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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

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.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    > I don't expect the green interest groups to accept such wholesale destruction of environments. In the grand scheme of things, this is like refusing chemotherapy for cancer because it makes your hair fall out. Climate change is a huge issue. You have to be willing to sacrifice what would normally be valid environmental concerns to address it. You either believe it is an emergency or not.
  - robocat 6y ago
    Existing hydro lakes can act as storage (within the constraints of how much inflow there is and minimum outflow rates). Decrease lake outflow when solar and wind are producing power. Increase lake outflow when they are not. https://www.hydro.org/waterpower/why-hydro/available/ https://www.hydro.org/waterpower/why-hydro/available/
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      Your link says that at best we could double our current hydro generation capacity, which supports my point: it's simply too little for our storage needs, and if we electrify more of our economy (i.e. use it to replace heat and transport for which we use a lot of fossils now), it will be even less. It might still be worth doing, but is far from solving the storage problem: it just has significant limits on its potential scale.
      - nl 6y ago
        > Your link says that at best we could double our current hydro generation capacity No, it says "that without building a single new dam" [hydro could roughly double its existing capacity in the US]. I'll assume you just misread that, but in any case that's pretty different to building new dams, or utilising tech like mines, or at-sea pumped storage.
        xyzzyz 6y ago
        > No, it says "that without building a single new dam" [hydro could roughly double its existing capacity in the US]. No, that's not what it says. It says: > The report estimates that without building a single new dam, these available hydropower resources, if fully developed, could provide an electrical generating capacity of more than 12 gigawatts (GW), equivalent to roughly 15 percent of current U.S. hydropower capacity. Without constructing any new dams, you only increase it by 15%, not double it. Also, consider that 12 GW is 105 TWh per year. US consumes 4100 TWh of electricity per year. It would sure be nice to increase non-fossil electricity production by 2.5%, but that's clearly not very much. If the plan is to use hydro to cover the shortfall when the renewables are not producing enough, you need much more generating capacity than 12 GW, and more than 65 GW your link suggests could be potentially built. Finally, 2.5% is on the order of our annual growth in electricity consumption, which will in fact accelerate as we move off fossils. Thus, building out all possible hydro will only buy one year of growth in consumption.
- cbmuser 6y ago
  There is no reasonable and economic way to store Terawatthours of electricity. Even huge hydrostorage plants have only a few GWh.
  - Reason077 6y ago
    Huh? Norway alone has 85 TWh of hydrologic storage. New Zealand has about 4 TWh, but they are considering adding an additional 5-12 TWh with one single storage project: https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/central-otago/scientific-thought-behind-hydro-idea https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/central-otago/scientific-thoug...
alliao 6y ago
isn't that the game plan for hydrogen powered vehicles? so they can build a plan to absorb all these excess from over provisioning at a lower rate to produce hydrogen for their fleet
- ncmncm 6y ago
  This is especially attractive for aircraft, but it will take awhile to happen. We probably need new aircraft. Hopefully civilization will not collapse first, from refugees driving fascist governments into power, and former democracies self-surveilling themselves into locked-in dictatorships. On the upside, collapsed civilization will have lower energy demands, and will find carbon extraction and transport harder to organize.
- bregma 6y ago
  Sure. Find some way to break up CO2 from the atmosphere and bond hydrogen to the carbons. It creates a relatively safe, easy-to-use hydrogen storage medium and it reduces greenhouse gases at the same time. The cars would just need to break the carbon-hydrogen bonds to release the energy once again, and the process is GHG-neutral.
xupybd 6y ago
>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 Maybe Carbon sequestration?
- jes5199 6y ago
  I sure hope so.
eldaisfish 6y ago
>Now renewables are cheaper. Yes, provided you ignore the cost of balancing an increasingly volatile grid, a volatility that is created by renewables. Also provided you ignore the cost to provide energy when said renewables aren't generating any. Claims to back up your statment, such as from Lazard, are horribly flawed because they use the metric of LCOE - levelised cost of energy - to claim that renewable energy is cheaper. It is, provided you ignore the slew of costs that are not borne by renewable generators but which ARE borne by consumers. Yes, batteries are getting cheaper but not at the scale required for the grid. Before you quote the Australian Tesla battery, remember that it can only provide energy for minutes - yes, minutes. What is needed today for a low-carbon future is nuclear and hydro. Renewables will get there one day but that day is not tomorrow or next year.
- manfredo 6y ago
  It's sad to see people downvote correct information. For context, the US consumes ~12TWh of electricity daily, so 500 GWh per hour. Global lithium ion battery production is around 300 GWh per year. While it's true this is projected to rise exponentially, the amount dedicated to storage is minuscule compared to the scale required to fulfill even one hour of energy storage [1]. This has prompted people to propose more exotic forms of storage like hydrogen, methane produced through the Sabatier process, or thermal storage. But none of those have been deployed at any significant scale, and their feasibility remains unproven. Nobody generates more than 20% of their electricity from solar. Denmark is the only country that generates over 30% of its power from wind, and Germany is the 3rd highest at 24.7% [2]. By comparison plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from nuclear power: Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Belgium, Hungary, Ukraine, Slovakia, and France. And the last 3 all produce the majority of their electricity from nuclear. [3] Fossil fuels didn't kick off the industrial revolution, it was the heat engine. The ability to translate thermal energy into mechanical energy. Heating a fluid, turning a turbine, which turns a dynamo is something we cannot easily replace. Replacing the source of heat with a carbon-free source represents a much more modest refactor as compared to trying to migrate modern societies off the the heat engine. Renewables make sense as mitigation: just slap down some solar or wind, don't bother with storage, and shave off daytime carbon emissions when it is producing. But not as the backbone of a carbon-free energy sector. 1. https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country
adrianmonk 6y ago
> Ideally fossil fuel plants would only spin up when they could sell power at a profit Another effect is it makes these plants sit idle for periods of time. It costs a lot of money to build a power plant. Every hour it sits idle is an hour you're not getting any benefit out of the investment you made. So it takes longer to break even on your investment. (Possibly, as a consolation, the plant lasts longer or has lower yearly maintenance costs.)
- robocat 6y ago
  Peaker plants can get paid fees to be ready to deliver power, even without actually running. I think there are plants that get built, paid for as a pure peaker plant, and never run because the peaker is not required.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  In my experience, machinery experiences more wear and tear if you repeatedly turn it off and on than just letting it run constantly. I’d expect a power plant to be the same with all the heat and whatnot.

