7 ms·

Countries are building lots of solar and wind. However, these techs only operate/run during the daytime or when the wind is blowing... which is not 100% of the

Countries are building lots of solar and wind. However, these techs only operate/run during the daytime or when the wind is blowing... which is not 100% of the time. If they continue to build out solar/wind and thereby drive FF-production "out of business" what happens when solar/wind cannot meet demand? Are they building stored energy reserves as well? What happens then?

jojo64 8y ago
We have a European market of Energy. If it's not sunny && windy in France, maybe it is in Germany or Spain etc.
tribesman 8y ago
I think hydro or nuclear can be turned on when wind/solar isn't available.
- mountainentity 8y ago
  one cannot do this with nuclear
  - reacweb 8y ago
    I keep earing that, but it is not totally clear for me. It seems the start and the stop of a nuclear plant takes a day if we want to be safe and efficient. A fast shutdown in a couple of seconds may cause difficulties to restart afterward. Maybe we could study procedures for safe quick start/stop even if the efficiency is not perfect.
    - rhino369 8y ago
      If you had enough nuclear capacity to cover for when wind/solar aren’t outputting anything, then you don’t need wind/solar. You’d just use your nuke plant 100%.
  - jabl 8y ago
    France actually has such a high fraction of nuclear in their grid (70%) that their reactors load follow. Granted, due to the cost structure of nuclear, it makes sense to run flat out if possible, but technically it's not necessary.
rjsw 8y ago
Most French electicity comes from Nuclear Power not from fossil fuels.
rhaps0dy 8y ago
>What happens then? If that happens often enough, it will be profitable to run something serves electricity in these demand peaks. For example, storing excess electricity in batteries or by pumping water to elevated reservoirs, and generating electricity with them in that moment.
StavrosK 8y ago
Nothing, it's a false premise. In reality, what will happen is that we'll be using the more expensive FF power when we can't get cheap renewable power, and supply will adjust to that demand. Why would FF plants go "out of business" when there's a need they could meet?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
F_r_k 8y ago
Negative prices (i.e. excess of energy), and really high ones (lack of it) rarely happen. When they do, there is ancillary services that take over (which there is plenty in Europe). Actually, the share of intermittent renewable energy is negligible in France. Let's worry about that later, as there will be plenty of choices (demand response, PHES, and even tesla, which is building AS plants without us noticing (Belgium))
ptaipale 8y ago
Gas, oil, coal plants fill in when solar and wind don't work. That - along with nuclear phase-out - is why there's lots of several new coal plants being built in Germany, for instance.
- _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
  "several new coal plants being built in Germany" Didn't know about that, which ones? I thought it was natural gas plants? [1] looks like a small list [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_Kohlekraftwerke_in_Deutschland https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_Kohlekraftwerk...
  - jerven 8y ago
    There is just one coal power plant under construction Dateln 4. [1] This is not going well, with boiler and legal issues meaning a plant which was supposed to open in 2013 is to open 7 years later in 2020. Making it not exactly a great poster child for how to build a coal power plant. Being in construction for 13 years is not cheap and fast. [1] https://endcoal.org/tracker/ https://endcoal.org/tracker/
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      Modern coal plants have to be complicated in order to be efficient, and that means they take a long time to build and have to be big. Meanwhile, wind and solar can be built much smaller and quicker, with the biggest bottleneck being building transmission lines (if needed.) Kind of funny that "big coal" is now suffering from a problem that nuclear has struggled with for a long time.
  - genericid 8y ago
    That is not a list of plants being built, it's a list of planned plants (for a broad definition of planned). - 3 plants (Lünen, Profen and Niederaußem) have apparently been cancelled. - The promoter of Kalkar-Appeldorn has applied for a permit - The one of Stade has gotten one, but there is a lawsuit against that - Datteln replaces a plant that was shut down in 2014, though the old plant only had about 1/3 of the power. Meanwhile, coal power plants are being shut down without being replaced all the time.
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
My guess is that energy will be so cheap, we produce much much more than we consume in the future. There will be an abundance of energy some decades down. Also electric cars will create very large storage capcities for energy in the next decade. On top of that we get intelligent meters, with machines like my washing machine pulling power at the best time, my battery chargers using the right time etc, so (non-industry) demand will flatten out over time with intelligent metering. I would have feared about this issue 20y ago, but I think this is no longer of any importance for the development of solar power. What is relevant with the ongoing centralization of solar power is power transmission.
- MrEfficiency 8y ago
  >Also electric cars will create very large storage capcities for energy in the next decade. Chem engineer here, battery technology doesnt seem to be a guarantee to improve. Batteries are limited by the physics of our universe. The chemistry between two chemicals will not change, and it feels like we have exhausted every option. This is a non trivial problem and I am unsure if I expect a solution.
  - _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
    I do agree. In 2 decades there will be hundreds of millions of electric cars in the world which currently do not exist. This is a huge increase in battery power even with battery technology not changing in the next 2 decades.
  - Zealotux 8y ago
    I'm curious of what your opinion of hydrogen is, I know that it's still very expensive because of energy lost during the conversions. Do you think it has a viable future when it comes to energy storage?
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    The actual track record of battery improvement is pretty incredible, especially the recent fall in prices.
  - 8y ago
mavdi 8y ago
Nighttime in US is daytime in China. Countries could simply sell their excess energy to eachother.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Transmission losses are significant
