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Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

157 points by Osiris30 7y ago

beat 7y ago
I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with wind at under $50/mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60/mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100/mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don't get unhelpfully pedantic!). These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear. Coal plants are shutting down as fast as replacements can be built, and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now. The cost of PV solar has dropped over 80% in the past decade, and wind like 50%, due to engineering improvements in operation and economies of scale in manufacturing. But it's a reasonable question how much farther their prices will drop. It seems unlikely to me that we'll see another decade of such radical price drops. Gas, on the other hand, is vulnerable to markets and availability. How long will it stay so cheap? And what happens if a politically progressive government gets serious about carbon taxing? On the other hand, it's a lot cheaper up-front to build a gas plant, and a lot less painful if it closes early.
- GuB-42 7y ago
  > and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now How? My understanding is that most of the cost of nuclear power comes from building the plant and decommissioning it. Running existing power plants for as long as they can seems like the most economical choice.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    Indeed. See page 2 (or 3, counting from the pdf) of this analysis by Lazard. In particular, the tan diamond symbol by nuclear (with a footnote). https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... Nuclear that's already built is very cheap AND has a very high capacity factor (i.e. doesn't need storage--although its value can be extended with storage).
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    In a word, price. As a consumer, do you want a bill for 2 cents a kWh? Or one for 15 cents a kWh? This example explainsa lot of what's happening: [1]. By way of a brief explanation, wind is expanding so fast in a lot of places that the combination of wind+LNG is just too cheap to compete with. Iowa is particularly bad, because wind is not "unreliable" in Iowa. There's a lot of wind and it's almost always blowing. So they aren't even using those LNG plants that much. Which only lowers the price to consumers even further. In some states the government has stepped in to protect the nuclear industry. Sometimes with things like carbon credits, that are given for generating power without generating carbon. Then the nuclear plants sell those credits on the free market to raise funds. But in some places government has had to be a good deal more draconian. In Georgia, they've basically made it illegal for anyone in Vogtie's service area to switch away. That's the only way they could get the math to work. (And it still doesn't work. The federal government is still pumping billions in cash into that project.) [1] - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/iowas-only-nuclear-power-plant-to-close-the-latest-blow-to-a-fading-industry https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/iowas-only-...
    - beat 7y ago
      An interesting factoid I ran across when researching this stuff a while back is that no one has ever built a new reactor in a deregulated electricity market. Period. The time frame of nuclear reactors is very long - like 50 years. So they're very sensitive to capital costs, and capital is sensitive to risk. Now, if you were doing the risk analysis on financing for a multibillion-dollar nuclear project, and you just saw the cost of a major competitor (solar) drop 80% in a decade... well, how would that factor into your risk analysis? How much would your interest rates increase? The only safe way to finance a reactor is government-based guarantees for price regulation - the nation will consume X megawatts for Y dollars, no matter what the market thinks the price should be. And do it in such a way that some government two generations down the road can't just throw it all out and screw you.
      - Recurecur 7y ago
        And that's one of the major arguments for mass produced small modular reactors. No one-off construction, flexible siting due to no water cooling, underground for security, and meltdown proof. Just walkaway safe electricity at five cents a KWH or less. :-) terrapower.com thorcon.com x-energy.com
  - Retric 7y ago
    Nuclear also has high operating costs, just not fuel costs. Solar can generally just be left alone for weeks or months at a time. Nuclear however needs security guards, regular maintenance, a highly trained workforce, large insurance premiums etc. On top of that it also needs some fuel. What’s happening with Nuclear is these older power plants occasionally need a significant overhaul and it’s at that point where they are considered too expensive.
    - beat 7y ago
      And a nuclear plant costs about the same to run whether it's running at 100%, or 20%. Fuel costs are negligible relative to capital and operational costs. So when lower-cost competition appears and eats into the demand for nuclear power, it actually increases the per-unit cost of nuclear power, which makes alternatives more compelling, which eats into demand, which turns into a cost death spiral.
      - zaarn 7y ago
        Nuclear plants are great for base demand for these reasons (ie, the power that is always needed 24 hours round the clock, 365 days a year). Alternative energies can provide some of that, meaning that plants need to shut down because outside of providing base demand, they're incredibly expensive to make power from.
  - beat 7y ago
    They're shutting down because it's cheaper to shutter them (even including the loss of interest on money set aside for decommissioning) than to continue operating them. Whatever seems "obvious" to us, the hardnosed managers responsible for the actual financial decisions are pulling the plug on dozens of reactors. If it seems irrational to us, it's because there are other cost factors we don't understand. That's why I like to look at the end, rather than make assumptions on what I think I know about the means.
    - cma 7y ago
      > If it seems irrational to us, it's because there are other cost factors we don't understand. Since they are shielded from almost all liability by law (something like $150 million liability cap + $12.5 billion industry fund; plausible disasters could reach $1 trillion+ depending on winds), it seems like there would probably be even more shutdowns if they had to pay for real insurance.
  - batmansmk 7y ago
    You are totally correct. US, France, Japan and UK all decided to extend the filetime of their nuclear power plants. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower/u-s-to-extend-nuclear-reactor-lifespans-in-bid-to-revive-industry-idUSKCN1U61YH https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower/u-s-to-e... Wind is cheap because when the wind blows, everybody is trying to sell their wind produced energy at the same time and the country often overproduces. In Germany, we even see negative prices when the wind blows; The price is low not because it does not cost a lot, but because it is heavily subsidized (wind is 60% of subsidies in Germany, for only 18% of the production) and needs to sell fast otherwise the fines and costs for overloading the network are massive.
    - beat 7y ago
      Negative prices? You'll pay me to take electricity off your hands that I can sell later? That's the best argument for the battery storage market I've seen yet... (And really, it makes sense. Generate surplus when the sun is shining or wind is especially strong, run from storage when demand exceeds supply, build both until there's enough. As long as the costs are less than current baseline systems, which seems possible, then it wins.)
      - fingerlocks 7y ago
        Negative prices are not uncommon. Happens nearly every spring in the Pacific Northwest when the mountain snowpack melts, flooding the rivers and surging the output of many hydroelectric dams. The negative prices are factored into the annual revenue, and consumer prices are sort-of averaged over the year which is why you never see it on your electric bill.
        glennpratt 7y ago
        I live in Portland. Last time I toured Bonneville, no turbines were operating on the East side. The ranger told us there was sufficient solar and wind at the time and they shutdown to protect aquatic life. Assuming that's true, I assume they'd also shutdown to protect thier pocket book.
- ph0rque 7y ago
  There's still a margin of soft costs that can be reduced (more in the residential than commercial/utility sectors, admittedly): https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72399.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72399.pdf
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Numbers for wind and solar are now about $40/MWh unsubsidized according to current LCOE analysis: https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... ...as you say, this is not the whole story as you still need storage (etc). But the floor for (unsubsidized) solar may be a lot lower than that. About $14/MWh: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-ultra-low-solar-bids-14-per-megawatt-hour https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-u... And we're already seeing bids nearly that low: https://www.pv-tech.org/news/brazil-auction-sets-record-low-solar-price-of-us17.5-mwh https://www.pv-tech.org/news/brazil-auction-sets-record-low-... Wind is also super cheap.
  - omarhaneef 7y ago
    Yes, we are seeing very low bids. $26-$30/MWh for solar doesn't even turn heads anymore. And battery costs are coming down too, and I think that curve looks more linear, but its coming down. One of the issues is that these costs are so capital intensive that the financing costs drive a lot of the price drop. With near zero or negative rates in so much of the world, I think its hard to tell what the real rates would be.
    - beat 7y ago
      Capital costs are a legit concern. If something happens in international markets that causes interest rates to spike globally, it will set back the pace of conversion tremendously.
      - Analemma_ 7y ago
        “Fortunately” we appear to be heading into a recession, so I doubt high interest rates are on the way any time soon.
      - toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Any way to leverage negative interest rates from developed countries into renewables? Very interested if someone knows how to facilitate such a bond issue.
- surfmike 7y ago
  Do those prices for solar and wind factor in storage?
  - beat 7y ago
