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The article says the world relies on fossil fuel for energy because it's cheaper. That's true. It doesn't mention that the world relies on it because it's relia

by bregma 6y ago

The article says the world relies on fossil fuel for energy because it's cheaper. That's true. It doesn't mention that the world relies on it because it's reliable. It doesn't disappear for 6 months of the year, or stop producing for 3 out of 5 days or during peak demand periods. Make renewables cheaper and more reliable and they will replace fossil fuels in a snap. Cheaper is not enough if it doesn't do the job.

dariusj18 6y ago
That's still cheaper. No need to create battery farms that can hold power for half a year.
BurningFrog 6y ago
It does mention this briefly in the Batteries and electricity storage follow learning curves too section.
- shoguning 6y ago
  Yeah, that is mentioned as "one of the downsides of renewables". That is like saying, "one of the downsides of using a cooked noodle as a fork is that it doesn't hold its shape". It's disqualifying until that issue is sorted. The value of solar right now is that it provides energy at the hottest, most energy use part of the day. But there is a tipping point where marginal solar is not really valuable for a grid anymore. California and Germany are at that point. Hopefully we get cost-effective day-scale energy storage, it's not going to happen in the next few years unfortunately.
  - oblio 6y ago
    Well, at least the upside is that this will be another forcing function for better battery tech. Another step up in battery tech would literally level us up as a civilization.
  - marshray 6y ago
    > But there is a tipping point where marginal solar is not really valuable for a grid anymore. And that is a very good problem to have. There are any number of industrial processes that could easily put that excessively cheap energy to use. Aluminum smelting, for example.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      electrolysis, bitcoin mining (!), electric car recharging, etc.
    - konjin 6y ago
      It isn't. Your base load stations close and you are left only with the intermittent reweables and natural gas. South Australia is the only energy market in that place right now and the prices paid there would destroy any industrial economy.
      - pjc50 6y ago
        "Renewables, natural gas and a couple of nuclear plants" is the UK situation, with normal electricity prices. Almost all the coal is closed permanently. People will keep saying it won't work long after it's already been done.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    It's certainly not disqualifying until we are at far far far higher levels of renewables on the grid. Getting to 80% generation would take very little storage. And people overestimate how much storage costs. In Texas, even with super cheap natural gas, there are more GW of storage in the interconnection queue than there are of natural gas plants. That's at today's prices, in a market where everybody competes on their own costs! https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/ https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/ And greater than 95% of new solar projects in California include storage, and something like 25% of projects outside of California include storage along with the renewables. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hybrid-power-plants-are-growing-rapidly-but-are-they-a-good-idea https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hybrid-power-pl... We don't absolutely need to deploy storage right now, but independent agents are still doing it, because they make money by deploying storage at current costs.
jes5199 6y ago
in the past they were cheaper. Now renewables are cheaper. Right now, intermittent renewables actually drives up the cost of fossil fuels! Renewables do wacky things to the spot price of power - sometimes electricity is free or even has negative value, sometimes it's expensive. Ideally fossil fuel plants would only spin up when they could sell power at a profit, but they can't dispatch so quickly, so they end up selling power at a loss for minutes or hours after the solar panels or wind turbines kick back on. This is producing market conditions that are favorable to batteries and super-capacitors, because they can dispatch in seconds, or milliseconds. Arbitraging between times of cheap power to times of expensive power can already be competitive with fossil fuels some of the time. And batteries are getting cheaper, too. There's some question about what the ideal mix of generation vs storage will end up being. While storage is expensive, we'll tend to over-provision wind and solar, and end up throwing power away... unless we can come up for some use for it when we have moments of surplus. There's some talk of using it for things like ocean water desalination, but most of our machinery has such a high investment cost right now that the cost of electricity is not the biggest expense, so we don't actually have many machines that we idle until power gets cheap. Maybe that'll change eventually.
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  I think we’ll start using more ways to store the energy. In the scenarios you describe, when the energy price fluctuate so wildly, the processes don’t have to be efficient. There’s not really a problem if 70% is lost in the process if the energy we started with is free. Pumping water to higher elevation or hydrogen production is suddenly reasonable.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    Pumped storage is great, but it's simply not viable at a large scale. There are very few places where natural landscape allows it, and making more artificial ones would require flooding vast areas. Considering how difficult it often is to build solar plants on deserts (e.g. consider Ivanpah solar plant, which almost did not get build due to its impact on habitat of desert tortoises, which ended up getting relocated at a cost of $300k each), I don't expect the green interest groups to accept such wholesale destruction of environments.
TomWhitwell 6y ago
Traditional power stations do exactly this - being closed for maintenance or running on low output for days, weeks or months even the interconnector cables between UK and European power suppliers have failed for months at a time. BUT yes, there's no equivalent of unexpected low wind and/or low solar for days or weeks.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  The equivalent is a detached turbine blade, or sudden failure of cooling water pipes/intakes/pumps. Unexpected failures happen all the time.
  - _ph_ 6y ago
    The point is, a failing turbine makes not a noticable dent in the electricity production when there are tens of thousands of turbines. At that scale, the number of turbines which are shut down for failures/maintenance becomes a constant. A huge power plant going down in an instant is another problem however.
CountSessine 6y ago
Related question: what's the spot price for solar power at 1am? How cheap is it then?
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  Assuming no or minimal congestion or losses, the LMP (locational marginal price) or nodal price is basically the same everywhere. So the question is what is the MEC (marginal energy component) of the nodal price which is shared by everyone. In general, prices in the spot market are pretty low that early in the morning. It depends on the RTO/ISO region, but maybe ~$10/MWh?
- epistasis 6y ago
