
Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study - Osiris30
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-09/gas-plants-will-get-crushed-by-wind-solar-by-2035-study-says
======
beat
I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking
at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with
wind at under $50/mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60/mwh.
Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100/mwh (these are all
rounded numbers from memory, don't get unhelpfully pedantic!).

These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear. Coal plants are shutting
down as fast as replacements can be built, and nuclear plants are shutting
down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing
major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now.

The cost of PV solar has dropped over 80% in the past decade, and wind like
50%, due to engineering improvements in operation and economies of scale in
manufacturing. But it's a reasonable question how much farther their prices
will drop. It seems unlikely to me that we'll see another decade of such
radical price drops.

Gas, on the other hand, is vulnerable to markets and availability. How long
will it stay so cheap? And what happens if a politically progressive
government gets serious about carbon taxing? On the other hand, it's a lot
cheaper up-front to build a gas plant, and a lot less painful if it closes
early.

~~~
GuB-42
> and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-
> of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that
> are available right now

How? My understanding is that most of the cost of nuclear power comes from
building the plant and decommissioning it. Running existing power plants for
as long as they can seems like the most economical choice.

~~~
bilbo0s
In a word, price. As a consumer, do you want a bill for 2 cents a kWh? Or one
for 15 cents a kWh?

This example explainsa lot of what's happening: [1].

By way of a brief explanation, wind is expanding so fast in a lot of places
that the combination of wind+LNG is just too cheap to compete with. Iowa is
particularly bad, because wind is not "unreliable" in Iowa. There's a lot of
wind and it's almost always blowing. So they aren't even using those LNG
plants that much. Which only lowers the price to consumers even further.

In some states the government has stepped in to protect the nuclear industry.
Sometimes with things like carbon credits, that are given for generating power
without generating carbon. Then the nuclear plants sell those credits on the
free market to raise funds. But in some places government has had to be a good
deal more draconian. In Georgia, they've basically made it illegal for anyone
in Vogtie's service area to switch away. That's the only way they could get
the math to work. (And it still doesn't work. The federal government is still
pumping billions in cash into that project.)

[1] - [https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/iowas-
only-...](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/iowas-only-nuclear-
power-plant-to-close-the-latest-blow-to-a-fading-industry)

~~~
beat
An interesting factoid I ran across when researching this stuff a while back
is that no one has ever built a new reactor in a deregulated electricity
market. Period. The time frame of nuclear reactors is very long - like 50
years. So they're very sensitive to capital costs, and capital is sensitive to
risk.

Now, if you were doing the risk analysis on financing for a multibillion-
dollar nuclear project, and you just saw the cost of a major competitor
(solar) drop 80% in a decade... well, how would that factor into your risk
analysis? How much would your interest rates increase?

The only safe way to finance a reactor is government-based guarantees for
price regulation - the nation will consume X megawatts for Y dollars, no
matter what the market thinks the price should be. And do it in such a way
that some government two generations down the road can't just throw it all out
and screw you.

~~~
imtringued
The complexity of reactors needs to go down and they need to be smaller. Big
reactors can only be cooled if they are near the ocean, otherwise they have to
be shutdown when the flow rate of the river is too low, this usually happens
during heatwaves. It's easier to achieve economies of scale with 16 identical
small scale reactors instead of designing a custom reactor for each plant and
then building only 2.