    Depends. But wind doesn't really need storage... a broad-based wind grid delivers a pretty consistent base load, as we've learned from early adopters like Iowa and Texas that have over a decade of wind data at scale. edit: There's enough variation in wind farm output to maybe make some storage financially beneficial - production costs could actually go negative when there's enough wind.
    - bob1029 7y ago
      As a Texas resident who lives in the ERCOT region, I am going to have to vehemently disagree regarding the "consistent base load" that should allegedly be supplied by our wind farms. We had a day no fewer than 4 weeks ago that broke every record in terms of energy cost - for over 90 minutes our electricity cost 9 entire American dollars per KWh. We were <500MW of capacity away from rolling blackouts. The cause is the fact that we had bet a certain % of the base load would have been supplied by all the new wind farms, but in reality we had to fire up every peaker plant in the state, and even request assistance from other grids in order to meet demand. The wind simply wasn't blowing. If more of our mix had been natural gas, even just 5-8%, that event would have been completely mitigated.
      - powerbroker 7y ago
        Adding just 10%, to Nat Gas plants, would be 5,000 MW on the Texas grid. Given that wind farms were operating at 1/5th of capacity during this Texas grid events, you would need something like double the current installed wind farm base to be able to deliver 5,000 MW at that 1/5th capacity utilization. It has taken decades to get to the current, rough, 24,000 MW nameplate capacity for Texas to get to where it is.
      - matthewdgreen 7y ago
        So help me with the costs here. Adding 25,000 MWh (5,000MW * 5 hours emergency supply) of lithium battery storage would cost... what? As compared to constructing and operating new natural gas plants? I can't get clear numbers that I trust.
- batmansmk 7y ago
  Don't get fooled by simple price comparison. It's comparing apples and oranges. Gas, nuclear, coal, reversible dams, geothermy... are all controllable energy sources: they produce when we need it. Wind and solar are intermittent. Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment. What's happening is that countries migrating towards wind turbines like Germany also adds coal plant to the same capacity in order to compensate for when the wind doesn't blow. For each GW of wind one can find a GW of coal or gas being installed. Then, if we are talking about adding batteries into the mix to make it work, solar and wind become far from carbon neutral, and endangers us way more than nuclear.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I suspect that if variable electricity pricing for consumers, a great deal of the need for "batteries" will evaporate. Heavy consumer electric uses (charging the car, HVAC, hot water) can easily be time shifted. It isn't time shifted today because consumer electricity rates are constant 24/7.
    - mruts 7y ago
      The price for electricity already varies hour by hour. Maybe not as much as solar would, but most people (including me) are not paying a pegged price for electricity 24/7.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        Not in the Pacific Northwest (Puget Power). Also, to make this work best, appliances need to be connected to the internet and the power companies need to have an internet ABI where the current power price can be extracted by those appliances. At last, an actual use for internet connected appliances!
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        Pacific Power (Oregon) also has fixed rates.
- bobcostas55 7y ago
  The $/mwh for renewables is only part of the story. The intermittency costs they impose on the system as a whole is higher than the direct cost of producing the energy, and the only way to solve this is through improving battery technology by orders of magnitude. Additionally, the intermittency costs per mwh will increase as the share of renewable energy increases. In general, renewable energy investments right now are completely irrational in terms of the environmental impact, as they cost up to 10x more than the total social cost of the carbon emissions they are displacing. (And also much more than _current_ carbon sequestration tech!) [0] [0] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFIEPIC_WP_201962_v3.pdf https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFIEPIC_WP_20196...
- MarkMc 7y ago
  So cost of PV solar has dropped 80% over past decade - it it reasonable to expect another 40% drop over the coming decade? A quick Google search suggests that Solar PV efficiency is 11-22%. Could it be 20-35% in 2029?
GuB-42 7y ago
Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar and big batteries. Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.
- mpweiher 7y ago
  From TFA: "...to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems"
- smileysteve 7y ago
  Hydro can act as a giant battery and the reservoirs already exist in much of the US and Europe.
  - sdfasdfsafasf 7y ago
    And they've being used as storage since the earliest days of the grid. I.e., they're already doing the balancing
- fulafel 7y ago
  This assumes that we keep supply and demand pricing models mismatched. The current "fixed price 24/7" model is not set in stone. AC/heating, EV charging, many industrial processes can shift demand and make good forecasts about how flexible their demand is vs average intra-day variation in electricity prices.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    Not really, because seasonal variance is far greater than intraday variance.
  - generatorguy 7y ago
    I don't have a lot of hope for people changing their behaviour based on time of day pricing. Sure aluminum smelters etc might have to flag it for a day once every 5 years but they do that currently because there isn't enough power for everyone so please help us out and shutdown for a day instead cause we are going to dump you anyway because we have to decide between giving you power or this other major load such as a big city. Perhaps there is some gradient to this and it is achieved with price signals - but basically the forecast has to be 1000+ $/MWH for a whole day instead of just a couple high prices intervals or hours, and it has to be order of magnitude higher $/MWH not just $200/MWH instead of $80. If it is a low-wind evening and prices on the grid are higher than normal what fraction of people are going leave their electric cars with depleted batteries instead of charging them? Say a charge takes say 8 hours, there isn't a lot of room overnight to shift the load around. How many people will refrain from charging because it is going to cost you $50 instead of $10? I think the answer to that can be seen from how much people refrain from driving when fuel costs go up. Given that traffic never gets better I would say none! 1) electricity is cheap. it will have to get a lot more expensive for anyone to care enough to change the way they are using it 2) a lot of the demand is inflexible, regardless of price. lights are going to be on, dinner is going to be made when kids are hungry, car is going to be charged overnight because must go to work tomorrow. there is going to come a point where all wind and solar must have a certain amount of firm capacity - say it has to be able to deliver 50% of nameplate rating for 5 days straight - and this is going to significantly add to the $/MWH cost of renewables. Then after 5 cloudy days in a row (unthinkable!) the output of the solar farm is 10% of nameplate until it is sunny again.
timw4mail 7y ago
I don't see batteries being able to store the amount of power (for a practical battery lifetime to be cost effective) needed to make solar a practical primary electricity source.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  To make the system close for a single site (without any geographical diversity) is to produce about 3 times as much solar energy you need and install enough batteries to meet 48 hours of average demand. That's enough to deal with seasonality and with cloudy weather to provide a constant output for an entire year. The 48 hours of battery would last a really long time as typically only about 12 hours will need to be used, thus you'd get very long cycle life. A battery used so lightly could get 10,000 effective full cycles, so probably would last multiples of 25 years from a cycle life perspective (calendar life may be another thing). EDIT: If you add in geographical diversity and diversity in sources like wind, hydro, and geothermal, then you need to throw away a lot less energy and you need a lot less storage. IMHO, we should just bite the bullet and install a bunch of transmission lines (which could be done in 2 years, enabling us to decommission coal power within about 2 years in the US).
  - lstodd 7y ago
    Haha lol. Even in equatorial Africa 48h is not enough. Neither for actual usage, nor for battery life (and no one ever got marketing-leaflet-aka-datasheet-stated lifetime out of them batteries). Two years max, and hope either the project dies, or the company dies, or someone steals the batteries. Source: been there maintaning solar offgrid. And then --- geodiversity can only make it worse, never better.
    - generatorguy 7y ago
      Don't know why you are downvoted. I used to run solar powered sites that would have 5 rainy days in a row in which only about 10% of solar generation was delivered during daylight hours. We started with only enough batteries to last overnight and ended up with 10x that. Then we added 33% more when the first set of batteries had a short life due to getting so deeply discharged.
weregiraffe 7y ago
No they won't, unless the storage issue is solved.
- mpweiher 7y ago
  From TFA: "...to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems"
  - weregiraffe 7y ago
    Right, because writing this sentence makes the technology exist.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      But... it does? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/18/tesla-big-battery-is-holding-its-own-in-a-burgeoning-energy-storage-market https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/18/tesla-big... Plus stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit..., in use for well over a century.
      - weregiraffe 7y ago
        Neither can be scaled to power the entire human civilization. Not even close, in fact. Seriously, do some research.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  When the future arrives, lots of people will be amazed at how little of the solution to this "issue" ended up being storage as such and how much turned out to be demand management and reasonable system architecture.
  - weregiraffe 7y ago
    When the future arrives, we will build enough nuclear reactors.
Erudite_Genius 7y ago
There are at least 5 better alternatives to wind and solar, but we don't teach science any more in public schools. If we did, there wouldn't even BE climate change alarmist hysteria poised to destroy entire economies.
- reallydontask 7y ago
  could you name them and explain the rationale? genuinely curious
- tambre 7y ago
