But that's no longer the world we live in. The lowest cost energy is now from intermittent sources, and the optimal grid design will look very different.
Nuclear, fission or fusion, is the opposite. It's all fixed cost. A higher fixed cost than solar or wind.
Natural gas just trade pollution, a problem for the future, in return for cheaper energy price today.
It’s not clear there would be much longer time periods. Build enough low carbon generation to guarantee a surplus every day and you have a surplus every day.
Anyone claiming we need days worth of storage is inherently making an argument that days worth of storage is cheaper than simply building more generation and generation is really cheap while batteries aren’t.
AND not OR. To actually need 2 weeks of storage you would need both 0 output in solar for 2 weeks and 0 wind for two weeks and 0 output from hydro. That doesn’t happen.
You still get solar power on cloudy days, it just takes more panels to generate some specific level of power.
The goal is to minimize X$ for generation + Y$ for storage while guaranteeing sufficient supply. Any study approaching things from any other set of assumptions is going to give you nonsensical answers.
Heavy industry will tend to migrate to sunnier areas.
A hypothetical estimate of 100% NYC’s electricity from Southern Arizona to NYC across HVDC adds up to ~1,300$/per person for infrastructure that lasts ~50 years.
East/west is even cheaper because people on both ends would want to move electricity. Florida solar kicks in early in the morning for California and California solar is still available late into the evening Florida time. You have some losses across HVDC, but you have losses and battery degradation with storage.
So, if by short distances you’re talking 1,000+km and 10GW then sure it’s billions. However, the US is only so big and Billion’s don’t actually mean much to move over 2% of the US’s total electricity.
Now my personal power output does tank during this period, but such extremes are local events. Further hydro, nuclear, and geothermal just don’t care about clouds.
Another point here is that demand shaping is an effective way to deal with fluctuating supply of power. By creating financial incentives, you can get energy consumers to scale up or down their consumption of power. Night tariffs are still common in places with a lot of static generation, for example. With solar generation now being so common, we even get occasional negative energy rates in some places where the static generation can't be scaled down.
Batteries and cables are a key enabler for demand shaping. Also, the time windows that energy gets sold for are getting shorter. It used to be that you'd buy x amounts of mwh for some price for hours. It's now getting down to minutes. That means grids can respond more rapidly to fluctuations in supply and demand. And of course it creates incentives for companies to invest in being able to scale up or down their energy consumption from the grid and benefit from these price fluctuations. For example by having batteries and using their roofs for solar generation.
Base load is of course a very flimsy concept and the discussions about it tend to be very hand wavy and rarely cite specific numbers in GW needed. Because as soon as you do that, you can talk solutions: cables, storage, more solar (it always generates some power), etc. And cost.
Hysterical assertions that we need to spend double digit percentages of GDP on things like nuclear or fusion kind of fall over when you apply some rationality to that. How much power for how much $? Maybe do something less mad and cheaper instead. Build some cables. Add some off shore wind. Much cheaper, faster, and way less risky.
Of course the reality is that we still have plenty of base load for the foreseeable future. That's why the vast increases in wind and solar generation, which are now the dominant source of power in a growing number of places, isn't really causing any outages or rolling blackouts. Whatever amount of base load we need, apparently it's way less than we currently have because we have been removing lots of it from the grid.
If someone was starting from scratch and looking at fossils, the arguments against would be so obvious and compelling that any arguments for would look insane. Nukes aren't much better.
The arguments against renewables are purely opportunistic and political.
We need clean energy now, not 10/20/50 years from now. We could have clean energy with some fairly cheap local build out - panels over carparks, for example - combined with regional power farms, and buffered with existing storage technologies and an improved grid.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nishandegnarain/2020/09/25/loud...
Further, the economics will dictate what happens not just our current predictions. It makes a real difference if solar panels are 25% or 30% efficient in 2035+ similarly how flexible demand for charging EV’s is and how expensive battery storage ends up being etc.
I often point to this, but it's such a fun and useful site I'll do it again.
What you get is typically (it depends on where you are) producing steady output from solar + wind requires some hours of batteries (typically much less than a day) and usually a fairly large backup of hydrogen (particularly far from the equator). The hydrogen gets burned in combined cycle plants with a mediocre round trip efficiency; most of the stored energy goes through batteries and back again at high round trip efficiency.
So, yes, one does need days worth of storage, but it's not batteries, it's a rainy day hydrogen account where storage capacity is very cheap.
Saying
> There will be times when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine
Is just FUD. The wind is blowing and the sun is shining in many places within 2000km no matter where you live
After failing to successfully launch a Trident missile for 8 years it probably wouldn't change much.
