New wind, solar are cheaper than costs to operate all but one US coal plant | Hacker News Reader

New wind, solar are cheaper than costs to operate all but one US coal plant

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27 pointsrbanffy92 comments

There has been significant windmill failures recently.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/wind-turb...

As these things age they are going to affect grid performance and endanger anyone below them. These aren't 'growing plans' they are major longevity, reliability and credibility issues. 'Cheaper' is not much use if they're not reliable and have a short life span...

'There’s no publicly available industrywide data on turbine failures, making it tough to paint a complete picture of changes in their performance over time. (why not? The rest of the energy industry is very over regulated and performance data driven) But Vestas and GE have said the shares of their machines in the field that are unable to produce power are elevated, even if it’s still a small proportion of their installed fleets.'

Separately, the sooner we stop burning biomass wood and calling it 'green energy' the better.

> endanger anyone below them

That’s a lot better than coal plants which endanger everyone, everywhere.

I prefer efficient energy reliability over burning wood and pretending short life span windmills are producing ever more electricity. We'll get there eventually with small nuclear reactors but this is an unfortunate 'green' marketing and public relations driven period in energy history with a lot of sleight of hand and snake oil..

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-certifies-first-us-sm...

But you could see how others are equally offended that running a coal plant is currently glancingly profitable due to distortions by local regulation and political connectedness; costs passed on to me and you.

Coal being the largest source of atmospheric mercury, which has no safe concentration, it’s unfortunate nuclear has the reputation of higher risk.

Should I be worried as I drive through the windmill fields in the panhandle of Texas as I do once in awhile? I'm surprised to learn that after centuries of development, windmills are still so poorly engineered.

I was thinking the same about California's Altamont pass which has a lot of elderly windmills that used to chop up a lot of birds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Pass_wind_farm

Given the worry over china and microchips, is anything being done about china's dominance of PV cell/wafer production? What happens if we get cut off?

1/3 of domestic demand is already produced state side.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-manufacturing

Qcell is investing $2.5B in its Georgia manufacturing facility.

https://www.georgia.org/press-release/qcells-more-double-pro...

First Solar is investing $1.2B

https://investor.firstsolar.com/news/press-release-details/2...

Last year saw ~18GW of PV installed in the US.

https://www.woodmac.com/industry/power-and-renewables/us-sol...

Renewables are projected to provide 25% of total US power generated in 2023.

https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2023/01/renewables-are...

(we are at the hockey stick inflection point)

At least a couple of years ago, the machines needed for all of that came from Europe. China is cheaper due to scale and better silicium supply chains. We could move cell and panel manufacturing back to the US and Europe, if we were willing to accept higher prices. Which we don't, not in the US nor Europe. So, this move will happen when China goes to war woth Taiwan, not before.

And China can’t go to war with Taiwan until new pipelines are built into Siberia. Russia is still strong enough to stop China from outright taking it and a partnership to build those pipelines is still more than five years away to securing energy for Beijing which cannot be so easily blockaded as the Strait of Malacca.

And if Ukraine showed the Chinese something, it is that an invasion if far, far from a walk in the park with a sure outcome.

I'd have hoped the reference class for a superpower that doesn't like the politics of a small island just off its shores would be the disastrous failure of the Bay Of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

But that may be optimistic. My reference class for the war against Ukraine is the war against Vietnam.

It’s often compared to the energy dependency from Russia, but fundamentally it’s different. China cutting off supplies would cut off installing new capacity and repairs to existing in plants. It would however not stop existing solar panels from producing energy. Components for repair can be stockpiled much easier than oil, so the timeline until such a cutoff would affect existing energy production is substantially longer.

PV lasts 25-50 years largely untended. The components are largely fungible.

The overwhelming nmajority of production facilities began construction under 10 years ago.

Not getting left in the dust cost-wise is a very good reason to expand production now (which the entire planet started doing last year), but nothing prevents building your own before it wears out.

