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Are you suggesting that variable renewables plus batteries will approach prices that are... too cheap to meter? Looking at current cost VRE trends, when variab

Are you suggesting that variable renewables plus batteries will approach prices that are... too cheap to meter? Looking at current cost VRE trends, when variable sources contribute up to 4% of world energy, and surrounded by massive amounts of cheap but high-carbon natural gas, and assuming that the trends will just continue exponentially downward without serious complication, is optimistic. Cost of integration of variable sources plus batteries is expected in many studies and somewhat intuitively to skyrocket as market penetration increases. When you have enough VRE to cover 100% including the big evening peak with batteries during a clear summer day, the extra generation you build to fill the other gaps gets curtailed. But you have to fill daily and then seasonal gaps, worldwide, including heat in winter and worldwide transportation (not just electricity). Buying that battery that is only even needed at all every third day is 3x the price, yet we prefer if the power doesn't brownout with this frequency. This is difficult. Already we're seeing NIBMYism in large solar installations in california and with transmissions lines. That gets worse with scale. Nuclear today is a hedge against the possibility that deeply carbonizing with variable renewables + storage at world scale will be harder than we all think and hope it will be. That said, nuclear certainly needs to drop capital and O&M cost dramatically if it wants to play the game. And security is indeed a big factor in this. Its competition in the small-footprint dispatchable world is natural gas with full CCS, which is also looking pretty cheap.

jillesvangurp 7y ago
Yes. Not indefinitely of course but we've seen nothing yet and there's enough in the research pipeline to suggest clear trends over the next two decades in terms of cost improvements, efficiency improvements, cheaper materials, etc. That 4% you mention was less than 1% not so long ago and will be closer to 40% not too long from now. Such is the nature of exponentials. IMHO 5X cost reduction is basically a done deal even just applying simple economies of scale. You can argue whether this happens in five or ten years maybe but arguing it isn't happening seems futile. Beyond that, 10x is extremely likely to happen as well. There's a lot of research happening that would need to be a complete failure/waste of time for that to not happen. At worst it will happen slower that I might like. Maybe this happens over the next decade. Or two. Or three even. From there, 20x might be quite possible as well. Beyond that we're indeed talking rapidly diminishing returns. 10X would mean 0.2 cent/kwh. 20x would cut that to about 0.1 cent. This indeed gets you in to territory where metering it becomes more expensive than is worth the trouble. The average household uses about 15000 kwh per year, or about 150$ worth of energy at these prices; much less outside the US. Much of that is going to be produced on people's roofs or in their back yards. At that point it turns into a fixed cost. Historically the same sources producing the studies you are referencing have been off by magnitudes predicting current adoption and prices for both solar and wind. So, I'd consider that the pessimist glass half empty point of view. Not to dismiss it entirely but arguing cost increases seems a bit far fetched in light of current trends in the market.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  Aren't roof solar panels very inefficient? They can't track the sun and you can't have good density from them either. Furthermore, they don't work for office buildings and apartment buildings. >Not to dismiss it entirely but arguing cost increases seems a bit far fetched in light of current trends in the market. I think what the parent was saying is that because solar and wind don't reliably produce energy, we will need redundancy. As the market share of solar and wind grows we will need to increase the amount of storage and power generation far beyond what we normally need to operate. Let's say you have a city that uses 1 GWh of electricity per day. If you were to generate all the electricity with natural gas then you need to have 1 GWh plus some extra for redundancy to fulfill the needs of the city. If you generate 5% with solar and the rest with natural gas then nothing really changes. If the weather is bad then the natural gas plant will step in. As the share of your solar power generation grows toil need more and more redundant storage and solar power generation. If you rely 100% on solar power generation and the weather can be bad for a week in a row over the city, then you'll need storage that will last for more than that entire week. Not only that, you'll also need extra power generation capability to be able to fill and maintain that storage. Just to put this into perspective: the US uses about 10 TWh of electricity per day.
  - Tuna-Fish 7y ago
    > Aren't roof solar panels very inefficient? They can't track the sun We are well past the point where tracking the sun was desirable. The apparatus that allows solar panels to track the sun is now much more expensive, especially when you consider the maintenance costs, than just using more static panels.
    - pfdietz 7y ago
      Actually, most new utility scale PV in the US southwest is now using single axis tracking systems. The advantage here is that the power curve is flattened over the day, which both makes better use of the inverters and pushes more production into higher value time periods.
  - fpoling 7y ago

jillesvangurp 7y ago

Yes. Not indefinitely of course but we've seen nothing yet and there's enough in the research pipeline to suggest clear trends over the next two decades in terms of cost improvements, efficiency improvements, cheaper materials, etc. That 4% you mention was less than 1% not so long ago and will be closer to 40% not too long from now. Such is the nature of exponentials. IMHO 5X cost reduction is basically a done deal even just applying simple economies of scale. You can argue whether this happens in five or ten years maybe but arguing it isn't happening seems futile. Beyond that, 10x is extremely likely to happen as well. There's a lot of research happening that would need to be a complete failure/waste of time for that to not happen. At worst it will happen slower that I might like. Maybe this happens over the next decade. Or two. Or three even. From there, 20x might be quite possible as well. Beyond that we're indeed talking rapidly diminishing returns. 10X would mean 0.2 cent/kwh. 20x would cut that to about 0.1 cent. This indeed gets you in to territory where metering it becomes more expensive than is worth the trouble. The average household uses about 15000 kwh per year, or about 150$ worth of energy at these prices; much less outside the US. Much of that is going to be produced on people's roofs or in their back yards. At that point it turns into a fixed cost. Historically the same sources producing the studies you are referencing have been off by magnitudes predicting current adoption and prices for both solar and wind. So, I'd consider that the pessimist glass half empty point of view. Not to dismiss it entirely but arguing cost increases seems a bit far fetched in light of current trends in the market.

Mirioron 7y ago
Aren't roof solar panels very inefficient? They can't track the sun and you can't have good density from them either. Furthermore, they don't work for office buildings and apartment buildings. >Not to dismiss it entirely but arguing cost increases seems a bit far fetched in light of current trends in the market. I think what the parent was saying is that because solar and wind don't reliably produce energy, we will need redundancy. As the market share of solar and wind grows we will need to increase the amount of storage and power generation far beyond what we normally need to operate. Let's say you have a city that uses 1 GWh of electricity per day. If you were to generate all the electricity with natural gas then you need to have 1 GWh plus some extra for redundancy to fulfill the needs of the city. If you generate 5% with solar and the rest with natural gas then nothing really changes. If the weather is bad then the natural gas plant will step in. As the share of your solar power generation grows toil need more and more redundant storage and solar power generation. If you rely 100% on solar power generation and the weather can be bad for a week in a row over the city, then you'll need storage that will last for more than that entire week. Not only that, you'll also need extra power generation capability to be able to fill and maintain that storage. Just to put this into perspective: the US uses about 10 TWh of electricity per day.
- Tuna-Fish 7y ago
  > Aren't roof solar panels very inefficient? They can't track the sun We are well past the point where tracking the sun was desirable. The apparatus that allows solar panels to track the sun is now much more expensive, especially when you consider the maintenance costs, than just using more static panels.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    Actually, most new utility scale PV in the US southwest is now using single axis tracking systems. The advantage here is that the power curve is flattened over the day, which both makes better use of the inverters and pushes more production into higher value time periods.
- fpoling 7y ago