16 ms·

In the US, it's cheaper to build and operate wind farms than buy fossil fuels

238 points by anandaverma18 7y ago

anandaverma18 7y ago
and same goes for solar farm as well.
oaiey 7y ago
I like to read news like this. Shows positive progress in the world. There should be a minimum percentage of positive news every day :)
- benj111 7y ago
  This submission currently on the front page would suggest that wouldn't work out as planned. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20730324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20730324
8bitsrule 7y ago
The sad part is that it would have been cheaper for decades ... had someone been willing to make that move. Big windmills had been built by the 1880s (e.g. Charles Brush), and a century later the technology was well within reach. But 'alternative energy' (as it was known) couldn't get heard about (Carter tried).
- roenxi 7y ago
  There is a chart in the article that suggests the price competitiveness is a new development, circa 2013.
  - NikkiA 7y ago
    I imagine GP's point was that economy of scale is the key, and had people actually listened earlier, the technology was there, it just needed the scale.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      We may as well complain that the Egyptian Middle Kingdom's 12 Dynasty didn't properly formulate Euler's formula in 1991 BC. Nobody at the time made it happen so it didn't happen and the same could be said of any improvement.
      - cryptoz 7y ago
        > Nobody at the time made it happen so it didn't happen and the same could be said of any improvement. Not in this case. These particular improvements were held back intentionally by megacorporations like Exxon, who spent billions telling lies to the US government, to American people and the rest of the world. Huge efforts were undertaken to ensure that this kind of technology - renewable through wind and solar - would not take off as quickly as it naturally would otherwise. The 'free market' only works at setting prices if the market knows the risks. In this case, the market not only had the risks actively hidden from them, but they were directly lied to about the risks. If the market had understood the risks of this technology in accordance with basic economic understanding (which is obviously flawed but hear me out), then renewable energy would have been cheaper than non-renewable energy a long time ago. That's not to mention the direct oil subsidies provided by the US and Canadian (and other) governments over the last many decades.
  - greendesk 7y ago
    2013 was 6 years ago. Meanwhile, I am confident that the point wind energy becomes cheaper than fossil energy was within reach much earlier than that. Note that without peer-reviewed research - which I am not providing here - this is just my opinion. But I hope it counts.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  How important are batteries to windmill success? Good batteries are very recent.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Not very important as long as you have a good power grid and some other form of backup power.
  - oliwarner 7y ago
    Geographic batteries (potential energy sinks, eg storing water in a reservoir at a higher altitude and releasing it through turbines to a lower one) have operated for decades. Dinorwig in Wales operates a 9GWh capacity at 1.7GW. Far from insignificant, much cheaper (and safer) than the equivalent lithium cells. https://youtu.be/6Jx_bJgIFhI https://youtu.be/6Jx_bJgIFhI To be clear, Dinorwig is not only powered by green methods, but it could.
    - viraptor 7y ago
      There's quite a few large working ones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydro... It looks like 60s/70s were pretty good for building initial low-capacity ones. Now it looks like the plans for new ones are entirely dominated by China. (Or were projects in other countries just not researched/included?)
      - tialaramex 7y ago
        The less favourable the existing geography, the harder it will be for a state to "just" build a pumped storage facility like Dinorwig. Dinorwig is basically ideal, the mountain was already right there, with a nice lake at the bottom and a quarry that had closed or was about to close that could be re-used as the top lake. It's far enough away to reduce the amount of random BANANAs‡ who get involved yet not so far as to make the infrastructure cost prohibitive (for HV power lines to the facility). The UK hasn't built lots more because it doesn't have dozens of other mountains with lakes next to them just kicking about for the work, and any it does have are deemed environmentally important (e.g. something rare lives in the lake or on the mountain). China has two advantages: One it's fucking enormous, there are bound to be places with mountain lakes that weren't needed for anything else more important. Two under an authoritarian government there's no prospect of protest against the plan even if it's catastrophic for some groups. ‡ NIMBYs but more so, Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
- lovemenot 7y ago
  There are technologies that have just not been ready until relatively recently. Design, material, manufacture, deployment and operation of very large blades is both critical and hard. A key operating constraint is keeping blade-tips below the speed of sound. To design the monsters that are currently being deployed, computer modelling would not have been adequate even fifteen years ago. Similarly, carbon fiber is finally getting scale economies from more than one industry. But it couldn't have been cost effective in the 1970s.
- mensetmanusman 7y ago
  This is not quite true. There have been required advances in materials science over the last decades that are needed to maintain the size/strength:weight ratios/etc. The larger the wind blade the more efficient.
  - 8bitsrule 7y ago
