=IR
Transmission losses are not negligible. Power goes from generator through transmission lines through multiple substations before it reaches a customer. There's a lot of loss that just gets rolled into the retail price of that power.
There are already places where locally generated energy is cheaper than utility-supplied energy, and this will only increase over time as the costs of solar and storage continue to decline.
Where I live in Western Australia the local utility is trying to get ahead of this trend by cutting the network and deploying stand-alone power systems to customers on the edge of the power grid.
These types of statements are meaningless, not only because you assume the future of solar power but because they are completely subjective and variable. Since there are already people who live this way, we know for a fact it’s “enough”, for some people.
Regarding transmission loss I’m sure you’re correct that it’s not a sensible solution when you’re already on the grid.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/03/1-year-of-edent_solar-we-ar...
Over the whole year, we generate more electricity than we use.
The panels need no maintenance. I guess we could wash them - but the English rain does that just fine. The inverter and panels all have long guarantees so, while they might break, there's no significant cost installed.
Having a reasonably big water heater I heat water from electricity [1] during the day and get it hot enough in the evening and next morning without extra energy needs, so actually the time-limited daily production for hot water can be shifted enough to cover 24h, actually if I do not use that much or install something bigger even around two days.
Something similar is valid for some other energy needs, for instance cooking, washing cloves, dishes when the Sun shine means full self-consumption witch does not cover the total, but heavily reduce grid usage. In the summer, at least here, I run air con almost full-power without consumption from the grid, in the evening and night temperature drop far more than enough to not need extra energy. Being on mounting in absence of sunlight I do not normally needs air con also during the day.
The real issue is another: grid stability. While I can easily produce enough energy in most days of the year when a load start solar inverter react slowly, when a load drop there is an excess of energy for a little time. ALL kind of generators do like static or slowly changing loads and do NOT like spikes. That's the real issue. In a large enough, but not too large, grid loads tend to remain stable enough, changes are more like "background noise changes". On a microgrid things are far different. until we found a way to waste excess energy, for instance to heat water, with something that can be feed with any amount of power p.v. and eolic generate stability issues and alone can't work enough in a microgrid. Smart grid AND devices that are able to slowly load and unload would be of help, but we do not have many.
In infrastructure cost IMVHO if/when we can solve the stability/load issue costs are still lower because any issue is still local and can easily have local backups. Cutting the need of quick restore cut the costs enormously enough to compensate.
[1] yes, is LESS efficient than classic solar BUT I still need electricity for other things and since production is enough during the day it's a nonsense for my needs have two kind of plant just for hot water.
You thought Chernobyl was bad? Wait until your reactor really does become a close analogue of an atomic bomb (except with many times the long term radioactivity). Even Edward Teller was famously cautious about fast reactors for this reason.
We might see fast reactors widely deployed, but if we do I think they'll be molten salt reactors where this sort of rearrangement would be much less plausible.
Not only that, but democratizing energy production creates resilient communities. This is a necessity in a world facing climate change, increasing inequality and social unrest.
On the other hand, centralizing production creates centralization of political power and systemic risk. Nuclear fission and fusion are the worst offenders in this.
Solar and wind are cheap, but intermittent. Batteries can help store energy from day to night. To help store energy from summer to winter, they need to become 1000 times cheaper, which is not going to happen. For that you need peaker plants. Initially methane-based, later they can be converted to hydrogen.
It's as simple as that.
You don't need batteries per se, only energy storage systems.
Pumped storage, pressurized air, flywheels, ultracapacitors, and of course chemical batteries. Pumped storage and compressed air systems store orders of magnitude more energy and power than batteries.
Furthermore, underground reservoirs have been demonstrated, in both natural and abandoned mining cavities.
A hollow sphere anchored to the sea bed can have the water pumped out with surplus power, and allowed back in to generate power.
Draining water from an elevated reservoir to a deep underground cavern can multiply the energy storage capacity. Height is strictly limited to hill height, but underground cavities may have any depth, to the limits of drilling.
That's true, but there are synergies. We will need lots and lots of batteries for electrifying the transportation. There's lots of R&D money in battery research. Much less in other types of storage. There's all the reasons to believe batteries will become cheaper in the long run by a factor of 2, or even more [1]. There are also a few advantages that batteries have over other types of storage: they don't have moving parts, they have quite high round-trip efficiency, their maintenance is cheap, the failure mode is not that bad.
