[HN Gopher] A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, an...
___________________________________________________________________
A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little
storage
Author : guerby
Score : 224 points
Date : 2022-08-24 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reneweconomy.com.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (reneweconomy.com.au)
| mattnewton wrote:
| Meanwhile in the US, we have states allowing counties to ban
| solar and wind energy production specifically on privately owned
| and industrially zoned land. I hope Australia can push through
| the fossil fuel lobby as they start to fight harder.
|
| https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/08/23/nine-ohio-counties...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| It's odd that the party that claims to be in favor of a free
| market is passing laws that actively restrict the free market.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| IMO the odd thing is people who believe the "Free Market" is
| or ever was real.
| dymk wrote:
| That's just the free market greasing the palms of
| politicians. A greasier solar lobby needs to come long and
| out-grease them, obviously.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I don't think they even claim to be free-marketers anymore.
| The nat-cons in particular are vocally anti-market.
| mperham wrote:
| They're only in favor of a "free" market that they control.
| Decentralization empowers everyone, not just plutocrats.
| glial wrote:
| As far as I can tell, claims of principle are meaningless
| with some folks. The only unifying idea is a thirst for
| power.
| kkfx wrote:
| If you want to play that game here (France) we can made DIY
| p.v. systems, pass a consuel (third party organism for
| electrical safety) check and connect it to the grid BUT with
| only two mode, one is pure-self consumption you might just have
| few over-voltage rejects to the grid, the other is gifting the
| grid of your surplus and in this case you do not only give
| energy for free, energy consumed by some neighbor who pay it to
| the grid, full price, but you also have to pay "energy
| transports fee" to the grid handler. You pay to gift something
| that get sold at full price. That's is.
| vbarrielle wrote:
| You make it sound unfair, but from the point of view of EDF
| getting the power you generate in the grid is probably never
| profitable. If you're in excess it's probable other sources
| of renewable are peaking simultaneously, but the demand does
| not change. They have to lower the production of the nuclear
| plants which is not free. Otherwise there would be a surplus.
|
| And transport fees is actually reasonable, it's a lot more
| expensive to connect lots of small production sources to the
| grid than a couple of big ones.
| kkfx wrote:
| Yes most of the time, but not always: for instance during
| peak heat in summer most p.v. still produce more than the
| actual owner consumption while EDF have issues producing
| enough electricity since almost anyone have A/C full power
| and many NPP are offline due mostly to the decade old lack
| of investments/minimal maintenance of them for private
| profits. The same private profit that now get 10 billion
| EUR to sell the last private slice of EDF to the State, who
| will made the needed investments and probably give EDF back
| to the private sector once done and that's not enough they
| want to sue the State for lack of profits due to the
| maximum price roof (bouclier tarifaire) imposed till this
| year end...
|
| TURPE fees is not expensive, true, and also EDF have issues
| keeping the frequency of the national grid with many p.v.
| systems on-line, true again, BUT the justification that EDF
| (energy production) and ERDF (energy distribution) are now
| two different companies and so while you gift the former
| you have to pay the latter is hard to digest... As a
| results many prefer zero injection even if means consuming
| a bit more from the grid.
|
| Beside that consider a thing: the State made anything at
| start, NPPs, electricity grid, TLCs etc then sold them to
| the private sector at a very cheap price "to made quick
| evolution and lower prices", none of witch happen, instead
| happen the exact opposite. The private sector invest FAR
| LESS than the public and leave a mess as a result, than
| when things became really bad the State came back to sort
| out the mess at Citizens expense. What you call it?
|
| Personally since the State now act with the famous
| "revolving doors" with the private sector I call it high
| treason for the public officers part, embezzlement and
| crimes against the State for the private part. To be a bit
| back on topic: I have invested in p.v. to guarantee my
| energy supply in case of blackouts, just for that because
| so far the investment is not really profitable, it would be
| without lithium storage but in that case I'll get no backup
| and the relevant profit is far little to justify the
| investment. Those who made profits are those who sell p.v.
| systems and all the energy giants, both "green" and
| "fossil". Me as a citizen get less wealthy to protect my
| comfort, less wealthy citizens can't protect themselves and
| to "compensate" those who can, also get far higher prices
| to be even more pushed to poverty, because that's the
| 2030/WEF target [1] is this fair? Is this "free market"
| since the enormous difference between the giant and the
| others?
|
| Take just an example: in France few municipalities kept the
| water public, most go private. Mine is one of those who
| have remained public: I pay water a bit less than 1EUR/m3,
| the nearby municipality is with Veolia, get the water from
| the very same source of mine but people pay ~12EUR/m3. They
| also have leaks and service continuity issues we have not.
| Does suffice as example? Beside that since EDF is now 100%
| public it's target must be offering a service, not making
| profit, so why IF the target of the Green Deal is a Green
| Deal really for environmental reasons why not actively
| subsidize p.v.? And even more: https://www.economie.gouv.fr
| /files/files/directions_services... if the government
| itself publicly state that France can't now and can't in
| the foreseeable future going really on renewables what we
| are talking about? Some, interested or sponsored by
| interest parties, say that we are just an inch behind the
| ability to going fully on renewables while public bodies
| (and personal experiences) state the exact contrary... In
| the meantime energy prices artificially skyrocket to
| maximize some westerners speculators, those who have
| invested in the green deal barely get the investment paid
| back but are anyway far less wealthy and those who have not
| suffer from prize rise just more. I see ALL the ingredient
| of a SCAM and nothing about the technical feasibility of a
| new deal green in the environmental sense, instead I see
| one in the dollar main color sense and in the stereotypical
| chemio-radioactive waste spilling out of rusty barrels...
|
| Try going further:
|
| - new buildings needed to consume less enough to being able
| to heat and cool on heat-pumps only => private costs for
| the owners, profits just for those who sell heat pumps and
| ENR stuff, the break even of such new constructions surpass
| their operational life anyway;
|
| - BEVs needed, integrated to homes electricity (a thing
| that's still not there, at least without any proper
| standard and again seems not that around the corner) who
| cost around the double of equivalent ICEs vehicles and
| again profits only for their OEMs;
|
| - massive renewable installations who made the grid
| unstable to push people further investing in renewable,
| similarly with artificially skyrocketed energy prices =>
| again profits only for the giants.
|
| Non-giants just get breadcrumbs, in little compensation for
| their investments and continuity of services, who happen to
| be evidently artificial. Oh and of course, the pollution
| issue not resolved at all, just hidden since with the new
| deal polluting productions happen in exotic places so
| people do not see it, but globally is not different than
| pure fossil. Meanwhile just seeing
| https://app.electricitymap.org/map nuclear seems to be the
| only really green (to a certain extent) electricity source
| we have with the bonus of being perfectly stable. Yes I
| make it sound unfair. Because it is in general. And I was
| even very polite in using the term "unfair"...
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11
| /10/s...
| voqv wrote:
| I'm very impressed to learn about Snowy 2.0. Of course, it's not
| a silver bullet - in a renewable world, storage will have to be
| fairly distributed across the grid to maintain frequency.
|
| For comparison, it seems Germany uses nearly 2x more electricity
| than Australia and currently has about 10x less pumped storage
| (including wip) than what Snowy 2.0 will have alone.
| wiz21c wrote:
| 120GWh of storage is needed (5hours). A MegaPack of Tesla has 3
| MWh capacity, so we'd need the equivalent of 40000 of them...
| Ouch!
| thayne wrote:
| "in Australia" is an important qualification here. Australia has
| a very high ratio of available solar and wind energy to
| population.
|
| Not that getting Australia fully on renewables wouldn't be
| exciting. But it is definitely an easier target than say the US.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Australian energy prices doubled in the last 6 months.
|
| I'm not sure who would ever use the Australian market as a
| model, other than "under no circumstances follow suit".
| qqqwerty wrote:
| Energy prices everywhere are up. That is what happens when
| the global economy is bouncing back from a pandemic and one
| of the biggest energy suppliers in the world decides to
| embark on the first major land war in Europe in over 70
| years.
| nomel wrote:
| With the energy industry making record profits [1], my
| naive self has extreme trouble believing that's the whole
| story.
|
| All I know is that I'm now paying $0.67/kWh, 7x what my
| family in the midwest pays.
|
| https://energycommerce.house.gov/newsroom/press-
| releases/pal...
| thrown_22 wrote:
| So you're saying Russia made sunshine more expensive?
|
| Or did we secretly build nothing but gas power plants
| because renewable are so intermittent nothing else can be
| turned on and off fast enough, leading to rising
| electricity prices world wide even before the latest shock?
| epistasis wrote:
| Anything else happened the past six months that might, say,
| affect the LNG prices and thus electricity prices overall?
|
| European prices are up far far higher than 2x
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-23/european-.
| ..
| olddustytrail wrote:
| The reason for that is because of high natural gas prices.
| And the reason that increases overall prices is because they
| are treated as a single purchase so renewable sources (who
| are obviously well aware of gas prices) push their prices up
| to match.
|
| This is so obviously a bad idea that even the CEO of a major
| energy firm has suggested the purchase market be split
| between renewable and fossil, so there are effectively two
| markets, and everyone can take advantage of cheap renewable
| prices.
|
| You should learn about this stuff rather than parroting the
| nuclear fanbook.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| It was the already the highest electricity price in the
| developed world before the start of the war.
|
| You should learn about this stuff rather than parroting the
| renewable fanbook.
| dougmwne wrote:
| The US also has plentiful natural resources vs. population
| size. It seems that Europe would be the least naturally blessed
| considering high per capita energy use and less solar
| resources. China has a high population to support, but also
| owns all that renewables manuring capacity. Other countries do
| not have such large and energy intense populations.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Quite a lot of people live in Texas and California where
| renewables are already pretty advanced, plus there's nuclear in
| the north, and they have hydro and grid connections with Canada
| who have even more hydro and nuclear so the USA should be
| easier.
|
| The US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free
| generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider
| electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035 and it
| didn't seem particularly a stretch even before the recent
| climate bill passed, so I'd guess they're well on target, not
| even sure a second Trump term as president could derail it now.
| smm11 wrote:
| I read somewhere that it's the storage/distribution part
| that's hurting California. Can't go full-throttle without
| disaster. If the storage/distribution part was worked out, CA
| would be full renewable tomorrow.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| California has a massive battery/solar rollout pipeline,
| and again that's before the IRA stuff, which lets you get
| incentives for batteries that aren't part of a solar/wind
| project, which can be used to fix transmission issues as
| wel as just being storage, so they'll be fine.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Is California at the point now where more renewables are
| not just diminishing returns, but potentially negative
| returns due to inconsistent generation causing thrashing
| and large levels of curtailment required to stabilize the
| grid?
|
| They're definitely causing faster natural gas generator
| breakdown due to them having turning up and down more
| frequently, causing greater wear and tear.
|
| More batteries and demand response to stabilize the day to
| day grid and absorb the uncontrollable generation output is
| going to be increasingly necessary.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| No, because there never is such an issue. Renewables can
| turn themselves off and on so fast that this won't ever
| be a problem. The current Australian model we're
| discussing has about 15% 'overgeneration' because that's
| economically efficient, there's no problems caused by
| that.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Can you build out enough capacity that the lowest wind
| conditions during nighttime in winter don't cause
| outages? I worry about distribution as the answer due to
| the vulnerability of our existing power distribution
| infrastructure. Do we have answers for that yet? We need
| them in any case I suppose unless you build out local
| storage to such an extent that you don't need any grid at
| all even in the coldest winter or hottest summer.