What will be the backup for when there is no wind or sun for several days or weeks? Electric customers get upset when their lights blink for a few cycles.

While not ideal, peaker gas plants. Better than coal, worse than solar and wind. Necessary evil until adequate grid storage.

That was the model that EU went with for the last 20-30 years. It was not ideal.

It worked fine until the invasion of Ukraine forced the difficult choice to stop funding that war by buying gas from them. Not dissimilar problem to dependency on oil.

There is a real issue with long term storage, but in the meantime overbuilding can achieve climate goals at reasonable cost and far less time than it takes to build a new nuclear plant. (Hinkley Point C was approved in 2012 and is still not online!)

Germany's decision to shut nuclear in response to Fukushima looks terrible in the rear view mirror. But I suspect it was informed by how bad the costs of Chernobyl were in terms of discarded agricultural production.

With Germany, in particular, I think there was also a lot of pressure from Green parties.

In any case, I would agree it looks like a mistake in hindsight.

The greens also pressured to install solar and wind as replacement, not coal and gas. They raised the issue of energy dependency early and constantly. It’s easy to blame them, but this is not what they asked for.

AFAIU, the Germany case is complicated: the non-Green government followed half of the Green parties plan (going out of nuclear) but half-assed the other half (compensate by expanding the required renewable sector) that was as important for the Green parties.

There can be tons of explanations for that: going out of nuclear was more popular than building renewables in people's backyard, going out of nuclear was an easier path to follow than develop the renewable sector, the effort of going out of nuclear may have been used as an excuse to say "see, we do green stuffs, no need to do more", the coal/gas generation may have looked an easier or more profitable path for some politicians, the industry had less resistance against going out of nuclear than going out of coal/gas, going out of the nuclear may have been an easy concession to give to the Green and to look good to the public, or even the government had low incentive to succeed in the transition because if it fails they can blame the Green parties ("but it was your plan ... see, Green parties don't have realistic ideas")...

Russia wasn’t the only source of gas available, it was just the cheapest. With minimal effort they could have sourced elsewhere, it’s just not an instantaneous pivot. Also closing nuclear plants was a bad choice.

No it wasn't. They relied on natgas for baseload production.

We are in a way different place with domestic natural gas production than the EU.

So it's not actually cheaper once you account for the entire parallel infrastructure you need.

That's not how you calculate electricity generation costs.

You should when it's actually required. (We don't currently do so because it's treated separately.)

In Australia its more and more batteries. California too I guess.

You can't comb a hairy ball

You’ve brought a spherical horse to a gunfight.

That means there's always at least one place where the wind is not blowing, it doesn't tell you anything about how often or for how long, which is the important part.

Report: https://energyinnovation.org/publication/coal-cost-crossover...

The one ONLY thing that wind and solar will never be able to beat coal is on the performance of uninterrupted durations.

Otherwise, knock yourself out on solar and wind expansions.

Yes, and they don't produce at night so you need to keep those coal/gas plants.

Wind operates at night, often producing more than it does in the day.

And sometimes not.

You really can't have a 95% available electricity system and call it "close enough".

Sure you can, you just need some diversification and some storage.

Power demand tends to be lower at night, too.

Until we're all charging our cars overnight.

Its expected that the "off peak" might eventually shift to daytime hours in solar heavy areas. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Off peak in the day in solar heavy areas seems like the worst possible outcome. When power is the most readily available, it'll be used the least. When it's the least available, it'll be used the most.

During the day is when most power is used. AC is a significant energy hog.

I'm not sure how that'd be the worst. It'd just mean that we incentivize mostly addressible loads (eg, car charging) to be done during the afternoon instead of at night.

And as others have pointed out, we already have high loads in those hours anyway during the summer.

The chances of wind for an entire electrical grid dropping to zero is slim. My power company already can ask my Nest to reduce usage during times of high demand; I'd fully expect a smart grid scenario eventually where charging is slowed or paused during dips in available power, and prioritized to less-charged vehicles.