You don't need to imagine it. Such a fire already happened. It was brought under control.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/05/tesla-megapack-fire-highligh...
That is going to be true regardless of storage technology. Concentrating energy into a tiny volume is effectively making a bomb.
Lithium, when it burns produces gaseous lithium oxide, which becomes lye, drain opener, when it gets to your nose.
Pumped storage in particular is also geographically dependent. If you've got lots of spare lakes on mountains, pumped storage is just what you needed, if you're the Dutch not so much.
Maybe a mix of storage systems will ultimately be the best solution for whatever reasons, but this idea makes so much sense to me because of how it takes advantage of all of our existing infrastructure. Just stand up renewables at existing plants, use spare capacity to power capturing CO2 from the output and/or the air, formulate the captured CO2 into a usable fuel on site, and then swap out the dirty fuel supply for the synthetic one. Now you have the functional equivalent of renewables + batteries — with the advantages that the plants are already built and wired into the grid, battery supply is no longer a bottleneck to rollout, and a lot of jobs are saved. So as a whole, as I see it, this would be faster, easier to plan, less wasteful, and more politically viable, as compared to replacing existing plants with brand new renewable ones that use battery storage.
The same concept applies to vehicles. Our entire infrastructure around gasoline is already sitting and waiting to be used as a massive energy storage system. If carbon could be captured from the air using renewables and centrally processed into a backwards-compatible fuel, it would no longer be necessary to push so heavily for a transition to BEVs. Instead, consumers could choose solely based on the costs and benefits to themselves; maybe gas cars would be less efficient than BEVs (like the equivalent of running an app in Wine or Rosetta), but that would be reflected in the price of the fuel if so, with consumers eating the full cost rather than passing part of it along to society as a negative externality.
Ditto for existing gas-powered stoves, heating, etc.
Additionally, once it's running at scale, this system would naturally lend itself to the next step: transitioning from net-zero emissions to net-negative emissions. Governments could allocate funds toward buying carbon capture fuel and simply sequestering it away for emergencies, at least until atmospheric CO2 drops to pre-industrial levels. Maybe the same method would prove useful for terraforming other planets with inhospitable atmospheres as well.
I'm very interested in seeing how United's experiments with synthetic fuel go for these reasons. Last time I brought this topic up on HN, someone shared Prometheus Fuels with me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels.
Does anyone know how far along this kind of technology is? What factors have prevented the idea from already being implemented in traditional power plants at scale?
Now it’s true that bev have transmission and battery losses, but synthetic gasoline is going to have inefficiencies and cost to transport, too.
The case wher e it makes sense is where the weight of batteries matter, ie: jet packs and airplanes.
"Imagine a lossless conversion" is obviously doing a lot of work here, but even if they're only 1% as efficient end-to-end as BEVs, that would still be fine in a world where we had more renewable power than we needed without the capacity to store it all. BEVs would eventually be pushed to dominance by market forces, while in the meantime we would accelerate our transition to net-zero emissions.
1 GigaWatt nuclear reactor takes 10 acres.
1 Gigawatt equivalent of solar panels is 2500 acres.
All those solar panels require much more metals and cement than the nuclear plant. And the lifetime of solar panels is also twice shorter than the nuclear plant.
The area requirement ignores that land is extremely cheap, as little as 1% of the cost of a utility-scale PV field in the US. Building an expensive nuclear plant to save cheap land is deeply foolish.
it depends. When it competes with other usage of the land (crops, biodiversity in forests...), that's not foolish.
Agree with you that each country has a different situation though.
But if the private sector wants to pursue nuclear (be it fission or fusion), I'm all for it.
100% are from before 1988.
Age out = you mean when they will be decommissioned ?
If nuclear energy has a similar breakthrough that could be revolutionary. LFTR could make a similar change in the economics of nuclear power so long as they can make the online chemical reprocessing work reliably. If you have a reactor running at higher temperatures and low pressure you no longer need such a massively heavy, thick, obscenely expensive reactor vessel and an even more massive and expensive containment building built to withstand a continuous overpressure on par with what would be experienced close to a nuclear bomb exploding. Fun fact, the wall thickness of a minuteman missile silo is supposedly 4ft thick reinforced concrete. Some nuclear reactors use 5ft thick reinforced concrete for their containment structures. Getting rid of all that expense for a GW scale reactor could be a game changer especially if an inherently safe design allows for graceful failure of many subsystems where any component breaking isn't substantially more severe than it would be for that to happen to a coal power plant.