    Those required advances would have materialized -much- sooner if windpower had been taken seriously and some (let's say) 500Kw mills had appeared on the market. I recall Reagan having Carter's White-House-rooftop solar removed. Anything green was mocked as a 'utopian dream' or whatever, and the established industry spent -a lot- of money keeping it that way. These days, when the alumni mag from my school arrives, I have to ruefully smile about all of the 'green language' in it, now that it's trendy. What a damn shame.
rmetzler 7y ago
Something I miss from reading those articles: what are you doing when the wind doesn't blow for a few days or even weeks? And in case of solar farms, the sun doesn't shine (like at night)? How do you store the energy efficiently? If you think batteries, how long does the battery of your smartphone or laptop works? 5 years max? Maybe 10? Is this the timespan you plan your reliable infrastructure for? And how "green" is it to build these batteries? If you think pumped-storage hydroelectricity, how much places do you have where you can have two pools (one uphill, one downhill) to store the water? How much energy can store in there? The thing is, you'll build all these solar and wind farms and then still build and run the fossil plants, because you aren't able to store the energy to make it reliable enough.
- stanmancan 7y ago
  Between wind, solar, and storage, you would be hard pressed to “run out” of energy in a well designed system. Stating otherwise is nonsense.
  - rmetzler 7y ago
    I don't understand how to design such a system. The sun doesn't shine in a lot of places for less than 12 hours a day. In the winter, a lot of places have much less sunlight. When men needed wind to sail the sea, there were situations when the wind didn't blow for weeks. How much energy would your "well designed system" need to store and what is possible? Yes, I read about that Tesla battery in Australia. Then I calculated how many Tesla walls a city like Munich would need to be able to survive for 1 week. I don't believe it is possible. People rely on electric power. If the grid goes down in places like Germany like once every month, there would be uproar.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      You don't need to survive for a week but max. a day or so. Anything longer and electricity will come from somewhere else in the grid, either a different region or a back-up conventional plant being gas or nuclear or even coal. At least in Germany even large industrial energy consumers are for years now an active part of grid balancing. Either they can stop and resume production as needed or continuous processes serve a similar function as your base power plants. The silver bullet to get them there was money, it became financially viable and profitable and all of a sudden businesses jumped at the opportunity. Disclaimer: Worked at two of these power hungry places and know of of another one making quite some money on the electricity exchanges by just timing his production runs properly.
Brakenshire 7y ago
It’s going to be interesting as wind and solar gets consistently cheaper than even the marginal fuel cost of gas. i.e. even if you already own a gas plant, it would be cheaper to build a wind farm just to be able to reduce fuel use. We’re approaching a world where the primary energy drivers will be renewable, and fossil fuels will be competing with energy storage.
- mavhc 7y ago
  And that's without counting the $3 trillion/year of subsidies for fossil fuels
- pjc50 7y ago
  Gas plants more or less have to become "peaker" plants. They'll get paid more for the electricity but run for much fewer hours, plus a payment for being on standby. Effectively they'll be competing with storage, yes.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    This will shift any new gas plants away from combined cycle toward simple cycle. Minimizing capital cost will be more important. Steam turbines may be on their way to the technology museum.
- achow 7y ago
  > ..fossil fuels will be competing with energy storage Since fossil fuels are energy dense, it would be interesting if we come back full circle by producing hydrocarbon fuels for energy storage by recycling atmospheric carbon using cheap renewable electrical energy. Edit to clarify, there are more energy dense substance than hydrocarbons (ex. Hydrogen), but hydrocarbons would have advantage of having ability of being useful in existing infra (IC engines, gas pumps, storage containers, etc.)
  - afarrell 7y ago
    Won't we have to do that anyway for air (and space) travel?
gandalfian 7y ago
I favour just declaring a national holiday whenever it's both dark and still. Throttle everything back, everyone take a rest. It might really improve societies standard of living.
- rayiner 7y ago
  As a kid in Bangladesh, where random power outages were a regular occurrence, I’d never have imagined people in the west actually seriously proposing to adopt what was for us a poverty-driven behavior.
  - lovemenot 7y ago
    As a vegetarian from the west, I have sometimes encountered similar incredulity from people in developing countries about my dietary choice. Development is a ratchet, but there's diminishing returns. Eventually costs can seem to outweigh benefits in specific areas.
  - pfdietz 7y ago
    I remember when AT&T made arguments against splitting up Ma Bell because the new system wouldn't have "five 9s" reliability. It turns out the optimal reliability/cost tradeoff, from the consumers' points of view, isn't necessarily what the entrenched incumbent producers want to provide.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      Note that telephone service today sucks compared to the gold-plated Ma Bell network. It’s nearly unusable, especially VoIP.
  - gandalfian 7y ago