We're a pretty innovative species; it baffles me that any discussion of renewables quickly trends towards "this issue is insurmountable" style wailing.

Except 2021, where whole Europe had low winds for almost a year. But let's ignore that.

https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...

> For instance, UK-based power company SSE stated that its renewable assets produced 32% less power than expected. Although this may appear initially alarming, given the UK government’s plans to become a world leader in wind energy, wind farm developers are aware these low wind “events” are possible, and understanding their impact has become a hot topic in energy-meteorology research.

> So should we be worried about this period of low wind? In short, no.

And in 2022. But that didn't stop wind and solar from picking up 5/6ths of the shortfall from hydro, nuclear, and gas.

It's unfortunate that coal picked up the last 6th. Pity money was spent on building gas and nuclear instead of wind and solar.

Why would we be charging them at night if we have PV everywhere?

Only makes sense to do that at night when you're overproducing at night and thus making it cheaper then. PV everywhere reversed that, making it cheapest to charge during the day.

Not sure what the location of solar panels has to do with charging cars, to be honest.

The point is that people will mainly charge their cars at their homes in the evening, when solar power is low/non-existent. You're not charging them during the day because you're using them.

60kWh of battery per car: Inevitable

Someone wanting to charge with 2c/kWh power during the day rather than 20c/kWh at night: Inconceivable!

70kWh of battery per car with 10kWh at the solar panels: Impossible!

A 20A AC extension cord at work: Inconceivable!

Yes, I clearly claimed all of those things. Being snarky isn't the same as being clever, but I'm sure you've convinced yourself otherwise.

And repeating tired lies is much less clever than pointing out the implied impossibilities, but I'm sure you've convinced yourself otherwise.

> Not sure what the location of solar panels has to do with charging cars, to be honest.

> You're not charging them during the day because you're using them.

"Everywhere" includes "on the cars" (covering 80% of mean usage because most people aren't commercial drivers) and "car parks" (because even commercial drivers take breaks, or at least that's my understanding of the law in various places).

With "some diversification and some storage" you can have 100% availability, sure. For some value of "some".

But you actually have to build for the worst cases, and include the costs in your calculations.

Sweden did not, and had a disastrous electricity winter. I expect California to be even less competent.

For context, I'm a Swede emigrated to California.

I suspect california winters are far more moderate than swedens.

What happened that was bad in Sweden, was it the record electricity exports?

> Sweden sent 33 terawatt-hours to other nations in 2022, making it the No. 1 exporter for the first time, according to Entso-E data analyzed by Rystad Energy AS.

Sweden exported when they had extra electricity.

In December they had much less than they needed, because some plants needed maintenance, the wind wasn't blowing, and the sun was down. Not sure if any actual blackouts happened, but electricity prices went insanely expensive to drive down demand. There is now a big political issue about how to compensate people ruined by their electricity bills.

They had built a system with very little backup capacity. When a few components stopped producing, there was nothing to replace them.

California has similar episodes, as do other parts of the US. I'm unconvinced anyone is making sure the system works under stress.

https://www.thelocal.se/tag/energy/

I hear this a lot as some sort of criticism of solar & wind, but tbh, it isn't that different from coal, natural gas, and other addressable generation. A major cost component is the reality that we have to build for the worst case. And worst case consumption is dramatically higher than the moderate case.

I'd like to see the deep engineering analysis on the cost differences over 30 years with varying degrees of renewables in the mix.

Solar & wind do have more inherent variability.

With fossil & nuclear power, an individual power plant can go offline for some technical issue, but they fail independently of each.

Solar & wind production is correlated to the weather of the region. If there is no wind, all wind power production is affected. Solar has similar dependencies.

This is all fine if you retain backup fossil or nuclear power, or built transmission lines or batteries. That's unfortunately not how the politics always work.

