7 ms·

It is actually quite simple to convince industry: An industrial facility will do that if the incentives are aligned that it makes them more money. The interest

by hannob 5y ago

It is actually quite simple to convince industry: An industrial facility will do that if the incentives are aligned that it makes them more money. The interesting thing is: The really challenging part of electricity storage isn't that much. Usually wind+solar complement each other fine. It depends on the location, but the challenge is usually something like 2-4 weeks in the winter when there's little sun and little wind. I.e. an industrial facility would only need to shut down in a very limited timeframe to have a huge effect on grid stability.

hef19898 5y ago
It is quite funny that in Germany every energy hungry industry is looking since the last decade to produce flexible enough to benefit from negative and cheap electricity prices during certain periods. Examples I know of first hand are graphite kathodes and electrodes (the process can be stopped for hours as long as temperature doesn't drip under a certain threshold) and paper. Continuous chemical manufacturing is having a harder time so, but they are looking into ways to store process heat for later use and generating needed heat for storage. Nothing came from that at on of previous employers so. Funny is that these same companies, already now making a small fortune from these initiatives, are complaining about electricity prices and base load stability. One of the best complementary sources to renewables are, besides existing nuclear plants, modern gas turbines.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  How is nuclear a good complementary source to renewables? You complement renewables with a source of flexibility, not another source of inflexibility.
  - corty 5y ago
    Stop spreading that myth. Nuclear isn't that inflexible, load following is possible and frequently done over here. "Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope." from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant There are some differences between BWRs and PWRs, but the figures are not hugely different.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Of course nuclear is inflexible. It's entire economic case is built on operating at very high capacity factor. That reactors can TECHNICALLY operate at lower capacity factor is irrelevant -- the cost of doing so is prohibitive. Economically, partnering renewables and nuclear doesn't work well. Nuclear does a very poor job covering for renewables intermittency, and renewables crowd out nuclear during the times they're churning out the power.
      - corty 5y ago
        That is untrue as well. Inflexibility isn't the problem, the cost profile is. Yes, nobody likes running nuclear at half power, because fuel costs are minute compared to the building cost of the plant (Btw that is exactly analogous to the cost profile of renewables: almost all cost is in the building). So as long as you can regulate some pumped hydro plants that, shed some load, etc, you may save some money. Why don't we do load following with renewables, like e.g. shutting off some wind turbines? Same reason as for nuclear, plus some government regulations. And in general, renewables do need a flexible supplement. So what would you suggest? More pumped hydro is impossible to build due to environmental regs, NIMBY and geography. Coal and lignite isn't flexible at all, and it is coal. Gas is extremely expensive to run, so expensive that there are gas peaker plants on idle for years in Germany. Also, they are burning gas. Bio gas is not available in sufficient capacity. Battery storage might be an option 30 years from now when enough old EV batteries are available on the cheap. But that will prevent recycling them into new EV batteries and need even more resources like lithium and cobalt. So the alternatives to nuclear like coal and gas are worse, and only still in use because they don't pay fair a price on their carbon emissions.
        pfdietz 5y ago
        No, it's not untrue. If you optimize a CO2-free grid for minimum cost, you will find that the solutions don't usually involve both renewables (particularly wind) and nuclear. Either nuclear is so expensive it goes to zero, or its so cheap it dominates. There's little synergy between renewables and nuclear. This also happens in unplanned grids where market forces are being allowed to operate. Renewables, if they are cheaper per kWh than nuclear, drive down the price sufficiently often that nuclear struggles (and with production subsidies, they can drive prices negative, but never mind that). Today, even existing nuclear plants are struggling to make an operating profit in the US. > And in general, renewables do need a flexible supplement. So what would you suggest? For the moment, this would be natural gas. If you object to the CO2 from this, consider that to compete against NG CC for BASELOAD in the US, new nuclear would need a CO2 tax of $300/ton or more (see below for quote and link). For new nuclear to compete against NG to cover renewable intermittency, the CO2 tax would have to be much higher, perhaps $1000/ton or more, depending on the fraction of time the NG generators are needed. This is a ludicrously high CO2 tax, and shows how far out of contention new nuclear plants would be. In the future, this last resort generation could be replaced with something like hydrogen (either produced from NG by SMR with CO2 capture, or from renewable energy by electrolysis.) And it would still be cheaper than new nuclear. > Gas is extremely expensive to run, No. Quote from Physics Today (Crane was the president of Exelon): https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088 https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088 “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies. (Since then, Exelon has announced they want to spin off all their nuclear generating assets.) > More pumped hydro is impossible to build due to environmental regs, NIMBY and geography. More pumped hydro ON EXISTING RIVERS is geographically constrained, but off-river PHES much less so. It has vast potential in most parts of the world, especially when coupled with long distance transmission.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    The weather is fairly predictable these days. Nuclear is inflexible, but it's human-controlled inflexible, so you can run it at complementary times to reduce the amount of flexibility needed.