I don't see this happening. Relying on new reactor designs to save nuclear
power isn't going to solve the problem in time. Right now governments are busy
with massive power plant designs that suffer from multi billion cost overruns.
After that experience they will probably stop building more power plants and
funding for new reactor designs will be reduced.

~~~
beat
Yeah. A lot of my attitude about pricing turns into pro-nuclear advocates
treating me as Treehugging Enemy of Progress, and one of the things they point
to is the always-in-the-future dream of small, simple thorium molten salt
reactors. But the best I've seen on that is a company that promises 30 cent
megawatts in 2030, but doesn't really have a working prototype yet. And it
would take, what, two decades past that to really get that going at scale? We
can't wait 30 years to do something about greenhouse gasses just because we
really really really want to do it with nuclear.

------
war1025
My understanding (which is probably uninformed at best) has been that coal,
nuclear, etc are used to cover base load, and basically work best when up and
running at 100% all the time.

Natural gas has the advantage that it can be spun up and down pretty quickly,
which has meant that it is used primarily for "peak" load, which I think used
to be covered a lot of the time by things such as diesel and oil plants and
have basically been supplanted at this point by natural gas.

Solar and wind have the trouble that they are unreliable, which means you need
something to smooth out demand. This is something coal and nuclear are poor
at, meaning if you are bringing solar and wind into the mix on a large scale,
natural gas becomes even more appealing since you can spin it up / down to
balance capacity.

A thing I don't see mentioned very often is the relative density of each power
source. One of the things nuclear and coal have going for them, is that you
can supply _a lot_ of electricity in a fairly limited footprint.

Wind and solar a much less dense, meaning you need to cover a much larger
area, and you need it to be more distributed rather than all concentrated in
one place.

All of this is to say that I think everything is inter-related much more than
people realize. Shifting to using more solar / wind creates a pressure to move
away from coal / nuclear even without considering the "clean energy" aspect.

~~~
godelski
Pretty accurate, but nuclear can spin up and down, by controlling the fuel
rods. This is one of the major advantage of the technology and why many
suggest it be used in combination with solar, wind, and hydro (many as in the
IPCC, which is why CNN pushed hard on everyone during the climate debates). It
can be used to provide a base load (greatly reducing the need for batteries
(or the need to invent good enough ones!) And can also scale back when it's
sunny and windy. All while producing no emissions when running.

~~~
baking
Chernobyl happened during a scheduled shut-down test that was delayed by 10
hours because there was higher than expected electricity demand. They tried to
speed-up the shut-down and the results did not go as expected. I think it may
be a little naive to say that nuclear can spin up and down by controlling the
fuel rods.

I think Three Mile Island and Fukushima also had issues with getting rid of
residual heat during a shut-down that at a minimum damaged the fuel and
resulted in a loss of the unit at TMI and a melt-down and major cleanup at
Fukushima. It seems to be the basic safety issue with fission and not one that
can be dismissed so easily. 6-10 hours for a controlled shut-down seems to be
the minimum safety margin.

~~~
godelski
> I think it may be a little naive to say that nuclear can spin up and down by
> controlling the fuel rods.

I'm not sure. Because that's exactly what control rods do. The carbon is a
neutron moderator. Neutrons are the "heat" in the reaction (that creates
actual heat). Less neutrons the colder the reaction is. You'll find this in
any elementary nuclear or atomic textbook (which I have read).

As for Chernobyl the show actually got a lot right. But there's a lot of
important things that get glossed over because it's dramatized. Like the fact
that it had a positive void coefficient and no other reactor operates that way
because everyone knew it had a chance is blowing up.

Similarly there's a lot wrong with your analysis about three mile and
Fukushima. Both of which killed zero people btw. I'd listen to the experts on
this one.

~~~
baking
I don't know what experts you are listening to, but the idea of shutting down
a nuclear reactor by lowering the control rods when the sun shines or the wind
blows is just plain silly, for economic and safety reasons. Maybe for some
future Gen IV design without fuel rods, but what you are talking about would
require doubling the staffing and would defeat any cost savings in fuel use.

Better to curtail the wind and solar or find ways to store the excess energy
in batteries, hydro, or fuel.

EDIT: Perhaps you mean something else by "spin up and spin down" but the usual
sense of the words implies a complete shut-down. Nuclear reactors do have a
normal operating range which can safely be reduced to half-power on a diurnal
cycle (typically at night, but could just as easily be during the day.)

~~~
godelski
No I mean vary the output levels. Not complete shutdown and restart. That's
how the spin up and down phrase was being used in the context of this thread
(I had also used the phrase "scale back"). So you and I are in agreement.

