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This is good, because this will make renewables more competitive with natural gas than they already are, which will provide leverage to people arguing for more
by mbgerring 5y ago
This is good, because this will make renewables more competitive with natural gas than they already are, which will provide leverage to people arguing for more renewable capacity instead of gas. Natural gas has already fulfilled its usefulness as a “bridge fuel,” and here on the other side of the bridge, renewables are getting cheaper and more reliable by the day. It’s time to move on.
- Johnny555 5y agoThis is good, because this will make renewables more competitive with natural gas than they already are Doesn't this also make coal more competitive against natural gas?
- toomuchtodo 5y agoSlightly, but still not competitive against renewables. When the spot price of power goes negative, renewables aren’t as impacted as coal plants (that are still burning a fuel every minute that must be paid for, while also paying someone to take the power they’re generating). Renewables can curtail, coal must stay running.
- rob_c 5y agoYes but renewable energy is difficult to build such that its always there to meet baseline demand. That is likely to get worse if the climate shifts for different countries and technologies. Solar in the Sahara great. Wind in the uk great. Solar in counties with moderate climates requires effort to moderate between supply and demand however.
- cratermoon 5y agoBut solar is not the only renewable. Wind is pretty ubiquitous.
- stavros 5y agoNuclear is too.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoHydro already provides more than both of those, and they often come with their own reservoirs so they are able to easily handle changing load requirements. Not that we have many hydro opportunities left, unfortunately.
- jacquesm 5y agoAnd - and this is often underestimated - it's fast. Hydro can spin up in an extremely short time, dealing with fluctuating demand in on the order of seconds. A typical example is everybody hitting the kettle/coffeemaker during rest time in an international soccer match. That is a noticeable increase in load and hydro can cover that without even trying hard, whereas for nuclear or coal there is no way that they could compensate for such a surge so quickly so unless you have some hydro to back you up you'd need to run those plants at well above the current load to be able to catch the spike without a problem.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoCoupling a nuclear plant with a reservoir and hydro could work. But with EVs, I’m sure it’s done somewhere.
- toomuchtodo 5y agohttps://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-three-myths-about-baseload https://www.nrdc.org/experts/kevin-steinberger/debunking-thr... (Debunking Three Myths About “Baseload”)
- jacquesm 5y agoYou can pretty much auto-repost that in every thread that mentions renewables.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rob_c 5y agoThis promptes the use of gas over a carbon neutral emitter like nuclear as a significant part of the can be ramped up/down solution. It will doesn't address the problem of evening out supply. I'm 100% certain we could go to a co2 neutral solution not one involving nonsense like clean coal or gas. You need to buffer supply and demand from __any__ supply to increase efficiency. If your not doing that we might as well start burning trees for power
- epistasis 5y agoIn addition to the other links here, I would add that grid modeling of renewables matched with weather records shows that it's fairly easy to get to 70%-80% renewables without massive storage or new technology. And even in France, this is the level of penetration that nuclear was able to provide. Germany is a country with absolutely terrible solar resources, but even they are starting to make solar work on their grid. And they spent a ton of money to subsidize the solar industry in its early days to drive down future solar prices. So even the worst case scenarios for cost are not hopeless.
- imtringued 5y agoYou always see snarky HN comments talk about how energy storage technologies don't exist. The reality is that we are drowning in grid storage tech but there is barely any demand for it because we haven't even reached the maximum potential of a renewable grid without storage. There simply isn't enough excess energy to justify it. There are some load shifting setups that extend solar energy 4 hours into the evening but that is about it.
- epistasis 5y agoThis is changing with new renewables installs, more than half of them include storage, if I recall correctly.
- kortilla 5y ago> The reality is that we are drowning in grid storage tech but there is barely any demand for it That means it’s too expensive. If it made sense everyone would be expanding solar/wind quickly and all fossil fuel plants would be being shut down. That’s not happening though because renewables+storage for base load costs a fortune.
- hourislate 5y agohttps://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/natgas.php https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/natgas.php We expect that U.S. consumption of natural gas will average 82.9 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in 2021, down 0.5% from 2020. U.S. natural gas consumption declines in the forecast, in part, because electric power generators switch to coal from natural gas as a result of rising natural gas prices.
