> In the US, it's cheaper to build and operate wind farms than buy fossil fuels.
This is currently HN's title, and the article's subtitle. But the article makes no statement to prove this assertion.
It does not even make sense to me. I guess the author meant that for firms that have high energy needs. But it is stupid to imply that the electricity provided by fossil fuel can always be replaced by wind turbines. If the need is for regular bursts, high volumes on short periods, wind won't be of much use.
Moreover, the article is a digest of a report that is less emphatic. The US Department of Energy expects a slow-down of wind capacity after 2020, once the tax credit will end. For a project that would start now, there would be no tax credit, so it would be hard to reach a competitive price.
You’re close to the situation at hand. Wind does not match the demand curve, but it’s vastly cheaper than natural gas.
This means wasting a significant percentage of wind generation is still a net savings. Currently curtailment aka excessive wind production is relatively low percentage of generation, but based on current prices it’s cheaper to build more wind just to offset more natural gas use.
You end up needing to pay for the generators either way. So, currently the breakpoint ends up being when 1/2 of all wind power is wasted resulting in 2 x 10$/MWh your at breakeven with fuel costing $20/MW-hr.
However, current natural gas prices are market driven. Reduced demand will lower prices, but that’s still a net win for power companies. In the coming years as new wind power comes online the economic situation will change, but for now massive investments look like a very good deal.
Yes, wind gets cheaper as you scale up the turbine. The transition is something like 1 MW turbines, but this is very location specific for both wind and solar.
Wind doesn't make a lot of sense when sized to serve a house, or even a neighborhood. It becomes economical hundreds of feet in the air with turbine blades the size of a city block.
The article translated whatever the price was when they wrote it into 20$/MWh. I assume it’s still reasonably accurate as it was published yesterday and the price has been fairly consistent recently.
Good to use data. What I am referring to are the pre-wellhead prices which can't even be measured because the gas producers will not pay to put it on the pipeline. Ergo the negative pricing.
"negative pricing" sounds like they'll pay me to use it, if only I would just use it. I can see that's not your intent, but I suspect that's the first reading of many.
They literally would pay you to use it, if you would go to the trouble of taking it off their hands. There are legal restrictions on those gas flares now, so they can't just burn all of it like they used to.
> But the article makes no statement to prove this assertion. It does not even make sense to me. I guess the author meant that for firms that have high energy needs...
They do make a statement, I think you might have missed this paragraph:
> That puts wind in an incredibly competitive position. The report uses an estimate of future natural gas prices that show an extremely gradual rise of about $10/MW-hr out to 2050. But natural gas—on its own, without considering the cost of a plant to burn it for electricity—is already over $20/MW-hr. That means wind sited in the center of the US is already cheaper than fueling a natural gas plant, and wind sited elsewhere is roughly equal.
The implication of this claim is that in operation it’d be cheaper to build both a gas plant and a wind farm, to reduce the amount of gas that you burn, rather than just building a gas plant. If that’s correct your discussion of intermittency wouldn’t be relevant.
> Wind is even cheaper at the moment because of a tax credit given to renewable energy generation. But that credit is in the process of fading out, leading to long term uncertainty in a power market where demand is generally stable or dropping.
Or from the government report itself:
> The magnitude of growth beyond the current PTC cycle remains uncertain, however, given declining tax support, expectations for low natural gas prices, and modest electricity demand growth.
So what is it? Is wind power cheaper or was that a tax subsidy effect?
It’s subsidized even as it’s still cheaper without the current subsidy. The uncertainty in natural gas prices means that this exact situation is unlikely to hold up over time. Reduced demand for natural gas resulting in lower prices, up to a point.
Good example of this is just last week when texas almost had an energy shortage and power skyrocketed to $9/kwh for a few hours. It was due to being super hot and not windy. Texas shut down many coal plants and replaced with wind.
> ..If the need is for regular bursts, high volumes on short periods, wind won't be of much use.
Just on this point, the article talks about curtailment:
At times, strong winds can cause wind farms to produce an excess of power relative to demand, causing a farm's output to be reduced. This process, called curtailment, remained a small factor, with only two percent of the potential generation lost this way. Put differently, if the curtailed electricity had been used, it would have only raised the average capacity factor by 0.7 percentage points.