Edit: you also replied to me twice.

~~~
baking
HN won't let you edit a comment after a certain amount of time has passed,
thus a second reply with the links.

------
philipkglass
1) I think it's certainly _possible_ , but 2035 is still some time out.
Extrapolating battery costs 16 years from now is not at all straightforward.

2) The headline result can be true even if solar/wind/storage have significant
annual gaps in availability. If a gas plant was originally built on the
assumption that it could run profitably for 5000 hours per year, but in the
future there are only 2000 hours a year it can run profitably (due to more
solar/wind), it can be financially "crushed." At least in competitive
electricity markets. There could be large writedowns as plant load factors
decline. Since gas plants are much less labor intensive to keep running than
coal plants, I don't expect to see gas plants mothballed and demolished quite
the way American coal plants have been over the past 5 years. They may still
be profitable to run in the peak-demand season each year even with much more
renewable capacity deployed. But they'll make less revenue and profit, burn
less fuel, and emit less CO2.

~~~
makomk
I'd venture a guess that solar/wind/storage _would_ have significant gaps in
availability in this scenario. The economics of battery storage solutions
scales really badly as the length of the gaps they need to fill increases. Not
only does the capital cost of batteries increase in proportion to the runtime
required, the utilization plummets due to longer gaps being less common and
predictable than shorter ones. I can easily see it becoming uneconomical to
provide a reliable electricity grid. Unfortunately, one of the other anti-
global-warming measures that's being pushed for in this timescale in at least
some European countries is switching to electricity for heating.

~~~
philipkglass
I think that you're probably right about gaps remaining, for basically the
reasons you have given. And for that reason I don't expect mass demolition of
American gas plants in the 2030s the way there was mass demolition of American
coal plants in the 2010s.

The growth of gas capacity is alarming to many environmentalists; the phrase
is that we're "locking in" decades of high emissions from gas fired electrical
generators. But gas plants release the vast majority of their emissions during
operation, not construction. Diminishing the plant load factor of gas plants
is as good from an emissions-cuts standpoint as tearing them down. What do you
do when the wind isn't blowing, the batteries are discharged, and it's night
time? Burn gas. But the number of hours per year where _at least one of_
{batteries, wind, solar} can bid below gas will go up year after year, whereas
that number was essentially holding steady at zero through the whole 20th
century.

This brief sketch is most applicable to deregulated electricity markets. In
markets with regulated utility monopolies, unfortunately, gas plants will be
subject to less competition even if the cost of storage-backed renewables
keeps declining steadily. The majority of US electricity consumption now takes
place in deregulated states but it's far from universal.

[https://www.electricchoice.com/map-deregulated-energy-
market...](https://www.electricchoice.com/map-deregulated-energy-markets/)

------
GuB-42
Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar _and big batteries_.

Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support
wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.

~~~
fulafel
This assumes that we keep supply and demand pricing models mismatched. The
current "fixed price 24/7" model is not set in stone. AC/heating, EV charging,
many industrial processes can shift demand and make good forecasts about how
flexible their demand is vs average intra-day variation in electricity prices.

~~~
generatorguy
I don't have a lot of hope for people changing their behaviour based on time
of day pricing. Sure aluminum smelters etc might have to flag it for a day
once every 5 years but they do that currently because there isn't enough power
for everyone so please help us out and shutdown for a day instead cause we are
going to dump you anyway because we have to decide between giving you power or
this other major load such as a big city. Perhaps there is some gradient to
this and it is achieved with price signals - but basically the forecast has to
be 1000+ $/MWH for a whole day instead of just a couple high prices intervals
or hours, and it has to be order of magnitude higher $/MWH not just $200/MWH
instead of $80.

If it is a low-wind evening and prices on the grid are higher than normal what
fraction of people are going leave their electric cars with depleted batteries
instead of charging them? Say a charge takes say 8 hours, there isn't a lot of
room overnight to shift the load around. How many people will refrain from
charging because it is going to cost you $50 instead of $10? I think the
answer to that can be seen from how much people refrain from driving when fuel
costs go up. Given that traffic never gets better I would say none!

1) electricity is cheap. it will have to get a lot more expensive for anyone
to care enough to change the way they are using it 2) a lot of the demand is
inflexible, regardless of price. lights are going to be on, dinner is going to
be made when kids are hungry, car is going to be charged overnight because
must go to work tomorrow.

there is going to come a point where all wind and solar must have a certain
amount of firm capacity - say it has to be able to deliver 50% of nameplate
rating for 5 days straight - and this is going to significantly add to the
$/MWH cost of renewables. Then after 5 cloudy days in a row (unthinkable!) the
output of the solar farm is 10% of nameplate until it is sunny again.