| anonporridge wrote:
| It's not a technical issue, but an economic one.
|
| If you have so much wind and solar generation that they
| spend too much of their lifespans sitting idle and not
| generating income, they potentially never even pay for
| their initial build cost and basic maintenance, let alone
| be a better investment than just buying a treasury note
| yielding 1%. That's a recipe for long term stagnation and
| depression.
| theluketaylor wrote:
| If whole solar or wind farms find themselves sitting idle
| someone will drop off some containers nearby to split
| water into hydrogen or run a data center or something
| else that drinks power and skip the grid middle-man.
| Over-idle is not going to be a real issue; someone will
| always find a way to use of excess power.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Yeah, that's demand response.
|
| Bitcoin miners are the key players innovating in that
| space right now. It's something that can very easily be
| packaged up in portable containers. I believe Chinese
| miners for years had a yearly migration to soak up
| massive amounts of excess hydro power during the rainy
| season that would have been otherwise wasted.
|
| There might be a place for more generic computation
| datacenters, but they would have to find a relatively
| unique customer that has compute loads that can be turned
| off and on at a moment's notice, and potentially be down
| for days, weeks, and even months. There's probably a
| startup to be founded here, if you can figure out how to
| severely undercut equivalent AWS services to justify the
| lack of uptime guarantees.
|
| I don't know enough about hydrogen production to know if
| it can be quickly spun up/down to suck up variable load.
| I imagine gas transport infrastructure is going to be the
| biggest blocker.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Over idle already is a real issue.
|
| Who is going to build a hydrogen generator or data center
| with a 80% idle time, operating only 12-4 PM?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Well the economic part is solved by solar/wind/batteries
| being much cheaper than all the other options, that's why
| this model overprovisions wind and solar.
|
| So yes, lots of solar might make it more cost effective
| to add some wind and/or batteries and vice versa but
| that's a good thing and what this model explores.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| What you have in mind requires someone to do the
| coordination. that is currently the system operator and
| they operate at a data rate measured in minutes or 4 s
| for the fastest changes (e.g. PJM).
|
| Meanwhile, solar output can go from 100% to 10% in three
| seconds. How is this not a problem?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The problem anonporridge was talking about was the 10% of
| solar meeting the current demand and then suddenly going
| to 100% in three seconds, so there's 'too much' power on
| the grid i.e. overprovision breaking things. Which it
| doesn't.
|
| While your example is solar at 100% exactly meeting
| demand, and then dropping to 10% in 3 seconds, and the
| fix for that is: overprovision (and some other stuff).
|
| They do need to have decent predictions of demand and
| supply, like this graph that shows the 1-hour ahead and
| 24-hour ahead predictions:
|
| https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
|
| To get the whole grid working together, but we already
| have that, and renewables and batteries help in various
| ways.
| philipkglass wrote:
| PJM has "Regulation D" signals for sub-second response
| from energy storage resources (which are mostly batteries
| in practice):
|
| https://www.pjm.com/~/media/committees-groups/task-
| forces/rm...
|
| _An energy storage regulating resource, such as a
| battery or flywheel, cannot burn fuels to produce
| electricity, but instead charge and discharge energy from
| the bulk electric system itself through a power inverter.
| Energy storage devices can match a desired output within
| 200 milliseconds of receiving the regulating signal;
| therefore these resources do not need to model any
| dynamics, ramp limitations, or dead-bands._
|
| Australia is also using batteries in a similar way:
|
| "South Australian Battery Responded in Just 140
| Milliseconds After A Coal-Fired Power Plant Failed"
|
| https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-s-south-
| australian-ba...
| anonporridge wrote:
| One thing I've learned recently is that grid management
| is extremely primitive. People are literally emailing
| each other word docs and pdfs and calling each other on
| the phone to make changes to generation output to keep
| the grid stable.
|
| It's an area that's ripe for some software innovation, if
| they can actually break through the legacy management
| club that currently runs the grid.
| akiselev wrote:
| I, for one, can't wait for the first ever Western
| Interconnect black start, brought to you by an off-by-one
| error. During a megadrought.
| chickenchicken wrote:
| There are already companies working on that https://www.e
| msysgrid.com/products/grid_management/futurepow...
| megaman821 wrote:
| Well, you need a 30 minute battery buffer to get gas
| peakers online. Whether those gas peakers are running
| natural gas or green hydrogen depends on how much excess
| solar capacity there is and how much hydrogen plants
| cost.
|
| Also, medium term storage is a very, very young industry.
| Things like redox batteries, flow batteries, molten salt,
| compressed air, and many others are on the horizon. The
| better these work the more gas peakers are solely used as
| backup.
| hammock wrote:
| > even before the recent climate bill passed
|
| What is in the bill that is investment in renewables? My
| understanding is that there aren't so much subsidies to
| generators-suppliers, but rather rebates and savings for
| homeowners and consumers.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Lots of little things, but a big one is that I think you
| can generate Green Hydrogen with Renewables and get tax
| credits on both (though I did read some conflicting stuff
| on that, think it still makes sense if you don't get the
| credit on the renewables, but if you do then it's another
| big push).
|
| https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/us-inflation-
| reduction-...
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Fairly big incentives, including, for the first time,
| battery investments.
| rdevsrex wrote:
| This podcast goes in depth on what's in the bill:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrfRbr_xbOE
| jaltekruse wrote:
| Getting people to use more efficient appliances and
| insulating their homes should help reach these targets. We
| don't need to generate today levels of energy if we can
| drop usage by some percentage and just generate all of that
| with renewables.
|
| That being said, the bill is also pushing for heat pumps to
| replace natural gas burning furnaces, so I'm guessing the
| net impact will be we need today levels of electricity
| generation, or maybe even a little more once we look at
| electrifying things that currently don't interact with the
| grid and consume fossil fuels directly.
|
| And actually as I even type this, I'm remembering that
| electrifying cars is a big part of this that will
| definitely drive up electricity need way more than
| efficiency gains suppress demands for some use. Hopefully
| we can get to some of the more transformative ideas
| suggested about improving city planning and density
| together with investments in public transit so we don't end
| up producing way too many batteries simply to preserve a
| car centric transportation system.
|
| I do think even just incentivizing consumers to buy
| electric everything will have a strong movement to drive
| more electricity generation, and renewables are the
| cheapest or very cost competitive options for new power
| generation installations. I think there are some funds in
| the new bill for encouraging sunsetting fossil fuel based
| plants early, but we likely need more of that down the
| line.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Getting people to use more efficient appliances and
| insulating their homes should help reach these targets.
| We don't need to generate today levels of energy if we
| can drop usage by some percentage and just generate all
| of that with renewables.
|
| Sure, but if the bulk of the problem isn't residential
| inefficiency (or if these incentives are only going to
| recoup a small portion of that inefficiency), then
| perhaps this money and political will might be better
| spent elsewhere.
|
| In particular, I suspect industry is a big emitter and
| the big gains are probably to be had in disincentivizing
| carbon emissions in industry. The low hanging fruit would
| be a border adjustment tariff on countries that don't
| meet our current emission standards (bring more jobs to
| the US, which improves our supply chain security). From
| there we could set a low price on carbon and ratchet it
| up as necessary. I would much rather us squabble over the
| price of carbon than trying to play whack-a-mole with
| specific incentives and disincentives. Moreover, carbon
| pricing isn't a cost, it's a revenue source.
|
| Besides carbon pricing, it would also be neat to see the
| money spent on increasing our renewable energy capacity.
| It's not enough to convert our grid to renewables because
| we have all of these new EVs and electric heaters and
| electric industrial applications coming online and
| replacing fossil fuel applications. The grid is going to
| be much more strained than before, so we need to increase
| that capacity as quickly as possible.
| sremani wrote:
| >> 95% carbon-free generation
|
| I am still not clearly getting the picture here - what
| exactly this means.
|
| US has about 30% electricity generated by Coal and I do not
| see that go away in next 20 years let alone 8. What am I
| missing here?
|
| As of today, US energy portfolio is around 83% fossil. The
| best case scenario for 2040 is something like 50%, that
| includes we get Nuclear fusion, massive battery storage,
| material science breakthroughs that will put a dent on steel
| and cement consumption.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Us coal production is at 22% down from 39% in 2014. That's
| a 17% reduction in 9 years with 22% to go.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_St
| a...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| All the big developed nations have committed to phase out
| coal by 2030, the USA skipped it because of politics, but
| if you read any of the coverage of that they usually say
| that it would happen with or without a government
| commitment e.g.
|
| Why the U.S. Didn't Join 40 Other Countries in Pledge to
| End Coal
|
| subtitle: Economics is already playing a large role in
| curtailing American coal power
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-u-s-
| didnt...
| [deleted]
| makomk wrote:
| The trouble is, the economics only worked out that way
| because natural gas was cheap - it's not anymore, and
| countries have been rolling back their coal shutdowns as
| a result. There's a good chance it never will be again.
| The same people who were campaigning for that managed to
| convince pretty much all developed nations other than the
| US to end new natural gas investment and extraction, and
| without the supply there prices won't go down and it
| won't be feasible to use as a coal replacement. This will
| probably also cut into the switch to renewables because
| all of the alternatives to natural gas, like coal, play
| much less well with them.
| [deleted]
| philipkglass wrote:
| I don't expect the US to hit that ambitious 2030 target.
| But you may not realize how fast the American generation
| mix has been changing recently. In 2015 coal supplied 33%
| of American electricity generation and renewables supplied
| 13%:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170328200331/https://www.eia.
| g...
|
| Coal supplied 21.8% of US electricity generation in 2021
| and renewables supplied 20.1%:
|
| https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427
|
| Coal is the fastest-shrinking electrical power source in
| the US:
|
| "Coal will account for 85% of U.S. electric generating
| capacity retirements in 2022"
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50838
|
| Solar and wind are the fastest-growing sources:
|
| https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/
|
| _The largest increases in U.S. electricity generation in
| our forecast come from renewable energy sources, mostly
| solar and wind. We expect renewable sources will provide
| 22% of U.S. generation in 2022 and 24% in 2023, up from 20%
| in 2021._
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| For the cost of 5kW nameplate of new western nuclear (>$10/W)
| you can get, right now, at retail, as an individual: 50kW
| nameplate of solar, and 8kW nameplate of wind, and 75kWh of
| storage and a 5kW generator (which will almost never need
| turning on) and a biogas digester.
|
| And it will produce enough excess power to replace itself
| (with a cheaper version) or just triple the batteries if you
| can get 2-3c/kWh for the surplus well before the reactor is
| built
|
| Mentioning nuclear as an option is about as sensible as a
| generator bicycle.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I'm not all in on nuclear, but nameplate comparison is
| meaningless. Solar might hit the name plate for a few hours
| a day with suitable weather while nuclear can run 24/7 or
| on demand.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Good thing we weren't comparing nameplate then but
| instead comparing ability to meet baseload on a cost
| basis (that thing that's supposed to be most strongly in
| favour of nuclear) and finding the result insanely in
| favour of renewables
|
| 5kW nameplate nuclear is 3-4.5kW net with 10-40% of the
| time needing total backup and zero ability to meet higher
| peak demand.
|
| The system I described needs 2.4 hours of peak sunlight
| spread throughout a day or 15 hours of wind in a day or
| 30kg of biofuel (not doable for very many days) or 30kg
| of imported fuel or any combination with the battery
| averaging 1-5(ie. you meet ~85% of load with wind/biofuel
| and draw ~20% of battery) days to meet the 5kW target. It
| also has a massive peak capacity which dwarfs the nuclear
| system during half of the year. You might need to tilt
| the panels two or three times a year in parts of Canada
| or similar, and maybe import a few days worth of ethanol
| (or any other stable hydrocarbon you can run your
| generator on) each year, but this is still less backup
| than a fission plant needs.
|
| Couple it to an uncorrelated system or trade some solar
| for an electrolyzer and fuel cells and you can reduce
| reliance on imported fuel even more. Solar cells and
| batteries will also better than halve in price well
| before your plant is finished -- likely making it
| impossible to even run, let alone recoup your costs.
| Additionally perovskites work better with partial shade
| and are quite likely to hit cost parity with solar so the
| nameplate value can be reduced (or reliability on a
| still, cloudy, winter, northern morning will increase).
