I love renewable energy as much as anyone I know, but they have some major and well-known problems.
One problem is that they only produce when the sun is shining, or the wind is blowing, etc…. These can be ameliorated with batteries, but that still takes a significant additional expense.
The bigger problem is location. They’re only cost-effective if you put them in the right places, and that’s usually far away from where people want to use that power. Which means you need transmission lines. And those take as long or longer to permit and build as do nuclear or combined-cycle natural gas power plants. These things tend to be delivered in terms of 120 months, or more. Not 120 days, like the datacenter builders want.
There are no quick and easy solutions here. Sure, you can truck in jet engines to use them as generators, but then you have to fuel them, you have to deal with the exhaust and added pollution, you have to deal with the noise, you have to deal with all the extra water you’re going to need to run them, you have to deal with added risk of toxic spills due to all the extra fuel you have to have on-site, you have to deal with added risk of fires because of that fuel, you have to deal with the increased heat island effects of running those engines, etc….
And datacenter builders want to externalize all their costs. This is the one single fundamental problem with them and all other big businesses.
If we make the datacenter builders fully internalize all of their costs, then we won’t have these problems.
> One problem is that they only produce when the sun is shining, or the wind is blowing, etc.
This is the irrelevant part when they're not the majority of the grid. We already have peaker plants to handle the differences in load throughout the day. They currently mostly run during the day and the early evening. You build a bunch of new solar and instead they'd mostly run at night, because the new solar takes the existing daytime demand plus the new daytime demand and the existing peaker plants take the new nighttime demand.
> They’re only cost-effective if you put them in the right places, and that’s usually far away from where people want to use that power.
This is not really true in the US. Solar doesn't work very well in Alaska because it's too far north, but it's fine basically anywhere south of the Canadian border, which is where essentially the entire US population actually lives. The average wind speed in every US state is enough to run a wind turbine.
There are some locations that are better than others, but better enough to build a thousand mile transmission line? That's almost a coin flip even before you consider what a liability it is to centralize power into a big exposed long-distance transmission line instead of just distributing the generation everywhere.
> Sure, you can truck in jet engines to use them as generators, but then you have to fuel them...
As a temporary measure, that's the trade off against short-term higher electric bills. As a permanent measure they're rubbish, but they're not needed as a permanent measure anyway. And the faster you build something else, the sooner they go away.
> And datacenter builders want to externalize all their costs.
That's not what that means. You can't internalize demand for a commodity. All you can do is increase supply to meet the new demand.
Not true. We are already seeing duck curve problems where the price should go negative, unless the solar and wind farms are told to curtail.
They need a buffer to be able to fully and properly contribute to the grid. Without a buffer, solar and wind farms are already causing some problems. They can’t really grow much beyond where they are today, without adding a buffer. Sad, but true.
T. Boone Pickens is pushing wind as hard as he possibly can out in the Texas panhandle, and it’s getting harder and harder for him to do that, in part because much of that is done without a buffer. Granted, he’s also having to fight transmission line problems.
For solar to be effective from the perspective of the grid, it needs to be installed in a place that gets enough average sunshine. And that latitude line is way lower than the border between Canada and the US. You also have to take weather and climate patterns into account, because if you’re below that line but you get too much average cloud cover, then you’re still not cost-effective enough.
The only places where you can install solar panels without regards for those kinds of constraints, is where people don’t care how many panels they have to install, in order to get the amount of average power that they need. If you over-provision by enough, then you can install useful amounts of solar in otherwise considerably less than ideal sites. But then you’re also willing to pay a price and space premium that no grid operator would be willing to pay. Many homeowners might fit into this category.
And many places where you would want to install solar panels close to the consumers so that you can avoid long transmission lines, that land just isn’t available. Or not available at a price that any grid operator would be willing to pay.
> We are already seeing duck curve problems where the price should go negative, unless the solar and wind farms are told to curtail.
This happens with solar in the summer because it generates more in the summer, and then if you build enough for the other seasons you have "too much" on many days in the summer. But storage doesn't help much for that anyway because you'd need storage that lets you store power from July to use in January.
And "too much" isn't a problem when it only happens a minority of the time. You'll have critics complaining if it happens at all, but that doesn't mean it's a real problem.
The real problem is "not enough", which is the thing that doesn't get really bad until you're trying to run the majority of the grid on it. If it's only half then the other half is reliable power sources, some of those are still peaker plants and then you have the option to run them during the day on the days when it's cloudy, renewable generation is sometimes low but it's hardly ever actually zero, and by that point you're at something like 80% coverage on the lowest generation days and can get the remaining 20% through variable pricing.
> For solar to be effective from the perspective of the grid, it needs to be installed in a place that gets enough average sunshine.
