
Sometimes, a Greener Grid Means a 40k% Spike in Power Prices - Bostonian
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-26/sometimes-a-greener-grid-means-a-40-000-spike-in-power-prices
======
jb_s
This is energy industry FUD

In Australia the complete opposite happens. Extremely hot days cause coal and
gas plants to fail
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/31/what-h...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/31/what-
happened-to-our-electricity-system-in-the-heat-coal-and-gas-plants-failed)

Whereas renewables have been causing power prices to occasionally fall to $0.
[https://reneweconomy.com.au/electricity-prices-across-the-
gr...](https://reneweconomy.com.au/electricity-prices-across-the-grid-fall-to-
zero-as-renewables-reach-44-share-77635/)

~~~
gwright
Not sure what you are talking about. Seems like prices are high in Australia:
[https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2018/jul/01/austr...](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2018/jul/01/australias-high-electricity-prices-the-new-normal-report-
says)

It is pretty much basic physics and math:

1\. Power supply must balance power consumption. 2\. No one wants blackouts.
3\. Intermittent power sources must be backed up by non-intermittent power
sources. 4\. You have to pay for the intermittent power generation as well as
the backup power generation. 5\. Cost of providing power goes up because your
capitol costs have increased.

~~~
kahnjw
I can't make sense of the sequence you've laid out but what do does capital
cost have to do with daily (or even momentary) fluctuations in price?

Also, energy prices can be higher on average than elsewhere and dip to zero in
some circumstances.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
To deal with the inherent fluctuations in renewable energy sources, you have 2
options: 1) Storage, and right now while there is a lot of R&D into large-
scale energy storage, there aren't really any great solutions yet, and 2) Non-
renewable backup, e.g. natural gas plants. Since it's easy to have cloudy or
windless conditions for days or weeks on end, your backup plants basically
need to be able to run at full capacity if you want to prevent blackouts.

Thus, with renewable sources, you need to have the capital investments of both
the renewable plant and the backup plant(s).

~~~
kahnjw
This does not answer my question.

The identifying characteristic of capital cost is: does not change over small
time intervals, it is fixed up front and amortized over the lifetime of the
asset.

This article and OP are talking about price spikes which are a symptom of
short term (days, hours, minutes) market dynamics.

The reason that prices spike has nothing to do with capital cost and
everything to do with short term demand/supply fluctuations.

~~~
gwright
Fair enough. You were focused on the short term spikes and I jumped to the
larger issue of a reliable grid that had backup power.

The connection in my mind is that if you shift your mix of generation plants
towards renewables then you have less ability to respond to outages of _any_
kind. Could be cloudy days, windless days, failed transmission lines, and so
on.

The advantage of a coal/gas/hydro/nuclear plants is that you can control the
amount of power they are producing. That isn't true with wind/solar. You
certainly can't turn them up and I think (but I'm not sure) it is difficult to
shed power that they generate (i.e. turn them down).

Those price spikes are last ditch attempts to purchase power to meet demand
before moving to brown/blackouts. Just another side-effect of not having an
appropriate mix of generation capacity.

------
superfluousText
"The road to a world powered by renewable energy is littered with unintended
consequences"

Yes, entirely unlike a world powered buy fossil fuels, which has provided no
surprises whatsoever and continues to go off without a hitch.

~~~
Arbalest
idk, the consequences have really only been a surprise to people who are
willfully ignorant. Can't argue the going off without a hitch though.

edit: I interpreted the comment as sarcastic, and responded to the opposite of
the explicit as implied by the sarcastic comment. Kind of forgot that it was
written that way and thus that it could be interpreted to mean I might be
saying it has gone off without a hitch.

~~~
peteradio
mmmm lead

------
matahwoosh
Yes, renewable energy like wind and solar are intermittent, so we will need to
invest (a lot) more into energy storage. So far storage has been expensive and
need to drop a lot, so it can reach mainstream [1].

[1] [https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/08/12/new-us-study-finds-
re...](https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/08/12/new-us-study-finds-renewable-
energy-storage-costs-need-to-drop-90/)

~~~
ianai
Good news

[https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-
surpris...](https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-
efficient-way-to-store-energy/)