  - kortex 5y ago
    1) corty addresses the inflexibility myth 2) there are always going to be Capex-dominated industries running full-bore 24/7 that need base power with the same power gen profile. Nuclear is perfect for this. You exactly want to complement renewables with inflexible. You want 100% of your "DC component" of your load profile handled by base load power plants, and maximizing the utilization of power storage by variables.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      You repeat the canard that baseload demand requires baseload supply (from individual power plants with high capacity factor). This is nonsense -- the grid allows baseload supply to be synthesized from intermittent and dispatchable sources. The consumer doesn't care where the energy is coming from. Even consumers that have their own baseload requirements and are not on the grid don't necessarily want baseload sources. An example is mines in Australia, which are installing batteries to work with solar and combustion turbines (for the latter, they allow the turbines to run at full load for a while, then turn off, which is more efficient than operating at partial load.)
  - gregwebs 5y ago
    The grid can only handle so much energy instability. So in that sense stable sources such as nuclear can be complements to unstable sources.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Are you talking about short term frequency stability on the grid? This was provided by large rotating mass of conventional generators, but today that stability can be provided far better by batteries. The Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia (that thing Elon Musk has built) made a killing off FCAS, which doesn't require more than a fraction of an hour of battery capacity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
      - hokkos 5y ago
        You are mixing up frequency control and inertia, Hornsdate brings FCAS but no inertia, it would need grid forming inverter.
        pfdietz 5y ago
        Hornsdale is testing a synthetic inertia mode that will supply half the inertia needed by SA. https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/learn/ https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/learn/
  - svara 5y ago
    If you have a high-capacity, constantly running power source, you can subtract that power from the demand curve, up to the minimum power demand. That means the winter renewable production troughs on dark, windless days become more shallow. Since the requirement on installed wind and solar capacity is driven by how many Watt-hours you need to overproduce so that they can be stored for sunless, windless days, that ends up drastically reducing how many solar panels and wind turbines you need. You can test this in the model.energy simulator that you linked by simply subtracting a value from "constant electricity demand". I just did that using realistic values for Germany - reducing the constant electricity demand by 20GW from 66 to 46 GW (roughly the peak capacity of nuclear plants in their heyday) leads to a reduction of peak renewable capacity from 537 to 358 GW, basically exactly a factor of 1.5. You'll still need a flexible source of course to get rid of the oscillations over the minimum demand.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      If you look at the solutions at model.energy as you vary cost assumptions, the solutions go from 0% nuclear to 100% nuclear in a step-like manner. It's almost never the case that the two get mixed. There would be some mix in a variable demand scenario if (for example) some of the demand varied along with insolation. But in the baseload case, it's like Highlander.
      - svara 5y ago
        Not sure if you're referring to a different simulator since model.energy doesn't seem to allow modeling nuclear? But, qualitatively, it sounds like the step-like behavior you describe simply reflects whether LCOE(nuclear) > LCOE(renewable+storage)? That wouldn't tell the whole story though, since you might still want to keep the number of nuclear plants low, or you might simply be thinking about whether to keep operating existing plants, rather than building new ones.
        pfdietz 5y ago
        You can turn on nuclear (look under the advanced assumption setting; it's called "Dispatchable technology 2" for some reason.) And yes, this modeling site is about designing an energy system from scratch, not operating existing plants.
sqqqqrly 5y ago
Have you ever run such a business?
bradknowles 5y ago
Why do you think so many crypto miner companies are moving to Texas? They want to be paid by ERCOT to not draw power during peak times. Yes, ERCOT will actually pay them money, if they’re not drawing power. Chinese crypto miner companies are moving here, and taking over old aluminum smelting operations, kitting them out with tens of thousands of crypto miner computers, and then getting paid for not turning them on.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  That's... an impressive twist on Proof of Work. Threat of Work?