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I wouldn't advocate for new nuclear (for the same reason
| the creator of this model gives, it just isn't cost
| effective) but existing nuclear in stable, northern regions
| that also have hydro is definately a positive if you're
| aiming to get to carbon-free power faster.
|
| If you don't have the much hydro then it can fight with
| solar/wind for usage of that dispatchable resource, and if
| you don't have the nuclear you can build solar/wind for
| less so there's no reason to start.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Agreed. Keep the current nuclear on as long as it's safe
| and doesn't cost more than eg. a new green ammonia build.
| evancox100 wrote:
| So you can buffer the wind/solar output for just 78
| minutes? Doesn't sound like a complete solution.
|
| Edit: I guess per the paper it really depends on the
| specific details of generation/load timing. Could be
| workable for a certain region but not for another.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| The demonstration is 5kW year round with insignificant
| consumption of fossil fuels everywhere with a climate
| about as good as Toronto or better, not having somewhere
| to put all the sunlight. Mid-winter in high latitude you
| get as little as 2hrs of sunlight/day (or 0 in the
| arctic, but hardly anyone lives there). If you live in
| the tropics, 10kW is probably fine.
|
| Also if you feel the need to use it up, electrolyzers are
| cheap and hydrogen is worth money. You can also store a
| great deal of energy in a few tonnes of NaOH and avoid
| using precious winter electricity for heating.
|
| You can also reshuffle the wind, solar and battery for
| your local climate, or wait a year or three for sodium
| batteries to halve the price.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| The parent is pointing out, that if you are trying to
| find a solution to generate 5kw of constant power using
| nuclear, for the same cost you can get an absurd amount
| of renewable generation and storage plus a backup
| generator. The batteries can store 15 hours worth of
| energy at peak demand, you get a 10x overbuild of peak
| capacity in solar, plus wind, biogas and a backup
| generator to boot. It is highly unlikely that the system
| would ever fail. I would guess you could probably cut the
| system size in half and still have uptime in the high
| 9's. And the added bonus is you would have a fair bit of
| redundancy should any part of the system need
| maintenance, whereas the nuclear solution doesn't even
| come with a backup generator.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| nuclear definitely needs to be in the mix to reach 100%
| fossil-fuel-free energy generation; not gonna happen on
| wind/solar/hydro alone
| epistasis wrote:
| This has been an article of religious faith, but I'm not
| sure it has ever been a technologically defensible
| opinion. Before the recent order of magnitude drops in
| battery prices, it may have been an economical argument,
| but to make that economic argument one would have to
| ignore the technological tech curve of solar and
| renewables.
|
| And now that nuclear won't be able to compete on the
| economics, whereas 10 years ago we though we could still
| build nuclear for historical prices, people have not
| updated their reasoning.
|
| Most of the models that included nuclear alongside
| renewables used far far lower prices for nuclear than we
| can actually build it for. And even then, nuclear was
| only selected at ~10% of generation for cost reasons, not
| tech reasons.
| scarby2 wrote:
| The data doesn't include SMRs and MSRs which could be
| extremely compelling both from a cost and time to build
| perspective (or they could be a dead end).
|
| Current gen LWRs are problematic for all sorts of reasons
| but i wouldn't rule nuclear out of the fight just yet.
| Especially when you take into account china's track
| record of delivering nuclear plants at a competitive
| price.
| epistasis wrote:
| I'm reminded of Admiral Rickover's thoughts on this:
|
| > An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has
| the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple.
| (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It
| can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in
| purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It
| will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in
| the study phase. It is not being built now.
|
| >On the other hand a practical reactor can be
| distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is
| being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It
| requires an immense amount of development on apparently
| trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a
| long time to build because of its engineering development
| problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is
| complicated.
|
| SMRs and MSRs are in the academic stage at the moment. We
| don't know what they will look like at the end when they
| are actual products, but there are technical and
| practical reasons that they haven't been tried before
| now, so I think it's only prudent to withhold enthusiasm
| until we have data on their characteristics and
| potential.
|
| Back in the 80s, we had PV panels in hand, and knowledge
| of silicon tech curves that could predict the rosy future
| we live in today. SMRs are a bit more shaky.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| You're literally commenting on a thread about how 100%
| renewable is possible on a comment demonstrating that an
| individual can beat the cost effectiveness of new nuclear
| with 100% renewables.
|
| The utility scale version of the digester is a gas peaker
| running on green ammonia possibly with a mix of long
| distance transmission. Everything else scales at least
| linearly.
|
| Nuclear is dead. The last nail went into the coffin when
| green hydrogen first hit parity with delivered grey
| hydrogen in some regions. The case just gets worse from
| here. Stop shilling.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The problem is that electrification of fossil fuel
| applications is going to significantly increase the demand on
| our grid. So it's not enough to get to parity in renewables,
| but we have to go far beyond our current capacity in order to
| accommodate a world in which almost every car is electric
| (whether electric hybrid or green hydrogen) and almost every
| home uses electric rather than natural gas for heating (not
| to mention all of the industrial applications that will need
| electrification).
| epistasis wrote:
| It's going to increase the amount of energy flowing through
| the grid, but there's plenty of excess grid capacity to
| accommodate that.
|
| The grid is a technological marvel, but one weakness about
| it is that it has never included storage except small
| amount of hydro (which I've heard some claim is because
| nuclear needed it so that the reactor could stay always on,
| but I have my doubts on that origin story)
|
| Without storage, every grid component must be sized to
| maximum expected through put, which can be many many times
| as large as average throughput. The grid is also the most
| expensive part of delivering energy, more expensive than
| generation.
|
| This means that storage, and a lot of electrification means
| storage, whether that's charging the battery on a car, or
| heating a hot water tank, or cooling/heating a building
| which can be used as several degrees of thermal storage, is
| going to drastically reduce the potential peak load as a
| ratio to average load.
|
| Electrification has enormous potential to reduce grid cost,
| and overall energy cost, IMHO.
| trashtester wrote:
| > Electrification has enormous potential to reduce grid
| cost, and overall energy cost, IMHO.
|
| This sounds a bit strange. I'm pretty sure that electric
| cars and replacing natural gas for heating will require
| quite significant investment in electric distribution
| infrastructure.
|
| Also, if you want to be able to transfer a significant
| fraction of power generated from wind and solar across
| the country, transmission capacity needs to be multiple
| times greater than today, as far as I can tell.
|
| Some kind of smart adjustment of the end user consumption
| may slightly shave up the extremes in demand, but that
| requires a significant investment per household (not only
| in money, but also awareness and ability to set this up),
| and a lot of people do not want to compromise on the
| charge of the car or the temperature in their living
| room.
|
| And in the end, I really doubt that those efforts will
| make a big difference, unless paired with significant
| spare battery capacity.
| teknopaul wrote:
| Electric vehicles are all a way of moving power, and huge
| spare battery capacity. They are not a problem, they are
| the solution.
|
| Just throw software at it. I know Musk does not believe
| that, but essentially it has to work.
| connicpu wrote:
| Even without any other sources of power, storage already
| makes sense for hydro since ideally you'd like to store
| excess water that comes during above average rainy
| seasons so that you have more power to use during a
| drought, but allowing your nuclear base load to stay
| running even when the rest of the grid demands less does
| seem like another useful benefit
| [deleted]
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| That's an interesting point I hadn't considered before.
| That said, I would think the net effect is still
| increased demand on the grid. If everyone buys an EV, I
| can't imagine that constitutes a net _reduction_ in
| demand on the grid even if everyone charges off-peak
| (unless utilities can pull storage from those car
| batteries during peak hours, and I doubt car owners will
| want that kind of wear on their batteries). Do you know
| of any publications which try to estimate the effect of
| electrification on capacity?
| beerandt wrote:
| In engineering speak, what he means is increased grid
| efficiency, which can happen simultaneously with
| increased demand and increased cost.
|
| But all that does is shift the inefficiencies off of the
| grid. It's redefining the system boundary in a
| politically/ marketing friendly way, but doesn't
| eliminate the problem of storage/buffer capacity.
|
| Anyone who thinks the grid can approach steady-state
| operations near capacity hasn't seriously looked at
| demand patterns, and that's before complicating things by
| trying to accommodate the transportation needs of
| replacing gas/diesel.
|
| It's the equivalent of claiming traffic problems can be
| solved by staggering when people work instead of doing
| road improvements.
| epistasis wrote:
| > Anyone who thinks the grid can approach steady-state
| operations near capacity hasn't seriously looked at
| demand patterns
|
| I think that's a bit of a straw man, the key thing is to
| reduce the peak, rather than get to steady state.
| epistasis wrote:
| The most advanced modeling I know of is coming from
| Christopher Clack, whose latest models show that
| deploying lots of storage at the grid edge now will pave
| the way for much cheaper energy in the future. I thought
| this was more recent but it's 16 months old now:
|
| https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-146-why-local-
| sol...
|
| Even if there are grid upgrades, getting a higher
| utilization factor, or more precisely, knocking off the
| highest peaks of demand, has huge cost savings on the
| grid size.
|
| So as we shift spending away from fossil fuel, that money
| will be going to utilities which will allow them to do
| the grid upgrades.
|
| Unfortunately utilities make the best profits on grid
| upgrades, so unless there are really good utility
| commissions, utilities will not be looking to decrease
| their grid investments or make grid utilization better,
| the are literally incentivized to make transmission and
| distribution costs as high as possible.
|
| If you live in California and have PG&E check out how
| many times more they charge you to deliver a kWh than to
| generate it, and you'll be fairly shocked and annoyed at
| CPUC for having done such a terrible job of reigning in
| PG&E's management.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| If you can store energy in batteries for days wherever, and
| store energy for weeks in hydrogen anywhere bigger than a
| house, and store energy in ammonia for decades and move it
| wherever there are trained personell, and store energy in
| NaOH and release it as low grade heat, and store energy in
| methane and put it through the existing gas network, and
| all these things cost in the range of $20-100/MWh over and
| above the energy input...
|
| Do we ever actually need to move our $1-10/MWh peak solar
| energy through our $100-200/MWh grid?
| klyrs wrote:
| I'm real bullish on electrification of everything, but the
| necessary service upgrades for me to get a level 2 charger
| on my property would cost on the order of $5-10k.
|
| Edit: typo corrected, I said level 3 previously
| Loudergood wrote:
| I'm honestly curious as to why you would need anything
| more than a Level 2 charger at home.
