9 ms·

Exciting. But here are some problems. - Unfortunately, they are averaging the entire US, which is made of several grids, so the bad days are not that bad in th

Exciting. But here are some problems. - Unfortunately, they are averaging the entire US, which is made of several grids, so the bad days are not that bad in their analysis. To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need. - Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid. If Covid has taught us anything, it is the need for resiliency in the face of rare events. In this case unfavorable weather, broken transmission, etc. - Cost projection is rosy... The panels, batteries, and storage are already very close to the material cost. Need some pretty fundamental tech transitions to improve further. - If there is no policy change, nukes and nat gas will not be competitive 99% of the time because solar/wind are nearly free electricity and bid extremely low power prices that nuke/gas can't compete with. So even though they will provide the backbone and dispatchibility needed for on-demand power, they do not currently have the financial incentive to do so. We need resiliency and dispatchibility payments. Report is Berkeley and GridLab, mostly policy wonks A much better report from MIT: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2542435119303009 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424... or http://energy.mit.edu/research/utility-future-study/ http://energy.mit.edu/research/utility-future-study/ Both are harder to read and give worse news, so probably won't be part of the policy discussion... The report itself: http://www.2035report.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2035-Report.pdf?hsCtaTracking=8a85e9ea-4ed3-4ec0-b4c6-906934306ddb%7Cc68c2ac2-1db0-4d1c-82a1-65ef4daaf6c1 http://www.2035report.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2035-Re... And the data explorer: https://www.2035report.com/data-explorer/?hsCtaTracking=aefa383f-f7b1-45c3-99c8-9413fdc3a3c7%7C98cb714c-8c3e-4475-b718-610a20b81491 https://www.2035report.com/data-explorer/?hsCtaTracking=aefa...