It sounds like 'short bursts' is really not a problem.
I'm pretty sure curtailment is the exact reverse of what the comment you're replying to is talking about - it happens when there's an excess burst of wind power compared to demand, whereas the question is about wind power filling bursts of demand. Since there's almost no curtailment it seems pretty clear that wind power doesn't currently play a role in filling those; there's just not the excess capacity for it. Of course, curtailment is only low right now because most of the generation is from fossil fuel plants which are shut down in preference to wind. Once that changes curtailment will go up and capacity factor will go down.
However now, in that case actually no renewable source of energy - wind, solar, geo thermal.. (other than perhaps hydro) can fulfill the need of sudden burst of energy - wind is like any other.
A no-nonsense title like "building and operating wind farms is cheaper than building and operating natural gas plants" wouldn't have been clickbait-ish enough.
Yes, that’s what they do, it’s called a levelized cost. These costs usually come with a sensitivity analysis of the impact of the different assumptions.
Wind or solar is actually often commissioned using a power purchase agreement for a certain price per kWh, guaranteed over a certain period.
Unless the wind turbines are trapped in some sort of time freezing status field, I would generally assume that they both can be measured in megawatt-hours. Or you can multiply out by 3.6 to get to gigajoules if you want more sensible units to play with.
It’s going to be interesting as wind and solar gets consistently cheaper than even the marginal fuel cost of gas. i.e. even if you already own a gas plant, it would be cheaper to build a wind farm just to be able to reduce fuel use. We’re approaching a world where the primary energy drivers will be renewable, and fossil fuels will be competing with energy storage.
> ..fossil fuels will be competing with energy storage
Since fossil fuels are energy dense, it would be interesting if we come back full circle by producing hydrocarbon fuels for energy storage by recycling atmospheric carbon using cheap renewable electrical energy.
Edit to clarify, there are more energy dense substance than hydrocarbons (ex. Hydrogen), but hydrocarbons would have advantage of having ability of being useful in existing infra (IC engines, gas pumps, storage containers, etc.)
Unless you want to cover really significant amounts of land in solar panels wind farms, you shouldn't use synfuels unless absolutely necessary. Not only do you use half of the energy just making the fuel, all applications where you burn it have terrible efficiency compared to electric alternatives. ICEs have an efficiency of maybe 30%, heat pumps easily produce two or three Joules of heat for every joule of electricity.
We already devote really significant amounts of land to energy in the form of corn for ethanol, ~10% of total US cropland. Corn only captures 1% of incoming light vs ~20% for PV solar, so it would be a huge gain in land efficiency to replace corn ethanol with an energy equivalent amount of PV.
I think creating aviation fuels from renewables is the path towards carbon-neutral aviation as one example where this tech makes sense. Shipping might be another, but I’m less familiar there.
But it might (big might) be worthwhile for a transition period.
ICEs are my pet peeve, mechanical engineers keep coming up with all those ways of improving efficiency, and to be fair, in the last 30yrs they got it to be "good" but the actual % numbers are awful regardless.
Efficiencies might seem bad, but thermodynamics limits the efficiency of any heat engine (of which an ICE is one) according to the absolute temperature of the hot and cold side of an engine. This is called the "Carnot efficiency" and it's comparable to a no-friction mechanical system, or a no-resistance electrical circuit.
For an ICE, assuming combustion temperatures of 550K and assuming the radiator can cool the system to 50C, the Carnot efficiency is (1 - Tc/Th) = (1 - 333K/550K) = about 40%.
That's a hard theoretical limit that assumes all processes are reversible. Real engines have irreversible thermodynamic processes so the Carnot limit can never really be attained.
In other words, your complaint isn't with the engineers, it's with thermodynamics.
(note: ICE engines are modelled using the Otto cycle rather than the Carnot cycle, but that's a bit more complicated and leads to efficiencies that are even worse. The Carnot efficiency is an upper limit for all heat engines, including steam engines, Stirling engines, turbines, etc.)
550k is a low combustion temperature. “Modern military jet engines, like the Snecma M88, can see turbine temperatures of 2,900 °F (1,590°C).” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbine_blade
Absolutely. But I read the comment as complaining about efficiencies of automobile engines, not modern military jet engines. The combustion temperature of gasoline is 553K.
