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That doesn’t change the fact that neither wind nor solar can produce electricity on demand. Unlike many other products, customers buy electricity when they nee

That doesn’t change the fact that neither wind nor solar can produce electricity on demand. Unlike many other products, customers buy electricity when they need it, not when it’s cheap. It doesn’t really matter whether a wind farm in the German North Sea can produce a lot of electricity cheaply during a windy day when that electricity is needed three days later in Munich. This complete lack of matching supply and demand is what drives electricity prices with a large share of renewables in the market so high. In Germany, lots of electricity is produced from renewables at times when it’s not needed. This causes market prices to be negative at times and Germany is paying neighboring countries money to buy that excess electricity. At the same time, producers of renewables have guaranteed sales by German law, i.e. their electricity is always bought by the market whether it’s needed or not. It’s this gap between supply and demand that customers are paying for which drives German electricity prices. Currently, we’re paying 31 Euro cents in Germany per kWh while French customers whose grid has a large share of nuclear pay just 17 Euro cents per kWh on average. At the same time, the average CO2 emissions in Germany per kWh are at 400 grams in Germany while they’re only at 50 grams in France. That’s because whenever solar and wind aren’t delivering any electricity we’re starting up coal and gas plants. I wish proponents renewables were honest enough to not withhold these problems. I mean, absolutely no one argues that it’s not that expensive to build a wind or solar farm. What makes wind ans solar expensive is keeping the necessary backup plants in standby for when they’re not delivering and paying for getting rid of excess electricity from renewables when they’re not needed. The intermittency and low energy density are inherent physical properties of solar and wind farms which is why 100% renewables is newer feasible (unless for countries like Norway who have the possibility to build lots of hydro plants).

