8 ms·

Study this: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspe

Study this: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... Ignoring storage: it makes no sense now to build anything but wind and solar. Only the marginal cost of gas is cheaper (meaning existing plants, not new ones). Including storage: conventional is still cheaper, but not by much (within a factor of 2): $81 for PV+storage vs. $44 for gas combined cycle. We should put more resources into storage now, fusion can wait.

adrianN 5y ago
PV+storage is how many hours of storage? Storing enough power to last a night is just getting close to commercially viable afaik, but storing enough power to last a winter is still quite expensive.
- myself248 5y ago
  The best storage is no storage at all, it is demand-response. Things like responsive appliances and EV chargers that can schedule their load rather than insisting that limitless power be available instantaneously. I don't care when the dishwasher runs as long as the dishes are clean by tomorrow, you know? Of course right now, putting the word "smart" on an appliance doesn't imply any of that, and the way it ends up implemented will probably be terrible and a half. But theoretically, demand-response could dramatically reduce the need for storage. I think it truly has a large role to play, but the folks releasing insecure internet-of-shit devices have a lot to answer for first.
  - pstrateman 5y ago
    There really aren't many things that can be off for significant periods of time without making them useless. Indeed I can't think of any that can be off for more than a day. Can you?
    - mikewave 5y ago
      There are companies that will drive your "smart" thermostat and purport to save you money by strategically controlling it, but in the end if you want to save money on your house's climate control, you're going to end up being warmer/colder than you would like.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        In our last house we had a box attached to the AC compressor that let the utility turn it off for 3 hours at a time, a prescribed number of times per month. We got a $10/month discount for this. We never noticed any effect on comfort.
    - myself248 5y ago
      Most EVs have enough battery to cover more than a week of daily commute. If you could charge for significantly cheaper and greener than you do right now, by simply telling it to only charge when the panels on the roof are producing a surplus, isn't that sort of a no-brainer? Maybe you'd go back to grid mode when anticipating a weekend trip, or when the charge hits some sort of level of concern. And I expect polar places with cloudy winters would probably run a fair bit of conventional generation like we do now, in the winter. But during the sunny season, shut it down!
  - mikewave 5y ago
    > I don't care when the dishwasher runs as long as the dishes are clean by tomorrow, you know? You can already accomplish 95% of this now with any dishwasher made within the last 20 years that has a delay timer on it. Just load it up and tell it to run in 6 hours and then go to bed. I don't want some 3rd party company driving a huge team of middlemen sucking up a gigantic pile of data in order to determine when it might be strategically useful for my dishwasher to be on. I don't want my dishwasher on the internet. I barely want it to have any electronics at all, because I want the damn thing to last for 20 years, not the scant 5 years people seem to be getting out of major appliances these days. You wanna talk carbon footprint and recycling, making things reliable would probably save us a million times more energy than would using the internet-of-things to run this stuff at night time. I _might_ be willing to accept a compromise where my smart power meter uses an open protocol to inform devices in my house of the current energy cost for Time-of-Use billing and then the appliance decides when to start based on a threshold I set, but even that's more implementation than is really necessary here. Also, there are only a few appliances that can really make use of that kind of thing. As a parent, I need to run laundry all the time, non-stop, because children are filthy monsters. I can't factor energy costs into that, because laundry takes a long time to run and many loads need to be run. It's only a small number of people who can stick their one weekly load into the dryer and tell it to wait for night - and again, a timer would do 90%+ of the work spreading the load around, you don't need a gigantic network of flimsy compute doing the work here.
    - myself248 5y ago
      I think we agree more than we disagree. An overnight timer is ideal right now while most base-load comes from coal and nuclear, and power is cheapest at night. But as we move past combustion (I'm in Michigan and the amount of coal we burn for power is absolutely shameful) and into more solar, it's less predictable. I can't set a timer that knows when the sky will be cloudy. This is why I'm so excited to see EVSEs that take data from PV inverters and have a "PV surplus only" mode, where the car is charged only when the sun shines, without ever importing grid power. Modulating 30kW of load is just as good as 30kW of storage, but costs nothing but a few lines of code. And yeah, networks and middlemen can suck it. Keeping it local is always better.
    - 5y ago
  - meltedcapacitor 5y ago