You've only managed to send to Ukraine what the US spends on parks.
Honestly at some point you all need to accept that you really aren't a meaningful player in geopolitics anymore and focus on getting GDP per capital higher than that of Americas poorest state.
Seriously you can't afford to not dump feces in your waterways, what other option do you have.
Uncle Sam and the Polish will keep you safe. The only threat you need to worry about is the machete gangs you keep importing to keep your Pret delivery under 3 quid.
Energy security is something every country should aim for, regardless of the size or perceived importance of the country.
> I find that fact that the UK would depend on another country for power generation in a serious way really really dumb.
Very erudite, but the UK imports 40% of its energy. It is already heavily dependent on other countries.
Building out more renewables and importing the extra 20% whenever the wind isn't blowing so hard isn't a risk to national security.
If the lines were cut you would be in a total war situation where
1. power would be rationed anyways
2. The wide distribution of renewables would be much harder to destroy than a handful of oil terminals, rigs, and ports.
> We might as well sell off our armed forces.
I don't see how this is relevant outside of the UK's desire to defend its foreign energy interests / trade, which it very obviously cant do anyways.
Where we import from matters, importing from France and the Nordic countries is far more viable and easily defensible than importing from Morocco. It is still not a great idea to rely on them.
I agree that renewable generation being more distributed is harder to destroy than oil infrastructure (not that anyone has the operational capacity to attack the UKs infrastructure barring the USA with any great success) but that is not what it is a risk - the HVDC lines are! They are much easier to take out. If renewables require a HVDCs to less stable and friendly areas of the world then they make the UK more vulnerable - it is dumb.
>> We might as well sell off our armed forces.
> I don't see how this is relevant outside of the UK's desire to defend its foreign energy interests / trade, which it very obviously cant do anyways.
That's hyperbole, selling off our armed forces is a naive move that no nation would rationally do, as is becoming so incredibly dependent on a chain of other countries for electricity generation.
I prefer a solution that does not involve rationing electricity.
And oil and gas are energy dense enough (and storing it is cheap/easy enough), it’s possible and common to stockpile months to years worth of supplies. All it takes is some big metal tanks.
Not sure how that is going to play out when it takes a decade plus to build a HVDC line, that line is in a fixed position (so easy to sabotage/destroy) and it’s orders of magnitude more expensive to store electricity - so most places will be lucky to even have a couple of days worth of storage.
I’m honestly not sure which will be more dramatic looking if someone bombs it though.
For somewhere with constant good insolation and low winter energy needs (like the Australian Outback, for instance), not likely to be a problem. Australia has never been meaningfully invaded or bombed either. So centralization is likely not a huge concern for them.
For somewhere with peak energy needs that coincide with minimal insolation (and often wind!), like long dark winters? And temps that can easily result in people freezing to death? And that has a history of conflict with neighbors?
Like Germany, France, Norway, Finland, etc.
Yikes.
I'd bet the chinese could run a line from Bejing to Lhasa in 6 months.
We have decarbonized a lot in the US already, but we still have a long ways to go. A future of just solar, wind, and storage is still a very long ways off. We'd need a lot of load that is responsive to price and we're just not there yet. That's unattractive politically. People are fine with renewables until all those fixed costs creep into their bills and they're told that they have to go to dynamic pricing to make you hyper conserve electricity during the times you want to use it the most.
Yes, we'll eventually get there, but I strongly believe that gas will still be a big player as a backstop/reserve...maybe with carbon capture technology which runs all out during times of renewable abundance to counter the carbon output of the gas. Will it be practical though?
True. But if we’re talking about rare - maybe once a year or two - dunkelflaute, then the gas power plants aren’t actually going to consume much gas at all. And thus the CO2 emissions will become negligible.
Those gas power plants already exist in most industrial countries. They’ll have made their return on investment so using them for backup will be fairly cheap. Especially in the coming age of robots/ drones for inspection work.
To get to zero emission we can just use biogas or hydrogen. If the consumption is low this will be sustainable and financially viable since the fuel cost will be a very small part of the total operating costs, and making the hydrogen will be very cheap since there will be an abundance of days with excess electricity.
So I don’t see that we will actually have a problem w.r.t. energy storage. Battery storage for short term has already outpaced pumped hydro. The transition to EVs already imply battery production capacity on a scale to handle energy balancing for hours or even days.
Trash burning power plants is a good solution for seasonal demand. Yeah, reuse and recycle first. But eventually when materials degrade we should burn it to avoid landfills.