chiefalchemist 6y ago
This helped to realize that our lens is a bit skewed. Oil and gas - _when compared with solar, wind, etc._ - aren't energy per se, they are batteries. The energy is stored and all we do is release it. On the other hand, wind and solar need to be created from scratch - and until we get better batteries - are released immediately. We're not usually comparing apples to apples but batteries (tradional energy sources) to from-scratch energy (solar and wind).
- airstrike 6y ago
  This is also the difference between fuel cells and batteries in the road to electrification
DataDaoDe 6y ago
I can't remember his name but there was a researcher (I think he was German) back in the early 2010s who predicted that as renewables became cheaper and gained more market share the price of energy would go up. This is because renewables are intermittent i.e. unreliable energy sources which means you need to maintain multiple energy infrastructures, a fallback for whenever renewables can't meet demand i.e. its nighttime or the wind isn't blowing, in addition to the renewable energy grid and switching back and forth has inefficiences. This is all if I'm remembering the paper correctly - it has been years since reading it.
- frenchyatwork 6y ago
  This is a lot more complicated than renewables/unrenewables. For example, hydroelectric power is almost the exact opposite of this. Geothermal, on the other hand, gives you a stable energy source, until it doesn't. Also, the grid doesn't use power evenly, but nuclear power (like geothermal) produces very even output so the US & Canada have agreements where Canada supplies excess hydro power during the day and then buys back cheap nuclear power at night. Of course, wind & solar are very intermittent, an many places don't have easy access to hydroelectric power, so this is certainly true in some places.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    >Geothermal, on the other hand, gives you a stable energy source, until it doesn't. Can you point me toward any studies about geothermal 'running out'? Is that a thing?
    - frenchyatwork 6y ago
      Not studies, but the geothermal active areas I've been to have stories of geysers/springs either coming out of nowhere, or disappearing. It's very rare, and mostly happens during earthquakes. I would imagine the same would apply to power generation.
      - Loughla 6y ago
bigphishy 6y ago
The old ways of thinking no longer apply now that high density industrial lithium batteries exist. Solar+Storage is the way of the future.
- dasudasu 6y ago
  Vanadium redox batteries are looking pretty good as an alternative to lithium for large-scale energy storage.
- ThomPete 6y ago
  Solar and wind today doesn't deliver more than 1% of the world energy consumption. We are as close to fusion as we are to the kind of fuel cells that would be needed for that. Furthermore solar+storage doesn't do industrial grade energy needs. The heat thats needed ex.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    > Solar and wind today doesn't deliver more than 1% of the world energy consumption. That's an interesting statistic, but the topic of the article is electricity in the UK not energy use in the world. A more useful statistic would be this: "The government’s official data has revealed that renewable energy made up 47% of the UK’s electricity generation in the first three months of the year, smashing the previous quarterly record of 39% set last year."[0] It's true that doesn't include the energy used by gas heating systems or fuel used by vehicles, for example, but to bring those into consideration it would be helpful to know how quickly heating systems and vehicles are being replaced by electric equivalents (increasing the load on the grid, although per capita energy consumption in the UK has been decreasing for decades). [0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/25/renewable-energy-breaks-uk-record-in-first-quarter-of-2020 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/25/renewable-e...
    - ThomPete 6y ago
      Electricity is only around 15-20% of a countrys energy usage.
austinl 6y ago
The book The Grid by Gretchen Bakke is a great primer on why this is such an important problem. Energy is strange, in the sense that everything produced needs to be consumed more or less immediately — it's not like other resources that can be easily stockpiled (even with batteries). Our infrastructure, at least the antiquated American power grid infrastructure, is built with the assumption that production and consumption is balanced. Maintaining the energy grid is a careful balancing act between preventing surges and blackouts. There are a lot of grid-related engineering problems that come from increasing decentralization (e.g. wind, solar, hydro) because, as you mentioned, it increases unpredictability in supply.
- dmix 6y ago
  Did the book explore every home getting a vanadium redox or lithium battery? It seems like something that will be needed in the future (further adding to the decentralization). This of course will be expensive and I'm not sure how well tall condo buildings will handle the costs. It could potentially increase the cost of buying a home in the future. Or significant investment from the government so we don't regress our back to having blackouts (especially when it puts even more pressure on the poor in the name of the environment)... either to homes or some centralized system.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    Interesting rabbit hole. I bought an Engel dual 120V/12V powered fridge. Runs off 120VAC and 12-24VDC. You can plug it into both and it switches automatically to 12VDC if the 120VAC drops out. Things I've noticed. Even high efficiency residential fridges aren't that efficient. Some off grid ones use three times less power. And lot of the modern fridges have inverters to drive the compressor. Which means would not that big a stretch to add a 12/24V input like my portable fridge. I mention this because not all household loads are the same. You really don't want your fridge to stop working. You probably can manage if you can't run you whole house air conditioner full tilt. Having appliances that can run off back up and ones that can adjust their load probably would help. Another random opinion is a lot of house wiring could be replaced with Power of Ethernet. There is a new automotive standard that provides up to 100W. A house where lights and light loads were run off POE could be trivially backed up by a battery.
gknapp 6y ago
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is an excellent and renewable answer to this problem in tons of areas, has high efficiency (above 70%) and is already in use in a number of areas.
- oblio 6y ago
  How applicable is this to large scale electricity storage? I don't have any numbers but I doubt you could power a large economy like the German one based on pumped-storage. It's ok for some niche use cases but I doubt it's the future.
  - myself248 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station ...can supply a maximum power of 1,728-megawatt and has a storage capacity of around 9.1 GWh.
    - oblio 6y ago
      I've just checked and Germany produced 516TWh of electricity in 2019. So that would mean that you need how many? 50000+ of these?
      - grey-area 6y ago
        No. Clearly you only need a small proportion of grid power in storage to cope with peaks. There are also multiple ways to smooth load - overcapacity, battery storage, pumped storage, load shedding, pricing. These are solved problems which just need a bit more work and investment, and many countries already use pumped storage extensively.
        oblio 6y ago
        The only example that I know of is Norway which is kind of the holy grail of hydro, in general: 1. Small population. 2. Pretty tall mountains and sparsely populated mountains (see 1.) 3. Quite high yearly rainfall levels. 4. Very rich country. 5. Country with a very low level of corruption and from what I know, pretty efficient at building new infrastructure. Is there an example of an "average" country having decent levels of pumped hydro storage at a level that's above 0.5% of the country's needs?
theklub 6y ago
Ive posted this before but it’s been a while, I like to add it to the conversation when talking about energy storage. https://energyvault.com/ https://energyvault.com/
- twic 6y ago
  I have heard quite a lot of skepticism about this. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIhCuzxNvv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIhCuzxNvv0
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Well, all I have to say is that this is the first practical gravity battery that isn't total garbage. In theory you can scale it up and eventually have something worthwhile...
hinkley 6y ago
In a perfect world, surplus energy production gets consumed by optional workloads. If you run a big enough internet presence you have at least a few services that can engage in load shedding, or deferring tasks (eg, work queues with priorities). Maybe luxury goods go into this category as well. Manufacturing and Cloud Providers both have to contend with the fact that idle equipment may cost them more than expensive power. Battery storage is predominantly about peak shaving of load variability, elective loads could help with trough filling. That doesn't get us to renewable power, but it does help get us away from the worst of the fossil fuel power plants.
- semi-extrinsic 6y ago
  Yeah, this is the "smart grid" concept that has been touted for years. If your washing machine knows the electricity price, it can run at optimal time, stuff like that. Unfortunately the dollar savings per person per year is way too low for people to bother, rather pay 30 cents extra to have the washing finished when you want it. So stuff like gamification has been seriously researched and tested as an option to make it fly. I think the jury is still out on it as a concept.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    In theory, automation should make a lot of this easier, which why something like a datacenter could be a productive place to start— it's not like a mine or some other industrial setting where turning down capacity in response to changes in the electrical grid suddenly means you have a bunch of people who showed up for their shift twiddling their thumbs instead of working.
  - novok 6y ago
    I would imagine EV charging could be a big consumer of this spare energy in the near future, especially with predictable commuting and same day weather forecasting.
    - etimberg 6y ago
      Working in the energy space, I don't know why a driver would want this. It's the same problem with V2G schemes. It means that you could decide on a whim to go for a drive, walk out to your car, and find that it has no charge.
mayama 6y ago
One option I don't see brought up often, in addition to battery, is HVDC. Transmission loss for 1000km on HVDC is 4% according to wiki. Continent wide grids could be created connected Europe, Asia and Africa. Storage requirements could be lowered with HVDC grid interconnect. India's One Sun One grid plan is to build a Asia Africa hvdc grid.
- cheez 6y ago
  Yep. If the people who run wild wonderful off grid (great channel) have taught me anything, it's that battery backup is essential.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  That's really cool, I didn't know India was doing that. I found this article a few years ago about a so-called "supergrid" that would produce a similar network across the globe. https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-a-global-power-grid https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build...
- BelleOfTheBall 6y ago
  How viable would that be in terms of maintenance? I presume it'd have to have a lot of failsafes or personnel that's assigned to some of the distant or at-risk grid sections, to keep things running smoothly and do repairs fast if something gets damaged.
  - elihu 6y ago
    That gets at an interesting point that if one country depends on energy from a far distant country for part of the day, then the defense of those power lines has immense geopolitical significance; similar to oil and gas pipelines. Maybe the solution is to keep a lot of dirty petroleum or coal-based generation capacity around to use in an emergency or war, but don't actually use it. As usual, there's a trade-off between efficiency and resilience.
- nomel 6y ago
  With HVDC, would you be able to take advantage of the occasional solar storm?
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
> In Germany, lots of electricity is produced from renewables at times when it’s not needed. This causes market prices to be negative at times and Germany is paying neighboring countries money to buy that excess electricity. The problem is that people cannot access these wholesale spot markets, only wholesalers. The consumer prices are usually set at like 11c kWh. If companies were given a chance to purchase electricity in a spot market, there would probably be some interesting business use-cases built around it, such as opportunistic bitcoin mining or battery arbitraging.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  We have companies in UK, like octopus energy, that allow you to purchase energy at hour-by-hour near-market-rates
7952 6y ago