by hannob 5y ago

hef19898 5y ago

It is quite funny that in Germany every energy hungry industry is looking since the last decade to produce flexible enough to benefit from negative and cheap electricity prices during certain periods. Examples I know of first hand are graphite kathodes and electrodes (the process can be stopped for hours as long as temperature doesn't drip under a certain threshold) and paper. Continuous chemical manufacturing is having a harder time so, but they are looking into ways to store process heat for later use and generating needed heat for storage. Nothing came from that at on of previous employers so. Funny is that these same companies, already now making a small fortune from these initiatives, are complaining about electricity prices and base load stability. One of the best complementary sources to renewables are, besides existing nuclear plants, modern gas turbines.

pfdietz 5y ago
How is nuclear a good complementary source to renewables? You complement renewables with a source of flexibility, not another source of inflexibility.
- corty 5y ago
  Stop spreading that myth. Nuclear isn't that inflexible, load following is possible and frequently done over here. "Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope." from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant There are some differences between BWRs and PWRs, but the figures are not hugely different.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Of course nuclear is inflexible. It's entire economic case is built on operating at very high capacity factor. That reactors can TECHNICALLY operate at lower capacity factor is irrelevant -- the cost of doing so is prohibitive. Economically, partnering renewables and nuclear doesn't work well. Nuclear does a very poor job covering for renewables intermittency, and renewables crowd out nuclear during the times they're churning out the power.
    - corty 5y ago
      That is untrue as well. Inflexibility isn't the problem, the cost profile is. Yes, nobody likes running nuclear at half power, because fuel costs are minute compared to the building cost of the plant (Btw that is exactly analogous to the cost profile of renewables: almost all cost is in the building). So as long as you can regulate some pumped hydro plants that, shed some load, etc, you may save some money. Why don't we do load following with renewables, like e.g. shutting off some wind turbines? Same reason as for nuclear, plus some government regulations. And in general, renewables do need a flexible supplement. So what would you suggest? More pumped hydro is impossible to build due to environmental regs, NIMBY and geography. Coal and lignite isn't flexible at all, and it is coal. Gas is extremely expensive to run, so expensive that there are gas peaker plants on idle for years in Germany. Also, they are burning gas. Bio gas is not available in sufficient capacity. Battery storage might be an option 30 years from now when enough old EV batteries are available on the cheap. But that will prevent recycling them into new EV batteries and need even more resources like lithium and cobalt. So the alternatives to nuclear like coal and gas are worse, and only still in use because they don't pay fair a price on their carbon emissions.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        No, it's not untrue. If you optimize a CO2-free grid for minimum cost, you will find that the solutions don't usually involve both renewables (particularly wind) and nuclear. Either nuclear is so expensive it goes to zero, or its so cheap it dominates. There's little synergy between renewables and nuclear. This also happens in unplanned grids where market forces are being allowed to operate. Renewables, if they are cheaper per kWh than nuclear, drive down the price sufficiently often that nuclear struggles (and with production subsidies, they can drive prices negative, but never mind that). Today, even existing nuclear plants are struggling to make an operating profit in the US. > And in general, renewables do need a flexible supplement. So what would you suggest? For the moment, this would be natural gas. If you object to the CO2 from this, consider that to compete against NG CC for BASELOAD in the US, new nuclear would need a CO2 tax of $300/ton or more (see below for quote and link). For new nuclear to compete against NG to cover renewable intermittency, the CO2 tax would have to be much higher, perhaps $1000/ton or more, depending on the fraction of time the NG generators are needed. This is a ludicrously high CO2 tax, and shows how far out of contention new nuclear plants would be. In the future, this last resort generation could be replaced with something like hydrogen (either produced from NG by SMR with CO2 capture, or from renewable energy by electrolysis.) And it would still be cheaper than new nuclear. > Gas is extremely expensive to run, No. Quote from Physics Today (Crane was the president of Exelon): https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088 https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088 “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies. (Since then, Exelon has announced they want to spin off all their nuclear generating assets.) > More pumped hydro is impossible to build due to environmental regs, NIMBY and geography. More pumped hydro ON EXISTING RIVERS is geographically constrained, but off-river PHES much less so. It has vast potential in most parts of the world, especially when coupled with long distance transmission.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  The weather is fairly predictable these days. Nuclear is inflexible, but it's human-controlled inflexible, so you can run it at complementary times to reduce the amount of flexibility needed.