Renewables may be cheaper than nuclear power, but renewables plus massively expanded energy storage plus nuclear power coming down in price would be an easy win for nuclear power.
There are some alternatives, though. One is to just build enough spare capacity into the system that one can still run a surplus on cloudy winter days when the winds aren't blowing.
Better I think is to connect power grids to even loads around. Barring megavolcano eruptions or nuclear winter, the sun is always shining somewhere in the world. And the wind is always blowing somewhere.
I think the thing that's needed most right now (aside from just more solar or wind plants everywhere) is high-capacity transcontinental grid connections. The United States should be able to buy solar power from the Sahara when it's night here, and sell surplus solar to Europe and Asia when the sun is shining here. This makes renewable energy much more attractive because there's always a buyer or a seller somewhere, and batteries aren't strictly needed.
Fossil fuel plants can continue to exist as emergency backup power sources in case something happens to the HVDC links. Ideally we'd get to the point where they never need to be used.
Apparently Chile and China are working on a plan whereby Chile supplies China with solar power via a trans-pacific HVDC line [1]. We need more of that: connections between North America and Europe, connections between South America and Africa, and so on.
Hydrogen, which can be stored underground like natural gas.
https://power.mhi.com/regions/amer/news/20210511.html
"The project’s salt caverns will be capable of holding more than 5,500 metric tonnes of hydrogen. From an energy storage perspective, one cavern holds the equivalent of 150 gigawatt hours (GWh) of carbon-free dispatchable energy and/or decarbonized fuel that can be used in other industries. By comparison, a U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) 2020 report estimates the current installed base of battery energy storage across the U.S. at 1.2 GWh."
(The formation there has room for 100 such caverns.)
(Also: "metric tonnes"?!)
https://www.powermag.com/large-scale-green-hydrogen-infrastr...
If you're wondering why you'd measure hydrogen in tonnes at all, well, it's a measure of mass, you could tell people how many hydrogen atoms it is but that's some mind-bogglingly huge number so it just feels meaningless, a tonne of something you can imagine, even if doing so for hydrogen is a stretch.
Or maybe I missed what the question is.
That was my point. For long term storage you can convert electricity in green hydrogen. The round trip efficiency is not great, but it's not really that bad either. Until we develop the infrastructure to do that, we just use natural gas.
Solar, wind, batteries (for short term storage) and nat gas for peaker plants will get you to 20% net emissions. Hydrogen will get you to zero.
Yeah, but sometimes that somewhere is mostly just the Pacific Ocean. If you look at the sun around Thursday, December 22, 2022 at 00:48:00[1], there's not a whole lot of land area with great sun.
Of course, if you overprovision, and interconnect, and have some peaker plants, and make syngas (or whatever) when there's overproduction to use in the peaker plants (and probably elsewhere, liquid fuels are really handy if the price is right), we can probably make it work.
I wouldn't build a solar plant in the Sahara though; sand is going to ruin everything if the heat doesn't first.
[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html?iso=202...
1000 times? Citation desperately needed.
That's it, in a nutshell.
To make it concrete, a Tesla Megapack has about 20 MWh of energy, costs about $7 MM (including maintenance) and has a lifetime of 10 years [1]. At the end of its lifetime the energy drops to about 70% of the initial charge, but I'll ignore that. So, the price per kWh comes down to 7000000 / (365 x 10 x 20000) = 10 cents. That's somewhat steep, but acceptable. The average price of 1kWh in the US last year was about 14 cents and in the state of New York about 20 cents [2]. If you manage to generate electricity with solar panels for less than 10 cents/kWh, then solar+short term batteries are competitive.
If you can only sell energy once a year, then the cost comes down to 365 times higher, or about $35/kWh.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design
[2] https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-york-new-jersey/news-release...
Not sure it works well, because those reactions are not 100% efficient (so you have to take that loss into account, requiring more energy production) and then transporting/storing hydrogen is hard : - either you compress it and you don't transport many of if - either you cool it to make it liquid and then it takes a lot of energy
Why wouldn't the learning curve apply to nuclear power? There the fuel cost is almost negligible. I think the large unit size hampers learning - less iterations per decade.
Nuclear will never be cost competitive unless they can use the same turbines gas and coal plants use. And that is of course what most GenIV reactors do.