A lot of what you are talking about is market related, rather than instrinsic to renewables. And capital costs for solar and wind do help with these issues. It could mean that you can afford to generate less and turn off when demand is low. It means that more money is available for battery storage or grid reinforcement. Interconnection could also make a big difference. You can export power from the North Sea to Germany or from Germany to Belgium for example. And ideally the market across Europe would help encourage cross border imports from less carbon intensive sources. Obviously nothing is a 100% solution, but that is why we have a grid and a market.
dpierce9 6y ago
Coal plants also can’t produce on demand because of inertia and long start times (though they can balance a bit). The only thing that can ‘produce’ on demand is battery. Combustion Turbines come in a close second. The peaks in the grid utilization curve actually tends to match the solar production curve pretty well (there are local deviations, running an aluminum smelter at night). Look at the demand curve in CA, you will see that it is flat midday. Before solar there was a peak midday. This creates issues on the ends (duck curve) of course but the key point is that solar production very closely matches peak electricity use.
- hinkley 6y ago
  How long does it take for a coal plant to ramp up or down? I wonder how much battery buffer you'd need to have the plant work on a pure control theory basis instead of long term forecasting?
  - dpierce9 6y ago
    Different plants have different ramps depending on where they are in their output curve, how hot they (or various parts) are, and how their operators want to run them (max ramp is generally higher than economic ramp) but, while it isn’t my business to know this stuff anymore, IIRC it is 2-5 MW/min for coal. This is ignoring the control loop.
  - etimberg 6y ago
    Some answers to that here: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-typical-ramp-rate-i-e-MW-s-for-hydro-and-thermal-power-stations?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-typical-ramp-rate-i-e-MW-s-f...
- twic 6y ago
  Gas turbines are on-demand enough. There's a bunch of stuff grids can do at shorter timescales to deal with variations in demand that don't involve actual batteries. There used to be a great article on Wikipedia how about this is done in the UK, but it was deleted. Notionally, it was merged into the main article about the National Grid, but all the interesting content was discarded when that happened. I think the worry was that the article was unsourced - it was pretty clearly just a Grid engineer who sit down and bashed it out one day. Anyway, here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Control_of_the_National_Grid_(Great_Britain)&oldid=680713385 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Control_of_the_Na...
ReptileMan 6y ago
MENA have too much sun (don't visit Oman or Qatar in July) and their countries run on air conditioning for survival. So large scale solar there actually matches that demand perfectly.
aftbit 6y ago
https://www.nonukesyall.org/pdfs/CarbonFreeNuclearFree.pdf https://www.nonukesyall.org/pdfs/CarbonFreeNuclearFree.pdf A carbon-free & nuclear-free grid definitely depends on either dramatic advances in storage or substantial infrastructure development in transporting electricity over long distances.
ThomPete 6y ago
And one of the primary reasons is that the more wind and solar we install the more backup we will need and the more complex our grid becomes. This is not actually factored into the price of wind and solar which is completely misrepresenting the actual cost of wind and solar.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
I don't disagree with the thrust of your comment, but: >customers buy electricity when they need it, not when it’s cheap. // It doesn't have to be like this. You can let customers buy according to price, distributors don't seem to want to; presumably because that democratises the cost savings. Octopus, a UK energy company, I think offers a customer direct grid pricing policy to some customers. I'm happy to run dishwasher, washing machine at night. Do hoovering (vacuum cleaning) on sunny days, etc.. Wait half an hour to bake a cake if a storm is passing. But these things mean paying less to the electricity company. I can see fridges that use a cold-storage scheme. And would definitely get a hot water tank if I could be paid to heat it.
- adwww 6y ago
  Fridges are a huge opportunity - they could easily monitor the frequency of the mains supply and turn the pump off whenever load drops under 50hz. Users would never even know, if they were factory wired with this kit the lights and any gadgets could continue to work. Perhaps this should be something manufacturers have to include in order to get their A+++ energy rating.
  - gdudeman 6y ago
    There are lots of interesting things like this right now. For instance, there is work on hot water heaters that can store excess energy by heating water hotter when electricity is cheap and then mixing with cold water to maintain a constant temp throughout the day / night.
    - natmaka 6y ago
      See also "smart grid" ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid ) and "vehicle to grid" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid )
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Using the grid frequency as a price signal seems to make perfect sense. A mapping table can be published of frequency to market price, and updated periodically. The prices for outer extremes of allowable system frequency should be "+Infinity" and "-Infinity" so there is never a situation that someone let's the grid frequency go outside allowable bounds for business reasons. Then home users can use devices with very basic built in electronics to save money or even earn money on electricity bills.
vbezhenar 6y ago
EU prices are ridiculous. I paid 2.9 eurocents per kWh last month in Kazakhstan. We just burn coal, AFAIK.
- hannasanarion 6y ago
  The premium probably comes largely from labor costs. US electricity is similarly expensive, averaging 0.12USD/kwh.
  - qayxc 6y ago
    Nope. The premium comes from taxes and surcharges. Industrial customers pay <0.09€/kWh.
- qayxc 6y ago
  Keep in mind that the average income in Germany is about 5x higher than in Kazakhstan, the grid is much bigger and most of the price is taxes. The actual price (before taxes) is less than 9ct/kWh (about 7.6ct/kWh to be precise - including profits, btw.) and that's what industrial customers pay. edit: I tried to find some figures to seejust how much bigger the German grid is compared to Kazakhstan and it's mind boggling. 25000 km in Kazakhstan vs 135000 km of just high voltage- and supergrid in Germany. Germany's grid is 1.8 million km versus 25 thousand km in Kazakhstan [1] [2]. Different worlds. [1] http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/energy/se/pp/eneff/9th__Forum_Kiev_Nov.18/13_Novembe_2018/RE_DEVCO/02_Baltugan_Tazhmakina.pdf http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/energy/se/pp/eneff/9th__F... page 4 [2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fde.statista.com%2Fstatistik%2Fdaten%2Fstudie%2F37962%2Fumfrage%2Flaenge-der-stromnetze-in-deutschland-in-1998-und-2008%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=h...
yourboypipiw 6y ago
You know you can just restrict output when there’s too much renewable energy? As it’s so cheap, this isn’t an issue, the issue in Germany is a regulatory problem they have got themselves in which is understandable given this is a new technology. Having wider inter connectivity of grids will help reduce these occasions too. And the major wind developers are looking into things like pumped storage, and electrolysis of water into hydrogen etc. Having too much energy isn’t the issue we’re facing right now, it’s being too dependent on fossil fuels. Less than 10% of energy worldwide comes from wind and solar - why are you worrying about the world not being able to be 100% renewable? By the time we get even halfway close, technology will have developed to a point that’s hard to foresee now. It’ll be ok to use up some natural gas for energy for example, especially if the carbon is captured and stored. Plus we have so many great natural carbon capturers like trees as it is. I don’t think it’s the case that proponents are withholding these problems, I just don’t think they are as big of an issue as you suggest, and they are categorically not as big of an issue as climate change.
- gwright 6y ago
  You are going down a well trodden path on HN where the problems of intermittent power generation are waved away and declared as not an issue because there are other technologies that will be available real soon now that can solve this problem. Here you mention several: more grid connectivity, pumped storage, electrolysis of water. Future imagined technologies and/or infrastructure can't help you with balancing the power on the grid today. The recent rolling power outages in California came from the fact that they are too dependent on renewables and basically ran out of power generating capability as the sun was setting in the evening but everyone wanted to keep running their air conditioning.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    > they are too dependent on renewables and basically ran out of power generating capability as the sun was setting Actually it's more complicated than that: "Several gas plants that were supposed to provide power failed to operate or tripped off, the CAISO said in a press conference last Wednesday. ... The CAISO also confirmed that demand was no greater than on previous very hot days."[0] You could equally make the case that the state was too dependent on unreliable gas plants. [0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renewables-arent-reason-california-blackouts/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renew...
looping__lui 6y ago
6 months ago I would have hot-headedly agreed with everything you say. The discussions I found on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21992958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21992958 changed my mind though. Nuclear power in France is heavily subsidized and it doesn’t make much economic sense. I mean, the radioactive emission from coal plants is higher than from nuclear powerplants - but the overall costs are too high. Check out what Patagonia has to say on hydro plants and the ecological impact in case you are interested. I do think that the way Germany is tackling electricity/energy is not great. Like so many things they are not solving...
- ebalit 6y ago
  What do you count as subsidies to nuclear power? Wind and solar have been heavily subsidized in France through buying it at an above market rate. [0] 0: http://www.bsi-economics.org/1016-evolution-prix-electricite-secteur-residentiel-france-tp http://www.bsi-economics.org/1016-evolution-prix-electricite...
  - michaelt 6y ago
    For example, the UK's "Hinkley Point C" nuclear plant expansion has the following subsidies [1] * Guaranteed minimum price for the electricity generated, well above current market rates. Taxpayer pays £92.50 per Megawatt Hour - when the wholesale price of electricity has been £35-£42 for the last year or so. The guaranteed price rises with inflation, and lasts 35 years. * Loan guarantees, reducing their interest rates. * Guaranteed maximum price for waste disposal, taxpayer pays anything above that. * Capped liability / reduced insurance requirements for nuclear accidents. Taxpayer pays if an accident exceeds their insurance. * Guaranteed maximum cost for decommissioning. Taxpayer pays if decommissioning costs more than predicted. When the whole project was kicked off it was pre-brexit and our politicians were pro-chinese-investment. So a nuclear plant built with French expertise and Chinese money seemed like a great way to replace our ageing coal-fired power plants and keep the lights on. [1] https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/publications/united-kingdom-subsidize-nuclear-power-at-what-cost.pdf https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/publications/united...
brlewis 6y ago
From the article: This work is an attempt to capture the “whole system costs” of an individual power plant. This could include the costs of enhancing the electricity network to connect a new power station, balancing supply and demand in real time, and providing backup power during periods of low wind or sun. From the comment I'm replying to: I wish proponents renewables were honest enough to not withhold these problems As the article makes clear, nobody is hiding from the fact that there are costs associated with providing backup power during periods of low wind or sun. The other problems in the comment are not problems with renewables per se (aside from one problem with the straw man "100% renewables"), but problems with German government policy.
bjourne 6y ago
> That doesn’t change the fact that neither wind nor solar can produce electricity on demand. Neither can nuclear power. Nuclear power has significant and often unpredictable down-times making the power source not as reliable as one might think. In Sweden the availability for nuclear power is on average something like 85%. Availability depends on the age of the nuclear power plant, what the staff situation is and how tight the regulations are. Can't run the plant if most of the staff is home sick and tighter regulations means more downtime for inspections. The availability for wind power in the North Sea is about 50%. Admittedly, lower than 85% but you can make up for it by building many wind farms. > Currently, we’re paying 31 Euro cents in Germany per kWh while French customers whose grid has a large share of nuclear pay just 17 Euro cents per kWh on average. That is an argument for tighter integration of electricity grids between countries. But also 31 - 17 = 14 cents/kWh. The cost of electricity isn't a problem for most households (in my household the static fee is the biggest expense even during the winter months).