| m463 wrote:
| Maybe they meant Level 2?
|
| A level 3 charger can easily use more electricity than an
| entire household (250kw is becoming more common now)
|
| Also, many cars can level 2 charge through the onboard
| inverter at fairly high levels, 48 amps ~ 11.5kw
| klyrs wrote:
| Ack, that was a typo
| cp9 wrote:
| fyi the inflation reduction act will cut a good chunk of
| that for you (assuming you're in the US)
|
| > The Alternative Fuel Refueling Property Credit expired
| at the end of 2021, but the Inflation Reduction Act gave
| it life again by extending its application through 2032.
| For homeowners, the credit is worth 30% of the costs of
| "qualified alternative fuel vehicle refueling property"
| installed in the home, up to $1,000.
| r00fus wrote:
| The IRA kinda ruined the AFRPC because it's now only 30%
| if you're in an eligible jurisdiction (ie, low-income
| area). Otherwise, you get 6%.
| cp9 wrote:
| forgot to cite it, it's from
| https://www.kiplinger.com/taxes/605069/inflation-
| reduction-a...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Yeah, same for me (I live in a condo building and our
| parking lot is not adjacent to the building). My wife and
| I bought a Tesla back in November of last year, and
| charging at superchargers hasn't been terribly
| inconvenient. If you do it too much, your peak charge
| rate gets limited by a small amount, but we haven't
| noticed it and we have 15k miles on it already. That
| said, it will be really nice to have a level 2 charger at
| our next place.
| r00fus wrote:
| I find this surprising. I specced out an L2 charger and
| it did cost me $2K for the install + charger a few years
| ago (in an expensive market). The install required a new
| 100A line pulled to my garage as I had no existing
| washer/dryer there.
|
| What else would you need to support L2 than an extra
| breaker entry for a 100A?
| klyrs wrote:
| We'd need to upgrade our panel, as it's already maxed
| out. On top of that, we'd also have to pay the power
| company to upgrade their distribution box and the wiring
| that's buried in a trench that runs under the garage.
| And, joy of medium density, we'd need about 10 other
| households to get in on the action and the price I quoted
| is per unit.
|
| Basically, the problem that we're experiencing is that
| everybody in the neighborhood has already maxed out their
| service. Infrastructure upgrades are painful.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Everybody leaves out Iowa when mentioning wind energy! Iowa
| and Oklahoma are both larger into wind that California.
|
| https://windexchange.energy.gov/files/slideshows/wind-
| energy...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free
| generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider
| electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035_
|
| This seems ambitious. Source?
| jlmorton wrote:
| Getting to 100% carbon-free generation is a goal of the
| President's Long Term Strategy [1]:
|
| > DECARBONIZE ELECTRICITY. Electricity delivers > diverse
| services to all sectors of the American > economy. The
| transition to a clean electricity > system has been
| accelerating in recent years-- > driven by plummeting costs
| for solar and wind > technologies, federal and subnational
| policies, > and consumer demand. Building on this success,
| > the United States has set a goal of 100% clean >
| electricity by 2035, a crucial foundation for net-zero >
| emissions no later than 2050.
|
| Other releases have set a goal of 2030 [2]:
|
| > 100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity (CFE) by
| 2030, at least half of which will be locally supplied clean
| energy to meet 24/7 demand;
|
| I don't agree with the rosy outlook of the previous
| commenter, though. Things are looking up, but I think it
| would be quite a stretch to hit this goal.
|
| [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/10/US-Lon... [2]
| https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-
| releases...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I think the latter is talking about procurement of energy
| by the government, not generation. Which obviously helps
| and is something the government has more control over,
| but is a slightly different thing.
|
| The 100% by 2035 is fairly widely communicated, but
| there's definately a document that talks about aiming for
| 95% in 2030 and then focusing on electrification of other
| sectors as the diminishing returns start to hit. Can't
| find it at the moment, too many other announcents with
| very similar google search terms.
|
| edit: I can only find sligthly older commitments to 80%
| clean energy by 2030. Which I guess is close enough, as
| the targets keep ratcheting as it becomes more obviously
| a good idea.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the latter is talking about procurement of energy by
| the government, not generation_
|
| Cute how they don't link to the order nor mention its
| number. Here it is [1].
|
| It exempts the GAO and independent agencies as well as
| anything not "an executive agency as defined in section
| 105 of title 5, United States Code" (SS 603.b). So no
| military, which is reasonable.
|
| [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-
| room/presidential-action...
| erie wrote:
| And the big elephant in the room? getting the US military
| on board is going to be tough. Every year, US armed forces
| consume more than 100 million barrels of oil to power
| ships, vehicles, aircraft, and ground operations
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The US military spends more on renewables each year than
| most countries. They were on board long before the wider
| US Government felt it was politically safe.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-military-green-
| energy...
|
| > The military's push into alternative energy started
| under Republican President George W. Bush in 2007, when
| he signed a law requiring the Pentagon to get 25 percent
| of the electricity for its buildings from renewable
| energy by 2025.
| geraneum wrote:
| Who knows, maybe one day, all of the tensions (wars,
| etc.) between countries that is rooted in access to oil
| reserves disappear because of this.
|
| One can dream...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _tensions (wars, etc.) between countries that is rooted
| in access to oil reserves disappear because of this_
|
| Unlikely. Lithium, minerals and advanced manufacturing
| clusters remain geographically concentrated and
| adversarially demanded.
| rednerrus wrote:
| 62% of the power in Oregon comes from renewables, mostly
| renewables that are available 24/7.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Yeah, but that renewable hydro is unlikely to grow much in
| the USA, while wind and solar will be growing
| exponentially. Hydro is cool, and works well with
| solar/wind/nuclear to help match supply and demand, but ...
|
| If you look at global renewable output, the big chunk of
| hydro production that's been flat for decades, somewhat
| obscures the recent sudden rise of solar and wind.
| Retric wrote:
| Swapping hydro from 24/7 power to a backup for wind and
| solar goes a long way to eliminate the need for storage.
| We don't need more total kWh per year of hydro we need to
| be able to more flexibility get those kWh.
| [deleted]
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true. Electricity generation is
| pretty regional, so it's not like we can use a region's
| hydro capacity to store energy for other regions. It can
| store energy for the region that already has hydro, but
| that region already has hydro so it probably needs less
| storage in the first place?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I am an engineer that works on hydro control systems -
| It's worth noting that a hydro turbine, depending on it's
| construction, has a certain turndown ratio - That ratio
| of it's full scale output to it's minimum output. At the
| turn of the century designers of these turbines did not
| particularly care about operating at a lot of different
| power output levels, they cared about maximizing power
| output at a particular point, and importantly, maximizing
| efficiency at that point. These units typically have a
| turndown ratio very close to one. Consequently many hydro
| turbines are capable of a relatively narrow operating
| range, and are not suitable for fast grid support of the
| type that would be required as the primary source of
| solar backup. They're on-off type resources in many
| cases. These turbines can be retrofitted to variable
| geometry style turbines with much wider operating bands
| but these upgrades are slow and expensive.
|
| Long story short - hydro is good as a 'base load' but we
| desperately need storage. Pumped storage, battery
| storage, compression storage. And we need massive
| transmission system upgrades (in the US at least).
| Nothing else will lead to a reliable grid based on
| renewables in the US.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Can't you get around this by turning on x% of your hydro
| capacity to 100% rather than turning 100% of your hydro
| capacity to x%? Also, batteries are really good as a
| short term storage, so hydro only needs to work on the
| hours to months time-scale.
| liketochill wrote:
| I also work in hydro controls.
|
| Apart from equipment limitations, most hydro plants I've
| been to have a river downstream and there are
| restrictions on how fast output can be changed and
| requirements for minimum flows. You can't just stop the
| whole river to fill up the reservoir and release it later
| in the day
| beloch wrote:
| While 120 GWh of electricity storage may be remotely feasible to
| build now, I would not characterize it as "little" in any way,
| shape or form.
| Retric wrote:
| It's roughly 2 years worth of EV batteries sold in Australia
| right now.
|
| So, calling it little storage actually sounds reasonable.
| ktzar wrote:
| I wonder how would the results vary if for every MW of renewables
| there was 100kWh of storage (using flywheels, lipo, thermal rock,
| gravity, etc...). I really believe a future with 100% renewables
| is very, very close. Will happen in the 2030s.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That's only _6 minutes_ of peak load worth of storage (assuming
| it's rated on output kWh, perhaps only 5 minutes otherwise). If
| you have three different types of renewables, all equally
| sized, and uncorrelated, it's 18 /15 minutes against a single
| type of renewable being offline.
|
| That doesn't seem like enough for a 100% renewables grid to be
| 3 9's reliable.
| fulafel wrote:
| Demand can be regulated to meet supply using various ways (eg
| pricing, quotas, etc).
| fallingknife wrote:
| Pricing is a poor tool as the signal doesn't propagate
| quickly enough. Quotas just means blackouts, and that isn't
| ever going to fly politically.
| pydry wrote:
| Pricing doesnt propogate fast enough only if you assume
| that we cant predict the weather.
|
| It's already working in the UK - power company sends a
| message saying between 2am-4am power will be free.
| fulafel wrote:
| Disagreed on both:
|
| Demonstrably pricing already technically works in many
| hourly priced markets in face of difficult conditions -
| the swings are not that fast and the time quantum can
| technically be made much smaller still, there is no
| fundamental signal propagation speed bottleneck in sight.
|
| Quotas yield cutoffs only if you exceed your quota, so
| you would still get power constantly for light loads
| unless you err by blowing your quota. This is far better
| than getting blackouts.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > My simulation used the 24GW/120GWh of assumed storage and
| existing hydro to firm up the wind and solar and match demand.
|
| 120 GWh is not what most would describe as "little storage". The
| largest hydroelectric storage facilities in existence are in the
| single digit or low double digit GWh. And this is for a country
| with a relatively small population.
|
| > Both the hydro and storage were assumed highly flexible. Note
| that I did not use the actual hydro generation data. I completely
| changed the dispatch of hydro so that it had minimal generation
| on days when it wasn't needed, and elevated levels whenever there
| was a day with significant shortfalls of wind and solar relative
| to demand.
|
| This is also a big simplification. While dams _can_ just totally
| shut off the flow of water downstream, this has big ecological
| impact and also impacts availability of water in population
| centers that draw from the river. Most dams always release a
| minimum amount of water to ensure the river never runs dry. Much
| of his simulation has dams bottling up water for long stretches
| of time.
| adrianN wrote:
| If you want to play around with a toy model of this problem,
| there is this website: https://model.energy/
| passwordoops wrote:
| Interesting, but the title should mention it's localized to
| Australia so as to avoid arm waving from either side
| smileysteve wrote:
| It's suggested by the url, but if mods wanted to add [AU]
| jakewins wrote:
| This survey paper shows the same holds true pretty much
| everywhere, with lots of different labs using different models
| arriving at the same finding:
|
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
| cinntaile wrote:
| It's the first sentence in the article, you can't really miss
| it.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| California, on most days, is generating slightly less power
| from solar (~10GW) than all of Australia from coal (per
| https://electricitymap.org). Texas has over 130GW of renewables
| in ERCOT's interconnect queue. There are challenges to solve
| for, certainly, but broad strokes the decarbonization roadmap
| is well defined and within reach. Velocity is a function of
| capital and technology investment.
|
| Edit: @usefulcat https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-
| transition/rampant-solar...
