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> Texas is the absolute best case scenario,

Better examples around the globe and within North America are non isolated grids - Texas is in a weak position to share it's excess and to get back energy from wind blowing in other states.

> it has to increase the cost of energy because you have to pay for renewables and pay for the battery operators to do nothing and pay for the gas operators to do nothing.

No, it doesn't have to increase the cost.

If you have a town powered by gas, the cost of maintaining and staffing the gas plant is locked in.

But most of the cost of that gas plant is the fuel.

If the total cost per kWh of a solar or solar+battery installation is lower than the fuel cost of the gas plant, then you build it. It saves you money even though you're paying the gas operators to do nothing part of the time.

If it's not cheaper than fuel, you don't build it. No harm no foul.

Follow that strategy and you'll end up with lots of renewables without wasting a penny.

Though honestly some idle gas plants don't cost that much. How many kilowatts do you need? 4? Okay, the fixed costs for 4 kilowatts of combined cycle gas power are $50 per year. That's all it takes to have backup production for the entire grid, even with no base load plants anywhere.

No, there are capital costs.

You don't have to theorize: you need substantial amounts of spare capacity because with solar, for example, there will be night and winter, the costs of maintaining this capacity have been substantial in practice and have driven up energy costs everywhere (the confusion here is about what the article is claiming to say vs what is actually happening...the article constructs a model to show that energy prices would be higher, the problem is that the model is useless).

You're paying the capital and maintenance costs of the fossil plants whether you have solar or not. They are not "driving up the price" because they're not new.

And in the real world renewables will never go to zero so you can reduce that cost when you build a lot of renewables, even accounting for the worst case winter.

Am I saying that overbuilding solar from a financial perspective never happens? No. But I am saying that if money is your priority, it's straightforward to plan and build renewables in a way that strictly saves you money. Even though you'll sometimes be paying people to do nothing!

To my best understanding, and to the extent that you are making a testable claim, it is not borne out by any analysis I have seen. For example:

> Texas is the absolute best case scenario, and it isn't working

In Texas, it's private investors who shoulder the risk of whether or not an energy source is economical. And private investors are largely choosing solar, wind, and batteries, with a bit of gas.

When you say "energy brought on as required" you appear to be talking about dispatch; but that's what batteries do, right?

And solar/wind do not need to be dispatchable to be a good economic choice; as long as their are cheaper than the fuel and operating cost of a different dispatchable choice, then why run the more expensive energy source?

Because private investors do not care if energy is more expensive, and there have been massive federal subsidies.

Correct, batteries do this but you need to pay for all the time when batteries are sitting there doing nothing.

I didn't say they did need to be dispatchable or not, the problem is the composition of supply. Renewables are more expensive, so why run them?

Renewables are more expensive than... what precisely?

And last I checked, we don't harangue cars because most of the time they are "sitting there doing nothing", so in what way is that a valid criticism of energy infrastructure?

With batteries, electricity can be brought on as required, and has already been helping: https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/infrastru...

This has been a reasonable point to bring up. Renewables when they are first coming into the system represent only a small part of the energy supply. But as they get bigger, the swings in availability end up swinging the entire system around to a larger degree. This is usually where Gas plants take up the slack trying to balance out the system. Storage is the key.

I suspect this is an issue that looks worse in 'intuitive' foresight but not so bad in educated retrospective but we will not know until we pass through that point. I am but an armchair "expert" on this. Usually when something like this comes up, 15 people who know better than me will highlight something I was not aware of.

The problem has been big bang policy-making. There is no inherent issue with renewable vs non-renewable, the only thing that matters is can you get energy at a cost that is economic...that is the purpose of the system we have. The problem has been created by policy-makers who want to go very quickly in one direction without regard for any other goal than increasing the share of renewables.

I think the only things most people are missing is the that a) renewable energy production has skyrocketed in the last five years specifically, with no slowdown in sight and b) as of just the last couple years we are seeing a similar boom in industrial battery installation that is starting to making the chorus of "but the sun doesn't shine at night!" sound old fashioned.

The issues with Texas and the UK are that their grids are relatively isolated. Like here in Finland, we have a bigger share of renewables than the UK or Texas, but electricity is still cheaper than UK and pretty much the same as in Texas.

The UK is not an isolated grid, massive amounts of electricity are exported/imported with Europe with all the benefits/costs that come with that (this was an issue, for example, when electricity prices went up in the UK and the UK began exporting huge amounts of energy to Europe...this was effectively why the UK had to introduce a retail subsidy, because EU nations did the same which increased their effective demand for energy).

And the difference is that Finland has nuclear...that is it, which provides the dispatchable demand. It is extremely challenging to replicate this in many other countries because of the planning issues (the UK is building Hinkley, the cost for this is tens of billions, the funny story here is that the government decided not to proceed with this ten years ago because electricity prices were too low...can't think what has changed in the meantime? total mystery...right?).