  Please explain your points instead of off-the-hip vague statements. I suggest you have a second look at the HN guidelines [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jandrese 7y ago
  Are you talking about natural gas? I can think of a couple of other renewable resources: Geothermal and Hydroelectric, but Geothermal is geographically limited and Hydroelectric has proven to have more environmental impact than we would like. I have no idea on what the other three could be. I guess you could include Nuclear in the list, but the price points on that make it hard to declare it better than Solar and Wind.
  - sunkenvicar 7y ago
    What are the severe environmental impacts of hydro?
    - prolepunk 7y ago
      Flooding, especially when building hydro in flat areas. Earthquakes -- there is some causality Destruction of fish habitat -- salmon in Columbia river In general, making water go slow when it used to go fast has a lot more negative consequence for the environment than one might expect. I find this episode of 99 percent invisible to be really informative -- https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fish-cannon/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fish-cannon/
wnevets 7y ago
Excess electric doesn't have to be in stored with chemicals like lithium ion, energy is still energy.
- phil248 7y ago
  True, it can be stored in salt for example, as it currently is in multiple operational concentrated solar plants. Some have the ability to maintain output during the entire night.
hash872 7y ago
Sorry to thread jack, but- important question: how are people reading Bloomberg now that they shut down incognito mode as of this week? Disabling Javascript doesn't seem to work either. I'm using Outline for the time being, but it's slow and annoying, and it won't load any longforms that contain multiple pictures or graphs. Anyone else have a better solution?
- magashna 7y ago
  Move on and find something else to read.
- anthonybsd 7y ago
  Bypass Paywalls extension
- sexisfun 7y ago
  https://outline.com/fFFeMw https://outline.com/fFFeMw
- Marsymars 7y ago
  Temporary containers with Firefox.
- perfunctory 7y ago
  Buy subscription?
- greenyoda 7y ago
  Works fine when I use the uMatrix add-on to disable cookies and JavaScript. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjalglgifnmanfmnieipoejdcf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjal...
  - hash872 7y ago
    Not sure if you'll see this, but this worked like a charm for me. Thank you!!
war1025 7y ago
My understanding (which is probably uninformed at best) has been that coal, nuclear, etc are used to cover base load, and basically work best when up and running at 100% all the time. Natural gas has the advantage that it can be spun up and down pretty quickly, which has meant that it is used primarily for "peak" load, which I think used to be covered a lot of the time by things such as diesel and oil plants and have basically been supplanted at this point by natural gas. Solar and wind have the trouble that they are unreliable, which means you need something to smooth out demand. This is something coal and nuclear are poor at, meaning if you are bringing solar and wind into the mix on a large scale, natural gas becomes even more appealing since you can spin it up / down to balance capacity. A thing I don't see mentioned very often is the relative density of each power source. One of the things nuclear and coal have going for them, is that you can supply a lot of electricity in a fairly limited footprint. Wind and solar a much less dense, meaning you need to cover a much larger area, and you need it to be more distributed rather than all concentrated in one place. All of this is to say that I think everything is inter-related much more than people realize. Shifting to using more solar / wind creates a pressure to move away from coal / nuclear even without considering the "clean energy" aspect.
- mpweiher 7y ago
  "...to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems" I think the "with storage systems" part is crucial here.
- baking 7y ago
  Excellent point. This should be the top comment. Buying up cheap solar and wind power during peak supply times and storing it for peak demand times should be more cost effective than building expensive gas/steam plants which would only operate for a few hours a day. It doesn't mean that we've found a solution for base load yet.
- beat 7y ago
  That's exactly what the market is doing, right now. The more wind/solar we get, the cheaper and more robust they are. And when they start costing a lot less than coal/nuclear (which is where we are now), then coal and nuclear basically collapse under their own cost - which is what is happening. The fact that gas saw a big cost cut around the same time is just accelerating the inevitable. But getting off carbon will require that wind/solar become significantly cheaper than gas as well as coal/nuclear. Which may be what happens over the next couple of decades.
kevinmhickey 7y ago
I read the headline too fast and thought it said "Gas planets Will Get Crushed by Solar Wind by 2035". Sounded terrifying.
- aasasd 7y ago
  I read it right the second time around, and had to think it over until I stopped imagining gas plants.
perfunctory 7y ago
Some time, in not so distant future, we will have abundant, almost infinite, almost free, renewable energy. We will forget what an energy bill is, because administration overhead will be higher than the price of the energy itself. It will just be an inconspicuous tiny item on the city taxes. And we won't think it's amazing. We'll take it for granted. It will become new normal. Just like now we don't remember any more what it feels like not being reachable by phone when you go out for dinner with your friends. Mark my words.
- flyinglizard 7y ago
  It's not so simple, because energy consumption is restrained by its cost. There are also grids that will need expansion and maintenance, and both solar and winds need either baseline energy backing (such as nuclear or gas) and/or storage.
  - beat 7y ago
    A wind-based grid, at scale, is actually a reliable baseline. We have over a decade of solid data on it now, from Iowa and Texas. Wind is much more reliable than you think.
    - thfuran 7y ago
      Just how reliable are we talking? The odds of being unable to fully service demand for even a single day should be really, really low for infrastructure like electrical or water supply.
      - beat 7y ago
        Reliable enough to say "Wind will provide at least this much power, even on a "non-windy" day. Also, keep in mind that wind is much, much steadier 200 feet in the air than it is on the ground, where it's subject to all sorts of disruptions and irregularities.
        7y ago
privateSFacct 7y ago
RMI has been pushing hydrogen cars for a while. I was never a big fan of their analysis there - so take their conclusions with a bit of a grain of doubt. Ironically gas and solar / wind sometimes go together with gas filling gaps in generation on a more flexible basis. Interesting to read here that gas will be "crushed". That will need some huge battery capacity - not saying its not possible but... Coal though - if article was coal is going to be crushed - sure.
effnorwood 7y ago
They won’t.
philipkglass 7y ago
1) I think it's certainly possible, but 2035 is still some time out. Extrapolating battery costs 16 years from now is not at all straightforward. 2) The headline result can be true even if solar/wind/storage have significant annual gaps in availability. If a gas plant was originally built on the assumption that it could run profitably for 5000 hours per year, but in the future there are only 2000 hours a year it can run profitably (due to more solar/wind), it can be financially "crushed." At least in competitive electricity markets. There could be large writedowns as plant load factors decline. Since gas plants are much less labor intensive to keep running than coal plants, I don't expect to see gas plants mothballed and demolished quite the way American coal plants have been over the past 5 years. They may still be profitable to run in the peak-demand season each year even with much more renewable capacity deployed. But they'll make less revenue and profit, burn less fuel, and emit less CO2.
- makomk 7y ago
  I'd venture a guess that solar/wind/storage would have significant gaps in availability in this scenario. The economics of battery storage solutions scales really badly as the length of the gaps they need to fill increases. Not only does the capital cost of batteries increase in proportion to the runtime required, the utilization plummets due to longer gaps being less common and predictable than shorter ones. I can easily see it becoming uneconomical to provide a reliable electricity grid. Unfortunately, one of the other anti-global-warming measures that's being pushed for in this timescale in at least some European countries is switching to electricity for heating.
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    I think that you're probably right about gaps remaining, for basically the reasons you have given. And for that reason I don't expect mass demolition of American gas plants in the 2030s the way there was mass demolition of American coal plants in the 2010s. The growth of gas capacity is alarming to many environmentalists; the phrase is that we're "locking in" decades of high emissions from gas fired electrical generators. But gas plants release the vast majority of their emissions during operation, not construction. Diminishing the plant load factor of gas plants is as good from an emissions-cuts standpoint as tearing them down. What do you do when the wind isn't blowing, the batteries are discharged, and it's night time? Burn gas. But the number of hours per year where at least one of {batteries, wind, solar} can bid below gas will go up year after year, whereas that number was essentially holding steady at zero through the whole 20th century. This brief sketch is most applicable to deregulated electricity markets. In markets with regulated utility monopolies, unfortunately, gas plants will be subject to less competition even if the cost of storage-backed renewables keeps declining steadily. The majority of US electricity consumption now takes place in deregulated states but it's far from universal. https://www.electricchoice.com/map-deregulated-energy-markets/ https://www.electricchoice.com/map-deregulated-energy-market...
jdoggie 7y ago
Clean energy sounds good to me!!
darksaints 7y ago
I'm interested in understanding how this will play out with the electrification of cars. As it stands now, the production and distribution infrastructure is mostly used for homes. But you could easily double your home's electric consumption with an electric car traveling just 10 miles per day. If we see a quick change in electric car adoption, our production and distribution systems are going to be massively strained. We might be keeping gas and coal powerplants online just for capacity reasons alone.