| usefulcat wrote:
| > Texas has over 130GW of renewables in ERCOT's interconnect
| queue
|
| I'm curious to know where you got the 130 GW figure? Texas
| consumption rarely exceeds 80 GW, even in summer, so 130
| seems like a lot.
|
| https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/supplyanddemand
|
| (Note: the Y axis in the above chart is megawatts)
| tstrimple wrote:
| I just found a dashboard for the ERCOT interconnect queue.
| It looks like the previous person understated the amount in
| the queue if anything.
|
| https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiYjM0YjNjZWQtM2U3ZS00
| Z...
|
| Page 4 shows nearly 200 GW just for solar and wind, and a
| total of 275 GW.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Good find. My figure was from September 2021, this is
| great to hear. I assume even more projects planned with
| the Inflation Reduction Act juicing renewables subsidies.
| [deleted]
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Yeah. As a consumer, I put solar panels on my house in 2017.
| They generate about as much electricity as I consume. In
| theory, I will break even on the cost in another two years.
| Obviously, they're going to depreciate and break at some
| point, but the only reason ~every house doesn't have them is
| the price of installation. If everyone did this, you're
| talking about a world where we would still need non-
| renewables for load balancing, night time, cloudy days, etc.,
| but we'd still have a huge reduction in carbon. The only
| thing stopping us from having near carbon free consumer
| electricity _with current technology_ is the capital costs.
| So duh, the government should just loan the money to
| consumers and get it done. We can figure out load balancing
| etc. later once we pick all the low hanging fruit.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > the government should just loan the money to consumers
| and get it done.
|
| I'm not sure everyone _wants_ to borrow money - there are a
| ton of financing options for solar right now, what makes
| you think adding yet another one would get everyone over
| that hump?
| nicoburns wrote:
| They could loan the money interest free. _that_ would
| make it rather a no-brainer
| jakewins wrote:
| Models show this same result for most (all?) regions they have
| been applied to. Here is a survey paper going over the current
| state of research globally and what mixes different models arrive
| at for different regions:
|
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
| iammjm wrote:
| each time somebody claims something is impossible, consider how
| much he is benefiting from the status quo
| trashtester wrote:
| When somebody claims something is impossible, maybe the status
| quo will be maintained, or maybe some alternative plan will be
| started.
|
| On the other hand, if someone argues for doing something that
| they know is impossible, it may be an even stronger indication
| that they may benefit from the status quo. In such a situation,
| those who advocate for an alternative, proven but less sexy
| option may be those who really seek progress.
| arcticbull wrote:
| The Ontario grid has been there for years. 92% zero-carbon. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-
| markets/pr...
| dont__panic wrote:
| Wow, that's a lot of hydro and nuclear power!
|
| Thanks for sharing. I wonder how the New England and upstate NY
| power grids compare, since they also have a lot of hydro and
| nuclear?
| theluketaylor wrote:
| New England and upstate NY don't generate nearly enough power
| for their own needs and buy excess power from Ontario and
| Quebec. Quebec in particular as Hydro Quebec has a terrifying
| amount of hydro generation and always has tons of excess. A
| big chunk of the clean energy in the northeast US comes from
| Canada.
|
| Super cool tool that shows the CO2 intensity of various grids
| and where power is flowing:
|
| https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-NE-ISNE
| testfoobar wrote:
| How does this analysis map to an all-electric car future? People
| generally need their cars during the day and charge them at
| night.
| dymk wrote:
| An all-electric car future involves charging stations at
| destinations as well at home, so cars can be charging during
| the day as well.
| ciconia wrote:
| A few random thoughts:
|
| 1. There are symbiotic relationships between different sources of
| energy. In order to suck petrol out of the earth we need coal
| (used in steel manufacturing). In order to mine coal we need
| petrol (used by diggers and for transport). We still don't know
| how to manufacture solar panels and wind turbines without fossil
| fuels. The mining, steel forging and international transport of
| these products is still based on fossil fuels.
|
| 2. Electricity consumption represents only about 30% of total
| energy consumption. A lot of people seem to underestimate the
| difference in energy density between petrol and lithium
| batteries. This difference makes it highly unlikely that we'll
| move to electric ships and aircraft in the near future.
|
| 3. The mining activity associated with manufacturing solar
| panels, wind turbines, batteries, smartphones and electric cars
| is highly demanding in energy, is highly polluting, and demands
| great quantities of fresh water as part of the process of
| refining the different metals. With the rise of electric cars,
| the continuing demand for smartphones mining is expected to
| demand even more energy and fresh water, and pollute even more
| our rivers and soils. This, in a period of constrained energy
| sources, droughts, and an already degraded environment.
|
| 4. Judging by the comments on here people demand an _always-on_
| supply of energy, be it electricity, petrol or gas, which is a
| privilege only some countries enjoy today, and is relatively
| recent in human history. I think the idea of _intermittent_
| energy supply is worth exploring, and might make it easier to
| achieve 100% renewable energy production, in conjunction with a
| lower energy consumption.
| intrepidhero wrote:
| And random responses.
|
| 1. I don't know if the coal used to make steal can be replaced
| with synthetic sources but petrol (and diesel and oil) can
| absolutely be replaced with synthetic fuel powered by renewable
| energy and carbon capture. The tech is old and boring. What's
| needed are cheaper renewable sources and more expensive oil,
| both of which are happening right now.
|
| 2. You're absolutely right and there is some debate that
| battery production can ever scale to level needed. Fortunately
| some combination of batteries and synthetic fuel almost
| certainly can get us to 100%.
|
| 3. Spot on and highly concerning, particularly as demand for
| these things at low cost has driven mining operations to places
| with poor environmental protections.
|
| 4. Great point. Demand side management and spot pricing are
| already things and more wide spread implementations will
| definitely make renewables more economical. I personally will
| be super excited to see one of the companies pursuing synthetic
| fuels figure out how to take advantage of surplus generation to
| capture carbon and turn it into essentially high energy density
| storage.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Speaking as an electrical engineer with a grid tied PV system for
| many years, this claim is just bonkers. It's exactly this sort of
| magical thinking that we don't need more of. Electric utility is
| a deadly serious business. The cost of getting a massive
| transition like this wrong is going to be measured not just
| economically, but in people's lives.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Which part is magic in this situation?
| [deleted]
| andrew-ld wrote:
| kkfx wrote:
| Those who made such "simulation" probably do have forgot or never
| learn a classic engineering practice (at least in Europe
| engineering) witch is named resilience.
|
| We need resilient systems as more resilient as bigger is the
| impact of their eventual failure. In other terms stating we can
| made a big and complex enough smart grid to run "almost" an
| renewable means spend an incredible amount of resource to build a
| hyper-fragile unmaintainable monster that can malfunction at best
| most of the time.
|
| Also the "little storage" they state is not little at all and
| most importantly it does NOT LAST LONGER. So far we have some
| long-lasting storage (pumped hydro) witch is very effective where
| you have enough mountains and basins, witch might be true for
| let's say Norway and to a little extent Swiss, but certainly not
| for let's say Germany. Compressed air storage seems to offer an
| option at a sufficient scale, but so far only some experimental
| plants exists and they have a significant amount of fragility and
| risks. Long story short: we haven't enough storage on scale to
| deploy almost only intermittent sources of power. BEVs can
| compensate an unstable grid for homes, but not for industry,
| hospitals, big infrastructures etc. Long story short those who
| claim such possibility follow this classic:
| https://www.commitstrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Strip...
| sorry I do not have one in English but I think anyone can
| translate quick enough. A video equivalent is
| https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg
|
| It's not much different than
| https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-...
| something that MIGHT BE partially true, in pure math, but
| practically false. Fails to understand the real feasibility of
| such projects is probably the root cause of all managerial driven
| projects fails.
| trashtester wrote:
| Norway has very little pumped hydro, even though they have 50%
| of all hydro in Europe. The flexibility is gained by just
| postponing consumption if demand is low or alternative supply
| is high.
|
| Of course, these days, there is rarely any surplus power being
| generated, so Norway is just exporting as much as they can
| spare (and then some).
| ParksNet wrote:
| Its unclear if we even have the metal mining capacity (or the
| ores in the ground) to do this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc
| mactitan wrote:
| A very compelling case and the material for 100% renewables is
| staggering. How this can be ignored is bewildering.
|
| A discussion at:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/wuc4vg/assoc_prof...
|
| Simon Michaux presents the deck of data showing details of
| where his calculations are coming from that show even the first
| generation of renewables to replace fossil fuels is going to
| outstrip our capacity to source the minerals (lithium, copper,
| vanadium, manganese, cobalt, etc required for only the first
| generation of renewable energy) and the amount of energy to be
| replaced based on efficiencies is exorbitant. Summary: EROI
| going down, mineral requirements going way up spell issues
| moving forward.
| anovikov wrote:
| Great job! Did a similar study for Germany about 7 years ago
| based on their published 30-minute production and demand data and
| arrived to very similar conclusions. It's not as good as in
| Australia because both wind and solar in Germany is less
| reliable, also good enough.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| If all cars in Germany would would be EV and could be used for
| storage, it would be 2 days of power consumption.
| conjecTech wrote:
| One thing I would love to see addressed in these kinds of
| analyses: the efficacy of strategic placement of solar.
| Electrical demand tends to peak slightly after sundown for much
| of the year. However, the sun obviously doesn't set at the same
| time everywhere. Darwin's sunset is currently an hour and a half
| later than Sydney/Brisbane. Could building more
| equatorial/western solar installations together with transmission
| defer some of the need for storage, even with the same amount of
| solar deployed?
| wyager wrote:
| Transmission losses would eat any benefit, unfortunately.
|
| Of course, the author didn't model this at all.
|
| This is the problem with 99% of "actually we could totally rip
| out our entire infrastructure right now" posts - it's usually
| justified with crappy modeling that falls apart under slightly
| more scrutinizing consideration.
|
| Solar-only with low storage overhead might become more viable
| if we get room-temperature superconductors or something.
| theptip wrote:
| > Transmission losses would eat any benefit, unfortunately.
|
| Big "citation needed" on that assertion.
|
| HVDC is a widely proposed option and it's an
| oversimplification to dismiss it with a single sentence.
|
| For example the old DeserTec made a feasibility analysis for
| HVDC interconnects across EU and into Africa; the problem
| with that one seemed to be more about geopolitical issues and
| upfront investment costs, rather than long-term feasibility
| of transmission losses.
|
| A newer analysis at the top of Google does not say "this
| doesn't work because of transmission losses". https://www.eia
| .gov/analysis/studies/electricity/hvdctransmi....
| snek_case wrote:
| I see a lot of cynicism around renewable energy and electric
| cars and I frankly don't get it. The typical cynical approach
| is to point out _one_ potential problem, and dismiss the
| entire solution as if it was worthless, which is obviously
| false.
|
| As others have pointed out, there are now HVDC lines that can
| go over thousands of kilometers (transcontinental scale!)
| with reasonable losses. There's no reason to believe that
| we've hit the peak of HVDC technology either. The need for
| this technology to exist will drive further innovation.
|
| Even if the OP's estimate is off. Even if we "only" get to
| 90% renewables by 2045, that's still pretty damn great
| compared to what we have now, isn't it? Is your cynical
| opinion that we should just keep going with the status quo
| because we can't get 100% ?
