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The story of solar’s growth seems like a big deal now, but it’s nothing compared to a few years from now when costs fall so low that it becomes cheaper to repla

The story of solar’s growth seems like a big deal now, but it’s nothing compared to a few years from now when costs fall so low that it becomes cheaper to replace a coal or nuclear plant than to continue operating them.

ZeroGravitas 9y ago
I think that's been an economic reality in the USA for a few years now, though also including natural gas in the tech doing the replacing. The recent EPA document that was intended to support coal and nuclear covered this: “The draft report finds that since 2002, ‘most baseload power plant retirements have been the victims of overcapacity and relatively high operating cost but often reflect the advanced age of the retiring plants.’ “Overcapacity is a major cause of the turmoil in electricity markets. The report explains that because the growth in electricity demand has flattened since 2008, it is harder for ‘less competitive plants’ to survive. … “And it doesn’t make sense to keep an uneconomic plant running when you know it’s going to keep losing money. “In the case of nuclear power, the study notes that vast majority of the plant closure announcements blame plant retirement on ‘unfavorable market conditions.’ And the ‘most unfavorable condition is that the marginal cost of generation for many nuclear plants is higher than the cost of most other generators in the market.’ “Similarly, coal is also hurt by its high marginal cost: ‘[Coal] plants that have retired are old and inefficient units that were not recovering their operations and fuel costs, much less capital cost recovery.'” That may be starting with the oldest, dirtiest and least efficient powerplants but it's only going to get worse for them as time goes on.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Small caveat: the Trump administration is looking into using a national security law from decades ago to prop up coal plants (the law provides subsidies to generators who can keep 90 days of fuel on hand). If this policy were to go into effect, it would raise rates consumers pay, very likely speeding the adoption of rooftop solar in those markets. https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-09-29/perry-moves-to-aid-coal-nuclear-generators-with-pricing-rule https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-09-29/perry...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - kcorbitt 9y ago
    That's kind of ironic, considering that solar plants can keep an effectively unlimited number of "days of fuel" on hand.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
      They can't though -- the next day could always be cloudy and there's a very strong chance that one day in 90 will be. So solar panels can't stock a reliable X day supply, even if over any (moderate) period of time, they have a very guaranteed supply.
      - bluGill 9y ago
        They can with batteries, but that is a slightly different situation. In answer to the question below, this isn't practical with modern battery technology.
        SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        Is there a battery technology that can store 90 days worth of full-plant production (which doesn't require a second generator consuming a fuel later)? All the ways I know of on that scale actually require a second plant/turbine -- in which case, you didn't store 90 days of solar production capacity, you actually stored 90 days of the second plant's fuel, which you produced intermitently with solar capacity. (Which can still be a very good and environmentally friendly thing to do! But isn't what we're talking about as a technical point.) Ways of the second variety: - Hydro pumping - Hydrocarbon synthesis - Hydrogen separation - Compressing gasses And there's probably more that I'm forgetting.
  - matt_wulfeck 9y ago
- MrRadar 9y ago
  The oversupply in the generation market is why I've lately been confused why the coal and nuclear industries haven't been promoting electric vehicles more vigorously to drive demand for electricity. With pretty much every other electric appliance having only gotten more efficient I don't see any other way to drive significant increases in demand.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    "Utilities Should Charge Into Electric Vehicles" "The total potential market for electricity fueling American vehicles is staggering (warning: large back-of-envelope ahead).Let's just take light-duty vehicles (not heavy trucks or buses), of which there were about 190 million on the road in 2015, according to government figures. For the sake of simplicity, replace them all with a full battery-electric vehicle that gets 3.5 miles per kilowatt-hour, loses 10 percent of the power it takes as it charges and discharges, and travels 13,000 miles a year.Presto! You've basically created an entirely new center of demand for power rivaling the entire industrial sector of the U.S.:" https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-10-03/electric-vehicle-charging-infrastructure-utilities-can-charge-in https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-10-03/electri...