    Yes, but bulk of the demand is heat and industry, so you're quickly back to having to build a lot of "storage" in the form of buildings with high thermal inertia and spare capacity for production, so that you can keep the high energy plants idle at inconvenient times. Hard to say if that is more efficient than building actual energy storage. Every little helps I guess, but getting people not to shower on cloudy days is not gonna move the needle materially.
    - Qwertious 5y ago
      Heat is fairly trivially stored for months on a mass scale, check out Polar-night Energy's system - basically, you heat up (usually with just resistive heating) a bunch of sand in a 40metre-wide insulated cylinder, and when you want to use that heat you use fans to blow air through ducts that are surrounded by the sand. The amazing thing is that every single part of the tech is old and boring - resistive heating is literally as old as electricity, electric fans and ducting are trivial, heating sand is basically impossible to screw up, etc etc.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        Sand can be used as a surprisingly effect store for electrical energy (round trip efficiency > 50%). https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20Day1-Zhiwen%20Ma_NREL.pdf https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20D... I am particularly taken by the fluidized bed heat exchanger. What an neat concept, and so compact.
    - learc83 5y ago
      You could just implement enough surge pricing that people/companies work around peak times on their own and build their own storage.
      - xyzzyz 5y ago
        Industry often works around the clock already. You don't want to buy and install three times the equipment you need, and have it sit idle 16 hours of the day. You also don't want to shut down for winter just because the electricity is less abundant then.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    I agree, but I think you can't demand-response away all of winter. People still want to drive their EVs and heat their homes and industrial processes can't be time shifted for weeks or even months. You'll need some storage. Right now that would probably be Hydrogen or Methane, and making those is pretty expensive. Perhaps something better will come along, or it gets cheaper with scale, but at the current CO2 price it's not competitive with fossil fuels.
  - giaour 5y ago
    Nitpicky, but shouldn’t this pattern be called “supply-response” (as in, appliances programmed to respond to a supply glut) “Demand-response” sounds like it should be used for power sources that only spin up when demand exceeds the production rate.
    - myself248 5y ago
      It strikes me as weird too. They're calling it "demand which responds", but it's phrased funny.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
"We should put more resources into breeding faster horses now, internal combustion can wait." - someone in late 19 century.
- jhallenworld 5y ago
  Hah, well what was the rate of progress on breeding faster horses vs. internal combustion in the late 19th century? I don't imagine that the progress rate was very high for horses..
  - after_care 5y ago
    I want to live in a world where we work on projects that will benefit us both 5 and 50 years in the future.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Long term projects often have the problem they are solving disappear out from under them. They become obsolete before they're done. Freeman Dyson famously pointed this out and suggested anyone planning ahead more than five years was fooling themselves (and he meant that in science, too.) Fusion seems a good illustration of this. Work started on it about half a century ago. Its motivation was "fission will be cheap, but uranium will get scarce, so let's build fusion reactors that have cheap fuel!" Except fission didn't get cheap, the cost turned out to be dominated by the cost of the power plant, not the fuel, and fusion reactors don't solve that problem AT ALL.
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    I'm not so sure about internal combustion, but I think it took steam engines 100 years to start outperforming horses. I think that that's a better technology comparison because internal combustion was able to leverage the theoretical insights originally derived for steam. There's no shoulders-of-giants effect going on for nuclear fusion, as there wasn't for steam.
thomasahle 5y ago
This is a great resource!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
eldaisfish 5y ago
Lazard do not factor in the cost of accommodating the vagaries of wind and solar into these figures. As just one example - when the wind turbines aren’t running, your lights are still on. That power comes from somewhere and that somewhere has a cost to keep it available. That cost is passed on to electricity consumers but not the source of the problem - wind and solar generators.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Yeah, a better option is to use capital costs and input them into https://model.energy https://model.energy
Robotbeat 5y ago
Why should we wait for fusion? We can and should do both, and fusion also benefits from storage. Fusion and fission help northern countries in particular as they actually produce MORE energy during the dark, cold months.
8note 5y ago
Where does that leave turning existing coal plants into gas plants?