  - _Microft 8y ago
    High-voltage direct current has losses of less than 3% per 1000km according to the Wikipedia article. That's not China-to-US stuff but definitely low enough to move energy around in Europe.
    - tialaramex 8y ago
      And they do. Up to 3-4GW of the power (maybe 10% of typical power demand) in the UK is imported from its neighbours - some Ireland and the Netherlands, lots of France - at the moment. The French have a LOT of Nuclear power, and idling a nuclear power station, though possible, is economic insanity, so it makes sense to sell it at a discount to the British.
      - rsynnott 8y ago
        It's worth noting that this is a two-way street; GB sometimes exports electricity, particularly to Ireland when there's not much wind, but also sometimes to France.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    Losses have to exceed 65% (i.e. 350 watts at the socket from 1,000 watts at source) for that to make worldwide solar load balancing a bad idea with current technology.
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Musk will sell grid storage! Its online in Australia I think.
- EADGBE 8y ago
  ...As long as it's pretty enough. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-solar-insight/inside-teslas-troubled-new-york-solar-factory-idUSKBN1KT0DU https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-solar-insight/insid...
gameswithgo 8y ago
everyone on hackernews knows this stuff. yet every renewable posts gets these "but there is no sun at night" posts to the top. build large scale energy storage instead of offshore oil wells, super tankers, and refineries I guess. It will be hard, it is hard to get oil out of the ground and into your car too.
- PuffinBlue 8y ago
  Won't even be that hard I think, or less hard than we imagine. Electric vehicles will bring widespread distributed storage 'organically'. At least in the UK the National Grid is doing a huge amount of work to prepare for this[0]. There is also work to install large battery installations commercially in public EV charging areas and National Grid sub-stations[1] - first ten multi-dozen MWh installations should be ready Q2 2019. So, for instance, installing MWh of battery capacity at (lets say) a current Fuel Station and that is constantly trickle charged at say 350KW from the grid, then discharge that to cars at super high rates - smoothing out delivery to EV's but having the added benefit of acting like a distributed storage system in periods of lower use (say at night) when things like wind generate surplus. This specific example isn't covered in the videos linked but the installations at sub-stations are. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLE2SrDNPZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLE2SrDNPZc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSUlaDbckmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSUlaDbckmo
nolok 8y ago
France doesn't plan to drive other energy out of business, we plan to diversify (with the ageing of some of our older reactor, replace them with solar and wind so we decrease to 50% nuclear). We still have a lot of hydro power with no plan to touch it, and we don't want to replace all nuclear by solar/wind either.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  That makes sense. Solar does its thing, nuclear takes over slow or predictable fluctuations, hydro takes over for quick changes in solar output.
wcoenen 8y ago
The electric power produced by "peaker plants" (e.g. gas turbines, hydroelectric, pumped storage) will become more important. If there aren't enough of those, the cost to buy power from peaker plants will rise and investors will build more of them. More long distance transmission lines will be built to average out local variation in production. Grid-scale battery systems like brine4power may start to come online. Excess power may be dumped into power-to-gas systems which enrich natural gas with hydrogen.
yardie 8y ago
France has never relied on FF energy in the first place. They have a modern, well run nuclear program, lots of hydroelectric, a few geothermal, and FF power plants as well.
- genericid 8y ago
  France got almost 75% of its electricity from fossil fuels in the mid-70s[1], so "never" is wrong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_by_sources_in_France.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_by...
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    Well, 40-50 years is already a long time. It means that France made the shift before and ahead of other countries.
  - WhompingWindows 8y ago
    Technically, they were running their economy by burning wood/fats/oils for hundreds of years. However, in the context of energy, what matters most is what's happening right now and the total sum of global emissions prior to right now.
    - genericid 8y ago
      In the context of sentences involving the word "never", it does not matter when the thing that supposedly never happened did happen.
- yoz-y 8y ago
  Sadly, our nuclear program is neither modern nor well run. Our nuclear power plants are old and some are at the limit of their expiration date. Bad management and lobbying has made a huge gap in the knowledge of power plant building and management and now the price of new construction skyrockets. Just look at the years in which the reactors were constructed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#Franc...
golangnews 8y ago
Are they building stored energy reserves as well? Yes, they are. https://www.edie.net/news/6/Green-light-for-first-UK-hydro-storage-project-in-30-years/ https://www.edie.net/news/6/Green-light-for-first-UK-hydro-s... or https://www.fastcompany.com/40580693/exclusive-tesla-has-installed-a-truly-huge-amount-of-energy-storage https://www.fastcompany.com/40580693/exclusive-tesla-has-ins...
rb808 8y ago
I think we have to shape demand. Right now people use eletricity whenever they feel like it. I think people will need adjust their lives around when energy is cheap - eg wash clothes on windy days, A/C only runs during the day, have cooler houses on cold, windless nights.
Spooky23 8y ago
You'll see continued shift towards natural gas. You have to keep in mind that capital costs are a huge part of electric generation. The capital costs associated with most traditional generators are too high - this is why utilities pushed for regulatory PV/wind are cheap and have low opex and will start to eat at the baseload generators. Gas plants can spin up quickly, but the marginal cost will be high if they are idle too much. That market condition will make storage cost sustainable.