There are several hundred GW worth of methane emitted from organic sources that need to be collected. Burning it reduces its net GWP to zero. Gas peakers cost a pittance to build or idle. There is also 500GW of existing hydro. There will also be large stores of hydrogen derivatives like ammonia because electrolysers can be used as seasonal arbitrage for easily stored intermediates.

The only people who claim it is a problem are pro fossil fuel and pro nuclear reactionaries and shills.

Sounds like you have decent plan. I could also come up with one.

My point is that neither will be implemented.

All of the things I mentioned are being implemented.

More than likely $20/kWh batteries will make them obsolete before they're fully rolled out, but landfill and wastewater gas collection is necessary, as is green ammonia.

> This is all fine if you retain backup fossil or nuclear power, or built transmission lines or batteries. That's unfortunately not how the politics always work.

My statements were made with reasonable assumptions about sanity in policy decisions. You are correct that those aren't always reasonable assumptions. :)

In my area, it isn't unusual to see relatively small utility solar on vacant land next to substations. Its cheap to build, transmission lines are low cost due to small distances, the land wasn't being used anyway, and its basically just demand reduction from a grid pov.

I suspect that economics change when they start putting huge installs 100 miles from anything in a desert, but I don't live in California.

So no wind at night?

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

"A near 100 per cent renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage"

In Australia*

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

There are plenty of energy storage options.

I don't know how much they increase cost, but there really is no need for old tech like coal/gas

From the report:

> Replacing coal plants with local wind and solar would also save enough to finance nearly 150 gigawatts of four-hour battery storage, over 60 percent of the coal fleet’s capacity,

4 hours is sometimes not enough. I think that we can build a clean grid, but I think:

1) it is orders of magnitude easier if we include nuclear, and

2) even with a nuclear baseline we will need to build up caches of supplemental longer term storage options such as synthetic fuels. The added resiliency is worth the reduced efficiency.

Nuclear has the same cost issues as coal. Whatever reasonable figure you put on it, it would be better spent on renewables and batteries.

Nuclear is about the same price as very simple LiIon, and LiIon is one of the more expensive options that regularly gets brought up.

Nuclear also comes with a lot of geopolitical concerns, because it's not just "us good guys" who need a working power supply, but also "that rogue state, $insert_country_here". For example, Israel and the Begin Doctrine w.r.t. Syria, Iran, and Iraq.

We could also solve the same problem for reasonable $-cost with a really big HVDC line around the planet, with the same criticism: geopolitics is hard, yo.

> Nuclear is about the same price as very simple LiIon...

For what time frame? That is, I can build an X Megawatt nuclear plant, and I can get X megawatts out of it hour after hour, day after day. But if I build LiIon, that's storage - a stock, not a flow. I can build X Megawatts for an hour, but if I need two hours, I have to double the storage.

As the batteries are rechargeable and have a lifespan mainly limited by charging cycles, what you're describing turns out to make negligible difference.

Buy enough for e.g. a week of pure battery use, most of days you're using 1/14th of your total capacity, but that makes the system as a whole last almost 14 times longer between battery replacements than a system that only has the capacity to last overnight.

So, back to your initial claim: Does nuclear have about the same price as two weeks of LiIon?

Yes.

Sorry, I thought that was obvious, given that time factors out.

Two [minutes, hours, days, weeks, months], to a reasonable approximation doesn't change the price of electricity.

It's like asking in which fuel tank petrol costs more per litre, the big one or the little one.

But to charge that lion you need some other source of energy. So costs should be Lion + power plant which is charging it.

You don't need to charge nuclear power plant, obviously.

The cost of wind or pv is a rounding error in this context.

@Schroedingersat specifically for yourself (if you don't have this already) as you appear to have a good handle on actual real world mining issues and an interest in renewable energy ..

For anyone else with an interest ..