- foota 7y ago
  Really? A quick Google shows a Tesla gets ~3 miles per kwh, so 10 miles would only be about 3 kwh. A kwh is about ten cents where I live iirc. Power's like $50 a month. So I use about ($50/10 cents)/30 ~ 13-14 kwh a day. So 10 miles a day would be more like 20%. That said though, a quick search shows vehicle miles travelled per capita in the US is 10k, so closer to 30 miles a day, or 9 kwh. However, vehicles can be charged off peak in a lot of places (hot places peak during the day in the summer) so can be charged at night.
- gibybo 7y ago
  300 wh/mile seems to be about what most electric cars achieve. 10 miles/day * 300 wh/mile * 30 days = 90 kWh. The average monthly energy consumption per capita in the U.S. is about 1000 kWh[1], so in order to double that with electric cars every individual would need to drive an average of 110 miles per day. [1] https://www.worlddata.info/america/usa/energy-consumption.php https://www.worlddata.info/america/usa/energy-consumption.ph...
  - mruts 7y ago
    1000 kWh/month? That seems like a buttload to me. I used to live in the US (though I never measured how much I used there) and currently, average between 6-15 KWh/day. I know this because I live in a 3rd world country and must pre-pay for my electricity by going down to the local equivalent of a corner store to add power. And I don't even turn off most of my lights at night.
- fooblitzky 7y ago
Merrill 7y ago
>"The authors of the study say they analyzed the costs of construction, fuel and anticipated operations for 68 gigawatts of gas plants proposed across the U.S. They compared those costs to building a combination of solar farms, wind plants and battery systems that, together with conservation efforts, could supply the same amount of electricity and keep the grid stable." If the same amount of electricity is being supplied, why are conservation efforts needed? Has anyone downloaded the reports from Rocky Mountain Institute? They want your email address.
- makomk 7y ago
  I had a look at the report and it looks fishy. They're not actually comparing the cost of gas plants with the cost of wind, solar and storage - they're comparing with a hypothetical "clean energy portfolio" consisting of whatever combination of energy efficiency improvements, demand shifting, wind, solar and storage their model reckons is cheapest, effectively modelling energy conservation as a source of electricity that replaces gas power plant outputs. This makes very little sense; there's nothing inherent about efficiency improvements or demand flexibility that restricts them to being used with renewables rather than gas power. That's not the only dodgy thing either. Their proposal generates substantial excess energy throughout most of the year. In order to improve its cost effectiveness, they assume that excess energy has a value of $15/KWh and subtract that income from the cost of the renewable program. The actual value of this energy is probably close to zero; remember, we're talking about energy that has gone unused even after substantial use of demand shifting and storage.
gkolli 7y ago
What are the steps into getting there? What are the biggest roadblocks - scientific or political?
jpadkins 7y ago
link to 2 page summary of the study https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/clean-energy-portfolio-two-pager.pdf https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/clean-energy-port...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
trenning 7y ago
Something I'm curious about is how this will affect plant manufacturers. Specifically I'm thinking about generator manufacturers like MHI, Siemens, GE, Toshiba. Do they just shut those divisions down and move on? There's also a lot of other businesses that exist for building/maintaining/repairing plants and equipment that are non-OE and their futures seem grim.
heyflyguy 7y ago
When I see studies of this nature I always think that it is such beautiful idea to be living in a clean world. To be clear, I work in the petroleum industry; so this would most certainly be an obvious end to my line of work. I will hopefully be living in the keys by 2035. At the rate our world population is expanding, I have to wonder if there is simply enough surface area we can turn over to power generation and lose it to things such as farming and other agriculture. We are learning to farm land previously thought too arid for non-hearty crops.
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago
The report in question: https://rmi.org/insight/clean-energy-portfolios-pipelines-and-plants https://rmi.org/insight/clean-energy-portfolios-pipelines-an...
hairytrog 7y ago
I downloaded the study - it's long and filled with pictures so haven't read yet. I expect they made the mistake of not taking into account the increase in cost due to a primarily renewable grid. Such massive changes in the type of generating supply will yield massive changes in the costs to supply power. As you remove all the dispatchable power sources (power generators that you can put on line at will) you have to build really big heat or electricity storage and would have to have emergency generating capacity for the potential of extremely low wind and sun for days and weeks at a time. Basically, you'd have to have all the natural gas generators and pipelines for the eventuality of bad renewable conditions. Who will pay for that? Just leaving them idle 95% of the time is not the best use of money and it's possible the government may have to pay for renewable's storage problems. Geography is also a serious concern. Texas will have vastly different economics than than Washington or New York.
- usrusr 7y ago
  > Basically, you'd have to have all the natural gas generators and pipelines for the eventuality of bad renewable conditions. Who will pay for that? Ideally the operators of facilities that tackle the storage problem with power-to-gas technology. It's by far the most scalable storage option and the discharge part of the cycle is already up and running.
powerbroker 7y ago
On the week of August 12, the Texas grid, managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) maxed out at around 75,000 MW of load. On one of the worst days, the approx. 24,000 MW nameplate capacity wind farms on that grid produced about 4,500 MW at the absolute peaks of demand. In other words, wind farms produced 18% or so of their maximum rated capacity. This is a typical pattern during the dog days of August. Winds lull during the late afternoon, and pickup after midnight. Winds farms, on an annual basis, provide 22% of Texas electricity generation. However, during these peak demand hours, natural gas contributed about 50,000 MW, with coal and nuclear distant second and third place. If Texas wind farms are to displace the gas-fired plants, there will need to be 10-fold increase in their numbers, or somehow solar and battery storage will have to step in. Saying that wind is going to crush gas, is only half true. Currently, the pipeline of new generators being built in Texas has slightly more wind (capacity factor ~ 40%) being installed than gas. Solar, during the next 5 years, is being built (allowing for capacity factor ~ 20%) at about the same rate (~12,000 averaged MW). You could call these technologies the 'three amigos', as they will be appearing, as new generating capacity, in (very) roughly equal amounts. Nevertheless, gas plants are a unique, and necessary part of the future, due to their dispatch ability. They can literally be called upon to deliver electricity 24/7/365. Importantly, one hour of generation during these peak periods costs 450 times the average generator's fees for electricity. In other words, one hour of a natural gas plant's output, during these near-black-out conditions (properly termed Energy Emergency Alert), earns them as much as running those plants, non-stop, the previous 19 days. These extreme spikes haven't happened in Texas for a few years. Still, there is lots of opportunity for the gas plants to be the 'high rollers' of the Texas grid during their expected 30+ years of operation. Peak usage week: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/August_PUC_Presentation_FINAL.PDF http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/August_PUC_Pre... Energy Emergency alert: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/EEA_OnePager_FINAL.PDF http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/EEA_OnePager_F...
- philipkglass 7y ago
  The renewable capacity on the ERCOT grid is overwhelmingly wind-based since wind has been much cheaper than solar until the last handful of years. Its output tends to peak at night. I think a lot of the peak-demand opportunity for gas in Texas is going to be blunted by solar and battery projects coming online soon. "Can more solar help Texas meet peak demand?" https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/08/13/can-solar-help-ercot-meet-peak-demand/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/08/13/can-solar-help-ercot-... There is a truly awesome amount of solar on the way in Texas, with ERCOT’s July interconnection report showing 62 GW of solar projects. And while given the highly speculative nature of project development most of those will likely not be built, there are nearly 9 GW of projects that have interconnection agreements, including 3.2 GW that have a full interconnection study completed. Those projects that can secure financing and get built will come online over the next few years. It is difficult to say which ones will be online by next summer, but a June ERCOT report identified 1.3 GW of projects with interconnection agreements and financial security posted that are expected to come online later this year, a number which should grow as the year progresses. "Developer eyes world's largest solar+storage facility for Texas" https://www.utilitydive.com/news/developer-eyes-worlds-largest-solarstorage-facility-for-texas/548691/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/developer-eyes-worlds-large... "Energy Storage Developer Buys Texas Windfarms With Major Battery Retrofit Planned" https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnparnell/2019/08/24/energy-storage-developer-buy-texas-windfarms-with-major-battery-retrofit-planned/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnparnell/2019/08/24/energy-s... "GlidePath Builds Merchant Battery Plant in ERCOT, Bucking Industry Wisdom" https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/glidepath-bucked-the-industry-trend-and-built-a-merchant-plant-in-ercot https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/glidepath-bucke...
HocusLocus 7y ago
No they won't, unless the storage issue is solved. (A comment someone else made and it got greyed out by the "we hate your poopy face!" crowd.) And even if it IS solved. After outside wind and solar infrastructure is destroyed by the next continent wide Winter superstorm, how would having a few hours (or days) of storage help?