|
| Even if we need 15% more wind and 15% more storage to than
| the OP's estimate reach 99%, that's not impossible either. It
| will create a lot of jobs. Why not just roll up our sleeves
| and do the best that we can? Thankfully, the world is not
| only made up of cynics, and a lot of people already are.
|
| We aren't done innovating on the renewable front either.
| There's LOTS of research into cheaper, safer, more scaleable
| grid-scale batteries. The current state of the art is cobalt-
| free and nickel-free lithium iron phosphate, but people
| sodium-ion batteries look like they're going to be viable
| soon.
|
| I also feel pretty confident that we'll eventually manage
| relatively efficient ways to store energy over the long term.
| If we could turn electricity into methane or ethanol with
| even 25% efficiency, that would allow us to store energy from
| the summer to use in the winter, or to power transatlantic
| airplanes with renewables. That seems pretty exciting to me.
| kkfx wrote:
| Did you consider how strategical targets became such
| networks? How much geopolitics nightmares they represent?
| SlickNixon wrote:
| As opposed to fossil fuels, famously free of geopolitical
| nightmares.
| kkfx wrote:
| You can store oil. In significant quantity. You can't
| store electricity in the same way, easiness and quantity.
| So in case of a war you still have, any country still
| have months of oil reserves, very little electricity
| reserves in the form of pumped hydro, fossils and nuclear
| powers. Not only: a electricity grid disruption is almost
| instantaneous, oil&gas issue takes at least days and can
| be foreseeable in months and years.
|
| At a small scale: you can easily store in your garage
| 1000l, 2000l of diesel. You only need two cheap plastic
| reservoirs with a supporting structure (something here in
| EU south priced 50-200EUR per tank) and or a high enough
| support (gravity fall) or a manual/electric pump (various
| price but in the range of 200-500EUR more maximum) and
| your car will be autonomous for a certain, not that
| small, amount of time. Similarly to heat your house you
| might have perhaps 5-15.000l tank underground in your
| garden, normally sufficient for an year of heating. You
| can also easy store hot water, it does not last that long
| but two day is doable. You might have wood burning
| backups etc. Electricity? Try just to compare the impact
| of a 5 day gas station strike vs a 5 day blackouts for
| yourself.
|
| My personal lithium storage suffice for a night at
| minimum service (just lights, fridges/freezers, home rack
| etc NO heating/cooling without Sun) and its price was
| ~4kEUR (battery) + 2kEUR (battery inverter) for an
| estimated maximum service life of 10 years. While diesel
| reservoirs and pumps can potentially last 100+ years.
| Surely the Sun tend to shine a bit all day, but just to
| live on it I need at my single-home scale the price of a
| mid-range car for a similar MTBF. With a very cheap and
| resilient solution I can survive few months without
| diesel supply. With relatively cheap freezers I can
| survive a month or two grocery supply without special
| attentions. Without water things get complicated, but I
| still have a bit of autonomy anyway. Without electricity
| I have a small autonomy thanks to p.v. + lithium but
| while all the rest it's doable by anyone the p.v. system
| is too expensive for most and still not suffice to heat
| the house in winter. In summer I can cool it during the
| day and lucky here nights are always fresh, but you get
| the idea.
|
| At a bigger scale I do not have sources is English, this
| is a study by French Gov. https://www.economie.gouv.fr/fi
| les/files/directions_services... on the topic, it's
| conclusion are: we can't run France on renewable nor now
| nor in the foreseeable future. And that's a study by
| public body only, no interested parts for nor fossil nor
| renewables sectors...
| stevesimmons wrote:
| Conversely, did you consider how much critical
| infrastructure we already have today, and how
| surprisingly little of it is targeted?
| kkfx wrote:
| Yes, all are far less fragile than such worldwide grid:
| takes logistics, anything can go wrong but there are few
| hotspots and in any case we have buffers here and there,
| a total disruption it's hard, actual "crisis" clearly
| show it. We have big airports. If one goes totally out of
| service planes can choose some else and passengers with
| issue can continue their journey etc.
|
| On contrary a global-scale electricity grid means a
| global scale blackouts with global scale cascading
| effects. Something we have already seen at far smaller
| scales and already devastating effects.
|
| Anything can fail, but if the fail impact few it's far
| less big than something who impact all. Also if you have
| buffers you can have a bit of time, even short, to act,
| to reduce the impact. If you have nothing because you are
| actually powered by some farms in Uzbekistan thousand of
| miles away than you are completely TFU.
|
| Just as a sidenote: I've invested in a new (witch means
| well insulated) home, with p.v., a little lithium storage
| to survive a single night etc just to ensure I still have
| energy in case of disruption. So far it already worked
| few times, and curiously such times are more and more
| frequent, partially due to explicit political choices
| partially due to natural events, partially because we
| push renewables up and still have nothing to compensate
| energy (frequency) fluctuation they provoke in the
| national grid. Now instead of try solving this issue
| witch is VERY BIG especially if you live a bit at north
| (winter) or at south (aircon needs) some propose some
| megaprojects fully know that ALL recent megaprojects
| fails all over the world, and in general ANY big-enough
| project fail at a rate proportional of it's size and
| complexity. What's the outcome? Personally I'm protected,
| at a high price, others simply get worse and worse
| services and no backups. Also without any proof that we
| can reach a stable future and that the actual tech is
| less pollutant at global scale than even classic fossil
| (actually p.v. and battery shift pollution in exotic
| place, but do not reduce it at global scale)...
|
| Oh, just to be clear I'm from the EU, nephew of a WWII
| Partisan's family, so definitively not something like
| "proud boys" people.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > I see a lot of cynicism around renewable energy and
| electric cars and I frankly don't get it
|
| So far, we have never _globally_ replaced fossil fuels with
| renewable energy, only supplemented their usage (meaning
| you can 't point to a single drop of oil that is designated
| to never be extracted due to the creation of renewables).
|
| The energy required to build an electric car is massive and
| results in a lot of CO2 production and takes a fairly long
| time to balance out.
|
| Here's the really important part: despite lots of progress
| in electric cars and more importantly tremendous (seriously
| very impressive) growth in renewables _CO2 in the
| atmosphere is not only not decreasing, it is accelerating_.
|
| Ultimately massive renewables infrastructure projects and
| large scale adoption of electric vehicles are capitalist
| friendly ways of deluding yourself into thinking you're
| making change while actively making things much worse.
|
| The only surefire way to slow climate change is _degrowth_
| but this is literally a forbidden topic. Most of the
| comments mentioning this on HN or anywhere else on the web
| are immediately downvoted into oblivion. Even though we
| know for a fact that economic contraction leads to
| decreased fossil fuel consumption and have no evidence that
| on a system level increased renewables reduces CO2.
|
| And it's not just that capitalists don't like it, but
| nobody really wants to seriously consider degrowth. But
| here's the rub: climate change will bring massive degrowth
| either way, and in a much worse way.
|
| The cynicism is because the optimism around renewables
| allows people to pretend the problem isn't getting worse,
| and silences any discussion about hard but real solutions.
|
| It doesn't matter much either way, we've chosen violence
| and are going to play this out the hard way. If you want to
| pretend it's otherwise, I've given up on bothering to
| convince other people awhile ago. Have fun in your fantasy
| and let me know when the rate of atmospheric CO2 starts to
| even stop accelerating (forget actually dropping).
| svara wrote:
| How would you get to CO2 neutrality if degrowth is going
| to be the strategy? If you go back to the world of 50
| years ago, you reduce emissions but you don't solve the
| problem, and you make it impossible to go to an entirely
| carbon neutral economy since you won't be able to produce
| the required tech anymore. Unless the plan is to actually
| go back to a preindustrial lifestyle.
|
| Massive investment in renewables at least is a
| theoretically possible strategy for going to carbon
| neutrality without a total destruction of people's
| quality of life.
|
| You're right about electric cars et al being energy
| intensive to produce right now, but this gets better and
| better with increasing electrification and CO2 reduction
| in power generation.
| trashtester wrote:
| If there is not wind in Sidney, you may have to transport
| 10s of GW distances of about 4000km during peak hours. Even
| using HVDC, there is significant transfer loss and building
| and operating that kind of infra is not cheap either.
|
| Also, who wants to pay for those interconnects when they
| expect battery prices to plummet, as you say?
| theluketaylor wrote:
| Losses wouldn't be bad with HVDC, with the added benefit of
| HVDC ties not needing to be frequency synced across the
| entire grid, so you have some opportunity to increase
| resiliency.
|
| I don't think it's a one-sized fits all solution. There will
| be places where storage will make sense, and other where
| longer distance transmission makes sense. I think the reality
| is it will be a mix of both, along with a nice diverse mix of
| generation methods.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Losses wouldn't be bad with HVDC
|
| Uh-oh. We're going to have to rewrite the history books on
| the current war between Edison and Tesla, this time with
| Edison as the victor!
| philipkglass wrote:
| Australia seems especially well suited for long-distance
| transmission because development is so heavily weighted to
| the coasts; there's not a lot of existing built-up interior
| areas to route around. At 800 kilovolts HVDC line losses
| are only 5% per 2000 km:
|
| https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/
| J...
|
| (See page 11)
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Yeah, people really underestimate how efficient HVDC has
| become. Even that doc is outdated - it was published in
| 2015 so likely based on 2013/2014 figures. Modern
| projects, e.g. ultra HVDC (1100KV) in China are seeing
| more like 1.5%/1,000KM losses:
| http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0622/c90000-9474097.html
| blitzar wrote:
| Australia is ~4,000km wide, so ~6% - totally manageable
| _if_ it is needed.
| zizee wrote:
| Curious to know the relative costs of HVAC vs battery per
| megawatt/hour offset from peak solar production.
|
| 4000 KMs east to west is about 2.4 hours offset
| geographically. Would it be cheaper to have 2.4 hours of
| storage closer to the east coast of Australia, with solar
| farms close to the consumption? Or would building a
| 4000km HVAC transmission line from the west coast of
| Australia to the east coast be cheaper? I'd imagine there
| would be a tipping point where one option is more
| economical than the other.
|
| Personally, I'd like to see WA's electricity network
| connected through to SA, and connect SA's through to NSW,
| but I also like the idea of many independent microgrids
| for the resilancy they'd offer.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| This is pretty outdated.. HVDC has solved most of the
| transmission problem. Even the typical "3.5% per 1,000km"
| assumption that shows up on Wikipedia is pretty out of date.
| Modern projects are built with much lower losses (since
| they're running much higher voltage) and central Australia
| with massive solar potential is no more than 2,000KM from
| anywhere else in the country so generation transmission
| losses would be more like 5% total...
| 5d8767c68926 wrote:
| Even if losses were something absurd like 15%, I don't see
| how that would meaningfully change the numbers. Location
| offsetting sunlight seems like a huge win.
| theluketaylor wrote:
| Indeed. Solar is so cheap (and the price keeps falling)
| needing to build an extra 15% bigger solar farms is a
| total non-issue. By the time some projects go from
| planning to ground-breaking that extra 15% might be free
| due to costs plummeting.
| edwiecron wrote:
| I believe that this model is built using Excel and VBScript. I
| would love to see the source code for this.
|
| These sorts of things should be shared before anyone starts
| basing policy on it. I want to know the inputs, the outputs, etc.
| I want a lot of people going though this, looking at the data.