spenrose 6y ago
Hi! You don't seem to like renewables much [1][2]. (You do post about the promise of nuclear energy, including fusion, which for whatever reason seems to be associated with skepticism about renewables [3].) Finally, you called our attention to the need to be skeptical about COVID-19's impacts in mid-April [4]. Cool, cool. "To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need. - Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid." Citations for these sweeping claims? "If Covid has taught us anything, it is the need for resiliency in the face of rare events." Oh wait, we have a citation for this one. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868290 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21879466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21879466 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hairytrog https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hairytrog [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22881917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22881917
- shubhamjain 6y ago
  Digging into someone's comment history to paint an agenda is a very reprehensible behavior. I was a Covid-19 skeptic as well, I changed my opinion when I saw that the overall death rate YoY - the excess deaths painted a very bleak picture. To think that someone would go down my comment, post, or tweeting history to comment on my bias makes me wonder if it's worth being on social media at all.
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    It's ironic a bit because if you dig into spenrose's comment history they're critical of nuclear.. and seem to mostly comment on articles like this one. I think this person has an agenda they want to push and they want to shout down anyone with ad-hominems who doesn't share their world view. Is this not against hacker news guidelines? Dang?
    - kelnos 6y ago
      > It's ironic a bit because if you dig into spenrose's comment history they're critical of nuclear Huh? spenrose's most recent comment about nuclear power starts with: > I am rooting for lots and lots of new nuclear
      - ethanwillis 6y ago
        Even that comment chain is in fact not pro nuclear. If you read further they're basically arguing against nuclear saying that why even bother because it's not economical. And the only nuclear they want is "safe nuclear" > Safe micro-nuclear plants are an excellent start on the "economy" side of "political economy." Now y'all need to build a political coalition—and pro-variable-renewable peeps such as myself must be part of your core coalition if you are going to get anywhere. So start treating us as allies. It's a lot of double speak so I can see how it would be confusing. But definitely take a closer look.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Argue the argument, not the arguer.
smabie 6y ago
Say you drop it to 80%, would that work?
- hairytrog 6y ago
  Drop what to 80%? Our economy works really well because electricity is 100% dispatchable. You flip the switch at any time, things work. If you go below that, the economy will follow the weather, which I guess is just a different way to operate. But it's not so fun. I have some friends in South Africa where power rationing is in place. You basically have a few dead hours every day because the grid isn't run well and they haven't built enough capacity. They hate it. You're cooking a nice pie for grandma and then BAM, powers out. You're on your treadmill, and BAM - you hit the wall. You're playing CoD, and BAM. Sucks to suck.
  - desdiv 6y ago
    Headline says: "US can reach 90 percent clean electricity by 2035" and you gave your analysis. GP is asking how your analysis would change if we drop the target to "US reaching 80 percent clean electricity by 2035".
    - hairytrog 6y ago
      Short answer: anything above 20% is unproven and will cost significantly more if you expect to have 100% uptime/reliability. If you're okay with 95% uptime, wind/solar can get the job done, and I believe cheaper based on https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2542435119303009 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424... ____ The flaw with renewables is they are so dam cheap and so dam finicky. Basically, renewables force nukes and nat gas to sell power at a loss or sit idly by for most of the time. This becomes worse and worse as the renewable's market share increases and they eat away at the profitability of the dispatchable sources. The limit is something like 20% at which point nukes and nat gas just can't make any money and so a free market system would just get rid of them. But yet, they need to be there, just in case, because they are dispatchable and you want shit to work at all times. Unfortunately, prices for consumers don't go down because you need the super dispatchable power sources which just sit there for a lot of the time and cost just about the same if you have em on or off, and you also just built a bunch of renewables which are cheap and make money for the guys who built them, but hurt the rest of the grid because you have a bunch of idle equipment (gas/nukes during the day and most of the year, panels at night). Lower cost storage is a way to address that, but has to be really low cost, especially when you increase wind/solar market share. Keep in mind, there's not yet a good solution for long term storage (days or weeks or months). To go beyond 20% renewables you need a power market that rewards dispatchable sources, essentially preventing solar and wind from taking all the money and bidding everyone into oblivion. If the market is fair, there will be little incentive to push renewables because they just make things more expensive. There's a bunch of ideas on how to do this like capacity payments. Might work, but it's gonna cost more because of all the unused equipment. Everything is possible, you just need to be willing to pay for it. In an 80% renewables grid, most of the time, renewables will be meeting 100% of demand and producing much more than needed. 20% of the power is delivered by nat gas. But they will mostly be called to do that only on the bad days where they will have to be able to match closer to 100% of the demand. So you've basically got two nearly complete fleets. Who's gonna pay for the idle equipment? The solar power producers should right? One data point: Germany is 30% renewables and pays 50% higher than EU average. That's old prices in a country not ideal for renewables. It's no Arizona or Washington.