- kortex 5y ago
  1) corty addresses the inflexibility myth 2) there are always going to be Capex-dominated industries running full-bore 24/7 that need base power with the same power gen profile. Nuclear is perfect for this. You exactly want to complement renewables with inflexible. You want 100% of your "DC component" of your load profile handled by base load power plants, and maximizing the utilization of power storage by variables.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    You repeat the canard that baseload demand requires baseload supply (from individual power plants with high capacity factor). This is nonsense -- the grid allows baseload supply to be synthesized from intermittent and dispatchable sources. The consumer doesn't care where the energy is coming from. Even consumers that have their own baseload requirements and are not on the grid don't necessarily want baseload sources. An example is mines in Australia, which are installing batteries to work with solar and combustion turbines (for the latter, they allow the turbines to run at full load for a while, then turn off, which is more efficient than operating at partial load.)
- gregwebs 5y ago
  The grid can only handle so much energy instability. So in that sense stable sources such as nuclear can be complements to unstable sources.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Are you talking about short term frequency stability on the grid? This was provided by large rotating mass of conventional generators, but today that stability can be provided far better by batteries. The Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia (that thing Elon Musk has built) made a killing off FCAS, which doesn't require more than a fraction of an hour of battery capacity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
    - hokkos 5y ago
      You are mixing up frequency control and inertia, Hornsdate brings FCAS but no inertia, it would need grid forming inverter.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        Hornsdale is testing a synthetic inertia mode that will supply half the inertia needed by SA. https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/learn/ https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au/learn/
- svara 5y ago
  If you have a high-capacity, constantly running power source, you can subtract that power from the demand curve, up to the minimum power demand. That means the winter renewable production troughs on dark, windless days become more shallow. Since the requirement on installed wind and solar capacity is driven by how many Watt-hours you need to overproduce so that they can be stored for sunless, windless days, that ends up drastically reducing how many solar panels and wind turbines you need. You can test this in the model.energy simulator that you linked by simply subtracting a value from "constant electricity demand". I just did that using realistic values for Germany - reducing the constant electricity demand by 20GW from 66 to 46 GW (roughly the peak capacity of nuclear plants in their heyday) leads to a reduction of peak renewable capacity from 537 to 358 GW, basically exactly a factor of 1.5. You'll still need a flexible source of course to get rid of the oscillations over the minimum demand.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    If you look at the solutions at model.energy as you vary cost assumptions, the solutions go from 0% nuclear to 100% nuclear in a step-like manner. It's almost never the case that the two get mixed. There would be some mix in a variable demand scenario if (for example) some of the demand varied along with insolation. But in the baseload case, it's like Highlander.
    - svara 5y ago
      Not sure if you're referring to a different simulator since model.energy doesn't seem to allow modeling nuclear? But, qualitatively, it sounds like the step-like behavior you describe simply reflects whether LCOE(nuclear) > LCOE(renewable+storage)? That wouldn't tell the whole story though, since you might still want to keep the number of nuclear plants low, or you might simply be thinking about whether to keep operating existing plants, rather than building new ones.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        You can turn on nuclear (look under the advanced assumption setting; it's called "Dispatchable technology 2" for some reason.) And yes, this modeling site is about designing an energy system from scratch, not operating existing plants.

sqqqqrly 5y ago

Have you ever run such a business?

bradknowles 5y ago

Why do you think so many crypto miner companies are moving to Texas? They want to be paid by ERCOT to not draw power during peak times. Yes, ERCOT will actually pay them money, if they’re not drawing power. Chinese crypto miner companies are moving here, and taking over old aluminum smelting operations, kitting them out with tens of thousands of crypto miner computers, and then getting paid for not turning them on.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
That's... an impressive twist on Proof of Work. Threat of Work?