Do you have storage installed to smooth out the dead hours?
Unfortunately the answer is that you need days of storage for solar and wind to be anywhere near 100% of the energy mix.
The cost of that is astronomical.
He’s found that for the NEM grid in Australia at least, just six hours of storage can bring us to over 99% of demand being provided by renewables and storage over a month, almost every month. On a weekly basis, some weeks it’s 100%, but worst case will be something like two or three percent being provided by something like gas turbines over the week.
We have more pumped hydro coming online and will have more in the future, so not all those six or so hours worth will be chemical batteries.
Part of what makes this work is because on the eastern seaboard, often it might be, for example, windy in northern Queensland while it’s calm in South Australia, so being interconnected helps a lot. At this point we really don’t have (and it’s not simulating) any kind of serious demand management (apart from in emergencies, but I’m talking everyday kind of management), which could potentially remove some of the need for gas peaking. We also don’t have any offshore wind yet (legislation only legalised it last year and there are some early projects). As some of that offshore generation comes online with better capacity factors than onshore, it will likely make things more consistent.
Primary energy replacement obviously will require more than that, but it won't be so bad as people make out, since electrification can drive massive efficiency increases - electric cars are 3-4x as energy efficient as ICE cars, and there are very few places in the parts of Australia that get decently cold that are too cold for air source heat pumps, so that's a 3x efficiency increase over gas space and hot water heating (even as much as 5x for CO2 hot water heat pumps!).
Here in Norway the electricity prices this summer and fall were up to 100x higher in the south compared to the north, due to lack of interconnect capacity between the north and south.
Building hundreds of miles of high-capacity interconnects ain't done in a weekend either.
It's like saying, this remote town in the hills has cheap housing because it takes so long to drive to it so lets build a high speed express train right to the city. Then we can have cheap housing and access to the city.
Except you can't, because as soon as you have access to the market demand, the price goes up to match the market price.
Interconnects are useful, but people wanting to build interconnects so they can access the cheap power from places that only had cheap power due to a lack of interconnects is upside down thinking.
But better internal interconnects between south and north would certainly have contributed to averaging out the prices across the country, avoiding the extremes we saw this year.
After all, there were hydro plants in the north which halted production due to the low prices at the same time as we had prices >10x normal in the south.
By the time we completely transition to EVs, it will be 100s of times of storage. All this storage capacity is available at zero cost, people buy cars anyways. It is decentralized, no single point of failure. This is the sweetest kind of energy demand, can charge whenever electricity prices are negative or zero. Cars are parked nearly all the time, grid adaptations will evolve demand management. Cars will supply power back to the grid at its highest prices, providing a source of income for EV owners.
[1] https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/24/BloombergNEF-Z...
Yet the vast majority of EV's don't have the ability to discharge into the grid to earn money... Most can't even charge when power is negatively priced unless you pay for a third party charger and service.
Basically, Car owners, charger owners, Utility companies, and EV manufacturers would all like to earn the money by charging/discharging your EV at times to earn the most money. But all of those people don't want someone else being able to take that sweet sweet revenue. So they put roadblocks in the way.
EV's usually have the capability to charge into the grid, but firmware that won't allow it.
Chargers (AC and DC) won't allow power to flow back into the grid, and will disconnect any car who tries.
Utilities refuse to let home users take part in the minute by minute pricing - instead the best available is dynamic pricing set half hourly a day in advance.
And users want to do this, but have three parties who've assembled roadblocks in the way. And there is no indication of that impasse ending anytime soon.
That seems reasonable considering what happened with griddy in texas.
Then if the prices go sky high, users who chose that plan at least get to use 5kWh each day. 5kWh is plenty to not freeze and to keep your phone charged and fridge going. If you want more, you can pay more.
The UK already has a system of electricity meters that have a 'balance', and when the balance reaches zero it cuts off till more credit is added. Such a scheme integrates well with that, and means a user can never rack up a massive unexpected bill if the price goes crazy high or low.