  Using lithium ion batteries, that solar would cost $81-$140/MWh, which is pretty much the same price as coal (compare the final slide to the first slide): https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 But batteries get cheaper every year, so check back in 2021 for even cheaper prices. Most observers expect lithium ion storage to be cheaper than natural gas within a decade. And when you amortize the nighttime storage costs with the cheap daytime solar, natural gas is barely holding on in some markets. If we had a carbon tax that came close to internalizing the externalities, I don't think NG would be running for much longer.
  - nl 6y ago
    With 4500km power transmission lines currently being planned[1], the key question is "1 am where?" That's about 3-4 hours of time difference if the cable was along a line of latitude which obviously reduces the required storage time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_...
francisofascii 6y ago
Wood and biomass are renewable. Fossil fuels "disappear" after being consumed. The sun, however will reliably be around for quite some time.
davidwitt415 6y ago
RTFA: Batteries and electricity storage follow learning curves too One of the downsides of renewable sources is their intermittent supply cycle. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Technologies like batteries that store electric power are key to balance the changing supply from renewables with the inflexible demand for electricity. Fortunately electricity storage technologies are also among the few technologies that are following steeply declining learning curves.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  We already have cheap "batteries" in our homes. Run the electric water heater when the power is cheap. Water in the tank stays hot for a couple days. The only piece missing here is an internet-connected thermostat for the tank that inquires about the spot price for electricity and turns on when it's cheap. The same thing applies to your HVAC system.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    You're exaggerating a bit. Water heater will stay hot for a day or so, but will rapidly cool when you start using it and cold water flows in. House will be uncomfortably cold after a few hours in the wintertime if the heat is not running, and it's not really practical to overheat it when electric rates are low/free because you can only go maybe 10 degrees before it's really too warm for comfort. You'd need a heat tank of some sort which complicates the system and as a practical matter homes don't have that and might not have space for. Finally aside from all that I heat my water and my home with natural gas.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      I've had power outages for a week more than once, and can vouch for it staying warm enough for a comfortable shower for a couple days. For HVAC, you can heat/cool it at a minimum to the edge of the comfort range, which will make a big difference. You can take it much further by heating/cooling some thermal mass, and drawing on that mass when the electricity is cheaper. That mass can simply be a pile of stones in a box with some ductwork added. It's hard to find a cheaper "battery" technology than a box of rocks. Frankly, I think people are way too focused on batteries and are overlooking the rather obvious.
romanoderoma 6y ago
Also, unfortunately for our climate, fossil fuels are easy to store, even for decades (potentially forever, they don't decay) and transport and require no advanced technology to be useful, you simply need a way to set them on fire. There was a discussion few days ago about fossil fuels bootstrapping the industrial revolution(s), one of the theories is that without them we wouldn't be talking about renewable energy at all (except in very basic ways like running a watermill)
- WalterBright 6y ago
  That's why it's highly unlikely there was a civilization on the Earth before ours.
  - bregma 6y ago
    ... unless that's what we're burning when we burn fossil fuels....
0df8dkdf 6y ago
have you guys seen Naomi Klein new documentary. Renewable energy is a joke, just another way to squeeze money out of normal people by using a taxation system. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/17/the-green-new-deal-a-fight-for-our-lives/ https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/17/the-green-new-deal-...
cbmuser 6y ago
To make wind and solar power more reliable, you need to stop earth rotation or manipulate the climate to produce continuous sunlight and/or wind. That’s simply impossible. The only reliable renewable enery is hydropower and maybe geothermal power.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  Take some advice from someone who has been there and done that, and suffered for it: - Cure yourself of this tendency to jump to extremes. Your relationships and your career will benefit from pausing and moderating what you say. To the content of your comment: - There is a sizable menu of options to make wind and solar more reliable. Two technologies with nearly a century of history behind them are pumped hydro and CAES (compressed air energy storage). Batteries have been technologically feasible for decades, and are on the cusp of economic feasibility (that is: being cheaper than the alternatives), thanks to the manufacturing learning curve that the OP makes so much of. Better grid interconnections also help a lot and probably have an even more illustrious history than pumped hydro and CAES. Demand management (asking large users, e.g. pulp and paper mills to pause for a while), is also a venerable technique. It is possible to use surplus power to make fuels to burn when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. This is still in its infancy only because we have never before had periods when electricity had a negative price. These are just the things that sprang to my mind without thinking about it. There are others.
- imtringued 6y ago
  This reminds me of a comment about Creality's belted 3D printer not being able to violate the laws of physics and then someone added rollers so long prints don't fall of the bed... Seemingly complicated problems don't necessarily require complicated solutions. You can do three easy things. Create bigger electricity grids with more decentralized generation (the whole earth receives a roughly constant amount of energy from the sun), overproduce energy or build some storage.
_ph_ 6y ago
I don't think the term "reliable" is the right term to use there. One should distinguish between reliability and availability. Renewables tend to be extremely reliable - why would a solar cell fail? - but not always available. Fossil or nuclear powerplants are quite available - they can run 24/7 on full power, but not always reliable. Especially nuclear power plants have a not so great reliability. They are often shut down completely and without warning for smaller non dangerous events. Also, in certain weather conditions, cooling of power plants is an issue so they have to be shut down. Also, for all fossil fuel plants, there is existing storage to compensate on a failing supply change (oil crisis) which have to be calculated in the costs. Of course, the availability of renewables is an issue that has to be dealt with in planning the grid. If they are cheap enough, overprovisioning helps a lot, having larger grid interconnects help - even if there is not always wind in Germany, there should be pretty always be wind in Germany or France as an example. We still can change the way existing plants produce electricity - adding pumps to hydroelectric plants to convert them into storage, store the gas used in biomass plants rather than constantly burning it. And of course we need to build up additional storage. But that is just at the beginning of the learning curve, as most grids currently can just absorb all renewables as they are produced.