A solar panel generates around two thirds as much in New York (on the border with Canada) as in Arizona (on the border with Mexico). That isn't totally negligible but it's not so large as to make it unworkable.
> Many homeowners might fit into this category.
Naturally, because it solves two problems at once. First, no land cost because you're using what would otherwise be an empty roof. Second, no transmission cost because the power is consumed where it's generated.
This is an easy win for homeowners because even at the less advantageous latitudes, they'd be paying ~$0.10/kWh for their own solar while the New York power company is asking 28.6.
And there are still plenty of not just homes but also commercial buildings that don't have solar on their roof. Give every Walmart and Home Depot an incentive to install a support scaffold full of panels over every parking lot. Why pay for a lot of land when we haven't even taken the easy wins yet?
> The real problem is "not enough", which is the thing that doesn't get really bad until you're trying to run the majority of the grid on it. If it's only half then the other half is reliable power sources, some of those are still peaker plants and then you have the option to run them during the day on the days when it's cloudy, renewable generation is sometimes low but it's hardly ever actually zero, and by that point you're at something like 80% coverage on the lowest generation days and can get the remaining 20% through variable pricing.
You're not thinking like a grid operator. They need to pay to keep those peaker plants operational, even if they're not being used. The more peaker plants that have to be kept offline for more of the time, the less attractive it is to buy the power from the solar or wind plants.
Until solar and wind can generate reliable amounts of power, day-in and day-out, 365 days out of the year, you will always need those peaker plants to take up the slack. But those renewable sources will never be able to do that. The best they can hope for is to overgenerate during the times that they are capable of doing so, and storing the excess somehow in another medium. That could be batteries, flywheels, pumped hydro, or whatever. But they need that buffer if they are going to be a larger part of the grid.
> A solar panel generates around two thirds as much in New York (on the border with Canada) as in Arizona (on the border with Mexico). That isn't totally negligible but it's not so large as to make it unworkable.
It might not be enough to keep homeowners from installing solar panels in those kinds of environments, but it's definitely enough to keep large-scale power generation facilities from building there.
> And there are still plenty of not just homes but also commercial buildings that don't have solar on their roof. Give every Walmart and Home Depot an incentive to install a support scaffold full of panels over every parking lot. Why pay for a lot of land when we haven't even taken the easy wins yet?
I agree that parking lots and roofs of buildings are targets that look easy. But the incentives just aren't there. It's still just way too expensive, for not nearly enough ROI to make it happen. And I just don't see incentives of that scale coming, not even with the New Democrats.
In theory, I don't disagree with you with regards to where we should be going and what we should be doing.
But in practice, there is a huge difference between theory and practice.
> They need to pay to keep those peaker plants operational, even if they're not being used.
But they are being used, every night. And then you can also use them during the day on the minority of days when it's cloudy.
> It might not be enough to keep homeowners from installing solar panels in those kinds of environments, but it's definitely enough to keep large-scale power generation facilities from building there.
You could easily confuse that with a population density map of the US. The main tell is that the dots are on the outskirts of the major cities rather than in them.
> It's still just way too expensive, for not nearly enough ROI to make it happen.
It kind of is happening. Nearly 100% of net new generation capacity in the US is renewables, with some new natural gas barely offsetting the gradual death of coal to net to zero.
> But they are being used, every night. And then you can also use them during the day on the minority of days when it's cloudy.
But they're not being used every night. Night load is mostly carried by combined-cycle, nuclear and wind. Peaker plants are expensive to operate compared to combined-cycle, so they will get turned off as soon as possible, so that the grid relies on less expensive sources for base load operations.
It's basically just a whole bunch of single-colored dots on a map. That doesn't tell you when a given solar farm was installed, just by looking at it. And it doesn't tell you a whole lot about the capacity. If you zoom in, you can see that most of those dots are under 50MW in size. When I zoomed in and looked at a sample, most of them seemed to be single-digit MW ratings. What we really need to count is capacity, not number of dots.
Unfortunately, this page doesn't actually give us a lot of detail. But let's look at the detail it does give us. First off, let's look at the ten most recent solar farm installations that they show and where they are:
Five are in Texas, in the counties of Yoakum, Ector, Milam, Kaufman, and Upton. Two are in Illinois, in the counties of Pulaski and Jefferson. One is in Arizona. One is in Colorado. One is in Michigan. Of all of those, the ones in Colorado and Michigan are at about 40 degrees north latitude or higher, so that would qualify as "in the north". Pulaski and Jefferson counties in Illinois are below 40 degrees north latitude, so I count them "in the south".