    - dagss 9y ago
      Well you need to subtract what is currently burned off in refineries in those calculations it is quite significant (roughly same amount of energy for refining oil and electric cars per mile driven but only 1/5 or so in electricity and rest in burning oil products). Gasoline cars use lots of electricity...
  - petra 9y ago
    I don't think electric vehicles lack promotion.
    - MrRadar 9y ago
      When was the last time you saw or heard an ad for a electric car? If you went into a car dealership, would you expect the salesperson to recommend an electric car to you if you didn't ask?
- bluGill 9y ago
  Note that there is a difference between retirement and destroyed. I believe my company still keeps an old coal boiler from the 1880s connected to a generator from the 1920s in operating condition. Because this generator exists and can be started in an emergency (with 12 hours warning for warm up time) we get a substantial discount on our power. I understand that about every 5 years the power company asks us to turn it on at which point we supply power for most of the town. If you look you will see many businesses have their own generator running on the hottest day of the year - they get a discount. Because diesel generators can start on a minutes notice they get are higher on the priority list as to when they get asked to run on their own generator rather than grid power. The above isn't to say that the power company is retiring these old power plants in the same way. I would guess in some cases the maintenance required to make them safe (or emissions legal) to use might be too high and they are destroyed.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    It would be prudent to have backups,but it's hard to imagine why many nuclear plants would be kept in operating condition.
epistasis 9y ago
The levelized cost of solar is already less that the fuel and maintenance cost of coal, for many locations. However that’s the levelized cost, which means that it has to be used when the sun is out in order for solar to be competitive. It’s why the DOE is ignoring the findings of their own baseload reliability study to try to impose coal and nuclear subsidies: http://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-does-baseload-power-rule-would-blow-the-market-up/506269/ http://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-does-baseload-power-rule... The weird and arbitrary “90 days of fuel onsite” requirement says nothing about reliability, but it is a way to define what coal+nuclear can do (though I wonder if coal plants keep 90 days onsite these days...)
- dx034 9y ago
  While coal is more expensive, natural gas plants can still be cheaper for many locations. And older nuclear plants presumably have extremely low ongoing costs (as they don't pay for storage of waste in most countries).
  - epistasis 9y ago
    Yes, and since most natural gas plants are fed by pipeline, the subsidies seem designed specifically to exclude natural gas. This is despite coal stacks freezing during the last polar vortex, causing much of the reduction in resiliency. (Side note: though many old nuclear plants are still cost competitive, utilities seem to favor fossil fuels to the extent that many if not most of them are at risk of being decommissioned. And in competitive energy markets, many of these old plants can't bid on price any more either, leading to many proposed nuclear-specific subsidies in particular markets.)
    - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
      Nuclear and coal often can be shut by warm weather too, if their water supply is affected.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  I'm not sure anyone is upset about the idea of having to build new mass storage stations for major grids and sell storage for new homes. Distributing the grid COULD be the next big infrastructural push for the western world, if folks could just agree to stop propping up the fossil fuel world's influence.