157 points by Osiris30 7y ago

beat 7y ago

I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with wind at under $50/mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60/mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100/mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don't get unhelpfully pedantic!). These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear. Coal plants are shutting down as fast as replacements can be built, and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now. The cost of PV solar has dropped over 80% in the past decade, and wind like 50%, due to engineering improvements in operation and economies of scale in manufacturing. But it's a reasonable question how much farther their prices will drop. It seems unlikely to me that we'll see another decade of such radical price drops. Gas, on the other hand, is vulnerable to markets and availability. How long will it stay so cheap? And what happens if a politically progressive government gets serious about carbon taxing? On the other hand, it's a lot cheaper up-front to build a gas plant, and a lot less painful if it closes early.

GuB-42 7y ago
> and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now How? My understanding is that most of the cost of nuclear power comes from building the plant and decommissioning it. Running existing power plants for as long as they can seems like the most economical choice.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Indeed. See page 2 (or 3, counting from the pdf) of this analysis by Lazard. In particular, the tan diamond symbol by nuclear (with a footnote). https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... Nuclear that's already built is very cheap AND has a very high capacity factor (i.e. doesn't need storage--although its value can be extended with storage).
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  In a word, price. As a consumer, do you want a bill for 2 cents a kWh? Or one for 15 cents a kWh? This example explainsa lot of what's happening: [1]. By way of a brief explanation, wind is expanding so fast in a lot of places that the combination of wind+LNG is just too cheap to compete with. Iowa is particularly bad, because wind is not "unreliable" in Iowa. There's a lot of wind and it's almost always blowing. So they aren't even using those LNG plants that much. Which only lowers the price to consumers even further. In some states the government has stepped in to protect the nuclear industry. Sometimes with things like carbon credits, that are given for generating power without generating carbon. Then the nuclear plants sell those credits on the free market to raise funds. But in some places government has had to be a good deal more draconian. In Georgia, they've basically made it illegal for anyone in Vogtie's service area to switch away. That's the only way they could get the math to work. (And it still doesn't work. The federal government is still pumping billions in cash into that project.) [1] - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/iowas-only-nuclear-power-plant-to-close-the-latest-blow-to-a-fading-industry https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/iowas-only-...
  - beat 7y ago
    An interesting factoid I ran across when researching this stuff a while back is that no one has ever built a new reactor in a deregulated electricity market. Period. The time frame of nuclear reactors is very long - like 50 years. So they're very sensitive to capital costs, and capital is sensitive to risk. Now, if you were doing the risk analysis on financing for a multibillion-dollar nuclear project, and you just saw the cost of a major competitor (solar) drop 80% in a decade... well, how would that factor into your risk analysis? How much would your interest rates increase? The only safe way to finance a reactor is government-based guarantees for price regulation - the nation will consume X megawatts for Y dollars, no matter what the market thinks the price should be. And do it in such a way that some government two generations down the road can't just throw it all out and screw you.
    - Recurecur 7y ago
      And that's one of the major arguments for mass produced small modular reactors. No one-off construction, flexible siting due to no water cooling, underground for security, and meltdown proof. Just walkaway safe electricity at five cents a KWH or less. :-) terrapower.com thorcon.com x-energy.com
- Retric 7y ago
  Nuclear also has high operating costs, just not fuel costs. Solar can generally just be left alone for weeks or months at a time. Nuclear however needs security guards, regular maintenance, a highly trained workforce, large insurance premiums etc. On top of that it also needs some fuel. What’s happening with Nuclear is these older power plants occasionally need a significant overhaul and it’s at that point where they are considered too expensive.
  - beat 7y ago
    And a nuclear plant costs about the same to run whether it's running at 100%, or 20%. Fuel costs are negligible relative to capital and operational costs. So when lower-cost competition appears and eats into the demand for nuclear power, it actually increases the per-unit cost of nuclear power, which makes alternatives more compelling, which eats into demand, which turns into a cost death spiral.
    - zaarn 7y ago
      Nuclear plants are great for base demand for these reasons (ie, the power that is always needed 24 hours round the clock, 365 days a year). Alternative energies can provide some of that, meaning that plants need to shut down because outside of providing base demand, they're incredibly expensive to make power from.
- beat 7y ago
  They're shutting down because it's cheaper to shutter them (even including the loss of interest on money set aside for decommissioning) than to continue operating them. Whatever seems "obvious" to us, the hardnosed managers responsible for the actual financial decisions are pulling the plug on dozens of reactors. If it seems irrational to us, it's because there are other cost factors we don't understand. That's why I like to look at the end, rather than make assumptions on what I think I know about the means.
  - cma 7y ago
    > If it seems irrational to us, it's because there are other cost factors we don't understand. Since they are shielded from almost all liability by law (something like $150 million liability cap + $12.5 billion industry fund; plausible disasters could reach $1 trillion+ depending on winds), it seems like there would probably be even more shutdowns if they had to pay for real insurance.
- batmansmk 7y ago
  You are totally correct. US, France, Japan and UK all decided to extend the filetime of their nuclear power plants. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower/u-s-to-extend-nuclear-reactor-lifespans-in-bid-to-revive-industry-idUSKCN1U61YH https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower/u-s-to-e... Wind is cheap because when the wind blows, everybody is trying to sell their wind produced energy at the same time and the country often overproduces. In Germany, we even see negative prices when the wind blows; The price is low not because it does not cost a lot, but because it is heavily subsidized (wind is 60% of subsidies in Germany, for only 18% of the production) and needs to sell fast otherwise the fines and costs for overloading the network are massive.
  - beat 7y ago
    Negative prices? You'll pay me to take electricity off your hands that I can sell later? That's the best argument for the battery storage market I've seen yet... (And really, it makes sense. Generate surplus when the sun is shining or wind is especially strong, run from storage when demand exceeds supply, build both until there's enough. As long as the costs are less than current baseline systems, which seems possible, then it wins.)
    - fingerlocks 7y ago
      Negative prices are not uncommon. Happens nearly every spring in the Pacific Northwest when the mountain snowpack melts, flooding the rivers and surging the output of many hydroelectric dams. The negative prices are factored into the annual revenue, and consumer prices are sort-of averaged over the year which is why you never see it on your electric bill.
      - glennpratt 7y ago
        I live in Portland. Last time I toured Bonneville, no turbines were operating on the East side. The ranger told us there was sufficient solar and wind at the time and they shutdown to protect aquatic life. Assuming that's true, I assume they'd also shutdown to protect thier pocket book.
ph0rque 7y ago
There's still a margin of soft costs that can be reduced (more in the residential than commercial/utility sectors, admittedly): https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72399.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72399.pdf
Robotbeat 7y ago
Numbers for wind and solar are now about $40/MWh unsubsidized according to current LCOE analysis: https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... ...as you say, this is not the whole story as you still need storage (etc). But the floor for (unsubsidized) solar may be a lot lower than that. About $14/MWh: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-ultra-low-solar-bids-14-per-megawatt-hour https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-u... And we're already seeing bids nearly that low: https://www.pv-tech.org/news/brazil-auction-sets-record-low-solar-price-of-us17.5-mwh https://www.pv-tech.org/news/brazil-auction-sets-record-low-... Wind is also super cheap.
- omarhaneef 7y ago
  Yes, we are seeing very low bids. $26-$30/MWh for solar doesn't even turn heads anymore. And battery costs are coming down too, and I think that curve looks more linear, but its coming down. One of the issues is that these costs are so capital intensive that the financing costs drive a lot of the price drop. With near zero or negative rates in so much of the world, I think its hard to tell what the real rates would be.
  - beat 7y ago
    Capital costs are a legit concern. If something happens in international markets that causes interest rates to spike globally, it will set back the pace of conversion tremendously.
    - Analemma_ 7y ago
      “Fortunately” we appear to be heading into a recession, so I doubt high interest rates are on the way any time soon.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      Any way to leverage negative interest rates from developed countries into renewables? Very interested if someone knows how to facilitate such a bond issue.
surfmike 7y ago
Do those prices for solar and wind factor in storage?
- beat 7y ago
  Depends. But wind doesn't really need storage... a broad-based wind grid delivers a pretty consistent base load, as we've learned from early adopters like Iowa and Texas that have over a decade of wind data at scale. edit: There's enough variation in wind farm output to maybe make some storage financially beneficial - production costs could actually go negative when there's enough wind.
  - bob1029 7y ago
    As a Texas resident who lives in the ERCOT region, I am going to have to vehemently disagree regarding the "consistent base load" that should allegedly be supplied by our wind farms. We had a day no fewer than 4 weeks ago that broke every record in terms of energy cost - for over 90 minutes our electricity cost 9 entire American dollars per KWh. We were <500MW of capacity away from rolling blackouts. The cause is the fact that we had bet a certain % of the base load would have been supplied by all the new wind farms, but in reality we had to fire up every peaker plant in the state, and even request assistance from other grids in order to meet demand. The wind simply wasn't blowing. If more of our mix had been natural gas, even just 5-8%, that event would have been completely mitigated.
    - powerbroker 7y ago
      Adding just 10%, to Nat Gas plants, would be 5,000 MW on the Texas grid. Given that wind farms were operating at 1/5th of capacity during this Texas grid events, you would need something like double the current installed wind farm base to be able to deliver 5,000 MW at that 1/5th capacity utilization. It has taken decades to get to the current, rough, 24,000 MW nameplate capacity for Texas to get to where it is.
    - matthewdgreen 7y ago
      So help me with the costs here. Adding 25,000 MWh (5,000MW * 5 hours emergency supply) of lithium battery storage would cost... what? As compared to constructing and operating new natural gas plants? I can't get clear numbers that I trust.
batmansmk 7y ago
Don't get fooled by simple price comparison. It's comparing apples and oranges. Gas, nuclear, coal, reversible dams, geothermy... are all controllable energy sources: they produce when we need it. Wind and solar are intermittent. Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment. What's happening is that countries migrating towards wind turbines like Germany also adds coal plant to the same capacity in order to compensate for when the wind doesn't blow. For each GW of wind one can find a GW of coal or gas being installed. Then, if we are talking about adding batteries into the mix to make it work, solar and wind become far from carbon neutral, and endangers us way more than nuclear.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I suspect that if variable electricity pricing for consumers, a great deal of the need for "batteries" will evaporate. Heavy consumer electric uses (charging the car, HVAC, hot water) can easily be time shifted. It isn't time shifted today because consumer electricity rates are constant 24/7.
  - mruts 7y ago
    The price for electricity already varies hour by hour. Maybe not as much as solar would, but most people (including me) are not paying a pegged price for electricity 24/7.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      Not in the Pacific Northwest (Puget Power). Also, to make this work best, appliances need to be connected to the internet and the power companies need to have an internet ABI where the current power price can be extracted by those appliances. At last, an actual use for internet connected appliances!
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      Pacific Power (Oregon) also has fixed rates.
bobcostas55 7y ago
The $/mwh for renewables is only part of the story. The intermittency costs they impose on the system as a whole is higher than the direct cost of producing the energy, and the only way to solve this is through improving battery technology by orders of magnitude. Additionally, the intermittency costs per mwh will increase as the share of renewable energy increases. In general, renewable energy investments right now are completely irrational in terms of the environmental impact, as they cost up to 10x more than the total social cost of the carbon emissions they are displacing. (And also much more than _current_ carbon sequestration tech!) [0] [0] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFIEPIC_WP_201962_v3.pdf https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFIEPIC_WP_20196...
MarkMc 7y ago
So cost of PV solar has dropped 80% over past decade - it it reasonable to expect another 40% drop over the coming decade? A quick Google search suggests that Solar PV efficiency is 11-22%. Could it be 20-35% in 2029?