by bregma 6y ago

dariusj18 6y ago

That's still cheaper. No need to create battery farms that can hold power for half a year.

BurningFrog 6y ago

It does mention this briefly in the Batteries and electricity storage follow learning curves too section.

shoguning 6y ago
Yeah, that is mentioned as "one of the downsides of renewables". That is like saying, "one of the downsides of using a cooked noodle as a fork is that it doesn't hold its shape". It's disqualifying until that issue is sorted. The value of solar right now is that it provides energy at the hottest, most energy use part of the day. But there is a tipping point where marginal solar is not really valuable for a grid anymore. California and Germany are at that point. Hopefully we get cost-effective day-scale energy storage, it's not going to happen in the next few years unfortunately.
- oblio 6y ago
  Well, at least the upside is that this will be another forcing function for better battery tech. Another step up in battery tech would literally level us up as a civilization.
- marshray 6y ago
  > But there is a tipping point where marginal solar is not really valuable for a grid anymore. And that is a very good problem to have. There are any number of industrial processes that could easily put that excessively cheap energy to use. Aluminum smelting, for example.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    electrolysis, bitcoin mining (!), electric car recharging, etc.
  - konjin 6y ago
    It isn't. Your base load stations close and you are left only with the intermittent reweables and natural gas. South Australia is the only energy market in that place right now and the prices paid there would destroy any industrial economy.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      "Renewables, natural gas and a couple of nuclear plants" is the UK situation, with normal electricity prices. Almost all the coal is closed permanently. People will keep saying it won't work long after it's already been done.
- epistasis 6y ago
  It's certainly not disqualifying until we are at far far far higher levels of renewables on the grid. Getting to 80% generation would take very little storage. And people overestimate how much storage costs. In Texas, even with super cheap natural gas, there are more GW of storage in the interconnection queue than there are of natural gas plants. That's at today's prices, in a market where everybody competes on their own costs! https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/ https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/ And greater than 95% of new solar projects in California include storage, and something like 25% of projects outside of California include storage along with the renewables. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hybrid-power-plants-are-growing-rapidly-but-are-they-a-good-idea https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hybrid-power-pl... We don't absolutely need to deploy storage right now, but independent agents are still doing it, because they make money by deploying storage at current costs.