| radium3d wrote:
| As a homeowner (1750 sqft, 100% electric with one EV [no gas
| appliances or fireplace]) in a dry (9-10 inches of rain per
| year) climate with a small 8.4kW solar installation with one
| 13.4kW battery, I can tell you that if we had 5-10kW more
| battery storage our home would be 100% off grid. As it stands
| now we're 71% self-powered with a current energy offset of
| 106%.
| cbhl wrote:
| Do we actually have effective strategies for dealing with
| significant over-generation? The author glosses over it as being
| necessary to get to 98% renewables throughout the year ("we'll
| just run our hydro dams in reverse"), but I'm under the
| impression that over-generation that is unhandled leads to grid
| instability/desync.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I think wind and solar can simply be turned off if need be.
| cma wrote:
| Maybe folding@home; desalination for farming; pumping and
| spraying water to re-glaciate areas in the winter.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| Stop some of the wind generators. Disconnect some of the solar
| panels. Both are standard practice today.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| PV can be throttled instantly to anything down to 0. Otherwise
| no offgrid setup would be feasible.
|
| You can mandate smart control signals to PV inverters or don't
| do anything and let the frequency go up so even inverters
| installed today will start cutting power as this is a
| requirement from grid code.
|
| Wind has a bigger lag (seconds) but it has brakes to save them
| in storms.
|
| So those are easy problems (technologically).
| pydry wrote:
| It's better to use price signals to ratchet demand up if you
| can.
|
| The UK already has a tariff that can warn you about upcoming
| periods of free power. Electric car users like it. They like
| it a lot.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| I have a contract that uses nordpool spot market prices
| that are known ahead for each hour for the next day. I have
| PV on my roof and an EV. The price volatility is just
| insane between 2 and 4000 EUR/MWh so 2000x in the last week
| alone. So I finally connected a smallish house battery
| (about 14kWh) last week and by purely arbitrage I've made
| about 100 euros in the week. Even with an 8kW feed in cap
| and such a tiny battery.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Is over generation an issue that needs to be solved beyond
| disconnection from the grid?
|
| Gas and Petrol Plants are commonly run in stand by mode because
| the ramp down/up times are too great to take them off line.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Model.energy is a good website for modeling a 100% renewables
| grid.
| colechristensen wrote:
| If you lower this to, say, 75%, a good analysis will show that a
| renewables grid with zero storage is possible around the world.
|
| Storage is only required for the last _n_ % and _n_ is much
| larger than most people realize. If we accept that the energy
| economy will shift with supply-and-demand based pricing, what can
| actually happen is having peak production oversupply which will
| find users with its lower prices enabling off-peak-production to
| be high enough to meet peak demand. (this is a kind of thing that
| maybe needs blog posts with graphs to make the most sense)
|
| We would be in a very much better place if we were near _n_ and
| it 's probably not worth worrying that much yet because _n_ is
| also quite far away.
| skrause wrote:
| That was Germany's plan. Go to at least 80% renewable and fill
| up the rest with natural gas power plants that can change the
| load quickly. Oops.
| pydry wrote:
| That was literally everybody's plan. The alternative was to
| continue using coal while ramping up renewables.
|
| For all the handwringing about the turned off nuclear plants
| they were getting old in the tooth and wouldnt have made a
| substantive difference to the current crisis. New plants
| would take 3x as long and cost 3x as much.
|
| France is in just as much shit as germany this winter coz
| their nuke plants are aging out.
|
| The realistic alternatives for germany avoiding a gas crisis
| were dont turn off coal plants "just in case a war with
| russia starts" or dont try to rile up russia.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Germany's problem wasn't the end goal but the path to it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 5 hours of grid-scale storage seems like a lot.
| ParksNet wrote:
| Not if we figure out vehicle-to-grid.
| zdragnar wrote:
| On its own, it does seem like a lot.
|
| Thinking about the nature of renewables where I live, it seems
| so small as to be not worth mentioning; January will often have
| a week to several weeks of heavy cloud cover and little wind. A
| mere 5 hours of capacity is a pittance.
|
| Australia, on the other hand, could easily make more sense, as
| I imagine the outback to be sunnier year round and maybe
| windier.
| plantain wrote:
| Cloud doesn't mean solar stops working - the decrease is
| 30-60% depending on thickness, but there's still very
| meaningful generation.
| zdragnar wrote:
| We get about nine and a half hours of sun in January,
| assuming no clouds. That leaves around 14-15 hours of no
| production, assuming there isn't sufficient wind (also
| often the case in January).
|
| Panels operating at 30% capacity for 9 hours cannot be
| offset by 5 hours worth of storage. It simply isn't enough
| storage, even if the panels were operating at 100%
| capacity. Adding more storage really isn't a great solution
| either; I'm guessing that you would be hard pressed to get
| 15 hours worth of storage out of 9 hours of sunlight when
| the hours of darkness start at 4:30 PM, especially if
| everyone moves to electrical cooking, water heating and
| clothes drying, which some states are starting to compel.
|
| So, the two obvious solutions remain- import stored energy
| from out of state, or using non-renewables as a base load a
| few months out of the year. We'll need to pay for burying
| tonnes of HVDC lines (stringing them up in tornado prone
| areas isn't a great call, imho) or the expense of more
| nuclear plants (unpopular and, currently at least,
| uneconomical) or pulling CO2 out of the air to offset
| natural gas (also expensive).
|
| HVDC lines seem the cheapest, though sourcing the energy
| will take years of production and inter-state agreements to
| get to the point where the south is producing (and
| storing!) enough to send the excess north.
| plantain wrote:
| You can also over-provision solar and wind to factors
| well above 100%, and still be more economical than
| burning fossil fuels.
| coryrc wrote:
| The US can't even provision 100% capacity because of
| BANANA, let alone over-provision.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Especially depending on the season - clouds in the summer
| also typically correspond with a big drop in AC demand,
| reducing the amount of electricity required. That's why OPs
| modeling is so interesting, "real" daily data for an entire
| year is great for this type of planning.
| throwawayyyyyy wrote:
| the solar panel's I've used in off-grid applications put
| out 10% on cloudy days.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| it also creates another problem - solar generation drop off
| very quickly when the sun is obscured. going from 100% to
| 10% or 20% in many cases. Where doe the power come from
| during these swings? What generation source can ramp up and
| down at that speed?
| plantain wrote:
| Synchronous condensers or smart batteries. Australia has
| deployed a lot of the former to deal with this problem at
| solar farms.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| Australia uses synchronous condensers and batteries for
| frequency regulation, not energy delivery.
| qqqwerty wrote:
| What percentage of the population lives in climates like
| yours? If I had to guess, maybe something like 10-20% of the
| worlds population?
|
| My gut tells me the vast majority of the worlds population
| lives in locations that are more similar to Australia's
| climate than in climates like yours. So we start there, and
| overtime things get cheaper, we find better solutions to long
| duration storage, and then we start tackling the harder
| climates/geographies.
| trashtester wrote:
| Many of the countries with climate similar to Australia do
| not have the purchasing power of most northern countries,
| so they're currently building new cold power at a rapid
| pace.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| It also doesn't sound like actually enough. They never have
| outages longer than 5 hours?
|
| And even with fully renewable sources they would never have
| periods longer than 5 hours without much generation?
| plantain wrote:
| Hence the overgeneration.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Looks like they used Gas peaker plants (labeled "Other") to
| make up the difference during the times that was necessary.
| adrianN wrote:
| Developed countries have a couple of weeks worth of natural gas
| in strategic reserves. I don't see why we couldn't do that with
| gas made from CO2, water, and electricity. Or ammonia. Or maybe
| hydrogen.
| dashundchen wrote:
| Is it really though? How many gigawatts of gas peaker plants
| and all the associated infrastructure sit around waiting for
| the tens or hundred hours they're needed?
|
| Turns out, it's a lot - and it costs the ratepayers:
|
| https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/just-how-much-b...
|
| > Wood Mackenzie calculates the average peaker plant capacity
| factor will sit between 5 and 6 percent over the next two
| decades. That amounts to a low number of hours for storage to
| replicate.
|
| In New York City, ratepayers are paying billions of dollars for
| polluting gas peakers that sit idle.
|
| https://www.cleanegroup.org/ceg-projects/phase-out-peakers/
|
| * An estimated $4.5 billion in ratepayers funds have gone to
| support the continued operation of the city's peaker plants -
| most of which operate no more than a few hundred hours each
| year.
|
| * Even though the power plants don't run often, they can be
| significant contributors to local air pollution - accounting
| for more than 10 percent of nitrous oxide (NOx) emissions on
| high ozone days.
|
| Luckily we have the technology to both start replacing gas
| peakers with storage, and roll out demand response and load
| shedding to reduce peak demand.
|
| For example, my employer is a big power user. On a couple days
| in the summer during peak heat, the utility requests
| curtailment. The plant managers can respond by switching HVAC
| operation plans, shift some loads to the overnight - the
| utility saves money on peak generation, and the company saves a
| ton of demand charges. Win-win.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This is going to come up a lot in future, so we should be
| careful to seperate two things:
|
| 1. Money spent on having generators on standby when they are
| used only 5% of the time
|
| 2. Money spent on fossil fuels for those plants when they
| actually run.
|
| 1 is money well spent, 2 is a problem to be solved but just
| carbon taxing it is probably enough to consider it solved.
|
| Luckily, the high cost of 1, makes it easier to justify
| adding batteries or a thousand other things that help to
| reduce 2. But you know people are going to point to the same
| peaker plants we've had for years and say "look how expensive
| renewables are!".
|
| Also, we've already built the gas plants. Which is probably a
| big chunk of the cost (they'll just be spreading that cost
| across the hours that they intend to run during their working
| life).
| bombcar wrote:
| Based on some back-of-the envelope calculations, a single
| Powerwall would provide about 5-10 hours of "house run" for the
| average house, and residential use is about 1/3 of all
| electrical use.
|
| So a Powerwall on every house gets us a third of the way there.
| That seems entirely within possibility.
| plantain wrote:
| The "Victorian Big Battery" cost about 100 million to build and
| provides 450MWh, so at those prices the 120GWh they calculate
| for 5 hours would cost about 25 billion.
|
| Not outrageous in the scale of nation building projects.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Prices have roughly halved since then, and will likely halve
| again when a winner of the not-lithium battery competition
| emerges (which is looking very much like sodium ion as it's
| entering mass production). Everyone is expecting another
| halving after that but before 2035 even with no single clear
| winning outcome. After that prices become dominated by steps
| that don't typically get cheaper, so prices much below $30
| (or a bit over 10% of the Big Battery) are unclear.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| For 25 billion, you could have two Olkiluoto-like nuclear
| blocks that actually produce energy and not just store it.
| For several decades.
|
| (Olkiluoto is considered notoriously over budget.)
| cinntaile wrote:
| They won't use batteries for grid scale storage, that's a bit
| too expensive. They'll probably use hydro, some sort of
| heated mass or compressed air. Or gas, it's much better than
| coal at least.
| plantain wrote:
| I think Australia will use mostly batteries, but we are
| building more hydro. I think hydro is miscast as being
| green though, when in reality it causes enormous ecological
| destruction.
|
| Hydro is also intermittent - it requires the right amount
| of rainfall, currently hydro in Australia is not able to
| reach full generation because it will flood downstream as
| it's been a wet year.
|
| Hydro is not that cheap (depending on the metric you need)
| - see an example[1] comparing Australian hydro to the
| aforementioned Victorian Big Battery.
|
| [1] https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-
| stora...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I think in this model it is actually batteries. They pair
| pretty economically with solar to smooth output on the
| daily cycle.
