Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

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Alright. Since I work for one of America's largest utilities I'm going to point out something that apparently isn't all that popular to say:

We have plenty of energy already

The entirety of our generation capacity is aimed at delivering energy during peak use, which is 8 hours per day. That is 1/3 of the day. The other 1/3 of the day is much less energy intensive, and the final 1/3 hardly registers in comparison. Coal plants can't be powered down so if they're generating too much then the excess is sent to ground. Literally, we spend 1/3 of the day pumping energy into the ground. Ditto for today's nuclear power plants. Yet people keep saying we don't have enough energy.

What we don't have is two things:

1. A distribution system capable of handling 24/7 load. The lines feeding your neighborhood were never meant to be run 24/7 and the equipment is undersized to cool down properly. You need to upgrade so they don't overheat and cause problems. Remember, they're only meant to be run hard for 8 hours per day and they're used to not being used much at night so they can cool down in the cool night air. More nuclear generation isn't goin to do squat about that problem.

2. Smart load management. Yes, industry can't shift load as much - but residences can. Don't charge your EV while you're using your oven. Things like that. Collectively there's plenty of power to power everything you need - we just need to be a little smarter in scheduling that power. You need to manage your peak rate. We need smart plugs that shut of when you've reached your peak usage rate. Shut off the EV, shut off the electric water heater - you should be able to program what you want done and get alerts that you're going over your peak load. Load management needs to be part of our lexicon.

Continuing to do what we've been doing is not the path forward.

Well, we want to get rid of the coal entirely (that is those of us who care about climate change), so that's a big gap to fill.

Putting SMRs in coal plants to leverage the existing power gen and transmission is a very appealing proposition.

It seems that storage is a key part of the solution, and being able to distribute that more so that every neighborhood can have resiliency and the ability to charge fleets of EVs w/o taxing the grid.

Batteries win on convenience and are only going to get cheaper, but it would be nice to have other options. Flywheels are cool but Beacon Power's failure leaves that landscape looking bleak. Thermal storage seems like the best/cheapest option other than batteries.

I think we have enough technical solutions today -- now it's a matter of will and economic incentives.

Not only coal: in the end, transports (cars, trucks) and other industries (steel making) should also stop burning carbon as much as possible, so keeping the current quality of life would require increasing electricity production significantly.

Definitely. There's so many wins to going full on electrification.

I think the only "exception" will be air travel, but even that can be addressed by using green fuel.

https://medium.com/@twelve.CO2/electrify-the-fuel-how-e-jet-...

I would like to see a way more aggressive price scheme for power. Want to charge your Tesla, mine crypto on your 4090 setup, and have the AC running when you get home from work at 6PM?

Good for you -- you'll pay $2.00 per kWh for the privilege. Mad about it? Turn off the computer, insulate your house better, or wait to charge the car. YOU have to pay for it because WE all collectively pay for it when they turn those peaker plants on and CO2 is dumped into the atmosphere.

We already have such things, but the effect is greatly dampened because the utilities are so limited in what they can do. The only way to get people to change their behavior is with incentives.

Great, I'll stop heating my home with a heat pump, electric water heater and dryer, driving a Tesla and Energica, and working from home and replace all that with propane appliances, the Dodge Challenger and Yamahas I've always wanted, and start commuting to an office. Because it would be cheaper.

I use almost double the electricity of the average household right now, but I pay zero dollars towards fossil fuel energy and I pay extra for my energy to come from solar and wind. There are four adults under my roof. By all metrics, we're the "greenest" household in the neighborhood. If we switched to propane and gasoline, we'd have one of the largest carbon footprints instead.

The economics of what you're suggesting just don't make sense. Despite our high usage, our carbon footprint is far lower. As a society we want people to use more electricity. There's no such thing as clean energy when you get it from fossil fuels. The idea that we'd incentivize people to use dirtier energy instead of spending money to improve our electric infrastructure is wild.