What nuclear needs to do is go to something radical, like supercritical CO2 turbines. But that involves a large cost and delay to mature those, and it may be too late. Perhaps it can be combined with the CO2 turbine technology for the Allam cycle (oxyfuel combustion of gas in CO2 for zero marginal cost CO2 separation.)
It's a mystery to me why the CO2 turbines haven't gone forward? The talk has been there for 15 years.
And yeah, a CO2 based turbine will be better, but those are not commercially available.
Supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle seems to be a good candidate.
High level nuclear waste is not something you can responsibly lock up in a vault and forget about for 200,000 years. What ever is done with it, where ever it is put, it will need some monitoring for 200,000 years.
What are those future generations going to think of us?
Will they characterise this as: "The Age of Greed"? Maybe the "Age of Stupid"?
Reprocessing only really helps if you can feed the Pu into fast reactors that can more effectively consume the actinides. And France has given up on its fast reactor program.
It is ONE barrel PER YEAR for an operating reactor. That is a non-issue.
So greedy, selfish, and irresponsible.
There is no place on the planet that we can be confidant nuclear waste can be stored for 200,000 years with no monitoring.
You would think so.
Which is why nuclear's apparent negative learning curve in the west is such a surprise. https://archive.thinkprogress.org/does-nuclear-power-have-a-...
"Apparently negative learning curve" means from the raw data it is each plant is getting more expensive to build. Worse, when they analyse it, the main driver behind the cost increases doesn't appear to be government regulation or politics. It's all about construction and supply issues.
I can't help but think that in post industrial societies, maybe we are getting worse at building things.
My understanding is that the reason construction and supply costs is so high is because we go so long between building new ones that the process has to essentially be re-invented. That nuclear does not benefit from economies of scale. One could argue that this here is coupled with government and politics given that if the approval rate is low and people fight them, then it drives the cost up. And on the other side, that's why they were so much cheaper when we first built them and why they were cheap for France. There were lots of orders and so there was a benefit from scale.
And no one ever gives back any of the money.
I suspect it’s not so much reinventing rather repricing
This article makes a similar argument: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-pow...
Local rooftop solar, with no reliance on utility monopolies, is the most important thing in the global energy picture, and I'm afraid it isn't even close. And I'm pro nuclear. But it's past time to recognize that it's the distribution monopolists that are the problem. Solar and batteries free you from that.
The phenomenon is that consumer prices for broadband go up, even as the wholesale cost of bandwidth (what Comcast is reselling to you) goes down. The cause of this is a mix of two things:
1. Cable companies have regional monopolies. Without a choice, they can raise prices on consumers without losing customers
2. Cable companies face ever increasing 'infrastructural' costs, such as environmental review, trenching, construction, permitting, easements, etc... These costs are well established as going up in excess of inflation (part of why we can't build new infrastructure anymore) and therefore even while the product itself (internet access) gets cheaper, the 'last mile' of distribution keeps getting more expensive.
To sum up, it’s more expensive, because even as renewables grow in installed capacity, we cannot reduce installed capacity of fossil sources on 1-1 parity, and also we pay more per fossil generated kWh than we used to in all-fossil grid. Cheap grid-scale storage would solve this, but it’s no going to happen any time soon.
In practice, until cheap storage is invented, and as long as nuclear energy is eschewed, renewables will be paired up with fossil, and prices will stay up.
If you can cover 95% of the time but still need a natural gas power plant for the last 5%, you haven't saved any money except the cost of the natural gas itself. In the US, it is stupid cheap, so you haven't saved much at all.
You may think I'm joking, but one of the fuels that meets Pensylvania's Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard is "waste coal":
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0894192090344333...
1. The sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow strongly 2. People want to use power at all times of the day 3. Fixed costs in fossil fuel electricity generation are non-trivial 4. The utility scale electricity storage story is dire
The result is that renewables need to be overbuilt compared to their nameplate capacities to make up for less-than ideal weather and expected daily and annual weather cycles. I've heard those renewables produce something like 30% of their annual nameplate where a coal or gas plant will produce 90+%.
This overbuilding then ruins the wholesale price of electricity during high production times. For example, on a bright sunny spring day solar might push wholesale spot electricity prices negative. So the generating companies don't make as much money as you would expect from looking at average wholesale prices.