adrianN 5y ago

PV+storage is how many hours of storage? Storing enough power to last a night is just getting close to commercially viable afaik, but storing enough power to last a winter is still quite expensive.

myself248 5y ago
The best storage is no storage at all, it is demand-response. Things like responsive appliances and EV chargers that can schedule their load rather than insisting that limitless power be available instantaneously. I don't care when the dishwasher runs as long as the dishes are clean by tomorrow, you know? Of course right now, putting the word "smart" on an appliance doesn't imply any of that, and the way it ends up implemented will probably be terrible and a half. But theoretically, demand-response could dramatically reduce the need for storage. I think it truly has a large role to play, but the folks releasing insecure internet-of-shit devices have a lot to answer for first.
- pstrateman 5y ago
  There really aren't many things that can be off for significant periods of time without making them useless. Indeed I can't think of any that can be off for more than a day. Can you?
  - mikewave 5y ago
    There are companies that will drive your "smart" thermostat and purport to save you money by strategically controlling it, but in the end if you want to save money on your house's climate control, you're going to end up being warmer/colder than you would like.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      In our last house we had a box attached to the AC compressor that let the utility turn it off for 3 hours at a time, a prescribed number of times per month. We got a $10/month discount for this. We never noticed any effect on comfort.
  - myself248 5y ago
    Most EVs have enough battery to cover more than a week of daily commute. If you could charge for significantly cheaper and greener than you do right now, by simply telling it to only charge when the panels on the roof are producing a surplus, isn't that sort of a no-brainer? Maybe you'd go back to grid mode when anticipating a weekend trip, or when the charge hits some sort of level of concern. And I expect polar places with cloudy winters would probably run a fair bit of conventional generation like we do now, in the winter. But during the sunny season, shut it down!
- mikewave 5y ago
  > I don't care when the dishwasher runs as long as the dishes are clean by tomorrow, you know? You can already accomplish 95% of this now with any dishwasher made within the last 20 years that has a delay timer on it. Just load it up and tell it to run in 6 hours and then go to bed. I don't want some 3rd party company driving a huge team of middlemen sucking up a gigantic pile of data in order to determine when it might be strategically useful for my dishwasher to be on. I don't want my dishwasher on the internet. I barely want it to have any electronics at all, because I want the damn thing to last for 20 years, not the scant 5 years people seem to be getting out of major appliances these days. You wanna talk carbon footprint and recycling, making things reliable would probably save us a million times more energy than would using the internet-of-things to run this stuff at night time. I _might_ be willing to accept a compromise where my smart power meter uses an open protocol to inform devices in my house of the current energy cost for Time-of-Use billing and then the appliance decides when to start based on a threshold I set, but even that's more implementation than is really necessary here. Also, there are only a few appliances that can really make use of that kind of thing. As a parent, I need to run laundry all the time, non-stop, because children are filthy monsters. I can't factor energy costs into that, because laundry takes a long time to run and many loads need to be run. It's only a small number of people who can stick their one weekly load into the dryer and tell it to wait for night - and again, a timer would do 90%+ of the work spreading the load around, you don't need a gigantic network of flimsy compute doing the work here.
  - myself248 5y ago
    I think we agree more than we disagree. An overnight timer is ideal right now while most base-load comes from coal and nuclear, and power is cheapest at night. But as we move past combustion (I'm in Michigan and the amount of coal we burn for power is absolutely shameful) and into more solar, it's less predictable. I can't set a timer that knows when the sky will be cloudy. This is why I'm so excited to see EVSEs that take data from PV inverters and have a "PV surplus only" mode, where the car is charged only when the sun shines, without ever importing grid power. Modulating 30kW of load is just as good as 30kW of storage, but costs nothing but a few lines of code. And yeah, networks and middlemen can suck it. Keeping it local is always better.
  - 5y ago
- meltedcapacitor 5y ago
  Yes, but bulk of the demand is heat and industry, so you're quickly back to having to build a lot of "storage" in the form of buildings with high thermal inertia and spare capacity for production, so that you can keep the high energy plants idle at inconvenient times. Hard to say if that is more efficient than building actual energy storage. Every little helps I guess, but getting people not to shower on cloudy days is not gonna move the needle materially.
  - Qwertious 5y ago
    Heat is fairly trivially stored for months on a mass scale, check out Polar-night Energy's system - basically, you heat up (usually with just resistive heating) a bunch of sand in a 40metre-wide insulated cylinder, and when you want to use that heat you use fans to blow air through ducts that are surrounded by the sand. The amazing thing is that every single part of the tech is old and boring - resistive heating is literally as old as electricity, electric fans and ducting are trivial, heating sand is basically impossible to screw up, etc etc.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Sand can be used as a surprisingly effect store for electrical energy (round trip efficiency > 50%). https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20Day1-Zhiwen%20Ma_NREL.pdf https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-03/07%20D... I am particularly taken by the fluidized bed heat exchanger. What an neat concept, and so compact.
  - learc83 5y ago
    You could just implement enough surge pricing that people/companies work around peak times on their own and build their own storage.
    - xyzzyz 5y ago
      Industry often works around the clock already. You don't want to buy and install three times the equipment you need, and have it sit idle 16 hours of the day. You also don't want to shut down for winter just because the electricity is less abundant then.
- adrianN 5y ago
  I agree, but I think you can't demand-response away all of winter. People still want to drive their EVs and heat their homes and industrial processes can't be time shifted for weeks or even months. You'll need some storage. Right now that would probably be Hydrogen or Methane, and making those is pretty expensive. Perhaps something better will come along, or it gets cheaper with scale, but at the current CO2 price it's not competitive with fossil fuels.
- giaour 5y ago
  Nitpicky, but shouldn’t this pattern be called “supply-response” (as in, appliances programmed to respond to a supply glut) “Demand-response” sounds like it should be used for power sources that only spin up when demand exceeds the production rate.
  - myself248 5y ago
    It strikes me as weird too. They're calling it "demand which responds", but it's phrased funny.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