- api 5y agoBatteries help both those problems. There is no way curtailment is going to be a thing in 10-20 years.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoMaybe, depends on the cost of battery storage. Regardless, it’ll likely be cheaper to overbuild renewables and curtail when needed instead of keeping fossil generators around.
- rob_c 5y agoWhich is likely the route certain counties will go down given the huge up front cost of renewable energy still. (the elephant in the room being capacitive storage)
- gbrown 5y agoPeople look at me funny when I say I hope gas prices go up. It’s just basic economics - we’re running up ruinous externality debt, so just about anything that pushes us towards sustainability is good. There should be some incentive not to drive an F350 to an office job…
- shiftpgdn 5y agoA diesel f350’s fuel consumption is only marginally less than a Subaru Outback or WRX.
- et2o 5y agoThe EPA does not even produce fuel economy estimates for vehicles as large as the F-350, but data I can find gives about 13-14 mpg in real world use, perhaps about 20 mpg on the highway in ideal circumstances. Meanwhile the 2021 Outback (which is not particularly fuel efficient) is EPA rated at 26 city/33 highway, which is significantly better.
- shiftpgdn 5y agoDiesel f250/350s realistically get around 17-20mpg unloaded.
- kasey_junk 5y agoA WRX has a combined mpg score of ~23mpg. So even the worst case scenario (a tuner car) and the best average you provide (20mpg) we see that the WRX get takes 4.3 gallons to go 100 miles while the f350 takes 5. The ridiculous tuner car is 15% more efficient than the _unloaded_ f350 with the most efficient drive train. Thats a pretty big deal.
- epistasis 5y agoWhen you add in that diesel emits 13% more CO2 per gallon than gasoline, that's not even close, the f250/f350 is emitting at least 75% more CO2 per mile.
- beefield 5y agoThis is bad, because it will incentivize more natural gas being drilled and burned. The long term logic is ironclad and simple: Given a price P of a resource, all recources available cheaper than P will be eventually dug out and used. The only feasible way to stop digging fossil fuels is to get their price so low that it is not worth extracting them.
- syops 5y agoThat’s not the only feasible way to accomplish this. Taxing natural gas enough would accomplish this too. Banning it’s use will do the trick also. Making usage of alternatives cheaper is another way.
- beefield 5y agoThose are just some of the means to get the price of natural gas lower, which is still the only fundamental reason that reduces the amount of gas/oil/whatnot being dug out.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoThe fundamental reason that fossil fuel is pumped out is because people buy it, and the price is a reflection of where supply curve meets the demand curve. People will choose to buy less if alternatives are cheaper and accomplish the same needs, but with something like fossil fuels where all the infrastructure is already setup and fossil fuels are convenient, the end user price going down almost certainly means demand going up. The only way less fossil fuel is consumed is if people cannot afford it (equivalent to prices rising) or if people prefer something else. Or if there are less people overall period.
- beefield 5y agoIf people can't afford it, it means it is expensive, and only way for it to be expensive is that someone can afford it. And the more expensive it is, the more it is going to be extracted. In the end, it is very simple. You want to stop fossil fuel consumption, you need to get the price paid to the producer so low that the producer does not want to produce. Producer price can be high only if someone is willing to pay it. In economics terms, you do not only need to get price down, but the whole demand curve. That is, with any given price, there needs to be less demand than currently is. The supply side is fixed. Anything profitable will be extracted and burned. I do not see how anyone can disagree with that.
- ndkwj 5y agoOnly progressives could ever think that making energy much more expensive for poor people is a good thing.
- jdavis703 5y agoWhat is the non-progressive argument for helping poor people survive climate change? The cheapest policy I can think of is welcoming in more climate refugees to the west. But I don’t think that would be popular on the right for other reasons.
- swader999 5y agoEnergy from natural gas is much lower emission than coal and very cheap and easy. To fossil fuels by 2050 you'd need to be building a nuclear plant every three days to get it all done by then. That natural gas is being dismissed shows anyone looking at this seriously that net zerio will never be achieved.