    I was assuming that hydro, nuclear and such would keep the led lights on while people sat under a blanket and read a good book in their well insulated homes until they could turn industry back up and start charging their cars again. Living in harmony with nature would not really be that different from heating your water at night with offpeak electricity. If it gave us cheap clean power bills I think people would like it. Not turning the planet uninhabitable might be considered a perk too.
idoubtit 7y ago
> In the US, it's cheaper to build and operate wind farms than buy fossil fuels. This is currently HN's title, and the article's subtitle. But the article makes no statement to prove this assertion. It does not even make sense to me. I guess the author meant that for firms that have high energy needs. But it is stupid to imply that the electricity provided by fossil fuel can always be replaced by wind turbines. If the need is for regular bursts, high volumes on short periods, wind won't be of much use. Moreover, the article is a digest of a report that is less emphatic. The US Department of Energy expects a slow-down of wind capacity after 2020, once the tax credit will end. For a project that would start now, there would be no tax credit, so it would be hard to reach a competitive price.
- achow 7y ago
  > ..If the need is for regular bursts, high volumes on short periods, wind won't be of much use. Just on this point, the article talks about curtailment: At times, strong winds can cause wind farms to produce an excess of power relative to demand, causing a farm's output to be reduced. This process, called curtailment, remained a small factor, with only two percent of the potential generation lost this way. Put differently, if the curtailed electricity had been used, it would have only raised the average capacity factor by 0.7 percentage points. It sounds like 'short bursts' is really not a problem.
  - makomk 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure curtailment is the exact reverse of what the comment you're replying to is talking about - it happens when there's an excess burst of wind power compared to demand, whereas the question is about wind power filling bursts of demand. Since there's almost no curtailment it seems pretty clear that wind power doesn't currently play a role in filling those; there's just not the excess capacity for it. Of course, curtailment is only low right now because most of the generation is from fossil fuel plants which are shut down in preference to wind. Once that changes curtailment will go up and capacity factor will go down.
    - achow 7y ago
roel_v 7y ago
Does anyone know at what point fossil fuels will start to feel the shrinking economies of scale, ie when fossil will get more expensive because there is less scale? Does this point exist at all, or doesn't it matter any more because we have the tech developed already anyway?
- thinkcontext 7y ago
  Norway will be the canary in the coal mine for the fossil fuel industry. With half of new car sales electric they'll be the first place where we can observe at what penetration gas stations start to close.
DrNohj 7y ago
Wind power requires subsidies to work. Meaning shafting the end consumer. Period https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/02/21/texas-taxpayers-pay-the-french-government-for-wind-power-and-then-pay-the-grid-to-take-it/#3cb2f63046e9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/02/21/texas-ta...
- ben_w 7y ago
  This article explicitly mentions the cost without subsidies: ”””The levelized cost of electricity, which eliminates the impact of incentives and subsidies on the final prices, places wind below $40/MW-hr in 2018. The cheapest form of natural gas generation was roughly $10 more per MegaWatt-hour. Note that, as recently as 2015, the US' Energy Information Agency was predicting that wind's levelized cost in 2020 would be $74/MW-hr.”””
heyflyguy 7y ago
So much wrong with this line of thinking. Natural gas prices in west Texas are actually negative right now because there is no infrastructure to move it to refining and distribution hubs. Wind power experienced a renaissance due to subsidized infrastructure construction. Natural gas is clean burning and a byproduct in most cases of crude drilling. If we were really wanting clean cheap energy we'd build bigger and better pipelines to move the gas to the major distribution networks. Instead lawmakers want to install more of these structures that ruin the view, obscure the horizon, and take massive amounts of harmful chemicals to produce.
- SlipperySlope 7y ago
  Much more expensive to build pipelines and that is why gas gets flared at oil fields.
diafygi 7y ago
> Better grid management also helped the economics of wind. At times, strong winds can cause wind farms to produce an excess of power relative to demand, causing a farm's output to be reduced. I think this part is particularly relevant to the HN community. As we reach higher and higher penetration of renewables on the grid, we will need to dead with the intermittency more and more. A common phrase I hear at utility conferences nowadays is, "We used to forecast load and deploy generation, but in the future, we will be forecasting generation and deploying load." I think this area will be the next wave of innovation that needs to happen in the energy transition, and it's going to be primarily software driven. Smart load management will be key to avoiding huge storage and infrastructure capital expenses. For example, in Hawaii, they are starting to explore new utility business models that don't just rely on a fixed rate of return for capital spent. Anyway, as we cross 50%+ penetration of renewables, I think software is going to take a leading roll in connecting and managing everything so we can have the flexibility we need on the grid.
- formercoder 7y ago
  What does “don't just rely on a fixed rate of return for capital spent” mean precisely?
  - diafygi 7y ago