jes5199 6y ago

in the past they were cheaper. Now renewables are cheaper. Right now, intermittent renewables actually drives up the cost of fossil fuels! Renewables do wacky things to the spot price of power - sometimes electricity is free or even has negative value, sometimes it's expensive. Ideally fossil fuel plants would only spin up when they could sell power at a profit, but they can't dispatch so quickly, so they end up selling power at a loss for minutes or hours after the solar panels or wind turbines kick back on. This is producing market conditions that are favorable to batteries and super-capacitors, because they can dispatch in seconds, or milliseconds. Arbitraging between times of cheap power to times of expensive power can already be competitive with fossil fuels some of the time. And batteries are getting cheaper, too. There's some question about what the ideal mix of generation vs storage will end up being. While storage is expensive, we'll tend to over-provision wind and solar, and end up throwing power away... unless we can come up for some use for it when we have moments of surplus. There's some talk of using it for things like ocean water desalination, but most of our machinery has such a high investment cost right now that the cost of electricity is not the biggest expense, so we don't actually have many machines that we idle until power gets cheap. Maybe that'll change eventually.

Ma8ee 6y ago
I think we’ll start using more ways to store the energy. In the scenarios you describe, when the energy price fluctuate so wildly, the processes don’t have to be efficient. There’s not really a problem if 70% is lost in the process if the energy we started with is free. Pumping water to higher elevation or hydrogen production is suddenly reasonable.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  Pumped storage is great, but it's simply not viable at a large scale. There are very few places where natural landscape allows it, and making more artificial ones would require flooding vast areas. Considering how difficult it often is to build solar plants on deserts (e.g. consider Ivanpah solar plant, which almost did not get build due to its impact on habitat of desert tortoises, which ended up getting relocated at a cost of $300k each), I don't expect the green interest groups to accept such wholesale destruction of environments.

TomWhitwell 6y ago

Traditional power stations do exactly this - being closed for maintenance or running on low output for days, weeks or months even the interconnector cables between UK and European power suppliers have failed for months at a time. BUT yes, there's no equivalent of unexpected low wind and/or low solar for days or weeks.

tuatoru 6y ago
The equivalent is a detached turbine blade, or sudden failure of cooling water pipes/intakes/pumps. Unexpected failures happen all the time.
- _ph_ 6y ago
  The point is, a failing turbine makes not a noticable dent in the electricity production when there are tens of thousands of turbines. At that scale, the number of turbines which are shut down for failures/maintenance becomes a constant. A huge power plant going down in an instant is another problem however.

CountSessine 6y ago

Related question: what's the spot price for solar power at 1am? How cheap is it then?

7thaccount 6y ago
Assuming no or minimal congestion or losses, the LMP (locational marginal price) or nodal price is basically the same everywhere. So the question is what is the MEC (marginal energy component) of the nodal price which is shared by everyone. In general, prices in the spot market are pretty low that early in the morning. It depends on the RTO/ISO region, but maybe ~$10/MWh?
epistasis 6y ago
Using lithium ion batteries, that solar would cost $81-$140/MWh, which is pretty much the same price as coal (compare the final slide to the first slide): https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 But batteries get cheaper every year, so check back in 2021 for even cheaper prices. Most observers expect lithium ion storage to be cheaper than natural gas within a decade. And when you amortize the nighttime storage costs with the cheap daytime solar, natural gas is barely holding on in some markets. If we had a carbon tax that came close to internalizing the externalities, I don't think NG would be running for much longer.
- nl 6y ago
  With 4500km power transmission lines currently being planned[1], the key question is "1 am where?" That's about 3-4 hours of time difference if the cable was along a line of latitude which obviously reduces the required storage time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_...

francisofascii 6y ago

Wood and biomass are renewable. Fossil fuels "disappear" after being consumed. The sun, however will reliably be around for quite some time.

davidwitt415 6y ago

RTFA: Batteries and electricity storage follow learning curves too One of the downsides of renewable sources is their intermittent supply cycle. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Technologies like batteries that store electric power are key to balance the changing supply from renewables with the inflexible demand for electricity. Fortunately electricity storage technologies are also among the few technologies that are following steeply declining learning curves.