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.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > I don't expect the green interest groups to accept such wholesale destruction of environments. In the grand scheme of things, this is like refusing chemotherapy for cancer because it makes your hair fall out. Climate change is a huge issue. You have to be willing to sacrifice what would normally be valid environmental concerns to address it. You either believe it is an emergency or not.
- robocat 6y ago
  Existing hydro lakes can act as storage (within the constraints of how much inflow there is and minimum outflow rates). Decrease lake outflow when solar and wind are producing power. Increase lake outflow when they are not. https://www.hydro.org/waterpower/why-hydro/available/ https://www.hydro.org/waterpower/why-hydro/available/
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    Your link says that at best we could double our current hydro generation capacity, which supports my point: it's simply too little for our storage needs, and if we electrify more of our economy (i.e. use it to replace heat and transport for which we use a lot of fossils now), it will be even less. It might still be worth doing, but is far from solving the storage problem: it just has significant limits on its potential scale.
    - nl 6y ago
      > Your link says that at best we could double our current hydro generation capacity No, it says "that without building a single new dam" [hydro could roughly double its existing capacity in the US]. I'll assume you just misread that, but in any case that's pretty different to building new dams, or utilising tech like mines, or at-sea pumped storage.
      - xyzzyz 6y ago
        > No, it says "that without building a single new dam" [hydro could roughly double its existing capacity in the US]. No, that's not what it says. It says: > The report estimates that without building a single new dam, these available hydropower resources, if fully developed, could provide an electrical generating capacity of more than 12 gigawatts (GW), equivalent to roughly 15 percent of current U.S. hydropower capacity. Without constructing any new dams, you only increase it by 15%, not double it. Also, consider that 12 GW is 105 TWh per year. US consumes 4100 TWh of electricity per year. It would sure be nice to increase non-fossil electricity production by 2.5%, but that's clearly not very much. If the plan is to use hydro to cover the shortfall when the renewables are not producing enough, you need much more generating capacity than 12 GW, and more than 65 GW your link suggests could be potentially built. Finally, 2.5% is on the order of our annual growth in electricity consumption, which will in fact accelerate as we move off fossils. Thus, building out all possible hydro will only buy one year of growth in consumption.
cbmuser 6y ago
There is no reasonable and economic way to store Terawatthours of electricity. Even huge hydrostorage plants have only a few GWh.
- Reason077 6y ago
  Huh? Norway alone has 85 TWh of hydrologic storage. New Zealand has about 4 TWh, but they are considering adding an additional 5-12 TWh with one single storage project: https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/central-otago/scientific-thought-behind-hydro-idea https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/central-otago/scientific-thoug...