- jsharf 6y ago
  You can't just buy more wind farms -- the wind in an area is correlated. That means if one wind farm isn't producing power, the wind farms nearby aren't likely to be producing power either. But nuclear power plants? Completely uncorrelated. If each one produces power 85% of the time, then you need two, and you'll almost always have power.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    I don't think wind is a panacea, but I think you're over-simplifying things - you can't just buy more nuclear power plants either; at least in the Western world, cost overruns in multiples of the original price are inevitable, the total time from planning to operational is decades, and it's difficult to find places where their presence is accepted.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      If only we hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s, we'd be at 100% instead of 20% market penetration. We would be free of CO2-heavy electricity today, not maybe 30 years from now optimistically. We knew how to build nuclear, but then Chernobyl and TMI happened and we decided we didn't want to. Which, in a vacuum, seems reasonable, until one remembers that the "cool-headed alternative" we settled on was to pump our atmosphere full of CO2 while we waited for solar and wind to eventually become viable and continue to wait to deploy them. We made our bed and now we get to lie in it.
gumby 6y ago
> That doesn’t change the fact that neither wind nor solar can produce electricity on demand. That’s true of baseload generators like coal and nuke. Power generation is complex and multifaceted (hence calculation is always done on LCOE). Gas peaked plants are a critical part of the legacy generation systems, and permit more intermittent zero input sources like wind and solar to reduce the amount of baseload capacity. I don’t know about renewable “proponents” but actual providers (of renewable or not) understand these issues well. Source: I used to be in this business.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
Germany has lots of energy related challenges but most of those are of a political rather than a technical nature. Transporting the energy via cables is part of the solution for this and is exactly one of the things where Germany is struggling. A lot of wind capacity is in the north and east; a lot of the demand is further south and west. It's a combination of politics being a problem (this involves lots of federal states and local councils), poor planning, and old energy corporations dragging their heels. The obvious solutions of putting some cables in place is basically completely blocked on this. Hence you have southern Germany burning expensive coal & gas at the same time the northern part is oversupplying wind power and exporting it to other countries at a discount. E.g. France is importing cheap German power and struggling to export more expensive nuclear power, which is one reason they seem to be shutting down older nuclear plants and gradually shifting to non nuclear renewables. France is of course still a net exporter but nuclear is too expensive for them to export. The other part of the solution is of course investing in batteries and other forms of energy storage. This evens out peaks in supply and demand much more effectively, cheaper, and faster than any peaker plant can do. Also, vehicle to grid technology could be very interesting mid term as German car manufacturers are about to ramp up EV production to the order of a couple of million cars per year in the next few years. 1 million cars is about 0.5 twh of battery capacity (assuming about 50 kwh per car). A couple of million of EVs plugged into the grid could provide some very serious peak capability (to absorb over supply and provide peak demand). The hardest thing to figure out is proper incentives for this, which is not a technical problem. Long term, there should be zero need to keep legacy gas/coal plants around for this. Of course, short term cables & batteries are lacking and there is a lot of legacy infrastructure there to be used. This actually keeps the prices higher than they should be. Overall, the picture is improving rapidly. Renewable market share is growing year on year at the cost of basically everything else. The reason energy prices in Germany remain high is also because it continues to maintain a quite expensive and dirty brown coal infrastructure. The reasons for this situation are also entirely political. Politicians in the areas where this stuff is mined & burned are being pressured to keep that going even though everyone has known for decades that it is a stupendously dirty business that ultimately will have to go. It's been a point of contention between the two governing parties. Basically it's a combination of protecting jobs and big energy companies who are of course shifting investments to renewables but are putting the brakes on to protect their sinking legacy assets. Basically, there are big German energy companies that are slowly going bankrupt because they are neck deep into stranded assets related to coal that need these high fees just to survive. So, expensive wind plays to their agenda because they get to keep on burning coal for a bit longer. Yes Germany's early investments in wind were questionable but most of the new capacity is much better and quite competitive in other parts of the world (e.g. the US, the UK, etc.). E.g. Siemens is a big supplier in this space and of course a big German corporation.
Faaak 6y ago
You're mixing market prices and wholesale prices. The price thet consumer pays includes the electricity price (i.e. market price, as seen on epex spot or eex), the taxes, and the network ! Networ costs can be half of the final cost !! And these can change depending on the country and the electricity provider. So please, when comparing prices, only compare the market prices of the energy component.
hkt 6y ago
> Unlike many other products, customers buy electricity when they need it, not when it’s cheap Not so. Home energy storage systems are getting there. Case in point, smart storage radiators: https://www.ovoenergy.com/smart-home-heat https://www.ovoenergy.com/smart-home-heat
WalterBright 6y ago
A way to greatly mitigate the mismatch between supply&demand is with variable pricing. An awful lot of major electricity use, like HVAC, hot water, and electric car battery charging and be easily time-shifted. A fixed 24/7 electricity rate is thoroughly obsolete and has got to go.
_ph_ 6y ago
Renewable energy production in Germany doesn't really ever exceed the demand. The big problem is, that nuclear and coal power plants are very slow to change their output, so there are often situations, where they are producing electricity that is not needed. As in the last year, both nuclear and coal production has been reduced (a nuclear powerplant was shut down for good, coal got more expensive due carbon certificates) the amount of overproduction was reduced.
sfifs 6y ago
This problem is well known. I think the big opportunity is now to figure out ways to solve it efficiently at scale - in times of excess power, how to store energy. Until a few years ago, the cost of Solar/Wind didn't make it worthwhile studying this problem. Now it's probably viable. Personally, i think the solution would be in converting energy into fuel in some way. Hydrogen is probably the easiest but very dangerous to handle in field conditions. Hydro Carbons would be ideal (extracting Carbon from air or maybe organic waste). There have been recent advances in catalysts - how to use electric/magnetic fields to mimic the action of physical catalysts etc.
natmaka 6y ago
It is apparently cheaper because in France, as in many countries, the nuke was and remains heavily subsided, decommission costs under evaluated ( take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18686703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18686703 ), mishaps hidden... The French public financial auditing institution (la Cour des Comptes) published in 2012 that public nuke investments are opaque, and that it costed around 228 10e9 euros, plus nowadays 3.4 10e9 euros per year for the sole maintenance. Nuke risk is what it is, and even financially it is not sound. Read there, starting folio 269: https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/Rapport_thematique_filiere_electronucleaire.pdf https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/Rappor... It is so expensive it cannot be hidden anymore. Electricity in France is absolutely not cheap, its price there is average in Europe. Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Germany now pays in order to solve the problem. France isn't completely dumb and a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") states that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewables must replace it. However those are only words, until now. Meanwhile... Germany solves its problem by switching to more adequate energy sources.
knoke 6y ago
I really, really recommend reading the Bundesnetzagentur‘s reasoning for its preferred market structure of the energy grids. They have long time goal (building resilient and performativ smart markets and grids) that explain a bit how some perceived inconsistencies (or pains) are necessary from their point of view. (I don’t dare to judge if they are right or not). For example: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Sachgebiete/Energie/Unternehmen_Institutionen/NetzzugangUndMesswesen/SmartGridEckpunktepapier/SmartGridPapierpdf.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2 https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Sac... But also some of their market and grid reports. It is really interesting, especially from a geeky perspective.
imtringued 6y ago
>That doesn’t change the fact that neither wind nor solar can produce electricity on demand. It doesn't really matter. Each kWh of renewable energy reduces the number of kWh that have to be generated via fossil fuels thereby reducing emissions. A grid with 80% renewables is possible with very little energy storage. >It doesn’t really matter whether a wind farm in the German North Sea can produce a lot of electricity cheaply during a windy day when that electricity is needed three days later in Munich. Renewable power generation follows a normal distribution. Yes there are extreme outliers in each direction but the more extreme the lower the likelyhood of it happening. There are at most 10 days per year where renewables are below 30% of generated power. Running some gas plants during those 10 days doesn't matter. Especially if you are using power to gas. >That’s because whenever solar and wind aren’t delivering any electricity we’re starting up coal and gas plants. It's usually the opposite. When coal starts up and there is renewable energy available the renewable energy has to be curtailed but it gets paid anyway. Coal is the issue here. Gas is not a problem because it is more flexible. [0] The irony is that energy intensive industry doesn't have to pay the EEG surcharge which means consumers end up paying a 2-3 times higher EEG surcharge than they should. It's practically a heavy industry subsidy at this point, not a renewable subsidy. Consumers pay the electricity bill of arcfurnaces now. Germany has high emissions because Germany turned off nuclear before phasing out coal and the coal lobby in Germany is huge. >The intermittency and low energy density are inherent physical properties of solar and wind farms which is why 100% renewables is newer feasible (unless for countries like Norway who have the possibility to build lots of hydro plants). I actually couldn't care less about 100% renewables. Even 80% renewables sounds like a dream today. However what you're saying is not the whole truth. 100% renewables are possible with today's technology and it will only get easier in the future. https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/09/correcting-anti-renewable-energy-propaganda/ https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/09/correcting-anti-renewab... [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkA65vpeA5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkA65vpeA5g (Video in German)
olodus 6y ago
This is what all these smart fridges and smart everything in our houses should be doing. I don't need a fridge that can tell me that the milk is almost out, but it could be super cool with a dishwasher that can be set to run when the price for electricity is low. Besides that, if ever electricity cost goes negative I think some electricity companies should invest in storing solutions. I know there are a few out there but most I've seen need more research and large investment. Maybe some can be distributed with making it easier for common folk to store and sell back.
addicted 6y ago
When the marginal cost of electricity is 0, you can also build overcapacity and dump electricity that you don’t know what to do about without any problems. But anyway am the issue here is about storage. And storage is getting cheaper by the day. Utility scale storage is also a lot cheaper. Finally, if Germany was to build nuclear today it would cost far more than what they are paying for any other electricity source. There’s a huge difference between the cost of nuclear whose capex was already paid for by the government decades ago and new nuclear. New renewables are cheaper by far than new nuclear.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