- ndkwj 5y agoI meant poor people in first world countries. I don't care about those in third world countries.
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoI’d venture that there are plenty of conservative folks who want to help the poor, at least in the Christian communities. Maybe not so much in the libertarian contingent.
- AutumnCurtain 5y agoHelp them stay where they are, absolutely. Never met a Christian conservative who was pro- expanding refugee immigration despite working for an evangelical church myself. Even destitute Christian migrants at the southern border are told to go back home. They much prefer to go to Africa to proselytize there, in my experience.
- syops 5y ago
- Causality1 5y agoIt also makes coal more competitive. We need a few more years of cheap natural gas to finish shattering the coal industry and make it too expensive to spin up.
- fuoqi 5y ago>Natural gas has already fulfilled its usefulness as a “bridge fuel” Seeing how Poland still gets approximately 70% of its electricity from coal, I wouldn't say so. Also until the grid-scale storage problem (at least on the level of storing several days of grid consumption) will not be properly solved (personally I am fan of underground pumped hydro storage built on top of artificially dug cavities), I don't think we will see large predominantly renewable grids not backed up by natural gas power plants. And don't forget that natural gas consumption is not only about electricity. But also about heat generation (both in households and industry) and production of various chemicals.
- potency 5y agoNuclear. We need to renew our investment into nuclear. Carbon-free and reliable in all the ways that renewables are not.
- lumost 5y agoTbh the math is changing - largely due to the cost and complexity of nuclear projects. If your spinning up a new GW of generating capacity, it’s easier to find spare room that no one fights over with solar/wind than it is to find a spot for nuclear. Could we have faster permitting of nuclear plants and apartment buildings? Sure, will we? Almost certainly not.
- epistasis 5y agoI thought this in the mid-2000s, but the landscape has changed drastically since then in two ways: 1) solar wind and storage are decreasing in cost exponentially, and have crossed the inflection point where solar+storage is a firm energy source cheaper than building new fossil fuel infrastructure, and definitely cheaper than nuclear. 2) Attempts at building nuclear in the West over the past decade have revealed that our economic strengths no longer mean that nuclear construction is efficient or even reliably able to be completed. Since the 1970s, economic productivity overall has soared, but our construction productivity has barely improved. So, large construction projects that might have made sense in the 1970s are no longer economically efficient. Nuclear has proven to be very unreliable to build due to massive complexity compounded by the need for extreme accuracy in construction, since we don't want to need to go in to fix core components after they've been turned on. This is precisely what advanced economies are not good at.
- thayne 5y agoThe alternatives aren't ready yet though, except maybe nuclear. And in the US, natural gas is still the only readily available means of heating and other buildings. And even when alternatives appear, even with subsidies most people won't replace their existing systems until the old ones wear out, unless prices increase so dramatically that people can't afford to pay the gas bill. And if that happens, we could see more poor people freezing to death in the winter because they can't afford to heat their homes. And then there is the wider impact on the economy, if this causes sustained high inflation that could further increase wealth inequality. My hope is that this leads to harvesting more methane (natural gas) from cattle waste and similar sources.
- dashundchen 5y ago> The alternatives aren't ready yet though, except maybe nuclear. And in the US, natural gas is still the only readily available means of heating and other buildings. That's not really true anymore. While heat pumps have been popular in Europe and Asia for a while, they are taking off pretty quickly in the US and Canada in the past few years, even in colder climates. I'm in the Great Lakes and I heat an old drafty Victorian with a heat pump - I'm saving money and literal tons of carbon emissions over natural gas.
- thayne 5y agoHeat pumps don't work very well below 40 Fahrenheit. There are a lot of places where that makes them practically useless in the winter. It may be regional. Where I live at least, most hvac retailers only offer natural gas heaters.
- dashundchen 5y agoIn the region I live, it gets down to single digits and near zero for at least a week a year. Heat pumps still work, just reduced efficiency.
- nradov 5y agoThere's still a lot of potential to continue using natural gas as a bridge fuel. In particular we should be aggressively converting the long haul truck fleet over from diesel. It's going to take many years until batteries are adequate for most over-the-road trucks, especially team driven trucks that sometimes run 22+ hours per day.