ip26 6y ago
Instead of dispatchability payments, why not demand response? Thermostats, electric cars, water heaters, dryers, smelters, and data centers can all turn on a dime if an incentive is there. Also, what's wrong with policy wonks?
- hairytrog 6y ago
  it's just difficult to coordinate all these things top down and there's a bunch of extra infrastructure and IT, and more regulation and rules and complexity. People telling you when you can and can't do things, etc. Eh. Seems unAmerican. But given the total enthusiasm and commitment, I bet it could be made to work. But maybe we have to accept that it's gonna cost more, and that we'll probably lose on other sides. This renewable world just might not be such a nice place. Power would be less taken for granted because it would not always be available. a lot more people would have to work in the industry to keep it going (low EROI for renewables) and they wouldn't be working in other industries. Ironically, that's a plus in the article, which touts immense job creation. lol - not a very good objective. The landscape near populated areas would be dominated with wind turbines and solar plants.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    > it's just difficult to coordinate all these things top down and there's a bunch of extra infrastructure and IT, and more regulation and rules and complexity. People telling you when you can and can't do things, etc. Eh. Seems unAmerican. I honestly read that as "it requires people to communicate and co-ordinate in a way that is a net benefit to everyone, seems un-american" and thought yeah that seems about right. For what it's worth national grids with co-operation agreements and a strict regulatory regime absolutely do work when well implemented, the UK has had one for decades.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  Most data centers needs non-stop 24/7 reliability, and there are very few use cases where it makes sense and is even possible to delay your workload waiting for lower energy prices. Smelters have complicated processes, and they cannot really turn on a dime. Lastly, data centers and smelters are expensive capital investments, and typically the economic calculation requires them to be run non-stop to recoup the capital investment.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
specialist 6y ago
"But here are some problems." The opportunities are insurmountable. "...a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid." Grid will become massively decentralized. Transmission costs are already greater than production costs in many systems, a trend that will continue. We'll get resiliency "for free". Others have already commented on demand shifting. Additionally, producers will innovate, creating new "products" to meet unique customer demands. Like colocation. "...nukes and nat gas will not be competitive 99%" Current nukes must be propped up for as long as possible, stopgap until renewables can overtake. We'll definitely need new nuke options, like small modular reactors (micro reactors) and reprocessing. (My future perfect is traveling wave reactors, but that's a long ways off.) We need to phase out natural gas asap.
hairytrog 6y ago
I think I came out a little strong and biased here. My apologies. Some more thoughts on this article. - They group nukes in the clean %, so today we're at 37% clean already. not bad. Going to higher clean % with mix of wind/solar expansion + new storage + dispatchable nukes is very possible and the political momentum to throw a lot of money at this is there. - I think it's unlikely costs can be reduced much in most parts of the US if we still want 100% dispatch capability. - It's not just about cost. We should consider paying a bit more for carbon considerations, within reason and without forgetting who gets punished by higher prices in the short term, and without compromising the 100% dispatchable standard. - Wind/solar LCOE is approaching very low numbers, so it should be used as much as possible, but we shouldn't throw a trillion dollars from the government, as the article suggests, to shove wind/solar down the grid's throat. It's likely to break the grid and waste a load of money. Government should just ensure the markets can properly deal with higher renewables without compromising the grid. They can do this via establishing capacity markets, resiliency markets, R&D for storage tech, etc. They might also do a carbon tax to try to set the higher cost we are willing to pay from above. - There are significant resilience, material, and regulation challenges. It's not just the energy storage for a few hours, but longer term for days and weeks. If we are a responsible society and expect smooth operations and we want to do an extreme renewables expansion, we need to pay the price to keep an idle fleet of fully dispatchable gas/nukes in addition to the renewables fleet or establish multi month storage.
- cinquemb 6y ago
  > I think it's unlikely costs can be reduced much in most parts of the US if we still want 100% dispatch capability. I disagree, if there was a desire to transport molten salt tanks and retrofit coal plants with supercritical steam turbines and build large molten salt storage reservoirs on such sites, we could do it today for under 5 cents/kwh for 24/7 availability. See comments [0] and [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23588691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23588691 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581910
sunstone 6y ago
The key enabling technology is to tie all the separate grids together with High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power lines. This technology is flying under the radar but it's getting cheaper very quickly and it allows for continent size electric grids. To give a sense of how cheap it's getting consider that there's a proposal to send solar energy from North Australia to Singapore using this tech. That's about 4000km distance total with about 3000km of that under the ocean. 4000km is very close to the distance from Seattle to Miami. If Singapore can afford this then for sure the US can dig around in the couch and come up with enough spare change to build this out.