alliao 6y ago

isn't that the game plan for hydrogen powered vehicles? so they can build a plan to absorb all these excess from over provisioning at a lower rate to produce hydrogen for their fleet

ncmncm 6y ago
This is especially attractive for aircraft, but it will take awhile to happen. We probably need new aircraft. Hopefully civilization will not collapse first, from refugees driving fascist governments into power, and former democracies self-surveilling themselves into locked-in dictatorships. On the upside, collapsed civilization will have lower energy demands, and will find carbon extraction and transport harder to organize.
bregma 6y ago
Sure. Find some way to break up CO2 from the atmosphere and bond hydrogen to the carbons. It creates a relatively safe, easy-to-use hydrogen storage medium and it reduces greenhouse gases at the same time. The cars would just need to break the carbon-hydrogen bonds to release the energy once again, and the process is GHG-neutral.

xupybd 6y ago

>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 Maybe Carbon sequestration?

jes5199 6y ago
I sure hope so.

eldaisfish 6y ago

>Now renewables are cheaper. Yes, provided you ignore the cost of balancing an increasingly volatile grid, a volatility that is created by renewables. Also provided you ignore the cost to provide energy when said renewables aren't generating any. Claims to back up your statment, such as from Lazard, are horribly flawed because they use the metric of LCOE - levelised cost of energy - to claim that renewable energy is cheaper. It is, provided you ignore the slew of costs that are not borne by renewable generators but which ARE borne by consumers. Yes, batteries are getting cheaper but not at the scale required for the grid. Before you quote the Australian Tesla battery, remember that it can only provide energy for minutes - yes, minutes. What is needed today for a low-carbon future is nuclear and hydro. Renewables will get there one day but that day is not tomorrow or next year.

manfredo 6y ago
It's sad to see people downvote correct information. For context, the US consumes ~12TWh of electricity daily, so 500 GWh per hour. Global lithium ion battery production is around 300 GWh per year. While it's true this is projected to rise exponentially, the amount dedicated to storage is minuscule compared to the scale required to fulfill even one hour of energy storage [1]. This has prompted people to propose more exotic forms of storage like hydrogen, methane produced through the Sabatier process, or thermal storage. But none of those have been deployed at any significant scale, and their feasibility remains unproven. Nobody generates more than 20% of their electricity from solar. Denmark is the only country that generates over 30% of its power from wind, and Germany is the 3rd highest at 24.7% [2]. By comparison plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from nuclear power: Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Belgium, Hungary, Ukraine, Slovakia, and France. And the last 3 all produce the majority of their electricity from nuclear. [3] Fossil fuels didn't kick off the industrial revolution, it was the heat engine. The ability to translate thermal energy into mechanical energy. Heating a fluid, turning a turbine, which turns a dynamo is something we cannot easily replace. Replacing the source of heat with a carbon-free source represents a much more modest refactor as compared to trying to migrate modern societies off the the heat engine. Renewables make sense as mitigation: just slap down some solar or wind, don't bother with storage, and shave off daytime carbon emissions when it is producing. But not as the backbone of a carbon-free energy sector. 1. https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

adrianmonk 6y ago

> Ideally fossil fuel plants would only spin up when they could sell power at a profit Another effect is it makes these plants sit idle for periods of time. It costs a lot of money to build a power plant. Every hour it sits idle is an hour you're not getting any benefit out of the investment you made. So it takes longer to break even on your investment. (Possibly, as a consolation, the plant lasts longer or has lower yearly maintenance costs.)

robocat 6y ago
Peaker plants can get paid fees to be ready to deliver power, even without actually running. I think there are plants that get built, paid for as a pure peaker plant, and never run because the peaker is not required.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
In my experience, machinery experiences more wear and tear if you repeatedly turn it off and on than just letting it run constantly. I’d expect a power plant to be the same with all the heat and whatnot.