    In exchange for providing an essential service to everyone, utilities are typically given monopoly protections and regulated by their local jurisdiction (e.g. a public utility commission). This means the business model for privately owned utilities must be pre-approved. Up until now, the typical pre-approved business model was where the utility would go to the commission and say they needed to build something (e.g. a new substation), the commission would approve it, and the utility could then charge their customers for the cost to build plus a fixed rate of return (e.g. $300m + 7%). However, that business model breaks down when you start moving away from a centralized grid, since customers are able to start using alternatives to your infrastructure (e.g. solar on their roof and batteries in their garage). So, commissions are trying to figure out new business models that will ensure the continued operation of utilities while still imcentivizing reduction of carbon emissions. One way being explored in Hawaii is called "performance-based ratemaking" but is still being figured out. However, the interesting going (to my company, at least) is the increasing need for software and communication in these new business models. For performance-based returns to happen, you need to measure performance, which means software. Anyway, it's a very interesting time in the utility sector, and I think there's a lot of opportunity for the tech sector to come in and have a big part of it. Unfortunately, most tech entrepreneurs are allergic to regulated sectors.
effnorwood 7y ago
It isn’t.
littlestymaar 7y ago
Caveat, it works well if you don't mind not having power for several days in a row.
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  This is talking about using wind in conjunction with gas.
  - littlestymaar 7y ago
    This was a sarcastic comment about the title of the submission, because gas is a fossil fuel…
bryanlarsen 7y ago
If this trend continues, perhaps we don't need the storage breakthrough that we've been assuming we'd need. There are a quite a few industrial processes which have energy as their primary cost. Aluminum is one example. If a region needs 10GW average, one could build a wind installation with 10GW average output and a lot of storage to match supply and load. Or one could build a 100GW installation, a little bit of storage and an aluminum smelter. During normal operation the smelter gets 90GW and the region gets 10GW. During peak operation the smelter gets a lot more than 90GW. During a trough the region gets 10GW and the smelter gets nothing. You'd still need storage or a peaker to handle periods when there is absolutely no wind or low wind and high demand, but those needs would be much less. I don't know if aluminum can operate with such fluctuating power, but there are processes that can. At worst, bitcoin.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- xoa 7y ago
  >I don't know if aluminum can operate with such fluctuating power In case you're curious, this came up a few years ago in a discussion and at least at the time I checked a typical Hall-Héroult electrolysis smelter could last without power for something like 4 hours or so, maybe 5, and some countries did in fact use them as part of their electrical grid control. But they can't have power interrupted indefinitely because the pots are permanently damaged and require replacement or extremely expensive repair if the liquid metal completely solidifies in them. The molten state represents a significant thermal mass hence the hours of lag time, but it can't just be remelted from total cool down either. I do wonder if an economical design could be made that specifically tried to enhance this aspect as a core design feature, some sort of vacuum insulation or the like perhaps to reduce passive thermal loss and bring outage time more towards 12 hours? But even at 4 apparently it can be good enough for moderation of some intermittent demand (which in turn means extremely cheap electricity). Using something like this as "energy storage" that is also directly economically productive seems worth pursuing though. Another possibility would be to investigate direct carbon extraction from the air, either for storage or to turn into fully synthetic net-neutral hydrocarbons. If the electricity is essentially free anyway, even enormously consuming processes like that could make sense.
cjbenedikt 7y ago
Just to add to the confusion: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fuels/environmental-impacts-of-natural-gas https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fu... While I know it isn't something averybidy is concerned about. But maybe should?
spenrose 7y ago
HN discussion yesterday comparing wind and nuclear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724676
gridlockd 7y ago
> "In the US, it's cheaper to build and operate wind farms than buy fossil fuels." That's not the headline. The headline is cheaper than natural gas, which is a relatively expensive fossil fuel, but also historically cheap at the moment. However, natural gas is great at providing power on-demand and at small scale, which is exactly what you need to even out the highly volatile output of wind energy. Natural gas and wind energy are complements, not competitors.
ThomPete 7y ago
Its not cheaper once you factor in the need for backup energy and thats the only fair way of calculating the cost of wind and solar for that matter.
- diafygi 7y ago
  Then why is wind + storage winning bids as the cheapest resource? https://www.utilitydive.com/news/xcel-solicitation-returns-incredible-renewable-energy-storage-bids/514287/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/xcel-solicitation-returns-i...
  - ThomPete 7y ago
    It's not. Factor in the need for backup energy and remove subsidies and it will loose.
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
Assuming trump loses, these expiring credits need to be extended or at least eetooled. By the next Congress and administration