Okay, so now let's look at where the ten biggest solar farms are:
Three are in Texas, in the counties of Jack, Swisher, and Webb. Two are in Arizona, in the counties of Maricopa, and La Paz. One is in Nevada. One is in California. One is in Illinois. One is in Ohio. And one is in Utah. Of those, the three in Illinois, Ohio, and Utah are all about 40 degrees north latitude, so they can be considered to be "in the north".
So, while we don't have the full dataset available to us to show the actual distribution of when and where grid-scale solar farms are being installed, the tiny amount of data we do have from this website clearly shows that the majority of the new grid-scale solar farms that are installed or being installed are going into the South. Texas alone has 50% of the newest solar farm installations, according to that list.
According to EIA, Texas alone has 40% of the planned new solar farm installations (see https://www.eia.gov/TODAYinENERGY/detail.php?id=67205), out of the 43.4GW of planned new solar farm capacity to be installed across the country. That would give us another ~17.36GW of solar to be added in Texas alone.
There's also 24GW of battery capacity to be added this year, of which 53% is planned for Texas alone (12.9GW), and 80% of the total across just three states: Texas, California, and Arizona. Solar is happening, yes. But so are batteries.
All of which is in line with what I said before.
But all that said, we should be looking at total average amounts of sunshine, and not north versus south. Anything at or above about an average of five hours of sunshine per day is considered "sunny", and the order here is Arizona being the sunniest, followed by Utah, Colorado, and Texas. Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio are in the "low-sun" group.
By that criteria, of the ten largest solar farms, only two of ten are in low-sun states: Illinois and Ohio. For share of total solar farm capacity of the top ten, that would be about 20% (1,170 of 5,786 MW).
Of the ten most recent solar farms to be installed, only three of them are in low-sun states: Illinois twice and Michigan. For share of capacity of the ten newest solar farms, that would be about 27% (692 of 2,569 MW).
So, we're basically back to where we were, but now on more solid footing. Instead of north/south, we're looking at expected average sunny hours per day (a much more reliable measure), and we're also now measuring the actual capacities of each group across the sets.
If you want to run these counties through the NREL data (https://developer.nlr.gov/docs/solar/pvwatts/v8/), then you find they break out into three groups. The sites in Arizona are the best, with West Texas, California, and Nevada not far behind -- 95% or better, compared to the best. Central and East Texas, Colorado, and Utah come in behind that, from 80-90% of the best. The Midwest is 75% of the best or lower.
For the ten largest sites, 51% of the capacity is installed in the top tier sites, 29% capacity in the second tier sites, and only 20% in the third tier sites.
For the ten newest sites, 47% of the capacity is installed in the top tier sites, 26% capacity in the second tier sites, and only 27% in the third tier sites.
So, we get back to my belief that capacity skews toward sunnier sites, for a reason. Yes, you can build in sites that are not as sunny, if you're willing to pay the price. But the incentives are strong.
Now, getting back to the duck curve -- it is predictable enough that the grid operators can get nuclear and combined-cycle natural gas turbine powerplants started far enough in advance that they will be ready to take over when the solar farms are giving out. Depending on how good their prediction is, they might need to bring up a few peaker plants to cover the intermediate term, but then again maybe not.
They don't run peaker plants unless they have to, because they are more expensive than combined-cycle plants, even though they're both turbine-based systems running on natural gas. The problem with combined-cycle plants is that they take two to three times longer to turn up compared to peaker plants, and longer to curtail, and that's why they need peaker plants to fill in gaps.
For solar and wind plants to take a bigger percentage of the grid production, they need to operate more reliably, and more like base load plants. Which means that they need buffers. The advantage is that we may also be able to use them like peaker plants as well, if we're willing to pay to build bigger buffers than we would otherwise need.
One problem is that they only produce when the sun is shining, or the wind is blowing, etc…. These can be ameliorated with batteries, but that still takes a significant additional expense.
The bigger problem is location. They’re only cost-effective if you put them in the right places, and that’s usually far away from where people want to use that power. Which means you need transmission lines. And those take as long or longer to permit and build as do nuclear or combined-cycle natural gas power plants. These things tend to be delivered in terms of 120 months, or more. Not 120 days, like the datacenter builders want.
There are no quick and easy solutions here. Sure, you can truck in jet engines to use them as generators, but then you have to fuel them, you have to deal with the exhaust and added pollution, you have to deal with the noise, you have to deal with all the extra water you’re going to need to run them, you have to deal with added risk of toxic spills due to all the extra fuel you have to have on-site, you have to deal with added risk of fires because of that fuel, you have to deal with the increased heat island effects of running those engines, etc….
And datacenter builders want to externalize all their costs. This is the one single fundamental problem with them and all other big businesses.
If we make the datacenter builders fully internalize all of their costs, then we won’t have these problems.