jojo64 8y ago

We have a European market of Energy. If it's not sunny && windy in France, maybe it is in Germany or Spain etc.

tribesman 8y ago

I think hydro or nuclear can be turned on when wind/solar isn't available.

mountainentity 8y ago
one cannot do this with nuclear
- reacweb 8y ago
  I keep earing that, but it is not totally clear for me. It seems the start and the stop of a nuclear plant takes a day if we want to be safe and efficient. A fast shutdown in a couple of seconds may cause difficulties to restart afterward. Maybe we could study procedures for safe quick start/stop even if the efficiency is not perfect.
  - rhino369 8y ago
    If you had enough nuclear capacity to cover for when wind/solar aren’t outputting anything, then you don’t need wind/solar. You’d just use your nuke plant 100%.
- jabl 8y ago
  France actually has such a high fraction of nuclear in their grid (70%) that their reactors load follow. Granted, due to the cost structure of nuclear, it makes sense to run flat out if possible, but technically it's not necessary.

rjsw 8y ago

Most French electicity comes from Nuclear Power not from fossil fuels.

rhaps0dy 8y ago

>What happens then? If that happens often enough, it will be profitable to run something serves electricity in these demand peaks. For example, storing excess electricity in batteries or by pumping water to elevated reservoirs, and generating electricity with them in that moment.