238 points by anandaverma18 7y ago

and same goes for solar farm as well.

I like to read news like this. Shows positive progress in the world. There should be a minimum percentage of positive news every day :)

benj111 7y ago
This submission currently on the front page would suggest that wouldn't work out as planned. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20730324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20730324

8bitsrule 7y ago

The sad part is that it would have been cheaper for decades ... had someone been willing to make that move. Big windmills had been built by the 1880s (e.g. Charles Brush), and a century later the technology was well within reach. But 'alternative energy' (as it was known) couldn't get heard about (Carter tried).

roenxi 7y ago
There is a chart in the article that suggests the price competitiveness is a new development, circa 2013.
- NikkiA 7y ago
  I imagine GP's point was that economy of scale is the key, and had people actually listened earlier, the technology was there, it just needed the scale.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    We may as well complain that the Egyptian Middle Kingdom's 12 Dynasty didn't properly formulate Euler's formula in 1991 BC. Nobody at the time made it happen so it didn't happen and the same could be said of any improvement.
    - cryptoz 7y ago
      > Nobody at the time made it happen so it didn't happen and the same could be said of any improvement. Not in this case. These particular improvements were held back intentionally by megacorporations like Exxon, who spent billions telling lies to the US government, to American people and the rest of the world. Huge efforts were undertaken to ensure that this kind of technology - renewable through wind and solar - would not take off as quickly as it naturally would otherwise. The 'free market' only works at setting prices if the market knows the risks. In this case, the market not only had the risks actively hidden from them, but they were directly lied to about the risks. If the market had understood the risks of this technology in accordance with basic economic understanding (which is obviously flawed but hear me out), then renewable energy would have been cheaper than non-renewable energy a long time ago. That's not to mention the direct oil subsidies provided by the US and Canadian (and other) governments over the last many decades.
- greendesk 7y ago
  2013 was 6 years ago. Meanwhile, I am confident that the point wind energy becomes cheaper than fossil energy was within reach much earlier than that. Note that without peer-reviewed research - which I am not providing here - this is just my opinion. But I hope it counts.
im3w1l 7y ago
How important are batteries to windmill success? Good batteries are very recent.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Not very important as long as you have a good power grid and some other form of backup power.
- oliwarner 7y ago
  Geographic batteries (potential energy sinks, eg storing water in a reservoir at a higher altitude and releasing it through turbines to a lower one) have operated for decades. Dinorwig in Wales operates a 9GWh capacity at 1.7GW. Far from insignificant, much cheaper (and safer) than the equivalent lithium cells. https://youtu.be/6Jx_bJgIFhI https://youtu.be/6Jx_bJgIFhI To be clear, Dinorwig is not only powered by green methods, but it could.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    There's quite a few large working ones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydro... It looks like 60s/70s were pretty good for building initial low-capacity ones. Now it looks like the plans for new ones are entirely dominated by China. (Or were projects in other countries just not researched/included?)
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      The less favourable the existing geography, the harder it will be for a state to "just" build a pumped storage facility like Dinorwig. Dinorwig is basically ideal, the mountain was already right there, with a nice lake at the bottom and a quarry that had closed or was about to close that could be re-used as the top lake. It's far enough away to reduce the amount of random BANANAs‡ who get involved yet not so far as to make the infrastructure cost prohibitive (for HV power lines to the facility). The UK hasn't built lots more because it doesn't have dozens of other mountains with lakes next to them just kicking about for the work, and any it does have are deemed environmentally important (e.g. something rare lives in the lake or on the mountain). China has two advantages: One it's fucking enormous, there are bound to be places with mountain lakes that weren't needed for anything else more important. Two under an authoritarian government there's no prospect of protest against the plan even if it's catastrophic for some groups. ‡ NIMBYs but more so, Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
lovemenot 7y ago
There are technologies that have just not been ready until relatively recently. Design, material, manufacture, deployment and operation of very large blades is both critical and hard. A key operating constraint is keeping blade-tips below the speed of sound. To design the monsters that are currently being deployed, computer modelling would not have been adequate even fifteen years ago. Similarly, carbon fiber is finally getting scale economies from more than one industry. But it couldn't have been cost effective in the 1970s.
mensetmanusman 7y ago
This is not quite true. There have been required advances in materials science over the last decades that are needed to maintain the size/strength:weight ratios/etc. The larger the wind blade the more efficient.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
  Those required advances would have materialized -much- sooner if windpower had been taken seriously and some (let's say) 500Kw mills had appeared on the market. I recall Reagan having Carter's White-House-rooftop solar removed. Anything green was mocked as a 'utopian dream' or whatever, and the established industry spent -a lot- of money keeping it that way. These days, when the alumni mag from my school arrives, I have to ruefully smile about all of the 'green language' in it, now that it's trendy. What a damn shame.