I am aware of the Carnot efficiency, my issue with the engineers is that they can't make big gains anymore, exactly because of the Carnot limit.
Best way of making a gasoline car (not the engine - the car) efficient is taking the throttle of the engine out and attaching a hybrid/regenerative generator/motor to it.
But, for very long term storage efficiency is not that import. If you’re buying at an average of say 1c/kWh and selling at 20c/kWh in 6 months it’s mostly a question of what your storage costs per day as well as maximum output is.
I first worked that out in response to a claim that solar thermal plants were better than PV because they can store energy as molten salt and produce power at night. What sinks that claim is solar is cheap enough that you could heat your salt with electricity from solar panels and be ahead.
At the point there is no need to use salt. You can use a referable electrically driven gas turbine and get about 70-80% round trip efficiency.
Someone pointed me to a link where round trip efficiency was analyzed, with the claim that ammonia is better than hydrogen or methanol for energy storage. Apparently hydrogen compression takes a big hit, although I'm not clear if that's still the case if the hydrogen is burned in stationary turbines (that compressional energy could be recovered).
Ammonia's energy density by volume is nearly double that of liquid hydrogen — its primary competitor as a green alternative fuel and it is easier to ship and distribute. "You can store it, ship it, burn it, and convert it back into hydrogen and nitrogen,".
..he shows off one of the devices, about the size of a hockey puck and clad in stainless steel. Two plastic tubes on its backside feed it nitrogen gas and water, and a power cord supplies electricity. Through a third tube on its front, it silently exhales gaseous ammonia, all without the heat, pressure, and carbon emissions normally needed to make the chemical. "This is breathing nitrogen in and breathing ammonia out,".
Companies around the world already produce $60 billion worth of ammonia every year, primarily as fertilizer, and MacFarlane's gizmo may allow them to make it more efficiently and cleanly. But he has ambitions to do much more than help farmers. By converting renewable electricity into an energy-rich gas that can easily be cooled and squeezed into a liquid fuel, MacFarlane's fuel cell effectively bottles sunshine and wind, turning them into a commodity that can be shipped anywhere in the world and converted back into electricity or hydrogen gas to power fuel cell vehicles..
Cost increases linearly with capacity, which is undesirable at scale. You want sublinear scaling. For example, to store a year’s worth of US electrical generation using batteries would cost approximately 500 trillion dollars.
1) Huge number, but why would you need an entire year of energy in reserve
2) If there was a desire to build that many batteries, cost would surely decrease exponentially as new mines, factories, etc. open up and competition increases.
Gas plants more or less have to become "peaker" plants. They'll get paid more for the electricity but run for much fewer hours, plus a payment for being on standby. Effectively they'll be competing with storage, yes.
This will shift any new gas plants away from combined cycle toward simple cycle. Minimizing capital cost will be more important. Steam turbines may be on their way to the technology museum.
The sad part is that it would have been cheaper for decades ... had someone been willing to make that move. Big windmills had been built by the 1880s (e.g. Charles Brush), and a century later the technology was well within reach. But 'alternative energy' (as it was known) couldn't get heard about (Carter tried).
There are technologies that have just not been ready until relatively recently.
Design, material, manufacture, deployment and operation of very large blades is both critical and hard.
A key operating constraint is keeping blade-tips below the speed of sound. To design the monsters that are currently being deployed, computer modelling would not have been adequate even fifteen years ago.
Similarly, carbon fiber is finally getting scale economies from more than one industry. But it couldn't have been cost effective in the 1970s.
Geographic batteries (potential energy sinks, eg storing water in a reservoir at a higher altitude and releasing it through turbines to a lower one) have operated for decades.
Dinorwig in Wales operates a 9GWh capacity at 1.7GW. Far from insignificant, much cheaper (and safer) than the equivalent lithium cells.
The less favourable the existing geography, the harder it will be for a state to "just" build a pumped storage facility like Dinorwig. Dinorwig is basically ideal, the mountain was already right there, with a nice lake at the bottom and a quarry that had closed or was about to close that could be re-used as the top lake. It's far enough away to reduce the amount of random BANANAs‡ who get involved yet not so far as to make the infrastructure cost prohibitive (for HV power lines to the facility). The UK hasn't built lots more because it doesn't have dozens of other mountains with lakes next to them just kicking about for the work, and any it does have are deemed environmentally important (e.g. something rare lives in the lake or on the mountain).