spenrose 6y ago

Hi! You don't seem to like renewables much [1][2]. (You do post about the promise of nuclear energy, including fusion, which for whatever reason seems to be associated with skepticism about renewables [3].) Finally, you called our attention to the need to be skeptical about COVID-19's impacts in mid-April [4]. Cool, cool. "To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need. - Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid." Citations for these sweeping claims? "If Covid has taught us anything, it is the need for resiliency in the face of rare events." Oh wait, we have a citation for this one. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868290 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21879466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21879466 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hairytrog https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=hairytrog [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22881917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22881917

shubhamjain 6y ago
Digging into someone's comment history to paint an agenda is a very reprehensible behavior. I was a Covid-19 skeptic as well, I changed my opinion when I saw that the overall death rate YoY - the excess deaths painted a very bleak picture. To think that someone would go down my comment, post, or tweeting history to comment on my bias makes me wonder if it's worth being on social media at all.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  It's ironic a bit because if you dig into spenrose's comment history they're critical of nuclear.. and seem to mostly comment on articles like this one. I think this person has an agenda they want to push and they want to shout down anyone with ad-hominems who doesn't share their world view. Is this not against hacker news guidelines? Dang?
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > It's ironic a bit because if you dig into spenrose's comment history they're critical of nuclear Huh? spenrose's most recent comment about nuclear power starts with: > I am rooting for lots and lots of new nuclear
    - ethanwillis 6y ago
      Even that comment chain is in fact not pro nuclear. If you read further they're basically arguing against nuclear saying that why even bother because it's not economical. And the only nuclear they want is "safe nuclear" > Safe micro-nuclear plants are an excellent start on the "economy" side of "political economy." Now y'all need to build a political coalition—and pro-variable-renewable peeps such as myself must be part of your core coalition if you are going to get anywhere. So start treating us as allies. It's a lot of double speak so I can see how it would be confusing. But definitely take a closer look.
koheripbal 6y ago
Argue the argument, not the arguer.

smabie 6y ago

Say you drop it to 80%, would that work?

hairytrog 6y ago
Drop what to 80%? Our economy works really well because electricity is 100% dispatchable. You flip the switch at any time, things work. If you go below that, the economy will follow the weather, which I guess is just a different way to operate. But it's not so fun. I have some friends in South Africa where power rationing is in place. You basically have a few dead hours every day because the grid isn't run well and they haven't built enough capacity. They hate it. You're cooking a nice pie for grandma and then BAM, powers out. You're on your treadmill, and BAM - you hit the wall. You're playing CoD, and BAM. Sucks to suck.
- desdiv 6y ago
  Headline says: "US can reach 90 percent clean electricity by 2035" and you gave your analysis. GP is asking how your analysis would change if we drop the target to "US reaching 80 percent clean electricity by 2035".
  - hairytrog 6y ago
    Short answer: anything above 20% is unproven and will cost significantly more if you expect to have 100% uptime/reliability. If you're okay with 95% uptime, wind/solar can get the job done, and I believe cheaper based on https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2542435119303009 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424... ____ The flaw with renewables is they are so dam cheap and so dam finicky. Basically, renewables force nukes and nat gas to sell power at a loss or sit idly by for most of the time. This becomes worse and worse as the renewable's market share increases and they eat away at the profitability of the dispatchable sources. The limit is something like 20% at which point nukes and nat gas just can't make any money and so a free market system would just get rid of them. But yet, they need to be there, just in case, because they are dispatchable and you want shit to work at all times. Unfortunately, prices for consumers don't go down because you need the super dispatchable power sources which just sit there for a lot of the time and cost just about the same if you have em on or off, and you also just built a bunch of renewables which are cheap and make money for the guys who built them, but hurt the rest of the grid because you have a bunch of idle equipment (gas/nukes during the day and most of the year, panels at night). Lower cost storage is a way to address that, but has to be really low cost, especially when you increase wind/solar market share. Keep in mind, there's not yet a good solution for long term storage (days or weeks or months). To go beyond 20% renewables you need a power market that rewards dispatchable sources, essentially preventing solar and wind from taking all the money and bidding everyone into oblivion. If the market is fair, there will be little incentive to push renewables because they just make things more expensive. There's a bunch of ideas on how to do this like capacity payments. Might work, but it's gonna cost more because of all the unused equipment. Everything is possible, you just need to be willing to pay for it. In an 80% renewables grid, most of the time, renewables will be meeting 100% of demand and producing much more than needed. 20% of the power is delivered by nat gas. But they will mostly be called to do that only on the bad days where they will have to be able to match closer to 100% of the demand. So you've basically got two nearly complete fleets. Who's gonna pay for the idle equipment? The solar power producers should right? One data point: Germany is 30% renewables and pays 50% higher than EU average. That's old prices in a country not ideal for renewables. It's no Arizona or Washington.

ip26 6y ago

Instead of dispatchability payments, why not demand response? Thermostats, electric cars, water heaters, dryers, smelters, and data centers can all turn on a dime if an incentive is there. Also, what's wrong with policy wonks?