This helped to realize that our lens is a bit skewed. Oil and gas - _when compared with solar, wind, etc._ - aren't energy per se, they are batteries. The energy is stored and all we do is release it. On the other hand, wind and solar need to be created from scratch - and until we get better batteries - are released immediately. We're not usually comparing apples to apples but batteries (tradional energy sources) to from-scratch energy (solar and wind).

airstrike 6y ago
This is also the difference between fuel cells and batteries in the road to electrification

DataDaoDe 6y ago

I can't remember his name but there was a researcher (I think he was German) back in the early 2010s who predicted that as renewables became cheaper and gained more market share the price of energy would go up. This is because renewables are intermittent i.e. unreliable energy sources which means you need to maintain multiple energy infrastructures, a fallback for whenever renewables can't meet demand i.e. its nighttime or the wind isn't blowing, in addition to the renewable energy grid and switching back and forth has inefficiences. This is all if I'm remembering the paper correctly - it has been years since reading it.

frenchyatwork 6y ago
This is a lot more complicated than renewables/unrenewables. For example, hydroelectric power is almost the exact opposite of this. Geothermal, on the other hand, gives you a stable energy source, until it doesn't. Also, the grid doesn't use power evenly, but nuclear power (like geothermal) produces very even output so the US & Canada have agreements where Canada supplies excess hydro power during the day and then buys back cheap nuclear power at night. Of course, wind & solar are very intermittent, an many places don't have easy access to hydroelectric power, so this is certainly true in some places.
- Loughla 6y ago
  >Geothermal, on the other hand, gives you a stable energy source, until it doesn't. Can you point me toward any studies about geothermal 'running out'? Is that a thing?
  - frenchyatwork 6y ago
    Not studies, but the geothermal active areas I've been to have stories of geysers/springs either coming out of nowhere, or disappearing. It's very rare, and mostly happens during earthquakes. I would imagine the same would apply to power generation.
    - Loughla 6y ago

bigphishy 6y ago

The old ways of thinking no longer apply now that high density industrial lithium batteries exist. Solar+Storage is the way of the future.

dasudasu 6y ago
Vanadium redox batteries are looking pretty good as an alternative to lithium for large-scale energy storage.
ThomPete 6y ago
Solar and wind today doesn't deliver more than 1% of the world energy consumption. We are as close to fusion as we are to the kind of fuel cells that would be needed for that. Furthermore solar+storage doesn't do industrial grade energy needs. The heat thats needed ex.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  > Solar and wind today doesn't deliver more than 1% of the world energy consumption. That's an interesting statistic, but the topic of the article is electricity in the UK not energy use in the world. A more useful statistic would be this: "The government’s official data has revealed that renewable energy made up 47% of the UK’s electricity generation in the first three months of the year, smashing the previous quarterly record of 39% set last year."[0] It's true that doesn't include the energy used by gas heating systems or fuel used by vehicles, for example, but to bring those into consideration it would be helpful to know how quickly heating systems and vehicles are being replaced by electric equivalents (increasing the load on the grid, although per capita energy consumption in the UK has been decreasing for decades). [0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/25/renewable-energy-breaks-uk-record-in-first-quarter-of-2020 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/25/renewable-e...
  - ThomPete 6y ago
    Electricity is only around 15-20% of a countrys energy usage.

austinl 6y ago

The book The Grid by Gretchen Bakke is a great primer on why this is such an important problem. Energy is strange, in the sense that everything produced needs to be consumed more or less immediately — it's not like other resources that can be easily stockpiled (even with batteries). Our infrastructure, at least the antiquated American power grid infrastructure, is built with the assumption that production and consumption is balanced. Maintaining the energy grid is a careful balancing act between preventing surges and blackouts. There are a lot of grid-related engineering problems that come from increasing decentralization (e.g. wind, solar, hydro) because, as you mentioned, it increases unpredictability in supply.

dmix 6y ago
Did the book explore every home getting a vanadium redox or lithium battery? It seems like something that will be needed in the future (further adding to the decentralization). This of course will be expensive and I'm not sure how well tall condo buildings will handle the costs. It could potentially increase the cost of buying a home in the future. Or significant investment from the government so we don't regress our back to having blackouts (especially when it puts even more pressure on the poor in the name of the environment)... either to homes or some centralized system.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  Interesting rabbit hole. I bought an Engel dual 120V/12V powered fridge. Runs off 120VAC and 12-24VDC. You can plug it into both and it switches automatically to 12VDC if the 120VAC drops out. Things I've noticed. Even high efficiency residential fridges aren't that efficient. Some off grid ones use three times less power. And lot of the modern fridges have inverters to drive the compressor. Which means would not that big a stretch to add a 12/24V input like my portable fridge. I mention this because not all household loads are the same. You really don't want your fridge to stop working. You probably can manage if you can't run you whole house air conditioner full tilt. Having appliances that can run off back up and ones that can adjust their load probably would help. Another random opinion is a lot of house wiring could be replaced with Power of Ethernet. There is a new automotive standard that provides up to 100W. A house where lights and light loads were run off POE could be trivially backed up by a battery.

gknapp 6y ago

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is an excellent and renewable answer to this problem in tons of areas, has high efficiency (above 70%) and is already in use in a number of areas.

oblio 6y ago
How applicable is this to large scale electricity storage? I don't have any numbers but I doubt you could power a large economy like the German one based on pumped-storage. It's ok for some niche use cases but I doubt it's the future.
- myself248 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station ...can supply a maximum power of 1,728-megawatt and has a storage capacity of around 9.1 GWh.
  - oblio 6y ago
    I've just checked and Germany produced 516TWh of electricity in 2019. So that would mean that you need how many? 50000+ of these?
    - grey-area 6y ago
      No. Clearly you only need a small proportion of grid power in storage to cope with peaks. There are also multiple ways to smooth load - overcapacity, battery storage, pumped storage, load shedding, pricing. These are solved problems which just need a bit more work and investment, and many countries already use pumped storage extensively.
      - oblio 6y ago
        The only example that I know of is Norway which is kind of the holy grail of hydro, in general: 1. Small population. 2. Pretty tall mountains and sparsely populated mountains (see 1.) 3. Quite high yearly rainfall levels. 4. Very rich country. 5. Country with a very low level of corruption and from what I know, pretty efficient at building new infrastructure. Is there an example of an "average" country having decent levels of pumped hydro storage at a level that's above 0.5% of the country's needs?

theklub 6y ago

Ive posted this before but it’s been a while, I like to add it to the conversation when talking about energy storage. https://energyvault.com/ https://energyvault.com/

twic 6y ago
I have heard quite a lot of skepticism about this. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIhCuzxNvv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIhCuzxNvv0
- imtringued 6y ago
  Well, all I have to say is that this is the first practical gravity battery that isn't total garbage. In theory you can scale it up and eventually have something worthwhile...

hinkley 6y ago

In a perfect world, surplus energy production gets consumed by optional workloads. If you run a big enough internet presence you have at least a few services that can engage in load shedding, or deferring tasks (eg, work queues with priorities). Maybe luxury goods go into this category as well. Manufacturing and Cloud Providers both have to contend with the fact that idle equipment may cost them more than expensive power. Battery storage is predominantly about peak shaving of load variability, elective loads could help with trough filling. That doesn't get us to renewable power, but it does help get us away from the worst of the fossil fuel power plants.