If your energy truly comes from solar, you would have no problem. When solar is on, your energy is very cheap. It's if you are using that electricity at the "dirty" times that you should pay for the externalities. Right now, I can come home and charge my electric car at 6:00pm. California fires up a natural gas turbine so that I can do that. Do I pay extra? Not really! Rates are cheaper by a few cents in the late evening and early morning, but not nearly enough to change my behavior.

That's what this is about, changing behavior. Two things are necessary for that:

(1) things need to be priced to align consumer behavior (subsidies for green energy and pigouvian taxes for dirty energy) (2) consumers need to have full knowledge of prices

Right now, we are actually not bad at (1) although in my ideal world the cost differential is far more extreme (the actual cost of energy is like 4c/kWh when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing -- as the gp comment says, we make a lot of energy!). We totally fail at (2). Most consumers don't know that energy is more or less expensive at different times of the day. They see a monthly bill.

Of course, you're right if you don't close other loopholes it won't work. A gallon of gas would be $10 and a Dodge Challenger would cost $100,000 or more if externalities were priced in.

But that wouldn't be 100% of your electricity because of lights and appliances, which are still at those absurd rates. What you should do instead is install a transfer switch and a generator at home. You could even get a natural gas generator to hook up to utilities and not have to worry about refilling gasoline or propane.

That way 0% of your energy will be green!

We don't have a natural gas line running down our street. If we were going all in on having our energy trucked in, why not coal?

That's never going to be popular because the majority of people are coming home from work at 6PM. They want to be able to cook, shower, and relax. It's a minority of people (mainly those that are better off) who are able to shift their usage away from peak hours.

At some point when the prices are too much, it becomes a tax on the poor, who need to use public electricity, to pay for the rich's private batteries. It would be better to take that incentive money and spend it on public utility batteries instead.

Why jump directly to the stick approach and not the carrot approach?

Make electricity cheaper at night. Demand will shift and it'll be a popular program rather than another eco tax that creates opposition.

> We have plenty of energy already

Roughly 60% of US electricity comes from coal and methane. A serious response to climate change means shutting down all that fossil generation, while simultaneously electrifying all the cars, heaters, and industry.

We don't have nearly enough energy yet.

Our usage of coal has dropped 50% over the past 20 years. Natural gas has become popular because a natural gas plant is the easiest and cheapest plant in the world to build, is extremely efficient, does't produce emissions that are regulated so you don't have to care about, and, thanks to hydraulic fracking, is cheap. We joke that it's pennies per cubic mile. The stuff is super cheap.

If one were to regulate hydraulic fracking and/or regulate the emissions produced by these plants then there wouldn't have been the huge build-out of them. Utilities do what they're incentivized to do.

> does't produce emissions that are regulated so you don't have to care about

Unregulated CO2 emissions are a huge problem for the world, and natural gas is part of that problem, regardless of what the law says.

Do you know if the USA current energy production is enough, even considering we'll need to electrify everything (heaters, cars, etc.)? Could you share any good sources on that?

No it is not enough given growth demand and the decrease in supply from some of the dirtier plants shutting down.

Asking as an interested non-industry-member: where do you see very-large-scale short-term power storage going in the next few years?

Oversimplifying: if we're running at an average of (let's say) about half load (full load at peak, and 1/3 load at all other times, for about 4/9 ~= 45% average 24h load), wouldn't it be useful to run generating stations at or around that figure around the clock and store the off-peak surplus for on-peak use?

Related to shifting load. This hit the front page recently. It’s the DOE’s take on virtual power plants.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37738347

That's a dumb argument. The more energy we have, the cheaper it will be.

Exactly this.

And as additional food for thought... How many outages can anyone remember that were caused because of lack of generation capacity?

I (and other Texans) can remember plenty!

Think about what you're saying. Texas didn't suddenly lose generation capacity that day. Their generation failed to work because it was frozen - and let's be clear: it was the natural gas plants that were the problem. The Texas legislature incentivizes utilities to not winterize their plants, so they don't.

At the time Texas was dealing with frozen power plants there were plenty other colder parts of the country that had their generation, including windmills, running just fine. Let's not pretend the lack of generation capacity caused the problem, because it didn't.

Touché!

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