~~~
tomatocracy
We've had time of day based pricing in the UK for years - it's called "Economy
7" (and there are variants like Economy 10). Historically this was designed
for electric storage heaters which were switched on a separate circuit at
night and you had two sets of wiring into the house but nowadays it can be
done based on pure time of day by a smart meter.

People who have those tariffs do tend to alter behaviour to suit them - it
mainly makes sense for homes with electric space and water heating, where it's
more "set and forget" (and people also do change behaviour by eg putting
washing machines or tumble dryers on late at night when the cheaper tariffs
apply too).

Over time I imagine we might see more dynamic algorithms in use to pick and
choose times when electricity is used together with more dynamic per-unit
pricing.

~~~
generatorguy
Great examples.

These measures in the U.K. were put in place to shift demand due to
constraints in total system capacity - total generation, total transmission,
total distribution capacity. Eg a substation transformer couldn’t handle
normal daily loads plus heating, so heating load is shifted to night.

What happens when power at night becomes more expensive due to increases
demand such as car charging or low supply such as high renewable penetration
and no wind?

It’s all about having the firm capacity to deliver power for hours on end. So
the $/mwh of wind or solar power has to go up because grids are going to say
you can only have more if you can supply firm capacity. This is already
happening in Hawaii.

I implemented hot water tank load switching through smart meters on at a town
with its own power plant of only 850 kw so they wouldn’t run out of power at
dinner time when the river was low (and we didn’t have to fire up the diesel
either)

~~~
tomatocracy
Yes, there will always be baseload demand. But I think with the right setup
more demand matching is possible for domestic and commercial buildings with
relatively little effort.

One way this could work is that you have eg a smart heating thermostat which
plans which hours of the day/night to turn heating on and then buys power to
cover that in a day-ahead market, with the aim of minimising cost on that
basis.

Wind and solar power are relatively preditable a day out so you wouldn't be
paying too much to power traders for providing day-ahead liquidity vs on-
demand pricing.

Likewise, EVs all end up parked somewhere during the day - the challenge is
ensuring that as many of those places as possible (car parks, workplaces, etc)
have charging points too; you could do something very similar there with an
algorithm deciding whether to charge based on a spot price and how much is in
the battery (say, owner programs car to top up to 65% and then only continue
charging if power is cheap).

~~~
generatorguy
How much does it cost to implement and run all the demand matching, how much
money does it save the loads who are willing to participate, and how much load
can reliably be controlled? The marriage of electrical system reliability to
real time control of tens of thousands loads over internet or cellular would
be an unholy one. This will limit acceptance as the cost of outages
immediately outstrips savings. So I’m back to grids requiring solar and wind
to come with energy storage to firm them up. Which is a perfectly fine
solution and increasingly viable as the cost per MWH of storage comes down.

~~~
tomatocracy
I'm not talking about real-time demand matching/load shedding here as a
consumer solution - as I mentioned, I think matching on a day-ahead (and
perhaps also eg 6-hour ahead) basis could well be a lot better than we have
now because wind and solar generation is quite predictable on a day-ahead
basis, as are outside temperatures (so eg for space heating energy consumption
may be relatively well predictable too).

The beauty of this type of approach is that it can be done by incrementally
building on things which already exist.

There's already an electricity market, including day-ahead pricing in most
pools. Professional power traders already trade these markets. Smart meters
already exist and are capable of dealing with pool prices not just flat rates.
Smart thermostats already exist. EVs already have the capability to stop/start
charging based on more than just whether they're plugged in or not. Even
better, most of these already have standardised APIs.

What's missing is the software stack which ties all of these together - and
that can be done incrementally, device by device (on the load side).

~~~
generatorguy
Thanks for the discussion. The information we are missing is what the
percentage of total load can or would be willing to be shifted, and how strong
the incentive (savings) is for the load to allow themselves to be shifted
versus their inconvenience.