~~~
einpoklum
1\. The energy overhead seems quite significant - as the concrete barrels
don't really drop. 2\. What guarantees non-collapse in case of winds (and
ignoring floods)? 3\. Does this really scale? I mean, concrete is more dense
than water, but I think it's only... what, twice the density?

~~~
666lumberjack
Not the person you responded to, but you correctly identified some of the
serious flaws in this idea. They claim to be using commercially available
crane technology, but existing cranes are generally not designed to operate in
high winds, so they seem like a poor match for wind energy. According to [0]
tower cranes are typically limited to operating in wind speeds of 20m/s or
less, where as wind turbines[1] top out at ~35m/s. That would mean when the
turbines are at peak production (i.e, when you want to be 'charging' your
storage) wind speeds would be too high for co-located concrete block storage
to work.

The design also seems to have quite poor power density; their website[2] shows
a single tower in front of fields of turbines, but they only quote a power
output of 4-8MW - the equivalent of 1-2 large turbines - so in reality you'd
need dozens of them for a single installation.

[0]
[https://www.cranes.org.nz/uploads/2/0/5/7/20572552/wind4.pdf](https://www.cranes.org.nz/uploads/2/0/5/7/20572552/wind4.pdf)
[1] [https://www.enercon.de/fileadmin/Redakteur/Medien-
Portal/bro...](https://www.enercon.de/fileadmin/Redakteur/Medien-
Portal/broschueren/pdf/EC_Datenblaetter_WEA_en_052019.pdf) [2]
[https://energyvault.com/](https://energyvault.com/)

------
einpoklum
Sometimes, a greener grid means you will be struck by lightning. It's true! If
the power cables move from one place to another, a lightning strike could hit
you instead of some power cables.

Also, sometimes a greener grid means you will fail to win the lottery. A news
item about the grid may distract you from putting down the correct numbers!

------
andromeduck
IIRC the 40% renewables in California only work because we can page from
British Columbia's hydro reserves when we have a shortfall and then sell it
back for cheap to let them recover.

I'm not sure you can go much higher right now without building more dams or
retrofitting more of them for pumped storage and there's been enough
opposition to recent hydro expansions to make it seem nonviable for the path
to 100.

~~~
ocschwar
Renewables in CA are difficult because when the sun sets, electricity demand
is high, but there's no source of solar power to the west.

(And coastal wind in CA is hard since the costal shelf drops much deeper than
on the East Coast.)

~~~
sieabahlpark
Why would it be more during night? It's much cooler at night compared to the
day when AC is used at most buildings.

~~~
blake1
The solar ramp-down is faster than the AC ramp-down. If you have a dumb
thermostat, it runs the AC a fraction of the time which is a function of the
outside temperature. However, the temperature stays elevated some hours after
sunset, but the solar supply drops off quickly some hours before sunset. Solar
supply is pretty well matched to AC demand except for a big mismatch a few
hours around sunset.

Consider California. Currently, this mismatch is taken up by fossil fuel
plants and imports, but the solar demand drops off so fast that they have real
difficulty in ramping up as needed. Batteries are a major part of the
solution, but another part is improved transmission of wind from states to the
east. This will cost less than you might think.

California might use 800GWh daily; and yes, installing 800GWh of battery
capacity would be prohibitively expensive. However, the wind picks up in the
evening just a few hours after the sun goes down, so the batteries really just
need to shift some excess power from midday to the evening. When I last
calculated this, the additional transmission + batteries would cost around $40
billion.

Interestingly, smart thermostats can make this worse: devices with a home/away
mode allow the house to warm up when no one is inside because the owner
doesn't want to pay for cooling that they won't enjoy. However, as all of
these owners return home after work and school, this creates a demand spike;
also, the AC units on these houses, which have been allowed to warm up, now
need to run far longer into the evening. Really, the home/away feature is a
little bit of a hack: the real goal is to minimize cost with some constraints
on the temperature, and the utility ought to pay owners to shift their demand
forward from evening to midday. This is like getting paid to store energy
temporarily.

So some combination of demand shifting---either with smart-er thermostats or
batteries---adding other generation sources like wind, and some additional
transmission, mean that California really can get to 100%. It will not be
free, but it seems like the cost is less than $100 billion.

Now in Texas, the situation is somewhat reversed. There is too much wind
generation, and not enough solar, but the upshot is similar.

------
tzs
Isn't some of this due to Texas' Amish approach to the national grids? What I
mean by that is that Texas has little interconnection with the rest of the
country. Like the Amish, they mostly only use electricity they make themselves
[1].

Unlike most of the rest of the country, this means that when demand is much
higher than local capacity they can't import from other states, and when
demand is lower than capacity they can't export the excess. So they get big
price swings.

[1] It's largely a myth that the Amish do not use electricity. What the Amish
avoid is tying their infrastructure too closely to the outside. Tying into the
grid would be too close, but they generally are OK with electricity generated
locally by solar panels, windmills, or gas powered generators.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/zKUak](http://archive.is/zKUak)

~~~
raws
thanks

------
hobolord
> Clean energy advocates point to batteries as a solution to renewables’
> intermittent nature

Not just batteries, but an efficient grid that uses all the resources in an
optimal manner. This was always the goal in creating microgrids, to be able to
not rely on the main grid unless required, and when required the main grid
would be able to perhaps use another microgrid's resources.

~~~
qroshan
I'm pretty sure, the conditions that would lead one's switch to main grid
would be similar to everyone resulting overloading the main grid which pretty
much the article is alluding to. It matter diddly squat if I save 5c an hour
if I have to pay $1000 / hour during over load

------
bananatron
Low tech magazine has a good writeup on energy stability and security as it
relates to green energy: [https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-
some-of-th...](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-the-
lights-on-redefining-energy-security.html)

------
davidw
That's a pretty big incentive to try and bring in new sources of greener
power, isn't it?

~~~
yardie
It’s also a great incentive to upgrade your infrastructure and upgrade
buildings. I’m noticing a lot of office buildings in my area have switched to
white rubber roof seals instead of black asphalt.

------
ptah
sound like texas is doing it wrong tbh