|
| They also include existing Hydro in their model, plus
| 'other' which is what mostly covers the storage on longer
| scales.
|
| But there's easy answers for the rest too. It's just not
| modelled in this very simple model because most of the
| heavy lifting is always going to be solar and wind and
| that's probably the point they're trying to make.
| theptip wrote:
| Great analysis. I'm not so familiar with the AU energy market, so
| I don't know how much of an update this result is vs. a
| reasonable prior.
|
| The bigger simulation mentioned in the OP is the ISP:
| https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/major-publications/integr....
| Anyone know what that plan proposes in terms of energy mix?
|
| > It is interesting to note that the ISP is predicting that
| approximately 9GW of peaking gas or liquids will need to be
| retained in the NEM's generation mix out to 2050. This is more
| than the 6.6GW required so far in this study.
|
| Though the OP notes that ISP is doing demand modeling too,
| instead of simulating a new supply mix for the present demand &
| supply conditions.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This is completely in line with reasonable priors:
|
| https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
|
| It's more of a science/engineering communication effort,
| because there's a lot of unreasonable priors out there.
|
| edit: also the 6.6GW of 'other' the current model uses, is the
| current actual gas plant size, not an amount that they predict
| as optimal or desirable. Similar with the Hydro, they used the
| current capacity, even though some are being built right now.
| cm2187 wrote:
| The averages don't tell me much. We need to look at percentiles
| with intermittent sources of energy. 99% still means 3 full days
| of blackout every year. So it needs to be sufficient to cover an
| even higher percentile (in fact I don't even think there is an
| acceptable number of hours of blackout in a year). I would be
| curious how they get to that with energies that pretty much go to
| zero the week there is no wind.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Fossil gas short term, green ammonia long term. With enormous
| amounts of clean energy and air source carbon capture, you can
| carbon budget for last resort combustion generation. You might
| have to burn _something_ to keep the lights on, you're just on
| the hook to pay Climeworks or someone else to pull that carbon
| back out of the atmosphere (which will be done with clean
| energy) and that cost is built in the per MWh spot price.
|
| https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/low-carbon-e...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This isn't an average it's modelled on real-time demand and
| supply and the 99% means 3 days worth of power met by non-
| solar/wind/hydro peaker plants over a year, not instantly
| plunging into a 3 day long version of Mad Max.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > 99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year.
|
| Presumably the entire grid isn't going down.
|
| Brown outs in small parts of the country is what I'd expect.
|
| This sounds like the current state of California.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I grew up in California, and brown outs have been a problem
| here for at least the last 30 years.
|
| I don't know if renewables had much of an affect one way or
| another.
| themitigating wrote:
| https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/texas-power-grid-
| electr...
| malfist wrote:
| > This sounds like the current state of California.
|
| Ah yes, let's point the finger at California and ignore the
| one state that has been in the news repeatedly the past few
| years black outs, brown outs and generally failing to deliver
| electricity during peak demand. A state that's name rhymes
| with "Mexas"
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Honestly, it's gotten better in the last few years, but
| when I first moved to Dallas, the most noteworthy thing
| wasn't even these high-profile large-scale outages. It was
| the poor state of infrastructure in general. Above-ground
| power lines combined with trees the city never trimmed
| meant we had outages from lines going down virtually every
| time there was a rain storm. Really, that still happens,
| but they seem to have finally built enough redundancy in
| that it comes right back, instead of coming back hours
| later like it used to.
| evancox100 wrote:
| Omg for real, moved out of Dallas a few years ago but
| every moderately strong storm we would lose power.
| Totally ridiculous. They came and trimmed trees one time,
| and absolutely decimated a small tree on my property that
| had one branch close to the line, while leaving alone
| huge trees that were completely intertwined with the
| lines.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Ah yes, let 's point the finger at California and ignore
| the one state..._
|
| Wow, this comment is so indicative of modern discourse.
|
| The parent makes an off-hand reference about a state where
| brown outs have been an issue, (Democratic) California, and
| you feel the need to jump in with "WHY ARE YOU IGNORING
| (Repulican) Texas???" as if there's some political
| motivation behind an innocuous statement of fact.
| themitigating wrote:
| Why did the parent make the off hand reference?
|
| Republicans know if they keep repeating such remarks (or
| accusations) it will eventually will just be accepted as
| fact without requiring evidence because people hear it
| from so many different people over long periods of time.
|
| They don't lie either, they just bring to attention a
| problem in a blue state or with a company considered to
| be liberal" and ignore similar issues elsewhere. T
|
| Here's how it works with another example:
|
| If you were to go to someone and ask "What city has the
| highest rate of car theft in 2022" they would probably
| say NYC or LA when in reality, it's Odessa TX (btw
| Republican mayor). This shows how this manipulation
| tactic works, it's based on exaggeration, stereotypes,
| and constantly streaming information.
|
| Finally, they can then say, "don't vote for Democrats
| otherwise you'll end up like X city/state that has Y
| problem".
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I made the comment because I'm from California, and I
| don't think brown outs are catastrophic, and I think 99%
| renewable energy would be fine (better than fine?
| definitely not catastrophic).
| goatlover wrote:
| But why make this political when the parent didn't say
| "Democratic" California or specify democrats as being
| responsible for the brown outs? Maybe they live in
| California instead of Texas? How do you know what their
| politics are?
| ebiester wrote:
| Or, alternatively, a handful of gas plants working at this load
| like peaking power plants work now. So, for 72 hours or so,
| where the full need isn't met, we have some very expensive
| alternatives. According to wikipedia, some peaker plants may
| work as little as a few hours a year.
|
| Or, we have a set of solar thermal energy power plants that can
| function as peakers down the road.
| pydry wrote:
| >99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year.
|
| Or using some excess wind capacity to generate some windgas at
| and keeping it stored using existing natgas infrastructure.
|
| The windgas process is only 50% efficient at converting
| electricity so it's only cost effective if it's used for say,
| <1% of electrical needs.
|
| These calculations also dont take into account demand shaping.
| If you can convince people to stop smelting aluminium so much
| and charging their cars on the off day that reduces storage
| needs still further.
| philipkglass wrote:
| That's what is different about this new study. It uses real
| time supply/demand figures instead of annualized averages. It
| meets 98.8% of demand with renewables and fills in with fossil
| power the rest of the time. To quote from the article:
|
| _Key results from the 52 weeks of simulations are summarised
| as follows:_
|
| _- Renewables met 98.8% of demand over the year, with the
| remaining 1.2% met by 'Other' (fossils)_
|
| _- 'Other' generation peaked at 6.59 GW on the night of July
| 12. Over the year its average capacity factor was 4.3%._
|
| _- Hydro met 6.9% of demand. This was lower than my target of
| 7.5%, and also less than actual hydro generation of 8%. This
| means that dam storage levels in my simulation would have ended
| the year higher than they did in the real world._
|
| _- 17% of the wind and solar generation was in excess of
| requirements and ended up being curtailed._
|
| _- 11% of wind and solar generation went into storage. Storage
| discharge met 10% of demand._
|
| _- 82% of demand was directly powered by wind and solar
| without having to pass through storage or be curtailed._
| atoav wrote:
| > 82% of demand was directly powered by wind and solar
| without having to pass through storage or be curtailed.
|
| This is amazing. As an EE I wonder about transportation
| losses, but wind and solar should be pretty easy to
| decentralize, so maybe this is a non-issue. Wind might be a
| little harder to decentralize, but I don't know how the
| regional differences are in Australia. I'd suspect the coasts
| (or even offshore) would be windiest, which is also where
| most people tend to live.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| Solar can be decentralized, wind less so.
|
| I don't know what wind looks like in Australia but in the
| US it heavily favors places like the Front Range and the
| Wyoming Divide: https://california-times-
| brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com/77/87/8...
|
| EDIT: Looking at the same map for Australia I see that wind
| power potential tends to be strongest coastally, which
| matches population density (nice!)
|
| I'll still say that overall you can't expect to
| decentralize wind like you can with solar.
| mattferderer wrote:
| That map doesn't take off shore into an account though.
| Lots of potential in the oceans & Great Lakes.
| zo1 wrote:
| Am I the only one that's kinda off put or frankly
| disgusted by the thought of ruining our nature by
| peppering it with giant wind turbines? At what point does
| it stop?
| cheriot wrote:
| What do you think drilling rigs, pipeline leaks, and
| carbon emissions are doing right now? The impact on
| nature by renewables is dramatically lower.
|
| But your comment focuses on what's visible so no, I'm not
| put off by that. Wind turbines look cool.
| kickout wrote:
| Your not only one, but we (society) have ruined far
| prettier landscapes for far less tangible economic
| benefits.
|
| Hardly _any_ prairie ecosystems exist in NA, and we
| pretty much built a dam on every river with a pulse,
| ruining countless landscapes.
| nomel wrote:
| > Hardly _any_ prairie ecosystems exist in NA
|
| To really understand this, open google maps and zoom in
| to any random point in the US, where you would expect a
| prairie. You'll see a farm.
| trashtester wrote:
| Transportation is definitely one of the main issues. One of
| the reasons a place like Australia can manage so well in a
| simulation like this, is the huge size (combined with a
| generally very sunny interior). On a given day, a very
| large percentage of total power demand may have to be
| transported from one end of the continent to another.
|
| For other, smaller countries (like any European one except
| Russia), you also face political risk, like we're seeing
| currently with Russian natural gas. When relying on long
| distance transport of electricity to keep the grid stable,
| one or two bad actors may tear down the stability for
| everyone.
|
| Perhaps a smaller issue, but I would not be surprised if
| total transportation loss would be 10-20% if not higher,
| when counting both transmission lines, transformers,
| storage and similar.
|
| If the price of storage comes down enough, it might be a
| better source of stability, rather than relying on there
| being wind "somewhere".
| kkfx wrote:
| Didn't you wonder about the stability of such grid
| considering the timeframe inverters take to adjust their
| output on load or production changes? Wind can also consume
| energy, solar can just cut off and our electricity grids
| all other the world are not DC, for various significant and
| good reasons.
| ajross wrote:
| > 99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year.
|
| Or 3 days running otherwise-mothballed (and, yes, quite
| expensive per MW) gas plants or whatever to fill the gaps.
| There's a real problem in this discourse that wants to
| interpret things in absolutist ideas, when real solutions
| always end up looking a little patchwork in those last few
| percent.
|
| Reducing electrical grid carbon output by a factor of 100 (!!)
| is more than sufficient to meet anyone's climate goals. At that
| point, the low-hanging-fruit analysis will have long since
| moved on to transportation anyway.
| biomcgary wrote:
| A relatively simple model that is still a reasonable ballpark.
| However, throughout the article I was wondering about the effect
| of transmission efficiencies across Australia. The author
| addresses transmission at the end by acknowledging that they
| didn't model it. Not sure how much it matters, but I suspect that
| lots of wires would be required.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Australia is currently reducing their transmission length (and
| risk of bushfires) by creating microgrids with solar and
| batteries for remote communities.
|
| The battery rollout modelled, would also be able to reduce
| transmission bottlenecks by distributing them geographically,
| something the Australian grid has been encouraging for a few
| years now.
| guerby wrote:
| David Osmond (author of the simulation) interview on youtube
| channel "Engineering with Rosie":
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgxOlPu9kiM
|
| Twitter :
| https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1562318623359713280
|
| Also see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32567994
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