rmetzler 7y ago

Something I miss from reading those articles: what are you doing when the wind doesn't blow for a few days or even weeks? And in case of solar farms, the sun doesn't shine (like at night)? How do you store the energy efficiently? If you think batteries, how long does the battery of your smartphone or laptop works? 5 years max? Maybe 10? Is this the timespan you plan your reliable infrastructure for? And how "green" is it to build these batteries? If you think pumped-storage hydroelectricity, how much places do you have where you can have two pools (one uphill, one downhill) to store the water? How much energy can store in there? The thing is, you'll build all these solar and wind farms and then still build and run the fossil plants, because you aren't able to store the energy to make it reliable enough.

stanmancan 7y ago
Between wind, solar, and storage, you would be hard pressed to “run out” of energy in a well designed system. Stating otherwise is nonsense.
- rmetzler 7y ago
  I don't understand how to design such a system. The sun doesn't shine in a lot of places for less than 12 hours a day. In the winter, a lot of places have much less sunlight. When men needed wind to sail the sea, there were situations when the wind didn't blow for weeks. How much energy would your "well designed system" need to store and what is possible? Yes, I read about that Tesla battery in Australia. Then I calculated how many Tesla walls a city like Munich would need to be able to survive for 1 week. I don't believe it is possible. People rely on electric power. If the grid goes down in places like Germany like once every month, there would be uproar.
  - hef19898 7y ago
    You don't need to survive for a week but max. a day or so. Anything longer and electricity will come from somewhere else in the grid, either a different region or a back-up conventional plant being gas or nuclear or even coal. At least in Germany even large industrial energy consumers are for years now an active part of grid balancing. Either they can stop and resume production as needed or continuous processes serve a similar function as your base power plants. The silver bullet to get them there was money, it became financially viable and profitable and all of a sudden businesses jumped at the opportunity. Disclaimer: Worked at two of these power hungry places and know of of another one making quite some money on the electricity exchanges by just timing his production runs properly.

Brakenshire 7y ago

It’s going to be interesting as wind and solar gets consistently cheaper than even the marginal fuel cost of gas. i.e. even if you already own a gas plant, it would be cheaper to build a wind farm just to be able to reduce fuel use. We’re approaching a world where the primary energy drivers will be renewable, and fossil fuels will be competing with energy storage.

mavhc 7y ago
And that's without counting the $3 trillion/year of subsidies for fossil fuels
pjc50 7y ago
Gas plants more or less have to become "peaker" plants. They'll get paid more for the electricity but run for much fewer hours, plus a payment for being on standby. Effectively they'll be competing with storage, yes.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  This will shift any new gas plants away from combined cycle toward simple cycle. Minimizing capital cost will be more important. Steam turbines may be on their way to the technology museum.
achow 7y ago
> ..fossil fuels will be competing with energy storage Since fossil fuels are energy dense, it would be interesting if we come back full circle by producing hydrocarbon fuels for energy storage by recycling atmospheric carbon using cheap renewable electrical energy. Edit to clarify, there are more energy dense substance than hydrocarbons (ex. Hydrogen), but hydrocarbons would have advantage of having ability of being useful in existing infra (IC engines, gas pumps, storage containers, etc.)
- afarrell 7y ago
  Won't we have to do that anyway for air (and space) travel?

gandalfian 7y ago

I favour just declaring a national holiday whenever it's both dark and still. Throttle everything back, everyone take a rest. It might really improve societies standard of living.

rayiner 7y ago
As a kid in Bangladesh, where random power outages were a regular occurrence, I’d never have imagined people in the west actually seriously proposing to adopt what was for us a poverty-driven behavior.
- lovemenot 7y ago
  As a vegetarian from the west, I have sometimes encountered similar incredulity from people in developing countries about my dietary choice. Development is a ratchet, but there's diminishing returns. Eventually costs can seem to outweigh benefits in specific areas.
- pfdietz 7y ago
  I remember when AT&T made arguments against splitting up Ma Bell because the new system wouldn't have "five 9s" reliability. It turns out the optimal reliability/cost tradeoff, from the consumers' points of view, isn't necessarily what the entrenched incumbent producers want to provide.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Note that telephone service today sucks compared to the gold-plated Ma Bell network. It’s nearly unusable, especially VoIP.
- gandalfian 7y ago
  I was assuming that hydro, nuclear and such would keep the led lights on while people sat under a blanket and read a good book in their well insulated homes until they could turn industry back up and start charging their cars again. Living in harmony with nature would not really be that different from heating your water at night with offpeak electricity. If it gave us cheap clean power bills I think people would like it. Not turning the planet uninhabitable might be considered a perk too.