GuB-42 7y ago

Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar and big batteries. Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.

mpweiher 7y ago
From TFA: "...to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems"
smileysteve 7y ago
Hydro can act as a giant battery and the reservoirs already exist in much of the US and Europe.
- sdfasdfsafasf 7y ago
  And they've being used as storage since the earliest days of the grid. I.e., they're already doing the balancing
fulafel 7y ago
This assumes that we keep supply and demand pricing models mismatched. The current "fixed price 24/7" model is not set in stone. AC/heating, EV charging, many industrial processes can shift demand and make good forecasts about how flexible their demand is vs average intra-day variation in electricity prices.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  Not really, because seasonal variance is far greater than intraday variance.
- generatorguy 7y ago
  I don't have a lot of hope for people changing their behaviour based on time of day pricing. Sure aluminum smelters etc might have to flag it for a day once every 5 years but they do that currently because there isn't enough power for everyone so please help us out and shutdown for a day instead cause we are going to dump you anyway because we have to decide between giving you power or this other major load such as a big city. Perhaps there is some gradient to this and it is achieved with price signals - but basically the forecast has to be 1000+ $/MWH for a whole day instead of just a couple high prices intervals or hours, and it has to be order of magnitude higher $/MWH not just $200/MWH instead of $80. If it is a low-wind evening and prices on the grid are higher than normal what fraction of people are going leave their electric cars with depleted batteries instead of charging them? Say a charge takes say 8 hours, there isn't a lot of room overnight to shift the load around. How many people will refrain from charging because it is going to cost you $50 instead of $10? I think the answer to that can be seen from how much people refrain from driving when fuel costs go up. Given that traffic never gets better I would say none! 1) electricity is cheap. it will have to get a lot more expensive for anyone to care enough to change the way they are using it 2) a lot of the demand is inflexible, regardless of price. lights are going to be on, dinner is going to be made when kids are hungry, car is going to be charged overnight because must go to work tomorrow. there is going to come a point where all wind and solar must have a certain amount of firm capacity - say it has to be able to deliver 50% of nameplate rating for 5 days straight - and this is going to significantly add to the $/MWH cost of renewables. Then after 5 cloudy days in a row (unthinkable!) the output of the solar farm is 10% of nameplate until it is sunny again.

timw4mail 7y ago

I don't see batteries being able to store the amount of power (for a practical battery lifetime to be cost effective) needed to make solar a practical primary electricity source.

Robotbeat 7y ago
To make the system close for a single site (without any geographical diversity) is to produce about 3 times as much solar energy you need and install enough batteries to meet 48 hours of average demand. That's enough to deal with seasonality and with cloudy weather to provide a constant output for an entire year. The 48 hours of battery would last a really long time as typically only about 12 hours will need to be used, thus you'd get very long cycle life. A battery used so lightly could get 10,000 effective full cycles, so probably would last multiples of 25 years from a cycle life perspective (calendar life may be another thing). EDIT: If you add in geographical diversity and diversity in sources like wind, hydro, and geothermal, then you need to throw away a lot less energy and you need a lot less storage. IMHO, we should just bite the bullet and install a bunch of transmission lines (which could be done in 2 years, enabling us to decommission coal power within about 2 years in the US).
- lstodd 7y ago
  Haha lol. Even in equatorial Africa 48h is not enough. Neither for actual usage, nor for battery life (and no one ever got marketing-leaflet-aka-datasheet-stated lifetime out of them batteries). Two years max, and hope either the project dies, or the company dies, or someone steals the batteries. Source: been there maintaning solar offgrid. And then --- geodiversity can only make it worse, never better.
  - generatorguy 7y ago
    Don't know why you are downvoted. I used to run solar powered sites that would have 5 rainy days in a row in which only about 10% of solar generation was delivered during daylight hours. We started with only enough batteries to last overnight and ended up with 10x that. Then we added 33% more when the first set of batteries had a short life due to getting so deeply discharged.

weregiraffe 7y ago

No they won't, unless the storage issue is solved.

mpweiher 7y ago
From TFA: "...to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems"
- weregiraffe 7y ago
  Right, because writing this sentence makes the technology exist.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    But... it does? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/18/tesla-big-battery-is-holding-its-own-in-a-burgeoning-energy-storage-market https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/18/tesla-big... Plus stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit..., in use for well over a century.
    - weregiraffe 7y ago
      Neither can be scaled to power the entire human civilization. Not even close, in fact. Seriously, do some research.
jessaustin 7y ago
When the future arrives, lots of people will be amazed at how little of the solution to this "issue" ended up being storage as such and how much turned out to be demand management and reasonable system architecture.
- weregiraffe 7y ago
  When the future arrives, we will build enough nuclear reactors.