China has two advantages: One it's fucking enormous, there are bound to be places with mountain lakes that weren't needed for anything else more important. Two under an authoritarian government there's no prospect of protest against the plan even if it's catastrophic for some groups.
‡ NIMBYs but more so, Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
> Far from insignificant, much cheaper (and safer) than the equivalent lithium cells.
Pumped storage "batteries" have one disadvantage though, they are nowhere near as reactive as solid-state batteries can be - think of milliseconds instead of dozens of seconds.
I imagine GP's point was that economy of scale is the key, and had people actually listened earlier, the technology was there, it just needed the scale.
We may as well complain that the Egyptian Middle Kingdom's 12 Dynasty didn't properly formulate Euler's formula in 1991 BC. Nobody at the time made it happen so it didn't happen and the same could be said of any improvement.
> Nobody at the time made it happen so it didn't happen and the same could be said of any improvement.
Not in this case. These particular improvements were held back intentionally by megacorporations like Exxon, who spent billions telling lies to the US government, to American people and the rest of the world. Huge efforts were undertaken to ensure that this kind of technology - renewable through wind and solar - would not take off as quickly as it naturally would otherwise.
The 'free market' only works at setting prices if the market knows the risks. In this case, the market not only had the risks actively hidden from them, but they were directly lied to about the risks.
If the market had understood the risks of this technology in accordance with basic economic understanding (which is obviously flawed but hear me out), then renewable energy would have been cheaper than non-renewable energy a long time ago.
That's not to mention the direct oil subsidies provided by the US and Canadian (and other) governments over the last many decades.
Meanwhile, I am confident that the point wind energy becomes cheaper than fossil energy was within reach much earlier than that.
Note that without peer-reviewed research - which I am not providing here - this is just my opinion. But I hope it counts.
This is not quite true. There have been required advances in materials science over the last decades that are needed to maintain the size/strength:weight ratios/etc. The larger the wind blade the more efficient.
Those required advances would have materialized -much- sooner if windpower had been taken seriously and some (let's say) 500Kw mills had appeared on the market. I recall Reagan having Carter's White-House-rooftop solar removed. Anything green was mocked as a 'utopian dream' or whatever, and the established industry spent -a lot- of money keeping it that way.
These days, when the alumni mag from my school arrives, I have to ruefully smile about all of the 'green language' in it, now that it's trendy. What a damn shame.
> Better grid management also helped the economics of wind. At times, strong winds can cause wind farms to produce an excess of power relative to demand, causing a farm's output to be reduced.
I think this part is particularly relevant to the HN community. As we reach higher and higher penetration of renewables on the grid, we will need to dead with the intermittency more and more. A common phrase I hear at utility conferences nowadays is, "We used to forecast load and deploy generation, but in the future, we will be forecasting generation and deploying load."
I think this area will be the next wave of innovation that needs to happen in the energy transition, and it's going to be primarily software driven. Smart load management will be key to avoiding huge storage and infrastructure capital expenses. For example, in Hawaii, they are starting to explore new utility business models that don't just rely on a fixed rate of return for capital spent.
Anyway, as we cross 50%+ penetration of renewables, I think software is going to take a leading roll in connecting and managing everything so we can have the flexibility we need on the grid.
In exchange for providing an essential service to everyone, utilities are typically given monopoly protections and regulated by their local jurisdiction (e.g. a public utility commission). This means the business model for privately owned utilities must be pre-approved.
Up until now, the typical pre-approved business model was where the utility would go to the commission and say they needed to build something (e.g. a new substation), the commission would approve it, and the utility could then charge their customers for the cost to build plus a fixed rate of return (e.g. $300m + 7%).
However, that business model breaks down when you start moving away from a centralized grid, since customers are able to start using alternatives to your infrastructure (e.g. solar on their roof and batteries in their garage).
So, commissions are trying to figure out new business models that will ensure the continued operation of utilities while still imcentivizing reduction of carbon emissions. One way being explored in Hawaii is called "performance-based ratemaking" but is still being figured out. However, the interesting going (to my company, at least) is the increasing need for software and communication in these new business models. For performance-based returns to happen, you need to measure performance, which means software.