But people still want to use power after the sun has gone down and even if the wind has stopped blowing. So those generating companies need generating capacity to fill in that several hour long gap. Utility scale power storage in batteries isn't anywhere near being able to affordably store several hours worth of electricity. Also a cloud can roll across quickly or the wind might die suddenly. Therefore that backup generation is almost uniformly natural gas turbines because they can spin up and down quickly.
But even if no power is being sold by those plants, they need to be kept running to be instantly ready. So they are constantly burning some fuel to keep hot and spinning. The maintenance hours still keep racking up. There still needs to be people working 24/7. The costs of all that "idle" time need to be made up in the twelve hours of active generation.
So you end up with essentially double the generating capacity, half solar/wind half natural gas, and are continually paying the costs for both. Obviously that's going to be more expensive than simply burning a bit more fuel to run the natural gas plants near capacity full time. Or even build more efficient base-load plant types like coal or nuclear which have troubles scaling up and down quickly enough to balance out changeable renewable generation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectric...
Or decentralized battery packs.
The bogus explanation:
> renewable energy technologies follow learning curves [erroneous description elided]. The price of electricity from fossil fuel sources however does not follow learning curves
Learning curves can have different shapes (the steeper the better) so I cut that bill out.
It’s true that manufacturing and installing solar panels and wind turbines has followed a relatively steep learning curve as volume has increased but it’s foolish to claim that drilling, transporting, and burning fossil fuels do not.
Fossil fuels are at a flatter point on the curve, true, due to maturity but in a commodity market there is a lot of competitive development pressure. And very high volume.
What doesn’t move down the curve as fast is power plants themselves because they are not built identically in high volume.
Energy prices to business and consumers are staggering, and the 'transport' fees are proving to be a substantial portion of that. The 'Sunshine List' in Ontario, the government list used to publicise all civil servants making over $100K frankly was very focused on the electricity grid providers, with average wages multiple times the national average, and large swaths earning over $100K even a decade ago when that used to mean a lot.
Start to show us prices being reduced to consumers (or significantly increased consumption) and then we can talk about the great future.
The story is nice, but it's only halfway there.
Anything get "better" but we seems to be unable to really produce something really new.
In personal terms: having built a new home (so insulated, airtight and properly ventilated, properly exposed/designed to passive heat/cool as much as needed and possible) with domestic p.v. the "progress" just means that now start to be possible not being autonomous but nearly autonomous and start to be interesting IF it's not much needed and not every day having an EV but that's not much because such systems became chap more than because other systems became far more expensive and hearing many source their higher prices are voluntary made to make renewable cheap enough to push people who can adopting them. In practical terms I'm satisfied by the outcome, quality of my life is improved, resilience also. BUT in absolute economical terms that's not cheap nor really "naturally interesting".
IMVHO renewable can only succeed naturally, not artificially, only if they will be the byproduct of PUBLIC research (not private one more or less publicly founded) producing FLOSS/Open hardware tools and standards for it. So far most products on the market, even the formally "FLOSS for software" are just crappy piles of crap, sold as production ready products when they really are just prototypes.
Old folks remember when fossil fuels were way cheaper and it does not feel like that underlying floor is quite being struck.
It's physically difficult to capture enough energy in one lifetime to compare with vast deposits of energy captured over millions of years.
However it looks like those controlling the biggest oilfields might have already spent the petrodollars that have not even been pumped out of the ground yet.
This would be expected to compromise their ability to drop the floor out and have as halting of an effect on alternatives as there was in the early-to-mid 1980's. Before that alternatives had extreme progress mostly in response to shortages, and skyrocketing costs remaining from the early 1970's, rather than climate, but it was still progress that could not continue after it became unfeasible financially.
Now renewables are again moving fast toward the cost of currently-captured energy especially when they are widely distributed and operated by individuals rather than large powerful controlling organizations. Plus there is an urgency with climate degradation that is more recognized than ever.
Compared to Solar and Wind, which have no input costs other than initial investment and very low maintenance and upkeep costs.
And, the investment costs of setting up a 1 MW coal/gas plant vs. 1 MW solar plant, is about the same.
This IMF research estimates fossil fuels are subsidized globally by $5.2 trillion in 2017, and $649 billion in the US.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...
When you are ready for that next step try LCOE and LCOES (levelized cost of energy / energy and storage) as Google terms to find more info or click this link:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
LCOE is (lifetime costs)/(lifetime generation), but the value of that generation is very different between intermittent sources and dispatchable sources and the difference is very important at grid scale.