semi-extrinsic 6y ago
Yeah, this is the "smart grid" concept that has been touted for years. If your washing machine knows the electricity price, it can run at optimal time, stuff like that. Unfortunately the dollar savings per person per year is way too low for people to bother, rather pay 30 cents extra to have the washing finished when you want it. So stuff like gamification has been seriously researched and tested as an option to make it fly. I think the jury is still out on it as a concept.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  In theory, automation should make a lot of this easier, which why something like a datacenter could be a productive place to start— it's not like a mine or some other industrial setting where turning down capacity in response to changes in the electrical grid suddenly means you have a bunch of people who showed up for their shift twiddling their thumbs instead of working.
- novok 6y ago
  I would imagine EV charging could be a big consumer of this spare energy in the near future, especially with predictable commuting and same day weather forecasting.
  - etimberg 6y ago
    Working in the energy space, I don't know why a driver would want this. It's the same problem with V2G schemes. It means that you could decide on a whim to go for a drive, walk out to your car, and find that it has no charge.

mayama 6y ago

One option I don't see brought up often, in addition to battery, is HVDC. Transmission loss for 1000km on HVDC is 4% according to wiki. Continent wide grids could be created connected Europe, Asia and Africa. Storage requirements could be lowered with HVDC grid interconnect. India's One Sun One grid plan is to build a Asia Africa hvdc grid.

cheez 6y ago
Yep. If the people who run wild wonderful off grid (great channel) have taught me anything, it's that battery backup is essential.
tehjoker 6y ago
That's really cool, I didn't know India was doing that. I found this article a few years ago about a so-called "supergrid" that would produce a similar network across the globe. https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-a-global-power-grid https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build...
BelleOfTheBall 6y ago
How viable would that be in terms of maintenance? I presume it'd have to have a lot of failsafes or personnel that's assigned to some of the distant or at-risk grid sections, to keep things running smoothly and do repairs fast if something gets damaged.
- elihu 6y ago
  That gets at an interesting point that if one country depends on energy from a far distant country for part of the day, then the defense of those power lines has immense geopolitical significance; similar to oil and gas pipelines. Maybe the solution is to keep a lot of dirty petroleum or coal-based generation capacity around to use in an emergency or war, but don't actually use it. As usual, there's a trade-off between efficiency and resilience.
nomel 6y ago
With HVDC, would you be able to take advantage of the occasional solar storm?

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

> In Germany, lots of electricity is produced from renewables at times when it’s not needed. This causes market prices to be negative at times and Germany is paying neighboring countries money to buy that excess electricity. The problem is that people cannot access these wholesale spot markets, only wholesalers. The consumer prices are usually set at like 11c kWh. If companies were given a chance to purchase electricity in a spot market, there would probably be some interesting business use-cases built around it, such as opportunistic bitcoin mining or battery arbitraging.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
We have companies in UK, like octopus energy, that allow you to purchase energy at hour-by-hour near-market-rates

7952 6y ago

A lot of what you are talking about is market related, rather than instrinsic to renewables. And capital costs for solar and wind do help with these issues. It could mean that you can afford to generate less and turn off when demand is low. It means that more money is available for battery storage or grid reinforcement. Interconnection could also make a big difference. You can export power from the North Sea to Germany or from Germany to Belgium for example. And ideally the market across Europe would help encourage cross border imports from less carbon intensive sources. Obviously nothing is a 100% solution, but that is why we have a grid and a market.

dpierce9 6y ago

Coal plants also can’t produce on demand because of inertia and long start times (though they can balance a bit). The only thing that can ‘produce’ on demand is battery. Combustion Turbines come in a close second. The peaks in the grid utilization curve actually tends to match the solar production curve pretty well (there are local deviations, running an aluminum smelter at night). Look at the demand curve in CA, you will see that it is flat midday. Before solar there was a peak midday. This creates issues on the ends (duck curve) of course but the key point is that solar production very closely matches peak electricity use.

hinkley 6y ago
How long does it take for a coal plant to ramp up or down? I wonder how much battery buffer you'd need to have the plant work on a pure control theory basis instead of long term forecasting?
- dpierce9 6y ago
  Different plants have different ramps depending on where they are in their output curve, how hot they (or various parts) are, and how their operators want to run them (max ramp is generally higher than economic ramp) but, while it isn’t my business to know this stuff anymore, IIRC it is 2-5 MW/min for coal. This is ignoring the control loop.
- etimberg 6y ago
  Some answers to that here: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-typical-ramp-rate-i-e-MW-s-for-hydro-and-thermal-power-stations?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-typical-ramp-rate-i-e-MW-s-f...
twic 6y ago
Gas turbines are on-demand enough. There's a bunch of stuff grids can do at shorter timescales to deal with variations in demand that don't involve actual batteries. There used to be a great article on Wikipedia how about this is done in the UK, but it was deleted. Notionally, it was merged into the main article about the National Grid, but all the interesting content was discarded when that happened. I think the worry was that the article was unsourced - it was pretty clearly just a Grid engineer who sit down and bashed it out one day. Anyway, here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Control_of_the_National_Grid_(Great_Britain)&oldid=680713385 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Control_of_the_Na...

ReptileMan 6y ago

MENA have too much sun (don't visit Oman or Qatar in July) and their countries run on air conditioning for survival. So large scale solar there actually matches that demand perfectly.

aftbit 6y ago

https://www.nonukesyall.org/pdfs/CarbonFreeNuclearFree.pdf https://www.nonukesyall.org/pdfs/CarbonFreeNuclearFree.pdf A carbon-free & nuclear-free grid definitely depends on either dramatic advances in storage or substantial infrastructure development in transporting electricity over long distances.

ThomPete 6y ago

And one of the primary reasons is that the more wind and solar we install the more backup we will need and the more complex our grid becomes. This is not actually factored into the price of wind and solar which is completely misrepresenting the actual cost of wind and solar.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

I don't disagree with the thrust of your comment, but: >customers buy electricity when they need it, not when it’s cheap. // It doesn't have to be like this. You can let customers buy according to price, distributors don't seem to want to; presumably because that democratises the cost savings. Octopus, a UK energy company, I think offers a customer direct grid pricing policy to some customers. I'm happy to run dishwasher, washing machine at night. Do hoovering (vacuum cleaning) on sunny days, etc.. Wait half an hour to bake a cake if a storm is passing. But these things mean paying less to the electricity company. I can see fridges that use a cold-storage scheme. And would definitely get a hot water tank if I could be paid to heat it.

adwww 6y ago
Fridges are a huge opportunity - they could easily monitor the frequency of the mains supply and turn the pump off whenever load drops under 50hz. Users would never even know, if they were factory wired with this kit the lights and any gadgets could continue to work. Perhaps this should be something manufacturers have to include in order to get their A+++ energy rating.
- gdudeman 6y ago
  There are lots of interesting things like this right now. For instance, there is work on hot water heaters that can store excess energy by heating water hotter when electricity is cheap and then mixing with cold water to maintain a constant temp throughout the day / night.
  - natmaka 6y ago
    See also "smart grid" ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid ) and "vehicle to grid" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid )
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Using the grid frequency as a price signal seems to make perfect sense. A mapping table can be published of frequency to market price, and updated periodically. The prices for outer extremes of allowable system frequency should be "+Infinity" and "-Infinity" so there is never a situation that someone let's the grid frequency go outside allowable bounds for business reasons. Then home users can use devices with very basic built in electronics to save money or even earn money on electricity bills.

vbezhenar 6y ago

EU prices are ridiculous. I paid 2.9 eurocents per kWh last month in Kazakhstan. We just burn coal, AFAIK.