Anyway, it's a very interesting time in the utility sector, and I think there's a lot of opportunity for the tech sector to come in and have a big part of it. Unfortunately, most tech entrepreneurs are allergic to regulated sectors.
Does anyone know at what point fossil fuels will start to feel the shrinking economies of scale, ie when fossil will get more expensive because there is less scale? Does this point exist at all, or doesn't it matter any more because we have the tech developed already anyway?
Norway will be the canary in the coal mine for the fossil fuel industry. With half of new car sales electric they'll be the first place where we can observe at what penetration gas stations start to close.
I favour just declaring a national holiday whenever it's both dark and still. Throttle everything back, everyone take a rest. It might really improve societies standard of living.
When I moved to Norway for a few years I was a bit annoyed as pretty much everything was closed on a Sunday.
At first you get caught out without the right ingredients for lunch or wine. Or maybe just want to go get stuff. But after about a year I really came to value this. A day where everyone was off and you couldn't go shopping or get distracted with a bunch of consumer stuff that doesn't matter so much.
I doubt it ever will, but if like to see Sunday or Saturday trading halted again. It's good to have a day off.
We're experiencing this change now in Poland with a new law passed that will eventually make all Sundays off days.
The results are mixed. Our highly overworked society only has time for shopping during the weekends, so slashing half of that caused a great deal of chaos.
On the other hand the next day traffic is minimal, so it's a great opportunity to visit friends who live further than public transport can efficiently take you.
As a kid in Bangladesh, where random power outages were a regular occurrence, I’d never have imagined people in the west actually seriously proposing to adopt what was for us a poverty-driven behavior.
I remember when AT&T made arguments against splitting up Ma Bell because the new system wouldn't have "five 9s" reliability.
It turns out the optimal reliability/cost tradeoff, from the consumers' points of view, isn't necessarily what the entrenched incumbent producers want to provide.
I was assuming that hydro, nuclear and such would keep the led lights on while people sat under a blanket and read a good book in their well insulated homes until they could turn industry back up and start charging their cars again. Living in harmony with nature would not really be that different from heating your water at night with offpeak electricity. If it gave us cheap clean power bills I think people would like it. Not turning the planet uninhabitable might be considered a perk too.
Yes, though randomly spaced when the weather dictated, like spontaneous mass official duvet days or bank holidays. A 95% renewable availability might give two weeks of them a year. Turn renewables lack of 100% availability in to a positive for society.
If this trend continues, perhaps we don't need the storage breakthrough that we've been assuming we'd need.
There are a quite a few industrial processes which have energy as their primary cost. Aluminum is one example.
If a region needs 10GW average, one could build a wind installation with 10GW average output and a lot of storage to match supply and load.
Or one could build a 100GW installation, a little bit of storage and an aluminum smelter. During normal operation the smelter gets 90GW and the region gets 10GW. During peak operation the smelter gets a lot more than 90GW. During a trough the region gets 10GW and the smelter gets nothing. You'd still need storage or a peaker to handle periods when there is absolutely no wind or low wind and high demand, but those needs would be much less.
I don't know if aluminum can operate with such fluctuating power, but there are processes that can. At worst, bitcoin.
>I don't know if aluminum can operate with such fluctuating power
In case you're curious, this came up a few years ago in a discussion and at least at the time I checked a typical Hall-Héroult electrolysis smelter could last without power for something like 4 hours or so, maybe 5, and some countries did in fact use them as part of their electrical grid control. But they can't have power interrupted indefinitely because the pots are permanently damaged and require replacement or extremely expensive repair if the liquid metal completely solidifies in them. The molten state represents a significant thermal mass hence the hours of lag time, but it can't just be remelted from total cool down either.
I do wonder if an economical design could be made that specifically tried to enhance this aspect as a core design feature, some sort of vacuum insulation or the like perhaps to reduce passive thermal loss and bring outage time more towards 12 hours? But even at 4 apparently it can be good enough for moderation of some intermittent demand (which in turn means extremely cheap electricity). Using something like this as "energy storage" that is also directly economically productive seems worth pursuing though. Another possibility would be to investigate direct carbon extraction from the air, either for storage or to turn into fully synthetic net-neutral hydrocarbons. If the electricity is essentially free anyway, even enormously consuming processes like that could make sense.