Erudite_Genius 7y ago

There are at least 5 better alternatives to wind and solar, but we don't teach science any more in public schools. If we did, there wouldn't even BE climate change alarmist hysteria poised to destroy entire economies.

reallydontask 7y ago
could you name them and explain the rationale? genuinely curious
tambre 7y ago
Please explain your points instead of off-the-hip vague statements. I suggest you have a second look at the HN guidelines [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jandrese 7y ago
Are you talking about natural gas? I can think of a couple of other renewable resources: Geothermal and Hydroelectric, but Geothermal is geographically limited and Hydroelectric has proven to have more environmental impact than we would like. I have no idea on what the other three could be. I guess you could include Nuclear in the list, but the price points on that make it hard to declare it better than Solar and Wind.
- sunkenvicar 7y ago
  What are the severe environmental impacts of hydro?
  - prolepunk 7y ago
    Flooding, especially when building hydro in flat areas. Earthquakes -- there is some causality Destruction of fish habitat -- salmon in Columbia river In general, making water go slow when it used to go fast has a lot more negative consequence for the environment than one might expect. I find this episode of 99 percent invisible to be really informative -- https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fish-cannon/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fish-cannon/

wnevets 7y ago

Excess electric doesn't have to be in stored with chemicals like lithium ion, energy is still energy.

phil248 7y ago
True, it can be stored in salt for example, as it currently is in multiple operational concentrated solar plants. Some have the ability to maintain output during the entire night.

hash872 7y ago

Sorry to thread jack, but- important question: how are people reading Bloomberg now that they shut down incognito mode as of this week? Disabling Javascript doesn't seem to work either. I'm using Outline for the time being, but it's slow and annoying, and it won't load any longforms that contain multiple pictures or graphs. Anyone else have a better solution?

magashna 7y ago
Move on and find something else to read.
anthonybsd 7y ago
Bypass Paywalls extension
sexisfun 7y ago
https://outline.com/fFFeMw https://outline.com/fFFeMw
Marsymars 7y ago
Temporary containers with Firefox.
perfunctory 7y ago
Buy subscription?
greenyoda 7y ago
Works fine when I use the uMatrix add-on to disable cookies and JavaScript. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjalglgifnmanfmnieipoejdcf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjal...
- hash872 7y ago
  Not sure if you'll see this, but this worked like a charm for me. Thank you!!

war1025 7y ago

My understanding (which is probably uninformed at best) has been that coal, nuclear, etc are used to cover base load, and basically work best when up and running at 100% all the time. Natural gas has the advantage that it can be spun up and down pretty quickly, which has meant that it is used primarily for "peak" load, which I think used to be covered a lot of the time by things such as diesel and oil plants and have basically been supplanted at this point by natural gas. Solar and wind have the trouble that they are unreliable, which means you need something to smooth out demand. This is something coal and nuclear are poor at, meaning if you are bringing solar and wind into the mix on a large scale, natural gas becomes even more appealing since you can spin it up / down to balance capacity. A thing I don't see mentioned very often is the relative density of each power source. One of the things nuclear and coal have going for them, is that you can supply a lot of electricity in a fairly limited footprint. Wind and solar a much less dense, meaning you need to cover a much larger area, and you need it to be more distributed rather than all concentrated in one place. All of this is to say that I think everything is inter-related much more than people realize. Shifting to using more solar / wind creates a pressure to move away from coal / nuclear even without considering the "clean energy" aspect.

mpweiher 7y ago
"...to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems" I think the "with storage systems" part is crucial here.
baking 7y ago
Excellent point. This should be the top comment. Buying up cheap solar and wind power during peak supply times and storing it for peak demand times should be more cost effective than building expensive gas/steam plants which would only operate for a few hours a day. It doesn't mean that we've found a solution for base load yet.
beat 7y ago
That's exactly what the market is doing, right now. The more wind/solar we get, the cheaper and more robust they are. And when they start costing a lot less than coal/nuclear (which is where we are now), then coal and nuclear basically collapse under their own cost - which is what is happening. The fact that gas saw a big cost cut around the same time is just accelerating the inevitable. But getting off carbon will require that wind/solar become significantly cheaper than gas as well as coal/nuclear. Which may be what happens over the next couple of decades.

kevinmhickey 7y ago

I read the headline too fast and thought it said "Gas planets Will Get Crushed by Solar Wind by 2035". Sounded terrifying.

aasasd 7y ago
I read it right the second time around, and had to think it over until I stopped imagining gas plants.

perfunctory 7y ago

Some time, in not so distant future, we will have abundant, almost infinite, almost free, renewable energy. We will forget what an energy bill is, because administration overhead will be higher than the price of the energy itself. It will just be an inconspicuous tiny item on the city taxes. And we won't think it's amazing. We'll take it for granted. It will become new normal. Just like now we don't remember any more what it feels like not being reachable by phone when you go out for dinner with your friends. Mark my words.

flyinglizard 7y ago
It's not so simple, because energy consumption is restrained by its cost. There are also grids that will need expansion and maintenance, and both solar and winds need either baseline energy backing (such as nuclear or gas) and/or storage.
- beat 7y ago
  A wind-based grid, at scale, is actually a reliable baseline. We have over a decade of solid data on it now, from Iowa and Texas. Wind is much more reliable than you think.
  - thfuran 7y ago
    Just how reliable are we talking? The odds of being unable to fully service demand for even a single day should be really, really low for infrastructure like electrical or water supply.
    - beat 7y ago
      Reliable enough to say "Wind will provide at least this much power, even on a "non-windy" day. Also, keep in mind that wind is much, much steadier 200 feet in the air than it is on the ground, where it's subject to all sorts of disruptions and irregularities.
      - 7y ago

privateSFacct 7y ago

RMI has been pushing hydrogen cars for a while. I was never a big fan of their analysis there - so take their conclusions with a bit of a grain of doubt. Ironically gas and solar / wind sometimes go together with gas filling gaps in generation on a more flexible basis. Interesting to read here that gas will be "crushed". That will need some huge battery capacity - not saying its not possible but... Coal though - if article was coal is going to be crushed - sure.

effnorwood 7y ago

They won’t.

philipkglass 7y ago

1) I think it's certainly possible, but 2035 is still some time out. Extrapolating battery costs 16 years from now is not at all straightforward. 2) The headline result can be true even if solar/wind/storage have significant annual gaps in availability. If a gas plant was originally built on the assumption that it could run profitably for 5000 hours per year, but in the future there are only 2000 hours a year it can run profitably (due to more solar/wind), it can be financially "crushed." At least in competitive electricity markets. There could be large writedowns as plant load factors decline. Since gas plants are much less labor intensive to keep running than coal plants, I don't expect to see gas plants mothballed and demolished quite the way American coal plants have been over the past 5 years. They may still be profitable to run in the peak-demand season each year even with much more renewable capacity deployed. But they'll make less revenue and profit, burn less fuel, and emit less CO2.

makomk 7y ago
I'd venture a guess that solar/wind/storage would have significant gaps in availability in this scenario. The economics of battery storage solutions scales really badly as the length of the gaps they need to fill increases. Not only does the capital cost of batteries increase in proportion to the runtime required, the utilization plummets due to longer gaps being less common and predictable than shorter ones. I can easily see it becoming uneconomical to provide a reliable electricity grid. Unfortunately, one of the other anti-global-warming measures that's being pushed for in this timescale in at least some European countries is switching to electricity for heating.
- philipkglass 7y ago
  I think that you're probably right about gaps remaining, for basically the reasons you have given. And for that reason I don't expect mass demolition of American gas plants in the 2030s the way there was mass demolition of American coal plants in the 2010s. The growth of gas capacity is alarming to many environmentalists; the phrase is that we're "locking in" decades of high emissions from gas fired electrical generators. But gas plants release the vast majority of their emissions during operation, not construction. Diminishing the plant load factor of gas plants is as good from an emissions-cuts standpoint as tearing them down. What do you do when the wind isn't blowing, the batteries are discharged, and it's night time? Burn gas. But the number of hours per year where at least one of {batteries, wind, solar} can bid below gas will go up year after year, whereas that number was essentially holding steady at zero through the whole 20th century. This brief sketch is most applicable to deregulated electricity markets. In markets with regulated utility monopolies, unfortunately, gas plants will be subject to less competition even if the cost of storage-backed renewables keeps declining steadily. The majority of US electricity consumption now takes place in deregulated states but it's far from universal. https://www.electricchoice.com/map-deregulated-energy-markets/ https://www.electricchoice.com/map-deregulated-energy-market...

jdoggie 7y ago

Clean energy sounds good to me!!

darksaints 7y ago

I'm interested in understanding how this will play out with the electrification of cars. As it stands now, the production and distribution infrastructure is mostly used for homes. But you could easily double your home's electric consumption with an electric car traveling just 10 miles per day. If we see a quick change in electric car adoption, our production and distribution systems are going to be massively strained. We might be keeping gas and coal powerplants online just for capacity reasons alone.