For example, solar has become quite cheap -- when the sun is shining. At midnight the cost per KWh from solar is infinite. The cost per KWh for a coal plant, however, doesn't really change based on the time of day. This distinction isn't captured by LCOE.
That distinction is important because grid per-KWh costs are a weighted average of generation costs. Mathematically, that cost correlates nearly perfectly when most of the generation is supplied by baseload generation. LCOE and actual grid per-KWh cost correlates well when most of the generation is arbitrarily dispatchable. The simple numerical average LCOE correlates poorly to average grid per-KWh cost when much of the generation is intermittent if that intermittent supply doesn't line up well with demand.
For example, from your link if you want a solar system which provides power overnight, you need to sum up the generating cost (busy charging the batteries during the day) with matching storage cost. From your link utility solar ($30-$41) plus wholesale four hour (100MW/400MWh) storage ($131-$232) results in a "windless night" cost of $161-$273 which compares unfavourably with coal ($65-$152) and very unfavourably with gas combined cycle ($45-$74).
https://www.energyforgrowth.org/memo/lcoe-and-its-limitation...
It's a well understood way to evaluate cost. In short nuclear is at the very high end of the spectrum and not really dropping because (so far) of a lack of a learning effect.
Solar is on the very low end of the spectrum, as the article points out. And wind is somewhere in between. Both of those are still dropping dramatically because of learning effects. E.g. with offshore wind, bigger turbines mean more surface area and more load. There are some 20 MW models now coming online. These things are gigantic and obviously a bit capital intensive. But they also produce a large amount of power very reliably. And compared to nuclear which has gigantic capital cost, it's actually very good. And there are still plenty of ways left to find further cost reductions.
Baseload is a poorly defined notion often wielded in hand wavy style to argue that nuclear is needed. This overlooks a few important things.
1) nuclear is expensive for that too and cheaper technologies exist with learning effects of their own. Batteries were mentioned in the article for example. Another one is cables. Cables allow different regions to import and export electricity to each other. That provides base load and the average peaks and dips in supply and demand over large areas are far less dramatic than they are locally.
2) intermittency is not actually random but predictable and typically local. So are demand cycles. Weather forecasts allow grid operators to plan weeks/months in advance; mostly intermittency does not come as a surprise. Hot weather means everybody puts on their AC, high solar output, relatively little wind. That happens every year in roughly the same months. Of course air heats up and you get a lot of airflow to other areas, which will have lots of wind as a result. Weather predictions are mainly about figuring out where the low and high pressure areas are and how they move around.
3) base-load is a relatively poorly understood notion. How much for how long do we need? And how much extra would that be? Those would be reasonable questions to ask (and answer) if you are a grid operator. People assume a lot of answers to these questions that are probably false/irrational. The real answers are far less dramatic.
4) Some countries already have very high proportions of renewables on their grid. So far without causing issues. Better still, some countries with historically very unreliable grids (e.g. in the middle east), rely increasingly on renewables to fix that. That suggests, renewables actually improve resilience if you don't have enough base load.
So, it's not all that black and white. The answer isn't blindly putting your trust in nuclear to get some really expensive base load that you don't actually need. But sitting down and doing the math. A lot of people seem to be coming up with outcomes where renewables are cheap, feasible, and plenty reliable especially when you use cables and batteries as well. The sun always shines somewhere and wind is always blowing somewhere. If you simply connect those places with cables, there's not a whole lot of base load that you would need beyond that. If any at all.
The answer is China (well, Asia, really).
Now that we've answered that, let's pose a new question:
Why is China capable of such investment but not the United States, even though the United States has more money?
https://news.mit.edu/2018/explaining-dropping-solar-cost-112...
> China’s fledgling solar-electric panel industry dropped world prices by 80 percent, a stunning achievement in a fiercely competitive high-tech market. China had leapfrogged from nursing a tiny, rural-oriented solar program in the 1990s to become the globe’s leader in what may soon be the world’s largest renewable energy source.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-china-is-domi...
China has the plurality of solar installations, produces the majority, have given historically the most aggressive tax credits for production and use, and is forecasted to have the most growth.
I just wanted to point out that nations around the world had decades long plans around developing solar because it always made sense, and everyone who looked into it knew this.
The question of why China benefitted so much is interesting, and I personally think it comes down to them not having much local fossil fuels, and therefore not having the people who control fossil fuels as a political drag factor in their politics.