~~~
fulafel
We know that the answer is 100% as the price has no upper limit, no?

------
kevinmhickey
I read the headline too fast and thought it said "Gas _planets_ Will Get
Crushed by _Solar Wind_ by 2035".

Sounded terrifying.

~~~
aasasd
I read it right the second time around, and had to think it over until I
stopped imagining _gas plants_.

------
perfunctory
Some time, in not so distant future, we will have abundant, almost infinite,
almost free, renewable energy. We will forget what an energy bill is, because
administration overhead will be higher than the price of the energy itself. It
will just be an inconspicuous tiny item on the city taxes. And we won't think
it's amazing. We'll take it for granted. It will become new normal. Just like
now we don't remember any more what it feels like not being reachable by phone
when you go out for dinner with your friends.

Mark my words.

~~~
twoelfer
And at that point in time, in a cloudy night, the wind will stop blowing. And
the lights will go dark.

~~~
hyperbovine
Improved stargazing and no more blackout curtains? Sign me up. :-)

~~~
52-6F-62
Hahaha. Maybe by that time we will take it so for granted that time-out
periods so we can see the stars better will be socialized. I still remember
the blackout of 2003 rather fondly...

Probably not, though...

~~~
mruts
I live in a 3rd world country and had to go to hospital with no power and no
lights. It was chaos, amputations by flashlight, doctors unable to see where
to hook up IVs, etc etc. How could you honestly think that the power going off
would be anything except a horrible horrible thing?

~~~
52-6F-62
Edited to preface: my intention certainly wasn’t to dredge up any terrible
memories. I’m sorry if it did so. It was more a remark on North American “go-
go-go” culture that was forced to take a pause for a day or so.

In this part of the world many critical services like hospitals run on back up
generators if the main grid goes down. It was part of the main grid that went
down

There was surely chaos some places where traffic lights weren’t on backup
power, but otherwise the worst things that would happen were maybe you have to
close up the office or the worksite for the day. Transit was down but not much
else could be done anyway.

It was bittersweet. I’m sure there were problems. I’m also sure that many
people who’d never seen a star in their lives saw the sky unfolded like they
might never again. It was a stark reminder how much we’ve drowned out with
things that “matter”

------
privateSFacct
RMI has been pushing hydrogen cars for a while. I was never a big fan of their
analysis there - so take their conclusions with a bit of a grain of doubt.

Ironically gas and solar / wind sometimes go together with gas filling gaps in
generation on a more flexible basis. Interesting to read here that gas will be
"crushed". That will need some huge battery capacity - not saying its not
possible but...

Coal though - if article was coal is going to be crushed - sure.

------
wnevets
Excess electric doesn't have to be in stored with chemicals like lithium ion,
energy is still energy.

~~~
phil248
True, it can be stored in salt for example, as it currently is in multiple
operational concentrated solar plants. Some have the ability to maintain
output during the entire night.

------
hairytrog
I downloaded the study - it's long and filled with pictures so haven't read
yet.

I expect they made the mistake of not taking into account the increase in cost
due to a primarily renewable grid. Such massive changes in the type of
generating supply will yield massive changes in the costs to supply power. As
you remove all the dispatchable power sources (power generators that you can
put on line at will) you have to build really big heat or electricity storage
and would have to have emergency generating capacity for the potential of
extremely low wind and sun for days and weeks at a time. Basically, you'd have
to have all the natural gas generators and pipelines for the eventuality of
bad renewable conditions. Who will pay for that? Just leaving them idle 95% of
the time is not the best use of money and it's possible the government may
have to pay for renewable's storage problems.

Geography is also a serious concern. Texas will have vastly different
economics than than Washington or New York.

~~~
usrusr
> Basically, you'd have to have all the natural gas generators and pipelines
> for the eventuality of bad renewable conditions. Who will pay for that?

Ideally the operators of facilities that tackle the storage problem with
power-to-gas technology. It's by far the most scalable storage option and the
discharge part of the cycle is already up and running.