hannasanarion 6y ago
The premium probably comes largely from labor costs. US electricity is similarly expensive, averaging 0.12USD/kwh.
- qayxc 6y ago
  Nope. The premium comes from taxes and surcharges. Industrial customers pay <0.09€/kWh.
qayxc 6y ago
Keep in mind that the average income in Germany is about 5x higher than in Kazakhstan, the grid is much bigger and most of the price is taxes. The actual price (before taxes) is less than 9ct/kWh (about 7.6ct/kWh to be precise - including profits, btw.) and that's what industrial customers pay. edit: I tried to find some figures to seejust how much bigger the German grid is compared to Kazakhstan and it's mind boggling. 25000 km in Kazakhstan vs 135000 km of just high voltage- and supergrid in Germany. Germany's grid is 1.8 million km versus 25 thousand km in Kazakhstan [1] [2]. Different worlds. [1] http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/energy/se/pp/eneff/9th__Forum_Kiev_Nov.18/13_Novembe_2018/RE_DEVCO/02_Baltugan_Tazhmakina.pdf http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/energy/se/pp/eneff/9th__F... page 4 [2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fde.statista.com%2Fstatistik%2Fdaten%2Fstudie%2F37962%2Fumfrage%2Flaenge-der-stromnetze-in-deutschland-in-1998-und-2008%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=h...

yourboypipiw 6y ago

You know you can just restrict output when there’s too much renewable energy? As it’s so cheap, this isn’t an issue, the issue in Germany is a regulatory problem they have got themselves in which is understandable given this is a new technology. Having wider inter connectivity of grids will help reduce these occasions too. And the major wind developers are looking into things like pumped storage, and electrolysis of water into hydrogen etc. Having too much energy isn’t the issue we’re facing right now, it’s being too dependent on fossil fuels. Less than 10% of energy worldwide comes from wind and solar - why are you worrying about the world not being able to be 100% renewable? By the time we get even halfway close, technology will have developed to a point that’s hard to foresee now. It’ll be ok to use up some natural gas for energy for example, especially if the carbon is captured and stored. Plus we have so many great natural carbon capturers like trees as it is. I don’t think it’s the case that proponents are withholding these problems, I just don’t think they are as big of an issue as you suggest, and they are categorically not as big of an issue as climate change.

gwright 6y ago
You are going down a well trodden path on HN where the problems of intermittent power generation are waved away and declared as not an issue because there are other technologies that will be available real soon now that can solve this problem. Here you mention several: more grid connectivity, pumped storage, electrolysis of water. Future imagined technologies and/or infrastructure can't help you with balancing the power on the grid today. The recent rolling power outages in California came from the fact that they are too dependent on renewables and basically ran out of power generating capability as the sun was setting in the evening but everyone wanted to keep running their air conditioning.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  > they are too dependent on renewables and basically ran out of power generating capability as the sun was setting Actually it's more complicated than that: "Several gas plants that were supposed to provide power failed to operate or tripped off, the CAISO said in a press conference last Wednesday. ... The CAISO also confirmed that demand was no greater than on previous very hot days."[0] You could equally make the case that the state was too dependent on unreliable gas plants. [0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renewables-arent-reason-california-blackouts/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renew...

looping__lui 6y ago

6 months ago I would have hot-headedly agreed with everything you say. The discussions I found on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21992958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21992958 changed my mind though. Nuclear power in France is heavily subsidized and it doesn’t make much economic sense. I mean, the radioactive emission from coal plants is higher than from nuclear powerplants - but the overall costs are too high. Check out what Patagonia has to say on hydro plants and the ecological impact in case you are interested. I do think that the way Germany is tackling electricity/energy is not great. Like so many things they are not solving...

ebalit 6y ago
What do you count as subsidies to nuclear power? Wind and solar have been heavily subsidized in France through buying it at an above market rate. [0] 0: http://www.bsi-economics.org/1016-evolution-prix-electricite-secteur-residentiel-france-tp http://www.bsi-economics.org/1016-evolution-prix-electricite...
- michaelt 6y ago
  For example, the UK's "Hinkley Point C" nuclear plant expansion has the following subsidies [1] * Guaranteed minimum price for the electricity generated, well above current market rates. Taxpayer pays £92.50 per Megawatt Hour - when the wholesale price of electricity has been £35-£42 for the last year or so. The guaranteed price rises with inflation, and lasts 35 years. * Loan guarantees, reducing their interest rates. * Guaranteed maximum price for waste disposal, taxpayer pays anything above that. * Capped liability / reduced insurance requirements for nuclear accidents. Taxpayer pays if an accident exceeds their insurance. * Guaranteed maximum cost for decommissioning. Taxpayer pays if decommissioning costs more than predicted. When the whole project was kicked off it was pre-brexit and our politicians were pro-chinese-investment. So a nuclear plant built with French expertise and Chinese money seemed like a great way to replace our ageing coal-fired power plants and keep the lights on. [1] https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/publications/united-kingdom-subsidize-nuclear-power-at-what-cost.pdf https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/publications/united...

brlewis 6y ago

From the article: This work is an attempt to capture the “whole system costs” of an individual power plant. This could include the costs of enhancing the electricity network to connect a new power station, balancing supply and demand in real time, and providing backup power during periods of low wind or sun. From the comment I'm replying to: I wish proponents renewables were honest enough to not withhold these problems As the article makes clear, nobody is hiding from the fact that there are costs associated with providing backup power during periods of low wind or sun. The other problems in the comment are not problems with renewables per se (aside from one problem with the straw man "100% renewables"), but problems with German government policy.

bjourne 6y ago

> That doesn’t change the fact that neither wind nor solar can produce electricity on demand. Neither can nuclear power. Nuclear power has significant and often unpredictable down-times making the power source not as reliable as one might think. In Sweden the availability for nuclear power is on average something like 85%. Availability depends on the age of the nuclear power plant, what the staff situation is and how tight the regulations are. Can't run the plant if most of the staff is home sick and tighter regulations means more downtime for inspections. The availability for wind power in the North Sea is about 50%. Admittedly, lower than 85% but you can make up for it by building many wind farms. > Currently, we’re paying 31 Euro cents in Germany per kWh while French customers whose grid has a large share of nuclear pay just 17 Euro cents per kWh on average. That is an argument for tighter integration of electricity grids between countries. But also 31 - 17 = 14 cents/kWh. The cost of electricity isn't a problem for most households (in my household the static fee is the biggest expense even during the winter months).

jsharf 6y ago
You can't just buy more wind farms -- the wind in an area is correlated. That means if one wind farm isn't producing power, the wind farms nearby aren't likely to be producing power either. But nuclear power plants? Completely uncorrelated. If each one produces power 85% of the time, then you need two, and you'll almost always have power.
- GordonS 6y ago
  I don't think wind is a panacea, but I think you're over-simplifying things - you can't just buy more nuclear power plants either; at least in the Western world, cost overruns in multiples of the original price are inevitable, the total time from planning to operational is decades, and it's difficult to find places where their presence is accepted.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    If only we hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s, we'd be at 100% instead of 20% market penetration. We would be free of CO2-heavy electricity today, not maybe 30 years from now optimistically. We knew how to build nuclear, but then Chernobyl and TMI happened and we decided we didn't want to. Which, in a vacuum, seems reasonable, until one remembers that the "cool-headed alternative" we settled on was to pump our atmosphere full of CO2 while we waited for solar and wind to eventually become viable and continue to wait to deploy them. We made our bed and now we get to lie in it.

gumby 6y ago

> That doesn’t change the fact that neither wind nor solar can produce electricity on demand. That’s true of baseload generators like coal and nuke. Power generation is complex and multifaceted (hence calculation is always done on LCOE). Gas peaked plants are a critical part of the legacy generation systems, and permit more intermittent zero input sources like wind and solar to reduce the amount of baseload capacity. I don’t know about renewable “proponents” but actual providers (of renewable or not) understand these issues well. Source: I used to be in this business.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