idoubtit 7y ago

> In the US, it's cheaper to build and operate wind farms than buy fossil fuels. This is currently HN's title, and the article's subtitle. But the article makes no statement to prove this assertion. It does not even make sense to me. I guess the author meant that for firms that have high energy needs. But it is stupid to imply that the electricity provided by fossil fuel can always be replaced by wind turbines. If the need is for regular bursts, high volumes on short periods, wind won't be of much use. Moreover, the article is a digest of a report that is less emphatic. The US Department of Energy expects a slow-down of wind capacity after 2020, once the tax credit will end. For a project that would start now, there would be no tax credit, so it would be hard to reach a competitive price.

achow 7y ago
> ..If the need is for regular bursts, high volumes on short periods, wind won't be of much use. Just on this point, the article talks about curtailment: At times, strong winds can cause wind farms to produce an excess of power relative to demand, causing a farm's output to be reduced. This process, called curtailment, remained a small factor, with only two percent of the potential generation lost this way. Put differently, if the curtailed electricity had been used, it would have only raised the average capacity factor by 0.7 percentage points. It sounds like 'short bursts' is really not a problem.
- makomk 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure curtailment is the exact reverse of what the comment you're replying to is talking about - it happens when there's an excess burst of wind power compared to demand, whereas the question is about wind power filling bursts of demand. Since there's almost no curtailment it seems pretty clear that wind power doesn't currently play a role in filling those; there's just not the excess capacity for it. Of course, curtailment is only low right now because most of the generation is from fossil fuel plants which are shut down in preference to wind. Once that changes curtailment will go up and capacity factor will go down.
  - achow 7y ago

roel_v 7y ago

Does anyone know at what point fossil fuels will start to feel the shrinking economies of scale, ie when fossil will get more expensive because there is less scale? Does this point exist at all, or doesn't it matter any more because we have the tech developed already anyway?

thinkcontext 7y ago
Norway will be the canary in the coal mine for the fossil fuel industry. With half of new car sales electric they'll be the first place where we can observe at what penetration gas stations start to close.

DrNohj 7y ago

Wind power requires subsidies to work. Meaning shafting the end consumer. Period https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/02/21/texas-taxpayers-pay-the-french-government-for-wind-power-and-then-pay-the-grid-to-take-it/#3cb2f63046e9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/02/21/texas-ta...

ben_w 7y ago
This article explicitly mentions the cost without subsidies: ”””The levelized cost of electricity, which eliminates the impact of incentives and subsidies on the final prices, places wind below $40/MW-hr in 2018. The cheapest form of natural gas generation was roughly $10 more per MegaWatt-hour. Note that, as recently as 2015, the US' Energy Information Agency was predicting that wind's levelized cost in 2020 would be $74/MW-hr.”””

heyflyguy 7y ago

So much wrong with this line of thinking. Natural gas prices in west Texas are actually negative right now because there is no infrastructure to move it to refining and distribution hubs. Wind power experienced a renaissance due to subsidized infrastructure construction. Natural gas is clean burning and a byproduct in most cases of crude drilling. If we were really wanting clean cheap energy we'd build bigger and better pipelines to move the gas to the major distribution networks. Instead lawmakers want to install more of these structures that ruin the view, obscure the horizon, and take massive amounts of harmful chemicals to produce.

SlipperySlope 7y ago
Much more expensive to build pipelines and that is why gas gets flared at oil fields.

diafygi 7y ago

> Better grid management also helped the economics of wind. At times, strong winds can cause wind farms to produce an excess of power relative to demand, causing a farm's output to be reduced. I think this part is particularly relevant to the HN community. As we reach higher and higher penetration of renewables on the grid, we will need to dead with the intermittency more and more. A common phrase I hear at utility conferences nowadays is, "We used to forecast load and deploy generation, but in the future, we will be forecasting generation and deploying load." I think this area will be the next wave of innovation that needs to happen in the energy transition, and it's going to be primarily software driven. Smart load management will be key to avoiding huge storage and infrastructure capital expenses. For example, in Hawaii, they are starting to explore new utility business models that don't just rely on a fixed rate of return for capital spent. Anyway, as we cross 50%+ penetration of renewables, I think software is going to take a leading roll in connecting and managing everything so we can have the flexibility we need on the grid.