------
trenning
Something I'm curious about is how this will affect plant manufacturers.
Specifically I'm thinking about generator manufacturers like MHI, Siemens, GE,
Toshiba. Do they just shut those divisions down and move on?

There's also a lot of other businesses that exist for
building/maintaining/repairing plants and equipment that are non-OE and their
futures seem grim.

------
powerbroker
On the week of August 12, the Texas grid, managed by the Electric Reliability
Council of Texas (ERCOT) maxed out at around 75,000 MW of load. On one of the
worst days, the approx. 24,000 MW nameplate capacity wind farms on that grid
produced about 4,500 MW at the absolute peaks of demand. In other words, wind
farms produced 18% or so of their maximum rated capacity.

This is a typical pattern during the dog days of August. Winds lull during the
late afternoon, and pickup after midnight. Winds farms, on an annual basis,
provide 22% of Texas electricity generation. However, during these peak demand
hours, natural gas contributed about 50,000 MW, with coal and nuclear distant
second and third place. If Texas wind farms are to displace the gas-fired
plants, there will need to be 10-fold increase in their numbers, or somehow
solar and battery storage will have to step in.

Saying that wind is going to crush gas, is only half true. Currently, the
pipeline of new generators being built in Texas has slightly more wind
(capacity factor ~ 40%) being installed than gas. Solar, during the next 5
years, is being built (allowing for capacity factor ~ 20%) at about the same
rate (~12,000 averaged MW). You could call these technologies the 'three
amigos', as they will be appearing, as new generating capacity, in (very)
roughly equal amounts. Nevertheless, gas plants are a unique, and necessary
part of the future, due to their dispatch ability. They can literally be
called upon to deliver electricity 24/7/365.

Importantly, one hour of generation during these peak periods costs 450 times
the average generator's fees for electricity. In other words, one hour of a
natural gas plant's output, during these near-black-out conditions (properly
termed Energy Emergency Alert), earns them as much as running those plants,
non-stop, the previous 19 days. These extreme spikes haven't happened in Texas
for a few years. Still, there is lots of opportunity for the gas plants to be
the 'high rollers' of the Texas grid during their expected 30+ years of
operation.

Peak usage week:
[http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/August_PUC_Pre...](http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/August_PUC_Presentation_FINAL.PDF)
Energy Emergency alert:
[http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/EEA_OnePager_F...](http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/EEA_OnePager_FINAL.PDF)

~~~
philipkglass
The renewable capacity on the ERCOT grid is overwhelmingly wind-based since
wind has been much cheaper than solar until the last handful of years. Its
output tends to peak at night. I think a lot of the peak-demand opportunity
for gas in Texas is going to be blunted by solar and battery projects coming
online soon.

"Can more solar help Texas meet peak demand?"

[https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/08/13/can-solar-help-ercot-...](https://pv-
magazine-usa.com/2019/08/13/can-solar-help-ercot-meet-peak-demand/)

 _There is a truly awesome amount of solar on the way in Texas, with ERCOT’s
July interconnection report showing 62 GW of solar projects. And while given
the highly speculative nature of project development most of those will likely
not be built, there are nearly 9 GW of projects that have interconnection
agreements, including 3.2 GW that have a full interconnection study
completed._

 _Those projects that can secure financing and get built will come online over
the next few years. It is difficult to say which ones will be online by next
summer, but a June ERCOT report identified 1.3 GW of projects with
interconnection agreements and financial security posted that are expected to
come online later this year, a number which should grow as the year
progresses._

"Developer eyes world's largest solar+storage facility for Texas"

[https://www.utilitydive.com/news/developer-eyes-worlds-
large...](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/developer-eyes-worlds-largest-
solarstorage-facility-for-texas/548691/)

"Energy Storage Developer Buys Texas Windfarms With Major Battery Retrofit
Planned"

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnparnell/2019/08/24/energy-s...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnparnell/2019/08/24/energy-
storage-developer-buy-texas-windfarms-with-major-battery-retrofit-planned/)

"GlidePath Builds Merchant Battery Plant in ERCOT, Bucking Industry Wisdom"

[https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/glidepath-
bucke...](https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/glidepath-bucked-the-
industry-trend-and-built-a-merchant-plant-in-ercot)

------
jpadkins
link to 2 page summary of the study [https://rmi.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/09/clean-energy-port...](https://rmi.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/09/clean-energy-portfolio-two-pager.pdf)

------
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
The report in question:

[https://rmi.org/insight/clean-energy-portfolios-pipelines-
an...](https://rmi.org/insight/clean-energy-portfolios-pipelines-and-plants)

------
Merrill
>"The authors of the study say they analyzed the costs of construction, fuel
and anticipated operations for 68 gigawatts of gas plants proposed across the
U.S. They compared those costs to building a combination of solar farms, wind
plants and battery systems that, together with conservation efforts, could
supply the same amount of electricity and keep the grid stable."

If the same amount of electricity is being supplied, why are conservation
efforts needed? Has anyone downloaded the reports from Rocky Mountain
Institute? They want your email address.