StavrosK 8y ago

Nothing, it's a false premise. In reality, what will happen is that we'll be using the more expensive FF power when we can't get cheap renewable power, and supply will adjust to that demand. Why would FF plants go "out of business" when there's a need they could meet?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

F_r_k 8y ago

Negative prices (i.e. excess of energy), and really high ones (lack of it) rarely happen. When they do, there is ancillary services that take over (which there is plenty in Europe). Actually, the share of intermittent renewable energy is negligible in France. Let's worry about that later, as there will be plenty of choices (demand response, PHES, and even tesla, which is building AS plants without us noticing (Belgium))

ptaipale 8y ago

Gas, oil, coal plants fill in when solar and wind don't work. That - along with nuclear phase-out - is why there's lots of several new coal plants being built in Germany, for instance.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
"several new coal plants being built in Germany" Didn't know about that, which ones? I thought it was natural gas plants? [1] looks like a small list [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_Kohlekraftwerke_in_Deutschland https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_Kohlekraftwerk...
- jerven 8y ago
  There is just one coal power plant under construction Dateln 4. [1] This is not going well, with boiler and legal issues meaning a plant which was supposed to open in 2013 is to open 7 years later in 2020. Making it not exactly a great poster child for how to build a coal power plant. Being in construction for 13 years is not cheap and fast. [1] https://endcoal.org/tracker/ https://endcoal.org/tracker/
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    Modern coal plants have to be complicated in order to be efficient, and that means they take a long time to build and have to be big. Meanwhile, wind and solar can be built much smaller and quicker, with the biggest bottleneck being building transmission lines (if needed.) Kind of funny that "big coal" is now suffering from a problem that nuclear has struggled with for a long time.
- genericid 8y ago
  That is not a list of plants being built, it's a list of planned plants (for a broad definition of planned). - 3 plants (Lünen, Profen and Niederaußem) have apparently been cancelled. - The promoter of Kalkar-Appeldorn has applied for a permit - The one of Stade has gotten one, but there is a lawsuit against that - Datteln replaces a plant that was shut down in 2014, though the old plant only had about 1/3 of the power. Meanwhile, coal power plants are being shut down without being replaced all the time.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago

My guess is that energy will be so cheap, we produce much much more than we consume in the future. There will be an abundance of energy some decades down. Also electric cars will create very large storage capcities for energy in the next decade. On top of that we get intelligent meters, with machines like my washing machine pulling power at the best time, my battery chargers using the right time etc, so (non-industry) demand will flatten out over time with intelligent metering. I would have feared about this issue 20y ago, but I think this is no longer of any importance for the development of solar power. What is relevant with the ongoing centralization of solar power is power transmission.

MrEfficiency 8y ago
>Also electric cars will create very large storage capcities for energy in the next decade. Chem engineer here, battery technology doesnt seem to be a guarantee to improve. Batteries are limited by the physics of our universe. The chemistry between two chemicals will not change, and it feels like we have exhausted every option. This is a non trivial problem and I am unsure if I expect a solution.
- _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
  I do agree. In 2 decades there will be hundreds of millions of electric cars in the world which currently do not exist. This is a huge increase in battery power even with battery technology not changing in the next 2 decades.
- Zealotux 8y ago
  I'm curious of what your opinion of hydrogen is, I know that it's still very expensive because of energy lost during the conversions. Do you think it has a viable future when it comes to energy storage?
- greglindahl 8y ago
  The actual track record of battery improvement is pretty incredible, especially the recent fall in prices.
- 8y ago

mavdi 8y ago

Nighttime in US is daytime in China. Countries could simply sell their excess energy to eachother.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Transmission losses are significant
- _Microft 8y ago
  High-voltage direct current has losses of less than 3% per 1000km according to the Wikipedia article. That's not China-to-US stuff but definitely low enough to move energy around in Europe.
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    And they do. Up to 3-4GW of the power (maybe 10% of typical power demand) in the UK is imported from its neighbours - some Ireland and the Netherlands, lots of France - at the moment. The French have a LOT of Nuclear power, and idling a nuclear power station, though possible, is economic insanity, so it makes sense to sell it at a discount to the British.
    - rsynnott 8y ago
      It's worth noting that this is a two-way street; GB sometimes exports electricity, particularly to Ireland when there's not much wind, but also sometimes to France.
- ben_w 8y ago
  Losses have to exceed 65% (i.e. 350 watts at the socket from 1,000 watts at source) for that to make worldwide solar load balancing a bad idea with current technology.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Musk will sell grid storage! Its online in Australia I think.

