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Renewable advocates never account for the backup power plants. If they did, they couldn’t make these bold statements anymore.

epistasis 6y ago
10 years ago, the story was that solar could never produce energy at an affordable rate, and if we ever got past 5% renewables we'd see rolling blackouts. Then the panic point was 10%, then 30%, then 50%. Now the FUD has switched to "you're not taking into account the cost of backup fossil fuels." Well turns out that coal is being shut down everywhere, because it can't even compete. We don't need them. There's a chance that we might need natural gas a few weeks a year in 2040. The statement should be "how are natural gas plants going to shift payment schemes so they can survive in this world," not "you're not taking into account the cost." We have storage alternatives that will make natural gas obsolete at the next spike in fuel prices. Storage deploys quick. The fossil fuel guys had better get their lobbying straight if they want a piece of the pie in 15 years, or they will be engineered around.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > Well turns out that coal is being shut down everywhere, because it can't even compete. We don't need them. Because of natural gas. The growth of natural gas almost entirely offsets the coal shutdown. We have barely doubled the electricity generated by renewables in the US since the 90s: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-... And hydro makes up a 1/3 of it, wind makes slightly more than hydro, and solar is nearly a drop in the bucket.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    Check out the development pipelines in markets where generators competed based on cost: https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/ https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/ PJM and ERCOT interconnection queues are seeing big drops in natural gas, replaced with renewables (and storage). Counting hydro as renewables, when it has been a large and unchanging source of energy for decades upon decades, is just a tactic to obscure the exponential growth in renewables. A clever way to try to snow investors or shareholders that don't want to admit to bad investments, but not a good way to understand where the market is actually going.
    - ThomPete 6y ago
      cost of what?
      - epistasis 6y ago
        The cost to generate electricity when asked to. ERCOT operates an auction to match the supply of electricity to demand at any given moment. In PJM, they have an energy market, but there's also capacity markets, where people can get paid by being ready to generate on demand. The idea being that the capacity market will reduce some of the price volatility that happens in ERCOT, where sometimes energy goes for thousands of dollars per MHw. The PJM and ERCOT markets, where any independent operator can interconnect and start trying to make money, are in stark contrast to a lot regulated utilities in the US. Under the regulated utility model, the utility tries to maximize profits under the constraints of what the regulator will let them get away with, and what the regulator will let the utility bill to the customer. Often, the regulator's rules tend to make the utility want to build lots of transmission, because that's a guaranteed 20% profit. Whereas if the utility adds lots of cheaper new generation, they are at risk of putting old assets out of business, which means lost capital investments. So when we want to find out what the true costs of electricity are, we should look to where investors are putting their money in PJM and ERCOT, and ignore anybody who works for a regulated utility. The motives are completely different.
        ThomPete 6y ago
        The cost of generating electricity is not really a useful way to think about it if it doesn't look at the cost of generating reliable electricity. Solar and wind are unreliables and can't actually be used consistently which means that you need to not just factor in the cost of the backup energy but also to take into account that solar and wind are parasitic forms of energy and thus drives up the cost of other forms because they are politically preferred through among other things wind tax credits. So I don't believe that you are actually describing anything close to the true cost until you start doing something like the above.
        6y ago
- ThomPete 6y ago
  Wind and solar is less than 1% of the worlds energy consumption. Coal is replaced by gas not by wind or solar.

epistasis 6y ago

10 years ago, the story was that solar could never produce energy at an affordable rate, and if we ever got past 5% renewables we'd see rolling blackouts. Then the panic point was 10%, then 30%, then 50%. Now the FUD has switched to "you're not taking into account the cost of backup fossil fuels." Well turns out that coal is being shut down everywhere, because it can't even compete. We don't need them. There's a chance that we might need natural gas a few weeks a year in 2040. The statement should be "how are natural gas plants going to shift payment schemes so they can survive in this world," not "you're not taking into account the cost." We have storage alternatives that will make natural gas obsolete at the next spike in fuel prices. Storage deploys quick. The fossil fuel guys had better get their lobbying straight if they want a piece of the pie in 15 years, or they will be engineered around.

kortilla 6y ago
> Well turns out that coal is being shut down everywhere, because it can't even compete. We don't need them. Because of natural gas. The growth of natural gas almost entirely offsets the coal shutdown. We have barely doubled the electricity generated by renewables in the US since the 90s: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-... And hydro makes up a 1/3 of it, wind makes slightly more than hydro, and solar is nearly a drop in the bucket.
- epistasis 6y ago
  Check out the development pipelines in markets where generators competed based on cost: https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/ https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/ PJM and ERCOT interconnection queues are seeing big drops in natural gas, replaced with renewables (and storage). Counting hydro as renewables, when it has been a large and unchanging source of energy for decades upon decades, is just a tactic to obscure the exponential growth in renewables. A clever way to try to snow investors or shareholders that don't want to admit to bad investments, but not a good way to understand where the market is actually going.
  - ThomPete 6y ago
    cost of what?
    - epistasis 6y ago
      The cost to generate electricity when asked to. ERCOT operates an auction to match the supply of electricity to demand at any given moment. In PJM, they have an energy market, but there's also capacity markets, where people can get paid by being ready to generate on demand. The idea being that the capacity market will reduce some of the price volatility that happens in ERCOT, where sometimes energy goes for thousands of dollars per MHw. The PJM and ERCOT markets, where any independent operator can interconnect and start trying to make money, are in stark contrast to a lot regulated utilities in the US. Under the regulated utility model, the utility tries to maximize profits under the constraints of what the regulator will let them get away with, and what the regulator will let the utility bill to the customer. Often, the regulator's rules tend to make the utility want to build lots of transmission, because that's a guaranteed 20% profit. Whereas if the utility adds lots of cheaper new generation, they are at risk of putting old assets out of business, which means lost capital investments. So when we want to find out what the true costs of electricity are, we should look to where investors are putting their money in PJM and ERCOT, and ignore anybody who works for a regulated utility. The motives are completely different.
      - ThomPete 6y ago
        The cost of generating electricity is not really a useful way to think about it if it doesn't look at the cost of generating reliable electricity. Solar and wind are unreliables and can't actually be used consistently which means that you need to not just factor in the cost of the backup energy but also to take into account that solar and wind are parasitic forms of energy and thus drives up the cost of other forms because they are politically preferred through among other things wind tax credits. So I don't believe that you are actually describing anything close to the true cost until you start doing something like the above.
        6y ago
ThomPete 6y ago
Wind and solar is less than 1% of the worlds energy consumption. Coal is replaced by gas not by wind or solar.