~~~
makomk
I had a look at the report and it looks fishy. They're not actually comparing
the cost of gas plants with the cost of wind, solar and storage - they're
comparing with a hypothetical "clean energy portfolio" consisting of whatever
combination of energy efficiency improvements, demand shifting, wind, solar
and storage their model reckons is cheapest, effectively modelling energy
conservation as a source of electricity that replaces gas power plant outputs.
This makes very little sense; there's nothing inherent about efficiency
improvements or demand flexibility that restricts them to being used with
renewables rather than gas power.

That's not the only dodgy thing either. Their proposal generates substantial
excess energy throughout most of the year. In order to improve its cost
effectiveness, they assume that excess energy has a value of $15/KWh and
subtract that income from the cost of the renewable program. The actual value
of this energy is probably close to zero; remember, we're talking about energy
that has gone unused even after substantial use of demand shifting and
storage.

------
heyflyguy
When I see studies of this nature I always think that it is such beautiful
idea to be living in a clean world. To be clear, I work in the petroleum
industry; so this would most certainly be an obvious end to my line of work. I
will hopefully be living in the keys by 2035.

At the rate our world population is expanding, I have to wonder if there is
simply enough surface area we can turn over to power generation and lose it to
things such as farming and other agriculture.

We are learning to farm land previously thought too arid for non-hearty crops.

------
timw4mail
I don't see batteries being able to store the amount of power (for a practical
battery lifetime to be cost effective) needed to make solar a practical
primary electricity source.

~~~
Robotbeat
To make the system close for a single site (without any geographical
diversity) is to produce about 3 times as much solar energy you need and
install enough batteries to meet 48 hours of average demand. That's enough to
deal with seasonality and with cloudy weather to provide a constant output for
an entire year.

The 48 hours of battery would last a really long time as typically only about
12 hours will need to be used, thus you'd get very long cycle life. A battery
used so lightly could get 10,000 effective full cycles, so probably would last
multiples of 25 years from a cycle life perspective (calendar life may be
another thing).

EDIT: If you add in geographical diversity and diversity in sources like wind,
hydro, and geothermal, then you need to throw away a lot less energy and you
need a lot less storage. IMHO, we should just bite the bullet and install a
bunch of transmission lines (which could be done in 2 years, enabling us to
decommission coal power within about 2 years in the US).

~~~
lstodd
Haha lol.

Even in equatorial Africa 48h is not enough. Neither for actual usage, nor for
battery life (and no one ever got marketing-leaflet-aka-datasheet-stated
lifetime out of them batteries). Two years max, and hope either the project
dies, or the company dies, or someone steals the batteries.

Source: been there maintaning solar offgrid.

And then --- geodiversity can only make it worse, never better.

~~~
generatorguy
Don't know why you are downvoted. I used to run solar powered sites that would
have 5 rainy days in a row in which only about 10% of solar generation was
delivered during daylight hours. We started with only enough batteries to last
overnight and ended up with 10x that. Then we added 33% more when the first
set of batteries had a short life due to getting so deeply discharged.