formercoder 7y ago
What does “don't just rely on a fixed rate of return for capital spent” mean precisely?
- diafygi 7y ago
  In exchange for providing an essential service to everyone, utilities are typically given monopoly protections and regulated by their local jurisdiction (e.g. a public utility commission). This means the business model for privately owned utilities must be pre-approved. Up until now, the typical pre-approved business model was where the utility would go to the commission and say they needed to build something (e.g. a new substation), the commission would approve it, and the utility could then charge their customers for the cost to build plus a fixed rate of return (e.g. $300m + 7%). However, that business model breaks down when you start moving away from a centralized grid, since customers are able to start using alternatives to your infrastructure (e.g. solar on their roof and batteries in their garage). So, commissions are trying to figure out new business models that will ensure the continued operation of utilities while still imcentivizing reduction of carbon emissions. One way being explored in Hawaii is called "performance-based ratemaking" but is still being figured out. However, the interesting going (to my company, at least) is the increasing need for software and communication in these new business models. For performance-based returns to happen, you need to measure performance, which means software. Anyway, it's a very interesting time in the utility sector, and I think there's a lot of opportunity for the tech sector to come in and have a big part of it. Unfortunately, most tech entrepreneurs are allergic to regulated sectors.

effnorwood 7y ago

It isn’t.

littlestymaar 7y ago

Caveat, it works well if you don't mind not having power for several days in a row.

Brakenshire 7y ago
This is talking about using wind in conjunction with gas.
- littlestymaar 7y ago
  This was a sarcastic comment about the title of the submission, because gas is a fossil fuel…

bryanlarsen 7y ago

If this trend continues, perhaps we don't need the storage breakthrough that we've been assuming we'd need. There are a quite a few industrial processes which have energy as their primary cost. Aluminum is one example. If a region needs 10GW average, one could build a wind installation with 10GW average output and a lot of storage to match supply and load. Or one could build a 100GW installation, a little bit of storage and an aluminum smelter. During normal operation the smelter gets 90GW and the region gets 10GW. During peak operation the smelter gets a lot more than 90GW. During a trough the region gets 10GW and the smelter gets nothing. You'd still need storage or a peaker to handle periods when there is absolutely no wind or low wind and high demand, but those needs would be much less. I don't know if aluminum can operate with such fluctuating power, but there are processes that can. At worst, bitcoin.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
xoa 7y ago
>I don't know if aluminum can operate with such fluctuating power In case you're curious, this came up a few years ago in a discussion and at least at the time I checked a typical Hall-Héroult electrolysis smelter could last without power for something like 4 hours or so, maybe 5, and some countries did in fact use them as part of their electrical grid control. But they can't have power interrupted indefinitely because the pots are permanently damaged and require replacement or extremely expensive repair if the liquid metal completely solidifies in them. The molten state represents a significant thermal mass hence the hours of lag time, but it can't just be remelted from total cool down either. I do wonder if an economical design could be made that specifically tried to enhance this aspect as a core design feature, some sort of vacuum insulation or the like perhaps to reduce passive thermal loss and bring outage time more towards 12 hours? But even at 4 apparently it can be good enough for moderation of some intermittent demand (which in turn means extremely cheap electricity). Using something like this as "energy storage" that is also directly economically productive seems worth pursuing though. Another possibility would be to investigate direct carbon extraction from the air, either for storage or to turn into fully synthetic net-neutral hydrocarbons. If the electricity is essentially free anyway, even enormously consuming processes like that could make sense.

cjbenedikt 7y ago

Just to add to the confusion: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fuels/environmental-impacts-of-natural-gas https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fu... While I know it isn't something averybidy is concerned about. But maybe should?

spenrose 7y ago

HN discussion yesterday comparing wind and nuclear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724676

gridlockd 7y ago

> "In the US, it's cheaper to build and operate wind farms than buy fossil fuels." That's not the headline. The headline is cheaper than natural gas, which is a relatively expensive fossil fuel, but also historically cheap at the moment. However, natural gas is great at providing power on-demand and at small scale, which is exactly what you need to even out the highly volatile output of wind energy. Natural gas and wind energy are complements, not competitors.

ThomPete 7y ago

Its not cheaper once you factor in the need for backup energy and thats the only fair way of calculating the cost of wind and solar for that matter.

diafygi 7y ago
Then why is wind + storage winning bids as the cheapest resource? https://www.utilitydive.com/news/xcel-solicitation-returns-incredible-renewable-energy-storage-bids/514287/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/xcel-solicitation-returns-i...
- ThomPete 7y ago
  It's not. Factor in the need for backup energy and remove subsidies and it will loose.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

Assuming trump loses, these expiring credits need to be extended or at least eetooled. By the next Congress and administration