Aluminum is one thing. Another is electrowinning iron which unlike Hall-Héroult is a wet electrolytic process. One assume you could stop the process indefinitely. And iron takes a lot less energy than aluminum. Capital cost are probably really low as well.
At residential rates the cost is a few hundred a ton for energy. So not economic vs carbon reduction. But if you could get the energy for nearly free. It would be.
The solution will be a confluence of technologies.
* Wind and solar, over-provisioned, will supply the generation.
* Batteries will provide peak-shifting and frequency maintenance.
* Grid upgrades / HVDC will even out regional variation in generation due to weather while flattening the duck curve.
* Variable pricing will lead to more even demand curves, both from residential BEV usage and industrial strategies for cost optimization.
The pessimist's case for a non-renewable economy are just hopeless at this point. All of this stuff exists now, is competitive now, and will only be getting better. It will take time to build out, but the economics are impossible to ignore.
Something I miss from reading those articles: what are you doing when the wind doesn't blow for a few days or even weeks? And in case of solar farms, the sun doesn't shine (like at night)? How do you store the energy efficiently?
If you think batteries, how long does the battery of your smartphone or laptop works? 5 years max? Maybe 10? Is this the timespan you plan your reliable infrastructure for? And how "green" is it to build these batteries?
If you think pumped-storage hydroelectricity, how much places do you have where you can have two pools (one uphill, one downhill) to store the water? How much energy can store in there?
The thing is, you'll build all these solar and wind farms and then still build and run the fossil plants, because you aren't able to store the energy to make it reliable enough.
At the moment you just maintain a gas backup infrastructure. Depending on how large your grid is and the intermittency and variation of its sources of electricity, you can assume a certain level of output, then the gap between that and maximum demand needs to be maintained as backup. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, gas plants have a low up front capital cost, with a high marginal fuel cost, so having plants available but used less frequently is not a serious economic barrier.
In the long run energy storage techniques will come in which will displace some use cases for gas, how quickly that happens depends of technological development. As you say long term storage isn’t likely to be achieved by Lithium ion batteries, it’s more likely to be Flow batteries or Hydrogen production. Although Lithium batteries can shift storage throughout a day, and also balance the grid on near instantaneous timescales, which is useful.
Another possibility is overbuilding renewable generation, if solar is very cheap you could produce twice as much as you need in Summer in order to produce enough to meet demand in Winter. That can drastically reduce the need for long term storage, but depends on the properties and cost of the renewable technology in a particular location.
What do you mean by producing twice as much in Summer to meet demand in Winter? Because much of our energy consumption is immediate, and can't be easily stored (e.g. heating, cooking, browsing the internet etc).
>> it’s more likely to be Flow batteries or Hydrogen production.
From an engineering point of view, this statement probably should be correct. Hydrogen in particular has such wonderful potential.
But, we have to consider future economies of scale in production. We don't know how long it's cost-performance may continue to improve, but of the three technologies mentioned, unfortunately only LiIon is currently on an improvement curve that makes it feasible for large scale storage in the short-to-medium term.
At the moment Lithium batteries are cost effective for about 2-4 hours of storage, if you halve costs that would go down to 4-8 hours, but the point is that it’s very unlikely that you will ever get reductions large enough to store energy over weeks or months. Even 2 days would require costs to fall to 10% of where they are now.
Halving costs need not be equivalent to doubling of economic capacity. It might just as well cause an order of magnitude or higher of increased capacity.
I would not be able to estimate those factors, but it's almost certainly incorrect to assume a linear relationship between cost and productive capacity.
Each halving in cost doubles the amount of storage you can apply to any one project for the same cost. 2 hour storage on a solar or wind farm costs around about £5 per MWh, levelized over the batteries lifetime. There is no way to get around that, as far as I can see.
"The thing is, you'll build all these solar and wind farms and then still build and run the fossil plants, because you aren't able to store the energy to make it reliable enough."
So? If we only halve fossil fuel use does that not mean its worth doing?
The article states that wind power is now cheaper than just the fuel for NG power plants, so its financially advantageous to move to wind whilst maintaining NG plants. And its environmentally advantageous even though we may not have all the answers right now.