I suspect 5 kWh/day is way to little to keep the house warm and still be able to cook food. The exact number doesn't really matter here. What's more problematic is how the 5 kWh of guaranteed/insured/subsidized power would be allocated.
If it's your first 5 kWh/day, it will be you'll blow past the quota by noon, and if there was a price spike in the evening you would pay the full price of it, or shut off your breaker until prices go down.
Having it as a some sort of pool you can draw from anytime you want doesn't suffer from the above problem, but would make such a service very expensive to run for the counterparty due to adverse selection. Anyone using such a service would opt to use the market price when electricity is plentiful/cheap, and switch to fixed price when electricity is scarce/expensive. The net result is that the 5 kWh ends up always being the most expensive electricity for the day, and a service providing such a guarantee will be priced accordingly. In a competitive market, you would expect the price of a fixed price plan to be the same as the "5 kWh per day at fixed price and anything extra at instant market price" plan that you propose. You might be tempted to argue that utilities/the government can subsidize the latter plan as some sort of green energy initiative, but that would be be bad. The most expensive energy also tends to be the dirtiest, because peaker plants (power plants that can quickly turn on/off) tend to run on fossil fuels. Subsidizing such a scheme would also be subsidizing electricity consumption during peak hours, and therefore subsidizing fossil fuel plants.
Then you can hear the beep and either decide to turn off a few things, top up your balance, hit the 'emergency 1 kWh' button, or just sit in the dark for 15 minutes.
This benefits the grid operator because they get to massively overcharge for curtailed energy. It benefits the EV manufacturer because they get to greenwash. And the consumer doesn't get a say because they don't actually own their DRM'd remote controlled car and charger.
>Stop for lunch, plug in car to recharge
>Cloud passes in front of sun
>Grid empties car
People won't want to put their plans at the mercy of a fluctuating grid. There will never be a time when people are happy to plug in their car and come back to find it empty, electricity spot price be damned. It's my car, not your grid storage system.
But I also think we'll never get to the point that everyone has solar installed. There are plenty of situations where it doesn't make sense, such as properties with lots of taller trees around short buildings.
Also, generating 120% generally doesn't make sense because the payout from the electric company for the other 20% is pitiful.
A battery makes sense for a lot of people for a few reasons, too, so the power company doesn't necessarily have to be the one to do all of that, either. We did it mainly for relief from power outages, but it also works well for places with prices that change by time of day.
Panels are like $1 per nominal watt
Obviously that's missing commercial power, utility-scale storage, heavy industry, electric vehicle charging, etc., but it seems like factoring those in would give you a big yet feasible cost, especially if storage gets cheaper over the next decades.
That strengths your point.
However, 30kWh isn’t quite enough for heating and cooling an all-electric off-grid house, unless you carefully monitor battery capacity, etc.
Here is 30kWh of LFP batteries for $9,000. Now that doesn't include the inverters or installation or anything but LFP batteries have excellent longevity, in this case 7000 cycles to 80% depth-of-discharge. That means charging and discharging the battery every day for 19 years and at that point, you still have 80% of the remaining capacity.
This idea that you need to have your lights on all night is rather recent. For a very very long time people survived by following the natural rythms of daylight. Some people even think this is healthier, and suggest special apps to adjust screen brightness to follow natural light patterns.
A good fridge/freezer should hold its cold overnight, especially if you aren't snacking at midnight.
So while it might be true that your current lifestyle is based on 24/7 electricity, but what makes that lifestyle sacrosanct? You'll probably change it over the next few years anyway, and odds are it is different today than it was 5 years ago.
People have used fire, candles for a very very long time to provide light at night.
If we built our houses right, we could drastically shift energy usage requirements for heating and cooling to daylight hours (utilizing thermal mass storage like https://www.steffes.com/ets/ )
I think the idea of people sleeping as soon as the sun is down and not just doing low-light activities even 3000 years ago as ridiculous despite being a pervasive idea.