~~~
llukas
Is 10x overnight demand close to 48h of average demand? If yes then original
post was right.

~~~
generatorguy
My average day and night load was the same so I went from 12 hours to 120
hours worth of batteries and then could get through the 5 day storm, but with
batteries depleted so badly they were essentially damaged. Now we have about
150 hours worth of stored energy for our loads.

we added a wind turbine as well which was great since some of the rainy stormy
days had lots of wind. I don't understand my original posts parent's comment
about (geo) diversity not helping.

------
hash872
Sorry to thread jack, but- important question: how are people reading
Bloomberg now that they shut down incognito mode as of this week? Disabling
Javascript doesn't seem to work either. I'm using Outline for the time being,
but it's slow and annoying, and it won't load any longforms that contain
multiple pictures or graphs. Anyone else have a better solution?

~~~
greenyoda
Works fine when I use the uMatrix add-on to disable cookies and JavaScript.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/umatrix](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/umatrix)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjal...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjalglgifnmanfmnieipoejdcf)

~~~
hash872
Not sure if you'll see this, but this worked like a charm for me. Thank you!!

------
gkolli
What are the steps into getting there? What are the biggest roadblocks -
scientific or political?

------
HocusLocus
No they won't, unless the storage issue is solved.

(A comment someone else made and it got greyed out by the "we hate your poopy
face!" crowd.)

And even if it IS solved. After outside wind and solar infrastructure is
destroyed by the next continent wide Winter superstorm, how would having a few
hours (or days) of storage help?

------
jdoggie
Clean energy sounds good to me!!

------
weregiraffe
No they won't, unless the storage issue is solved.

~~~
jessaustin
When the future arrives, lots of people will be amazed at how little of the
solution to this "issue" ended up being storage as such and how much turned
out to be demand management and reasonable system architecture.

~~~
weregiraffe
When the future arrives, we will build enough nuclear reactors.

~~~
jessaustin
Who is "we"? There don't seem to be any investors eager to build these...

------
darksaints
I'm interested in understanding how this will play out with the
electrification of cars. As it stands now, the production and distribution
infrastructure is mostly used for homes. But you could easily double your
home's electric consumption with an electric car traveling just 10 miles per
day. If we see a quick change in electric car adoption, our production and
distribution systems are going to be massively strained. We might be keeping
gas and coal powerplants online just for capacity reasons alone.

~~~
gibybo
300 wh/mile seems to be about what most electric cars achieve. 10 miles/day *
300 wh/mile * 30 days = 90 kWh.

The average monthly energy consumption per capita in the U.S. is about 1000
kWh[1], so in order to double that with electric cars every individual would
need to drive an average of 110 miles per day.

[1] [https://www.worlddata.info/america/usa/energy-
consumption.ph...](https://www.worlddata.info/america/usa/energy-
consumption.php)

~~~
mruts
1000 kWh/month? That seems like a buttload to me. I used to live in the US
(though I never measured how much I used there) and currently, average between
6-15 KWh/day. I know this because I live in a 3rd world country and must pre-
pay for my electricity by going down to the local equivalent of a corner store
to add power. And I don't even turn off most of my lights at night.

------
Erudite_Genius
There are at least 5 better alternatives to wind and solar, but we don't teach
science any more in public schools.

If we did, there wouldn't even BE climate change alarmist hysteria poised to
destroy entire economies.

~~~
jandrese
Are you talking about natural gas?

I can think of a couple of other renewable resources: Geothermal and
Hydroelectric, but Geothermal is geographically limited and Hydroelectric has
proven to have more environmental impact than we would like. I have no idea on
what the other three could be. I guess you could include Nuclear in the list,
but the price points on that make it hard to declare it better than Solar and
Wind.

~~~
sunkenvicar
What are the severe environmental impacts of hydro?

~~~
jandrese
I didn't say severe, but there are environmental impacts:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_reserv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_reservoirs)

The biggest is the destruction of migrating fish habitat, sometimes reversible
with specialized structures (salmon ladders), sometimes not. There is also
some evidence for increased CO2 emissions from artificial reservoirs.

~~~
sunkenvicar
Hydro is clean and cheap baseload power. Better than nuclear.

The impact of creating water reservoirs must be immense. Because we are
dreaming about replacing hydro with vastly inferior power sources.