I'm not even sure if there is a 'the' answer. The solution will be probably be a combination of all of the above, plus HVDC, plus smart grid type features.
BTW laptops and phones are the worst environments for batteries, they're hot and enclosed. Look at EV battery warranties, the Bolt is 8 years, the powerwall warranty is 10 years. The expectation, and experience is they'll last much longer.
One, also inefficient, way to get to storage is by using surplus renewables (wind, solar) to generate bio gas (CNG or even LPG) for later use. Not the most efficient solution, but does that really matter when marginal costs for wind and solar are basically zero?
I would guess that if costs keep dropping you'd get a certain amount of overbuilding for the low energy demand season so you'd have capacity there for some kind of clean gas technology.
I wish the boffins would start crunching the numbers though. If my gas boiler breaks today, should I replace it or fit a heat pump? If I replace my kitchen should I keep a gas hob or move to electric?? These are less than once a decade purchasing decisions and theres absolutely no visibility on whether gas to the home is going to be a thing in the medium term.
Intraday, batteries would make more sense. Higher efficiency, quicker to react, 365 cycles a year to recoup costs.
You are probably never going to get to a point where you're charging a battery now for use sometime in January. That's where some kind of bio gas would come in, because it is feasible to store it long term.
Why is this comment being downvoted? These are all valid concerns, and even though the tone is a bit negative, they need to be addressed. We can't just ignore the viewpoints that challenge our views. I'd be much more interested in comments explaining how these problems with consistent energy supply can be solved, than downvoting this question. In fact, I'd like this question to be encouraged if it helps inform me of solutions to the storage side of the grid...
Your comment touches on topics outside the current article and its discussion. The reason is that Electrical grid balancing has been commented elsewhere; the economic operation of plants has also been commented in other discussions; if wind is blowing - there is energy left on the table without it being used; if operating a plant on fossil fuels, those fuels still have to be delivered. Wind energy is variable input, but review data on its variability over span of days.
Overall, having variable input of energy in an electrical grid is not the blocker. It is also an extensive - and ‘done enough for now’ area of research.
The variability is not what has slowed down wind energy deployments.
As someone said in a different thread: Fossil fuel will compete with storage, not with primary energy production. Wouldn't it make sense to move money and research into finding better energy storage?
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity does need special places to be most effective, but we already have a lot of one-way dams littering our rivers, of which some might be upgraded. Deep mines that can be used for the lower reservoir, maybe something to be give depleted coal mines a new purpose?
Energy production will change a lot over the next years, there's no way stopping it.
There is a YC startup looking at converting CO2 and H2O into "Fossil Fuel" called Prometheus (namesake of the monitoring tool I guess!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240.
The sun doesn't shine in a lot of places for less than 12 hours a day. In the winter, a lot of places have much less sunlight.
When men needed wind to sail the sea, there were situations when the wind didn't blow for weeks.
How much energy would your "well designed system" need to store and what is possible?
Yes, I read about that Tesla battery in Australia. Then I calculated how many Tesla walls a city like Munich would need to be able to survive for 1 week. I don't believe it is possible.
People rely on electric power. If the grid goes down in places like Germany like once every month, there would be uproar.
You don't need to survive for a week but max. a day or so. Anything longer and electricity will come from somewhere else in the grid, either a different region or a back-up conventional plant being gas or nuclear or even coal.
At least in Germany even large industrial energy consumers are for years now an active part of grid balancing. Either they can stop and resume production as needed or continuous processes serve a similar function as your base power plants. The silver bullet to get them there was money, it became financially viable and profitable and all of a sudden businesses jumped at the opportunity.
Disclaimer: Worked at two of these power hungry places and know of of another one making quite some money on the electricity exchanges by just timing his production runs properly.
Solar still works in cloudy weather, and you can compensate by building more than you typically need. You can transmit increasingly long distances. Here's a line working at 2300+km.
Most weather doesn't span 2300km in all directions so I think it's possible to handle most situations and fill in the gaps over time.
You can use a Tesla as home battery. Charge at work or home, or at a supercharger, power your house at night.
Sure there are edge cases like far north where you need coal or nuclear. But I'd bet the bulk of humankind can be supplied well given another 10/20 years of innovation.