Germany has lots of energy related challenges but most of those are of a political rather than a technical nature. Transporting the energy via cables is part of the solution for this and is exactly one of the things where Germany is struggling. A lot of wind capacity is in the north and east; a lot of the demand is further south and west. It's a combination of politics being a problem (this involves lots of federal states and local councils), poor planning, and old energy corporations dragging their heels. The obvious solutions of putting some cables in place is basically completely blocked on this. Hence you have southern Germany burning expensive coal & gas at the same time the northern part is oversupplying wind power and exporting it to other countries at a discount. E.g. France is importing cheap German power and struggling to export more expensive nuclear power, which is one reason they seem to be shutting down older nuclear plants and gradually shifting to non nuclear renewables. France is of course still a net exporter but nuclear is too expensive for them to export. The other part of the solution is of course investing in batteries and other forms of energy storage. This evens out peaks in supply and demand much more effectively, cheaper, and faster than any peaker plant can do. Also, vehicle to grid technology could be very interesting mid term as German car manufacturers are about to ramp up EV production to the order of a couple of million cars per year in the next few years. 1 million cars is about 0.5 twh of battery capacity (assuming about 50 kwh per car). A couple of million of EVs plugged into the grid could provide some very serious peak capability (to absorb over supply and provide peak demand). The hardest thing to figure out is proper incentives for this, which is not a technical problem. Long term, there should be zero need to keep legacy gas/coal plants around for this. Of course, short term cables & batteries are lacking and there is a lot of legacy infrastructure there to be used. This actually keeps the prices higher than they should be. Overall, the picture is improving rapidly. Renewable market share is growing year on year at the cost of basically everything else. The reason energy prices in Germany remain high is also because it continues to maintain a quite expensive and dirty brown coal infrastructure. The reasons for this situation are also entirely political. Politicians in the areas where this stuff is mined & burned are being pressured to keep that going even though everyone has known for decades that it is a stupendously dirty business that ultimately will have to go. It's been a point of contention between the two governing parties. Basically it's a combination of protecting jobs and big energy companies who are of course shifting investments to renewables but are putting the brakes on to protect their sinking legacy assets. Basically, there are big German energy companies that are slowly going bankrupt because they are neck deep into stranded assets related to coal that need these high fees just to survive. So, expensive wind plays to their agenda because they get to keep on burning coal for a bit longer. Yes Germany's early investments in wind were questionable but most of the new capacity is much better and quite competitive in other parts of the world (e.g. the US, the UK, etc.). E.g. Siemens is a big supplier in this space and of course a big German corporation.

Faaak 6y ago

You're mixing market prices and wholesale prices. The price thet consumer pays includes the electricity price (i.e. market price, as seen on epex spot or eex), the taxes, and the network ! Networ costs can be half of the final cost !! And these can change depending on the country and the electricity provider. So please, when comparing prices, only compare the market prices of the energy component.

hkt 6y ago

> Unlike many other products, customers buy electricity when they need it, not when it’s cheap Not so. Home energy storage systems are getting there. Case in point, smart storage radiators: https://www.ovoenergy.com/smart-home-heat https://www.ovoenergy.com/smart-home-heat

WalterBright 6y ago

A way to greatly mitigate the mismatch between supply&demand is with variable pricing. An awful lot of major electricity use, like HVAC, hot water, and electric car battery charging and be easily time-shifted. A fixed 24/7 electricity rate is thoroughly obsolete and has got to go.

_ph_ 6y ago

Renewable energy production in Germany doesn't really ever exceed the demand. The big problem is, that nuclear and coal power plants are very slow to change their output, so there are often situations, where they are producing electricity that is not needed. As in the last year, both nuclear and coal production has been reduced (a nuclear powerplant was shut down for good, coal got more expensive due carbon certificates) the amount of overproduction was reduced.

sfifs 6y ago

This problem is well known. I think the big opportunity is now to figure out ways to solve it efficiently at scale - in times of excess power, how to store energy. Until a few years ago, the cost of Solar/Wind didn't make it worthwhile studying this problem. Now it's probably viable. Personally, i think the solution would be in converting energy into fuel in some way. Hydrogen is probably the easiest but very dangerous to handle in field conditions. Hydro Carbons would be ideal (extracting Carbon from air or maybe organic waste). There have been recent advances in catalysts - how to use electric/magnetic fields to mimic the action of physical catalysts etc.

natmaka 6y ago

It is apparently cheaper because in France, as in many countries, the nuke was and remains heavily subsided, decommission costs under evaluated ( take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18686703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18686703 ), mishaps hidden... The French public financial auditing institution (la Cour des Comptes) published in 2012 that public nuke investments are opaque, and that it costed around 228 10e9 euros, plus nowadays 3.4 10e9 euros per year for the sole maintenance. Nuke risk is what it is, and even financially it is not sound. Read there, starting folio 269: https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/Rapport_thematique_filiere_electronucleaire.pdf https://www.ccomptes.fr/sites/default/files/EzPublish/Rappor... It is so expensive it cannot be hidden anymore. Electricity in France is absolutely not cheap, its price there is average in Europe. Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Germany now pays in order to solve the problem. France isn't completely dumb and a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") states that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewables must replace it. However those are only words, until now. Meanwhile... Germany solves its problem by switching to more adequate energy sources.

knoke 6y ago

I really, really recommend reading the Bundesnetzagentur‘s reasoning for its preferred market structure of the energy grids. They have long time goal (building resilient and performativ smart markets and grids) that explain a bit how some perceived inconsistencies (or pains) are necessary from their point of view. (I don’t dare to judge if they are right or not). For example: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Sachgebiete/Energie/Unternehmen_Institutionen/NetzzugangUndMesswesen/SmartGridEckpunktepapier/SmartGridPapierpdf.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2 https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Sac... But also some of their market and grid reports. It is really interesting, especially from a geeky perspective.

imtringued 6y ago

>That doesn’t change the fact that neither wind nor solar can produce electricity on demand. It doesn't really matter. Each kWh of renewable energy reduces the number of kWh that have to be generated via fossil fuels thereby reducing emissions. A grid with 80% renewables is possible with very little energy storage. >It doesn’t really matter whether a wind farm in the German North Sea can produce a lot of electricity cheaply during a windy day when that electricity is needed three days later in Munich. Renewable power generation follows a normal distribution. Yes there are extreme outliers in each direction but the more extreme the lower the likelyhood of it happening. There are at most 10 days per year where renewables are below 30% of generated power. Running some gas plants during those 10 days doesn't matter. Especially if you are using power to gas. >That’s because whenever solar and wind aren’t delivering any electricity we’re starting up coal and gas plants. It's usually the opposite. When coal starts up and there is renewable energy available the renewable energy has to be curtailed but it gets paid anyway. Coal is the issue here. Gas is not a problem because it is more flexible. [0] The irony is that energy intensive industry doesn't have to pay the EEG surcharge which means consumers end up paying a 2-3 times higher EEG surcharge than they should. It's practically a heavy industry subsidy at this point, not a renewable subsidy. Consumers pay the electricity bill of arcfurnaces now. Germany has high emissions because Germany turned off nuclear before phasing out coal and the coal lobby in Germany is huge. >The intermittency and low energy density are inherent physical properties of solar and wind farms which is why 100% renewables is newer feasible (unless for countries like Norway who have the possibility to build lots of hydro plants). I actually couldn't care less about 100% renewables. Even 80% renewables sounds like a dream today. However what you're saying is not the whole truth. 100% renewables are possible with today's technology and it will only get easier in the future. https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/09/correcting-anti-renewable-energy-propaganda/ https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/09/correcting-anti-renewab... [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkA65vpeA5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkA65vpeA5g (Video in German)

olodus 6y ago

This is what all these smart fridges and smart everything in our houses should be doing. I don't need a fridge that can tell me that the milk is almost out, but it could be super cool with a dishwasher that can be set to run when the price for electricity is low. Besides that, if ever electricity cost goes negative I think some electricity companies should invest in storing solutions. I know there are a few out there but most I've seen need more research and large investment. Maybe some can be distributed with making it easier for common folk to store and sell back.

addicted 6y ago

When the marginal cost of electricity is 0, you can also build overcapacity and dump electricity that you don’t know what to do about without any problems. But anyway am the issue here is about storage. And storage is getting cheaper by the day. Utility scale storage is also a lot cheaper. Finally, if Germany was to build nuclear today it would cost far more than what they are paying for any other electricity source. There’s a huge difference between the cost of nuclear whose capex was already paid for by the government decades ago and new nuclear. New renewables are cheaper by far than new nuclear.