2. China has a centralized and powerful government in the mainland managed by a single party, when the supreme leader says "I want something", deem it as done. It cannot be worse when going in the wrong directly but vice versa, nothing can beat it when in right direction. Renewable energy is one example. Other examples such as high speed rail systems and fiber network rollout were almost exactly the same story. China's first generation CHR was not that good at all but after decades of massive deployment, I really cannot see any high speed rails system better than China's. China's national fiber rollout started around 2009 which was after Australia's NBN plan, when most of China's telecom infrastructures were actually copper. Now China's fiber networks has covered around 95% of the population but much of the NBN is still on HFC or VDSL.
For reason #1, no country can compete in short term. For reason #2, hard to say good or bad now. I used to hold a negative view on that. But recent COVID responses around the world just showed me a different perspective.
When highway construction offers bonuses for fast construction, things go quickly. When governments have no idea what something should cost and offer cost plus contracts, the costs skyrockets and the gravy train rolls slowly. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02ramp.html
So apart from the fact that nuclear probably wouldn't react the same way as solar, even doing so wouldn't make it cost competitive. But I still like nuclear.
And they are unavoidably expensive to operate. Those costs also will not be coming down.
Fortunately, we don't need for them to come down. All we need is not to build any; then the cost stays fixed at zero.
I like nuclear, too, on other planets, without shielding, containment, or moving parts.
Renewables are on the same clear exponential trend for decades. There have been some small deviations, but they always correct back.
At some point the article pulls out the monolog graphs where you can clearly see there was no trend change and people expected that since the 70s. Yet, there's that surprised tone all over it.
Don't they sell energy to each other, on account of being in the EU and having their grids connected?
I'd assume that's true given that one of the bigger reasons given for the higher energy prices in Sweden this winter, despite running our grid on cheap renewables and nuclear, has been that we've sold a lot of that cheap electricity to Germany.
Like all new tech stacks, solar and wind benefited from modest R&D, access to cheap capital (subsidies, financial markets), "economies of scale" (low enough unit cost with high enough production rate to unlock Wright's Law aka the learning curve).
It remains to be seen if (or when) renewables will benefit from better accounting. Most impactfully, carbon tax to bake externalities into the street price of fossil fuels. Also, better energy market designs. And crucially, sufficient hush (extortion) money to soak up all the stranded assets held by incumbents. All those polluting coal power plants being run at a loss, teetering on the edge bankruptcy, because some revenue is better than none.
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FWIW, my thesis doesn't account for turf battles preventing widespread adoption. In the case of high volt energy transmission, required for next growth phase of renewables, the blocker in the USA are all the jurisdictional boundaries. We can't just build up the new power lines we need, because every Bubba in every county in every state needs to be bought off.
David Roberts of https://volts.wtf does a great job of covering these policy tarpits.
Pollution and wars sure are worth it!
I find your comment pointless, given that in a not so distant past the bulk of energy was produced from fossil fuel.
Thankfully, the world is transitioning away from that, and at a considerable speed. We went from propaganda selling the lie that renewables were a passing fad to a point in time where entire countries register days where all their energy needs come from renewables and even overproduce energy, leading to negative energy costs.
I think you mean electric needs. That it's around 30% of the needs of the average country. It's important to be very clear about those distinctions. I think, in this issue, overselling is so dangerous as underselling.
Motor vehicle use, gas heating, air travel, intensive agriculture these are surely things that will vary a lot from one country to another, yet they use large amounts of non-electrical energy.
80% of energy used is in the world is from fossil fuel, and fossil fuel usage is still growing.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/global-fossil-f...
Renewable are cheap when you have a coal/nuclear plant nearby for the days without wind or sun, and because solar panels are built in China. It's wrong to think that they could replace fossil fuel and still be cheap.
That's a clear example of lying with statistics, given that only a very limited number of countries in the world started investing in shifting away from fossil fuels.
It took the EU a massive politically-driven subsidies program to jump-start their own shift to renewables, and currently we're seeing European countries meeting all their country's needs for a few days with their own wind, solar, and hydro.
> In this article I will show that ERoEI is unimportant by itself. It usually does not matter if ERoEI is increasing or decreasing. ERoEI provides no guidance about which sources of energy we should pursue, nor does it offer any guidance about how much net energy will be available to us in the future. By itself, ERoEI is a useless figure, unless it is lower than 1, which it almost never is. Although different sources of energy (such as coal or solar PV) have different ERoEI ratios, this means nothing important.