Michael Moore is about to release a documentary essentially arguing that what you stated is largely a hoax. I don't have an opinion because I don't have the knowledge. But Moore is pretty credible to people on the left, I wonder what the impact of this will be.
Have you made simulations or calculations to this effect? (or alternately, point me to the analysis of those who have). I'm not sure hand-waving it away as it'll wash out on average should be a valid response to something as critical to modern life as the power grid.
Some questions that might be interesting:
What is the current downtime of electricity. What would be the desired goal for the new mixed / renewable grid?
Given existing patterns of wind and solar generation, how much storage needs to be installed to reach this goal?
How much would this storage be expected to cost at today's prices, and then with projected future savings from scaling (this could be used as a higher bound)?
The reason "running out" might be a valid concern is that the power grid is currently reasonably robust. Turbines are massive, with a great deal of inertia, meaning that even if something drastic were to happen, they can often cope with spikes in load long enough for extra production to ramp up. Wind and solar less so. Batteries presumably would be pretty great for ramping up, assuming we get enough of them on the grid. But then the economics needs to take into account the price of not just the renewables, but also generation.
Even if renewable plants are supplemented by fossil-fuel plants, that still reduces fossil fuel consumption.
Storage isn't all that feasible (yet) but they also don't build wind farms in places where the wind doesn't blow, and they don't build solar plants where the sun is inconsistent.
>Something I miss from reading those articles: what are you doing when the wind doesn't blow for a few days or even weeks? And in case of solar farms, the sun doesn't shine (like at night)? How do you store the energy efficiently?
As the renewable industry, you still have people depend on the conventional grid for the vast majority of power, while taking advantage of generous subsidies, tax breaks and other deals to convince people renewables are anywhere near a match for it at the moment...
I don't see how it is even thermodynamically possible for there to be no wind period. It is produced by temperature differentials and it would take some very extreme geoengineering to not have those - like a planetary superconductor grid.
Not to mention geographic distribution of grids levels it out.
At that point you may as well ask what if positive and negative charges repel each other?
A good grid (because it's always windy somewhere), batteries for a day or two of low production (e.g. the batteries in electric cars, one of those can power the average home for several days), power-to-methane for cold winters without wind.
Though I have only a 24kWh battery (2015 LEAF), that’s nowhere close to powering my home for several days, even if I were able to park the car entirely during that time period.
Looks like the average US electricity consumption is close to 30 kWh/day.
> "In the US, it's cheaper to build and operate wind farms than buy fossil fuels."
That's not the headline. The headline is cheaper than natural gas, which is a relatively expensive fossil fuel, but also historically cheap at the moment.
However, natural gas is great at providing power on-demand and at small scale, which is exactly what you need to even out the highly volatile output of wind energy. Natural gas and wind energy are complements, not competitors.
This article explicitly mentions the cost without subsidies:
”””The levelized cost of electricity, which eliminates the impact of incentives and subsidies on the final prices, places wind below $40/MW-hr in 2018. The cheapest form of natural gas generation was roughly $10 more per MegaWatt-hour. Note that, as recently as 2015, the US' Energy Information Agency was predicting that wind's levelized cost in 2020 would be $74/MW-hr.”””
So much wrong with this line of thinking. Natural gas prices in west Texas are actually negative right now because there is no infrastructure to move it to refining and distribution hubs.
Wind power experienced a renaissance due to subsidized infrastructure construction.
Natural gas is clean burning and a byproduct in most cases of crude drilling. If we were really wanting clean cheap energy we'd build bigger and better pipelines to move the gas to the major distribution networks. Instead lawmakers want to install more of these structures that ruin the view, obscure the horizon, and take massive amounts of harmful chemicals to produce.
This is currently HN's title, and the article's subtitle. But the article makes no statement to prove this assertion.
It does not even make sense to me. I guess the author meant that for firms that have high energy needs. But it is stupid to imply that the electricity provided by fossil fuel can always be replaced by wind turbines. If the need is for regular bursts, high volumes on short periods, wind won't be of much use.
Moreover, the article is a digest of a report that is less emphatic. The US Department of Energy expects a slow-down of wind capacity after 2020, once the tax credit will end. For a project that would start now, there would be no tax credit, so it would be hard to reach a competitive price.