foota 7y ago
Really? A quick Google shows a Tesla gets ~3 miles per kwh, so 10 miles would only be about 3 kwh. A kwh is about ten cents where I live iirc. Power's like $50 a month. So I use about ($50/10 cents)/30 ~ 13-14 kwh a day. So 10 miles a day would be more like 20%. That said though, a quick search shows vehicle miles travelled per capita in the US is 10k, so closer to 30 miles a day, or 9 kwh. However, vehicles can be charged off peak in a lot of places (hot places peak during the day in the summer) so can be charged at night.
gibybo 7y ago
300 wh/mile seems to be about what most electric cars achieve. 10 miles/day * 300 wh/mile * 30 days = 90 kWh. The average monthly energy consumption per capita in the U.S. is about 1000 kWh[1], so in order to double that with electric cars every individual would need to drive an average of 110 miles per day. [1] https://www.worlddata.info/america/usa/energy-consumption.php https://www.worlddata.info/america/usa/energy-consumption.ph...
- mruts 7y ago
  1000 kWh/month? That seems like a buttload to me. I used to live in the US (though I never measured how much I used there) and currently, average between 6-15 KWh/day. I know this because I live in a 3rd world country and must pre-pay for my electricity by going down to the local equivalent of a corner store to add power. And I don't even turn off most of my lights at night.
fooblitzky 7y ago

Merrill 7y ago

>"The authors of the study say they analyzed the costs of construction, fuel and anticipated operations for 68 gigawatts of gas plants proposed across the U.S. They compared those costs to building a combination of solar farms, wind plants and battery systems that, together with conservation efforts, could supply the same amount of electricity and keep the grid stable." If the same amount of electricity is being supplied, why are conservation efforts needed? Has anyone downloaded the reports from Rocky Mountain Institute? They want your email address.

makomk 7y ago
I had a look at the report and it looks fishy. They're not actually comparing the cost of gas plants with the cost of wind, solar and storage - they're comparing with a hypothetical "clean energy portfolio" consisting of whatever combination of energy efficiency improvements, demand shifting, wind, solar and storage their model reckons is cheapest, effectively modelling energy conservation as a source of electricity that replaces gas power plant outputs. This makes very little sense; there's nothing inherent about efficiency improvements or demand flexibility that restricts them to being used with renewables rather than gas power. That's not the only dodgy thing either. Their proposal generates substantial excess energy throughout most of the year. In order to improve its cost effectiveness, they assume that excess energy has a value of $15/KWh and subtract that income from the cost of the renewable program. The actual value of this energy is probably close to zero; remember, we're talking about energy that has gone unused even after substantial use of demand shifting and storage.

gkolli 7y ago

What are the steps into getting there? What are the biggest roadblocks - scientific or political?

jpadkins 7y ago

link to 2 page summary of the study https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/clean-energy-portfolio-two-pager.pdf https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/clean-energy-port...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

trenning 7y ago

Something I'm curious about is how this will affect plant manufacturers. Specifically I'm thinking about generator manufacturers like MHI, Siemens, GE, Toshiba. Do they just shut those divisions down and move on? There's also a lot of other businesses that exist for building/maintaining/repairing plants and equipment that are non-OE and their futures seem grim.

heyflyguy 7y ago

When I see studies of this nature I always think that it is such beautiful idea to be living in a clean world. To be clear, I work in the petroleum industry; so this would most certainly be an obvious end to my line of work. I will hopefully be living in the keys by 2035. At the rate our world population is expanding, I have to wonder if there is simply enough surface area we can turn over to power generation and lose it to things such as farming and other agriculture. We are learning to farm land previously thought too arid for non-hearty crops.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago

The report in question: https://rmi.org/insight/clean-energy-portfolios-pipelines-and-plants https://rmi.org/insight/clean-energy-portfolios-pipelines-an...

hairytrog 7y ago

I downloaded the study - it's long and filled with pictures so haven't read yet. I expect they made the mistake of not taking into account the increase in cost due to a primarily renewable grid. Such massive changes in the type of generating supply will yield massive changes in the costs to supply power. As you remove all the dispatchable power sources (power generators that you can put on line at will) you have to build really big heat or electricity storage and would have to have emergency generating capacity for the potential of extremely low wind and sun for days and weeks at a time. Basically, you'd have to have all the natural gas generators and pipelines for the eventuality of bad renewable conditions. Who will pay for that? Just leaving them idle 95% of the time is not the best use of money and it's possible the government may have to pay for renewable's storage problems. Geography is also a serious concern. Texas will have vastly different economics than than Washington or New York.

usrusr 7y ago
> Basically, you'd have to have all the natural gas generators and pipelines for the eventuality of bad renewable conditions. Who will pay for that? Ideally the operators of facilities that tackle the storage problem with power-to-gas technology. It's by far the most scalable storage option and the discharge part of the cycle is already up and running.

powerbroker 7y ago

On the week of August 12, the Texas grid, managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) maxed out at around 75,000 MW of load. On one of the worst days, the approx. 24,000 MW nameplate capacity wind farms on that grid produced about 4,500 MW at the absolute peaks of demand. In other words, wind farms produced 18% or so of their maximum rated capacity. This is a typical pattern during the dog days of August. Winds lull during the late afternoon, and pickup after midnight. Winds farms, on an annual basis, provide 22% of Texas electricity generation. However, during these peak demand hours, natural gas contributed about 50,000 MW, with coal and nuclear distant second and third place. If Texas wind farms are to displace the gas-fired plants, there will need to be 10-fold increase in their numbers, or somehow solar and battery storage will have to step in. Saying that wind is going to crush gas, is only half true. Currently, the pipeline of new generators being built in Texas has slightly more wind (capacity factor ~ 40%) being installed than gas. Solar, during the next 5 years, is being built (allowing for capacity factor ~ 20%) at about the same rate (~12,000 averaged MW). You could call these technologies the 'three amigos', as they will be appearing, as new generating capacity, in (very) roughly equal amounts. Nevertheless, gas plants are a unique, and necessary part of the future, due to their dispatch ability. They can literally be called upon to deliver electricity 24/7/365. Importantly, one hour of generation during these peak periods costs 450 times the average generator's fees for electricity. In other words, one hour of a natural gas plant's output, during these near-black-out conditions (properly termed Energy Emergency Alert), earns them as much as running those plants, non-stop, the previous 19 days. These extreme spikes haven't happened in Texas for a few years. Still, there is lots of opportunity for the gas plants to be the 'high rollers' of the Texas grid during their expected 30+ years of operation. Peak usage week: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/August_PUC_Presentation_FINAL.PDF http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/August_PUC_Pre... Energy Emergency alert: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/EEA_OnePager_FINAL.PDF http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/EEA_OnePager_F...

philipkglass 7y ago
The renewable capacity on the ERCOT grid is overwhelmingly wind-based since wind has been much cheaper than solar until the last handful of years. Its output tends to peak at night. I think a lot of the peak-demand opportunity for gas in Texas is going to be blunted by solar and battery projects coming online soon. "Can more solar help Texas meet peak demand?" https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/08/13/can-solar-help-ercot-meet-peak-demand/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/08/13/can-solar-help-ercot-... There is a truly awesome amount of solar on the way in Texas, with ERCOT’s July interconnection report showing 62 GW of solar projects. And while given the highly speculative nature of project development most of those will likely not be built, there are nearly 9 GW of projects that have interconnection agreements, including 3.2 GW that have a full interconnection study completed. Those projects that can secure financing and get built will come online over the next few years. It is difficult to say which ones will be online by next summer, but a June ERCOT report identified 1.3 GW of projects with interconnection agreements and financial security posted that are expected to come online later this year, a number which should grow as the year progresses. "Developer eyes world's largest solar+storage facility for Texas" https://www.utilitydive.com/news/developer-eyes-worlds-largest-solarstorage-facility-for-texas/548691/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/developer-eyes-worlds-large... "Energy Storage Developer Buys Texas Windfarms With Major Battery Retrofit Planned" https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnparnell/2019/08/24/energy-storage-developer-buy-texas-windfarms-with-major-battery-retrofit-planned/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnparnell/2019/08/24/energy-s... "GlidePath Builds Merchant Battery Plant in ERCOT, Bucking Industry Wisdom" https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/glidepath-bucked-the-industry-trend-and-built-a-merchant-plant-in-ercot https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/glidepath-bucke...

HocusLocus 7y ago

No they won't, unless the storage issue is solved. (A comment someone else made and it got greyed out by the "we hate your poopy face!" crowd.) And even if it IS solved. After outside wind and solar infrastructure is destroyed by the next continent wide Winter superstorm, how would having a few hours (or days) of storage help?