WalterBright 6y ago
We already have cheap "batteries" in our homes. Run the electric water heater when the power is cheap. Water in the tank stays hot for a couple days. The only piece missing here is an internet-connected thermostat for the tank that inquires about the spot price for electricity and turns on when it's cheap. The same thing applies to your HVAC system.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  You're exaggerating a bit. Water heater will stay hot for a day or so, but will rapidly cool when you start using it and cold water flows in. House will be uncomfortably cold after a few hours in the wintertime if the heat is not running, and it's not really practical to overheat it when electric rates are low/free because you can only go maybe 10 degrees before it's really too warm for comfort. You'd need a heat tank of some sort which complicates the system and as a practical matter homes don't have that and might not have space for. Finally aside from all that I heat my water and my home with natural gas.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    I've had power outages for a week more than once, and can vouch for it staying warm enough for a comfortable shower for a couple days. For HVAC, you can heat/cool it at a minimum to the edge of the comfort range, which will make a big difference. You can take it much further by heating/cooling some thermal mass, and drawing on that mass when the electricity is cheaper. That mass can simply be a pile of stones in a box with some ductwork added. It's hard to find a cheaper "battery" technology than a box of rocks. Frankly, I think people are way too focused on batteries and are overlooking the rather obvious.

romanoderoma 6y ago

Also, unfortunately for our climate, fossil fuels are easy to store, even for decades (potentially forever, they don't decay) and transport and require no advanced technology to be useful, you simply need a way to set them on fire. There was a discussion few days ago about fossil fuels bootstrapping the industrial revolution(s), one of the theories is that without them we wouldn't be talking about renewable energy at all (except in very basic ways like running a watermill)

WalterBright 6y ago
That's why it's highly unlikely there was a civilization on the Earth before ours.
- bregma 6y ago
  ... unless that's what we're burning when we burn fossil fuels....

0df8dkdf 6y ago

have you guys seen Naomi Klein new documentary. Renewable energy is a joke, just another way to squeeze money out of normal people by using a taxation system. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/17/the-green-new-deal-a-fight-for-our-lives/ https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/09/17/the-green-new-deal-...

cbmuser 6y ago

To make wind and solar power more reliable, you need to stop earth rotation or manipulate the climate to produce continuous sunlight and/or wind. That’s simply impossible. The only reliable renewable enery is hydropower and maybe geothermal power.

tuatoru 6y ago
Take some advice from someone who has been there and done that, and suffered for it: - Cure yourself of this tendency to jump to extremes. Your relationships and your career will benefit from pausing and moderating what you say. To the content of your comment: - There is a sizable menu of options to make wind and solar more reliable. Two technologies with nearly a century of history behind them are pumped hydro and CAES (compressed air energy storage). Batteries have been technologically feasible for decades, and are on the cusp of economic feasibility (that is: being cheaper than the alternatives), thanks to the manufacturing learning curve that the OP makes so much of. Better grid interconnections also help a lot and probably have an even more illustrious history than pumped hydro and CAES. Demand management (asking large users, e.g. pulp and paper mills to pause for a while), is also a venerable technique. It is possible to use surplus power to make fuels to burn when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. This is still in its infancy only because we have never before had periods when electricity had a negative price. These are just the things that sprang to my mind without thinking about it. There are others.
imtringued 6y ago
This reminds me of a comment about Creality's belted 3D printer not being able to violate the laws of physics and then someone added rollers so long prints don't fall of the bed... Seemingly complicated problems don't necessarily require complicated solutions. You can do three easy things. Create bigger electricity grids with more decentralized generation (the whole earth receives a roughly constant amount of energy from the sun), overproduce energy or build some storage.

_ph_ 6y ago

I don't think the term "reliable" is the right term to use there. One should distinguish between reliability and availability. Renewables tend to be extremely reliable - why would a solar cell fail? - but not always available. Fossil or nuclear powerplants are quite available - they can run 24/7 on full power, but not always reliable. Especially nuclear power plants have a not so great reliability. They are often shut down completely and without warning for smaller non dangerous events. Also, in certain weather conditions, cooling of power plants is an issue so they have to be shut down. Also, for all fossil fuel plants, there is existing storage to compensate on a failing supply change (oil crisis) which have to be calculated in the costs. Of course, the availability of renewables is an issue that has to be dealt with in planning the grid. If they are cheap enough, overprovisioning helps a lot, having larger grid interconnects help - even if there is not always wind in Germany, there should be pretty always be wind in Germany or France as an example. We still can change the way existing plants produce electricity - adding pumps to hydroelectric plants to convert them into storage, store the gas used in biomass plants rather than constantly burning it. And of course we need to build up additional storage. But that is just at the beginning of the learning curve, as most grids currently can just absorb all renewables as they are produced.