South Australia ( small Australian state with some heavy industry ) has had prolonged periods of getting by on just battery backed renewable energy (wind, solar) with minimal baseload generation support - as part of a larger interstate grid they've exported excess energy to larger neighbouring states.

The Tesla built battery pack facility details are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve

https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/

https://www.cefc.com.au/where-we-invest/case-studies/sa-big-...

and there should be enough actual real world details there to plug into any models people are making about wind + solar + battery at latitudes of 33° from the equator.

You also forget, that that lion battery will need to be changed as it will get cycled up. But I guess that such detail is also a rounding error.

That's...the entire point of the comment you completely missed. LCOS + LCOE is much smaller with a LiIon battery, and there are many better options for 95% of the storage needed.

Once in a 10 years rebuilding a nuclear power plant? You are the one missing the point here.

How often something needs to be serviced is a different question to how much it costs each time you do.

The installation cost of a battery storage system, spread over the lifetime of that system, is a bit less than the the cost of a nuclear plant spread over the lifetime of the nuclear plant.

Adding to that number the cost of a renewable power supply to charge that battery, spread over the lifetime of the power supply, makes it swings and roundabouts.

Yes. Replacing a battery is exactly as hard as building a nuclear reactor. Frequency of replacing parts is precisely the only thing related to cost.

Of course, we are rebuilding nuclear reactors every 10 years from ground up. And of course that "just changing few MWh in batteries" is the cheapest part of whole battery storage.

No, just digging up a thousand tonnes of uranium and then lugging spent fuel around in several thousand tonnes of copper casks every three to six years.

Way easier than recycling a few GWh of batteries every 20 years, or simply using a pumped hydro station.

Yes, and?

Cost for renewable is $a/kWh, for batteries is $b/kWh for installation and $(b/c)/kWh for delivery where c is the effective number of cycles the battery lasts for.

a+(b/c) ~= the cost per kWh for nuclear, thought of course I'm painting in broad brushstrokes here and averages hide details.

So what is your math saying? That battery storage which needs to be replaced every 10 years because it will cycle out + needs to have additional power plants which are providing the power for it is in the end more expensive than just nuclear power plant? I agree.

No, and I have no idea why you're failing to understand me.

OK, let me try to explain a bit better what my problem is with what you're saying.

You build a nuclear power plant, and it is capable of outputting X megawatts as a sustained output. The same plant that produced 100 (or however many) megawatts this now will also produce 100 megawatts next minute, or hour, or month. Same with solar or wind, except that it's not quite as consistent as nuclear. (On the other hand, you have to refuel nuclear plants from time to time.)

LiIon is different. It doesn't produce electricity, it stores it. You measure it in megwatt-hours, not in megawatts. The battery that you stored your first minute of standby power in is a physically separate battery from the one you store the next minute's standby power in. Two hours of standby power costs 60 times as much as two minutes, because you need 60 times as many batteries.

The only way your statement makes sense is if the cost of the batteries to store two months of power is only a rounding error compared to the cost of generating the electricity. That possibly might be true, but if you're claiming that, I'd like to see your source...

The op's point which you failed to comprehend is the less often you cycle a battery the longer it lasts. So the overnight cost per joule delivered is constant.

You could object to the amount needed up front, or use some reasoning based on discount rate, but you didn't.

Also it would be wrong even if you did because the energy needed for the infrequent long duration events is a small fraction of the total and doesn't need storing inna chemical battery. Even using gas for it for centuries would release less emissions than the emissions released whilst building the nuke instead of something reasonable.

Worked example, albeit simplified:

If you use, say, 1 kilowatt constantly, then the minimum you need overnight is a 12 kWh battery, while a battery that lasts a week would be 168 kWh.

Let's say that particular battery lasts exactly 1095 complete cycles. The 12 kWh battery gets replaced every 3 years. The 168 kWh battery gets replaced every 42 years.

The cost per night is the same.

OK, that clarifies things a great deal. I believe I now understand your point.

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