"We should put more resources into breeding faster horses now, internal combustion can wait." - someone in late 19 century.

jhallenworld 5y ago
Hah, well what was the rate of progress on breeding faster horses vs. internal combustion in the late 19th century? I don't imagine that the progress rate was very high for horses..
- after_care 5y ago
  I want to live in a world where we work on projects that will benefit us both 5 and 50 years in the future.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Long term projects often have the problem they are solving disappear out from under them. They become obsolete before they're done. Freeman Dyson famously pointed this out and suggested anyone planning ahead more than five years was fooling themselves (and he meant that in science, too.) Fusion seems a good illustration of this. Work started on it about half a century ago. Its motivation was "fission will be cheap, but uranium will get scarce, so let's build fusion reactors that have cheap fuel!" Except fission didn't get cheap, the cost turned out to be dominated by the cost of the power plant, not the fuel, and fusion reactors don't solve that problem AT ALL.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  I'm not so sure about internal combustion, but I think it took steam engines 100 years to start outperforming horses. I think that that's a better technology comparison because internal combustion was able to leverage the theoretical insights originally derived for steam. There's no shoulders-of-giants effect going on for nuclear fusion, as there wasn't for steam.

thomasahle 5y ago

This is a great resource!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

eldaisfish 5y ago

Lazard do not factor in the cost of accommodating the vagaries of wind and solar into these figures. As just one example - when the wind turbines aren’t running, your lights are still on. That power comes from somewhere and that somewhere has a cost to keep it available. That cost is passed on to electricity consumers but not the source of the problem - wind and solar generators.

Robotbeat 5y ago
Yeah, a better option is to use capital costs and input them into https://model.energy https://model.energy

Robotbeat 5y ago

Why should we wait for fusion? We can and should do both, and fusion also benefits from storage. Fusion and fission help northern countries in particular as they actually produce MORE energy during the dark, cold months.

8note 5y ago

Where does that leave turning existing coal plants into gas plants?