EADGBE 8y ago
...As long as it's pretty enough. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-solar-insight/inside-teslas-troubled-new-york-solar-factory-idUSKBN1KT0DU https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-solar-insight/insid...

gameswithgo 8y ago

everyone on hackernews knows this stuff. yet every renewable posts gets these "but there is no sun at night" posts to the top. build large scale energy storage instead of offshore oil wells, super tankers, and refineries I guess. It will be hard, it is hard to get oil out of the ground and into your car too.

PuffinBlue 8y ago
Won't even be that hard I think, or less hard than we imagine. Electric vehicles will bring widespread distributed storage 'organically'. At least in the UK the National Grid is doing a huge amount of work to prepare for this[0]. There is also work to install large battery installations commercially in public EV charging areas and National Grid sub-stations[1] - first ten multi-dozen MWh installations should be ready Q2 2019. So, for instance, installing MWh of battery capacity at (lets say) a current Fuel Station and that is constantly trickle charged at say 350KW from the grid, then discharge that to cars at super high rates - smoothing out delivery to EV's but having the added benefit of acting like a distributed storage system in periods of lower use (say at night) when things like wind generate surplus. This specific example isn't covered in the videos linked but the installations at sub-stations are. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLE2SrDNPZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLE2SrDNPZc [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSUlaDbckmo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSUlaDbckmo

nolok 8y ago

France doesn't plan to drive other energy out of business, we plan to diversify (with the ageing of some of our older reactor, replace them with solar and wind so we decrease to 50% nuclear). We still have a lot of hydro power with no plan to touch it, and we don't want to replace all nuclear by solar/wind either.

Symmetry 8y ago
That makes sense. Solar does its thing, nuclear takes over slow or predictable fluctuations, hydro takes over for quick changes in solar output.

wcoenen 8y ago

The electric power produced by "peaker plants" (e.g. gas turbines, hydroelectric, pumped storage) will become more important. If there aren't enough of those, the cost to buy power from peaker plants will rise and investors will build more of them. More long distance transmission lines will be built to average out local variation in production. Grid-scale battery systems like brine4power may start to come online. Excess power may be dumped into power-to-gas systems which enrich natural gas with hydrogen.

yardie 8y ago

France has never relied on FF energy in the first place. They have a modern, well run nuclear program, lots of hydroelectric, a few geothermal, and FF power plants as well.

genericid 8y ago
France got almost 75% of its electricity from fossil fuels in the mid-70s[1], so "never" is wrong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_by_sources_in_France.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_by...
- ekianjo 8y ago
  Well, 40-50 years is already a long time. It means that France made the shift before and ahead of other countries.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  Technically, they were running their economy by burning wood/fats/oils for hundreds of years. However, in the context of energy, what matters most is what's happening right now and the total sum of global emissions prior to right now.
  - genericid 8y ago
    In the context of sentences involving the word "never", it does not matter when the thing that supposedly never happened did happen.
yoz-y 8y ago
Sadly, our nuclear program is neither modern nor well run. Our nuclear power plants are old and some are at the limit of their expiration date. Bad management and lobbying has made a huge gap in the knowledge of power plant building and management and now the price of new construction skyrockets. Just look at the years in which the reactors were constructed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#Franc...

golangnews 8y ago

Are they building stored energy reserves as well? Yes, they are. https://www.edie.net/news/6/Green-light-for-first-UK-hydro-storage-project-in-30-years/ https://www.edie.net/news/6/Green-light-for-first-UK-hydro-s... or https://www.fastcompany.com/40580693/exclusive-tesla-has-installed-a-truly-huge-amount-of-energy-storage https://www.fastcompany.com/40580693/exclusive-tesla-has-ins...

rb808 8y ago

I think we have to shape demand. Right now people use eletricity whenever they feel like it. I think people will need adjust their lives around when energy is cheap - eg wash clothes on windy days, A/C only runs during the day, have cooler houses on cold, windless nights.

Spooky23 8y ago

You'll see continued shift towards natural gas. You have to keep in mind that capital costs are a huge part of electric generation. The capital costs associated with most traditional generators are too high - this is why utilities pushed for regulatory PV/wind are cheap and have low opex and will start to eat at the baseload generators. Gas plants can spin up quickly, but the marginal cost will be high if they are idle too much. That market condition will make storage cost sustainable.