> What is important to civilization (and to us) is the amount of net energy obtained from a source of energy. It is an amount of net energy (not a high ERoEI) which allows us to drive cars, fly airplanes, and so on. If we obtain 1 GWh of NET energy, then it does not matter if it came from a high-ERoEI source, or from a low one. What matters is the amount of net energy.
> In turn, the amount of net energy depends upon two things: ERoEI AND the amount of gross energy. BOTH of those figures are required to determine the amount of net energy obtained. ERoEI by itself tells us almost nothing.
> Let me provide an example, to demonstrate this point. Suppose you have a solar PV panel with an ERoEI of 3, which returns 1KW on average continuously for 30 years. In that case, the net energy provided by that solar panel is 175.2 MWh ((12436530)(1-1/3)) over its lifetime. If, however you have ten such solar panels, then the net energy returned is ten times higher (1752 MWh), despite no change in ERoEI.
I know the biggest criticism aside from that is that the stated price of renewables ignore storage, so is incomplete.
But that criticism is orthogonal to the discussion about rate of price drop.
Also its cute that people think we can move to renewables without nuclear. Its impossible and before you say batteries, think about the supply of natural resources needed to build batteries please
Eventually somebody running a plant will screw up, and when they do, the harm will be worse than a wind tower falling over.
Plus Germany's car industry is joined at the hip with ICE. If you waved a magic wand and made Germany's car industry electric hundreds of highly specialized parts for internal combustion engines.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/germany-electric-vehicles-eu...
Edit: Removed snark.
German government decided to shut down nuclear power plant in response to protests after Fukushima disaster.
Also, your statement that it is in response to Fukushima, but somehow not about the perceived danger of nuclear power, makes no sense.
One thing has nothing to do with the other.
Germany is pushing for renewable and has not transitioned to it.
It is depending on Russia for 30% or so in gas. It has this problem because the transition is not done and Fukushima pushed the faster end of nuclear power.
Which is understandable when you remember Tschernobyl and how dense populated Germany is.
I drive by isar nuclear power plant by train since I remember. While it looks interesting it's also frightening when you see how little real knowledge or excercise anyone had when Tschernobyl happened and when Fukushima happened.
Also given how densely populated Germany is, it's wildly irresponsible that they operate so many coal plants, it's literally killing thousands every year. Even if they had a Chernobyl style disaster every 10 years it would still be a lot safer than the way they're generating power right now.
Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were disasters.
It just so happened that Fukushima also was the final straw.
Similarly, there was a person eaten by a shark at my local beach last week. Everyone is asking 'how can you swim?'. The last death by a shark was 1963.
And they are very non rational about it. Arguments are based on emotion, not reason.
Turning of existing working plants and replacing them with more coal is borderline insane.
In my opinion Germany would be much better of today if they had invested huge amount of money in nuclear plants instead of transitioning to renewables.
If it had only installed renewables and also kept nuclear power, the situation would be a lot better.
In German, but look e.g. at the third graph in https://www.wind-energie.de/themen/zahlen-und-fakten/deutsch... . Shows the total and newly installed wind power (better than the second graph showing the number of new turbines, because turbines have gotten bigger).
For solar, look at: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29264/umfrage... the numbers for 2020/2021 unfortunately are missing. They're better, but by far not back to 2010-2012.
Every country in the world is moving to renewable, Germany is not special at all.
It's nice to finally see the slap in the face of the German grid policy that everyone was predicting 10 years ago, I'm just sad that so many lives had to be taken and will be taken just so that they finally start to get it.
Targeted investment in improved insulation and heat pumps should help remedy this issue, if they can pull it off. It will also help with the inevitable future heat waves, given that heat pumps also can act as cooling systems when home temperature needs become reversed during the summer.
Every since the invasion there has been a utterly silence in how the Russian grip on EU energy dependency will be solved if just Germany invest, construct or subsidize more wind power. Instead I read articles after articles than when the wind doesn't blow and its winter, Germany will need cheap fossil fuels for the next several decades. This is why removing Russian banks from SWIFT would hurt Germany since they then can't continue to buy more gas, or why nord stream will sooner or later be turned on. Sanction on Russian economy is only temporary because otherwise it will destroy the EU energy market, which many article highlight to be in the core of why the invasion exist.