hairytrog 6y ago
it's just difficult to coordinate all these things top down and there's a bunch of extra infrastructure and IT, and more regulation and rules and complexity. People telling you when you can and can't do things, etc. Eh. Seems unAmerican. But given the total enthusiasm and commitment, I bet it could be made to work. But maybe we have to accept that it's gonna cost more, and that we'll probably lose on other sides. This renewable world just might not be such a nice place. Power would be less taken for granted because it would not always be available. a lot more people would have to work in the industry to keep it going (low EROI for renewables) and they wouldn't be working in other industries. Ironically, that's a plus in the article, which touts immense job creation. lol - not a very good objective. The landscape near populated areas would be dominated with wind turbines and solar plants.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  > it's just difficult to coordinate all these things top down and there's a bunch of extra infrastructure and IT, and more regulation and rules and complexity. People telling you when you can and can't do things, etc. Eh. Seems unAmerican. I honestly read that as "it requires people to communicate and co-ordinate in a way that is a net benefit to everyone, seems un-american" and thought yeah that seems about right. For what it's worth national grids with co-operation agreements and a strict regulatory regime absolutely do work when well implemented, the UK has had one for decades.
xyzzyz 6y ago
Most data centers needs non-stop 24/7 reliability, and there are very few use cases where it makes sense and is even possible to delay your workload waiting for lower energy prices. Smelters have complicated processes, and they cannot really turn on a dime. Lastly, data centers and smelters are expensive capital investments, and typically the economic calculation requires them to be run non-stop to recoup the capital investment.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

specialist 6y ago

"But here are some problems." The opportunities are insurmountable. "...a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid." Grid will become massively decentralized. Transmission costs are already greater than production costs in many systems, a trend that will continue. We'll get resiliency "for free". Others have already commented on demand shifting. Additionally, producers will innovate, creating new "products" to meet unique customer demands. Like colocation. "...nukes and nat gas will not be competitive 99%" Current nukes must be propped up for as long as possible, stopgap until renewables can overtake. We'll definitely need new nuke options, like small modular reactors (micro reactors) and reprocessing. (My future perfect is traveling wave reactors, but that's a long ways off.) We need to phase out natural gas asap.

hairytrog 6y ago

I think I came out a little strong and biased here. My apologies. Some more thoughts on this article. - They group nukes in the clean %, so today we're at 37% clean already. not bad. Going to higher clean % with mix of wind/solar expansion + new storage + dispatchable nukes is very possible and the political momentum to throw a lot of money at this is there. - I think it's unlikely costs can be reduced much in most parts of the US if we still want 100% dispatch capability. - It's not just about cost. We should consider paying a bit more for carbon considerations, within reason and without forgetting who gets punished by higher prices in the short term, and without compromising the 100% dispatchable standard. - Wind/solar LCOE is approaching very low numbers, so it should be used as much as possible, but we shouldn't throw a trillion dollars from the government, as the article suggests, to shove wind/solar down the grid's throat. It's likely to break the grid and waste a load of money. Government should just ensure the markets can properly deal with higher renewables without compromising the grid. They can do this via establishing capacity markets, resiliency markets, R&D for storage tech, etc. They might also do a carbon tax to try to set the higher cost we are willing to pay from above. - There are significant resilience, material, and regulation challenges. It's not just the energy storage for a few hours, but longer term for days and weeks. If we are a responsible society and expect smooth operations and we want to do an extreme renewables expansion, we need to pay the price to keep an idle fleet of fully dispatchable gas/nukes in addition to the renewables fleet or establish multi month storage.

cinquemb 6y ago
> I think it's unlikely costs can be reduced much in most parts of the US if we still want 100% dispatch capability. I disagree, if there was a desire to transport molten salt tanks and retrofit coal plants with supercritical steam turbines and build large molten salt storage reservoirs on such sites, we could do it today for under 5 cents/kwh for 24/7 availability. See comments [0] and [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23588691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23588691 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581910

sunstone 6y ago

The key enabling technology is to tie all the separate grids together with High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power lines. This technology is flying under the radar but it's getting cheaper very quickly and it allows for continent size electric grids. To give a sense of how cheap it's getting consider that there's a proposal to send solar energy from North Australia to Singapore using this tech. That's about 4000km distance total with about 3000km of that under the ocean. 4000km is very close to the distance from Seattle to Miami. If Singapore can afford this then for sure the US can dig around in the couch and come up with enough spare change to build this out.