ZeroGravitas 9y ago

I think that's been an economic reality in the USA for a few years now, though also including natural gas in the tech doing the replacing. The recent EPA document that was intended to support coal and nuclear covered this: “The draft report finds that since 2002, ‘most baseload power plant retirements have been the victims of overcapacity and relatively high operating cost but often reflect the advanced age of the retiring plants.’ “Overcapacity is a major cause of the turmoil in electricity markets. The report explains that because the growth in electricity demand has flattened since 2008, it is harder for ‘less competitive plants’ to survive. … “And it doesn’t make sense to keep an uneconomic plant running when you know it’s going to keep losing money. “In the case of nuclear power, the study notes that vast majority of the plant closure announcements blame plant retirement on ‘unfavorable market conditions.’ And the ‘most unfavorable condition is that the marginal cost of generation for many nuclear plants is higher than the cost of most other generators in the market.’ “Similarly, coal is also hurt by its high marginal cost: ‘[Coal] plants that have retired are old and inefficient units that were not recovering their operations and fuel costs, much less capital cost recovery.'” That may be starting with the oldest, dirtiest and least efficient powerplants but it's only going to get worse for them as time goes on.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Small caveat: the Trump administration is looking into using a national security law from decades ago to prop up coal plants (the law provides subsidies to generators who can keep 90 days of fuel on hand). If this policy were to go into effect, it would raise rates consumers pay, very likely speeding the adoption of rooftop solar in those markets. https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-09-29/perry-moves-to-aid-coal-nuclear-generators-with-pricing-rule https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-09-29/perry...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kcorbitt 9y ago
  That's kind of ironic, considering that solar plants can keep an effectively unlimited number of "days of fuel" on hand.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    They can't though -- the next day could always be cloudy and there's a very strong chance that one day in 90 will be. So solar panels can't stock a reliable X day supply, even if over any (moderate) period of time, they have a very guaranteed supply.
    - bluGill 9y ago
      They can with batteries, but that is a slightly different situation. In answer to the question below, this isn't practical with modern battery technology.
      - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        Is there a battery technology that can store 90 days worth of full-plant production (which doesn't require a second generator consuming a fuel later)? All the ways I know of on that scale actually require a second plant/turbine -- in which case, you didn't store 90 days of solar production capacity, you actually stored 90 days of the second plant's fuel, which you produced intermitently with solar capacity. (Which can still be a very good and environmentally friendly thing to do! But isn't what we're talking about as a technical point.) Ways of the second variety: - Hydro pumping - Hydrocarbon synthesis - Hydrogen separation - Compressing gasses And there's probably more that I'm forgetting.
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
MrRadar 9y ago
The oversupply in the generation market is why I've lately been confused why the coal and nuclear industries haven't been promoting electric vehicles more vigorously to drive demand for electricity. With pretty much every other electric appliance having only gotten more efficient I don't see any other way to drive significant increases in demand.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  "Utilities Should Charge Into Electric Vehicles" "The total potential market for electricity fueling American vehicles is staggering (warning: large back-of-envelope ahead).Let's just take light-duty vehicles (not heavy trucks or buses), of which there were about 190 million on the road in 2015, according to government figures. For the sake of simplicity, replace them all with a full battery-electric vehicle that gets 3.5 miles per kilowatt-hour, loses 10 percent of the power it takes as it charges and discharges, and travels 13,000 miles a year.Presto! You've basically created an entirely new center of demand for power rivaling the entire industrial sector of the U.S.:" https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-10-03/electric-vehicle-charging-infrastructure-utilities-can-charge-in https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-10-03/electri...
  - dagss 9y ago
    Well you need to subtract what is currently burned off in refineries in those calculations it is quite significant (roughly same amount of energy for refining oil and electric cars per mile driven but only 1/5 or so in electricity and rest in burning oil products). Gasoline cars use lots of electricity...
- petra 9y ago
  I don't think electric vehicles lack promotion.
  - MrRadar 9y ago
    When was the last time you saw or heard an ad for a electric car? If you went into a car dealership, would you expect the salesperson to recommend an electric car to you if you didn't ask?
bluGill 9y ago
Note that there is a difference between retirement and destroyed. I believe my company still keeps an old coal boiler from the 1880s connected to a generator from the 1920s in operating condition. Because this generator exists and can be started in an emergency (with 12 hours warning for warm up time) we get a substantial discount on our power. I understand that about every 5 years the power company asks us to turn it on at which point we supply power for most of the town. If you look you will see many businesses have their own generator running on the hottest day of the year - they get a discount. Because diesel generators can start on a minutes notice they get are higher on the priority list as to when they get asked to run on their own generator rather than grid power. The above isn't to say that the power company is retiring these old power plants in the same way. I would guess in some cases the maintenance required to make them safe (or emissions legal) to use might be too high and they are destroyed.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  It would be prudent to have backups,but it's hard to imagine why many nuclear plants would be kept in operating condition.

epistasis 9y ago

The levelized cost of solar is already less that the fuel and maintenance cost of coal, for many locations. However that’s the levelized cost, which means that it has to be used when the sun is out in order for solar to be competitive. It’s why the DOE is ignoring the findings of their own baseload reliability study to try to impose coal and nuclear subsidies: http://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-does-baseload-power-rule-would-blow-the-market-up/506269/ http://www.utilitydive.com/news/how-does-baseload-power-rule... The weird and arbitrary “90 days of fuel onsite” requirement says nothing about reliability, but it is a way to define what coal+nuclear can do (though I wonder if coal plants keep 90 days onsite these days...)

dx034 9y ago
While coal is more expensive, natural gas plants can still be cheaper for many locations. And older nuclear plants presumably have extremely low ongoing costs (as they don't pay for storage of waste in most countries).
- epistasis 9y ago
  Yes, and since most natural gas plants are fed by pipeline, the subsidies seem designed specifically to exclude natural gas. This is despite coal stacks freezing during the last polar vortex, causing much of the reduction in resiliency. (Side note: though many old nuclear plants are still cost competitive, utilities seem to favor fossil fuels to the extent that many if not most of them are at risk of being decommissioned. And in competitive energy markets, many of these old plants can't bid on price any more either, leading to many proposed nuclear-specific subsidies in particular markets.)
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    Nuclear and coal often can be shut by warm weather too, if their water supply is affected.
KirinDave 9y ago
I'm not sure anyone is upset about the idea of having to build new mass storage stations for major grids and sell storage for new homes. Distributing the grid COULD be the next big infrastructural push for the western world, if folks could just agree to stop propping up the fossil fuel world's influence.