9 ms·

Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that when you're trying to displace existing technology that was built to have 50 year lifetimes, this is kind of a drop

Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that when you're trying to displace existing technology that was built to have 50 year lifetimes, this is kind of a drop in the bucket. Slowly growing, but a drop nonetheless, compared to the whole. The generating capacity in the US is approx. 1100 GW, of which 80% is coal/NG. [1] This press release talks about this year's installed 50 GW, 60% will be renewable. And the 40% added this year is still fossil fuel, which is designed still to last 50 years. You run into the same issues when talking about EV adoption. Yes, it's good that they make up say 10% of cars sold this year, but you're still selling 90% gasoline fleet, and it lasts 15 years and it takes a long time to displace. The best place to have an effect is to be absolutely sure to get into the markets where they're about to start buying the old technology and help them switch to new technology as soon as possible. China/India. Getting old countries to pay to replace what they already bought is just too hard. [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>Getting old countries to pay to replace what they already bought is just too hard. This is too defeatist. We shouldn't be building any fossil fuel based plants now and all those existing plants will need replacing in time.
- dmix 5y ago
  Yeah poor people shouldn’t have cars built in the last decade or affordable energy bills. I agree!
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Which poor person drives a car built in the last decade? The median car in Germany is approximately ten years old. Almost all the poor people I know ride the bus, but that's probably my city bubble. The remaining ones can't even afford that and ride a bike exclusively. Also, renewable energy is cheap. That renewable energy is expensive is a meme that was born when the prices were ten times higher than today.
    - thanatos519 5y ago
      Don't forget, the US is a car-oriented country with inadequate public transit and rail infrastructure. Many poor people are forced to own a car because they can't afford to live near where they work. No able-bodied person in an urban area should need to own a car, but that's not reality.
      - Aeolos 5y ago
        And this could change within a very short period of time if need be. The current skyrocketing prices may very well be that need.
        fomine3 5y ago
        Does "a very short period of time" means like a few decades?
        oblio 5y ago
        Change how? EVs? EVs are expensive cars and our production capacity for them is limited, despite the growth. For the average poor person an EV is 5-10 years into the future. Good public transportation is even farther away, you need a ton of committment, which many places don't even have, and then a good network takes 30-50 years to build.
  - xupybd 5y ago
    Renewables at present cost more than dirty energy. At least in capital costs. You're not going to get poor people affordable energy that way. Your best bet is to develop the technology in the countries that can afford it. Then introduce the renewables when it's affordable. That's not far off.
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      Because world gas prices are so high, renewable energy is by far the cheapest option for new electricity generation in the UK already. Let's take this morning's peak, electricity wholesale spot prices were £600 per MWh. A "subsidised" wind farm in the North Sea might be paid £150 per MWh, which ordinarily is indeed very expensive, but right now that means £450 per MWh comes to the government as the other side of the "subsidy". There's maybe 13GW of wind power this morning (of maybe 35GW used in Britain). If that was all gas power instead, it would have cost us almost £1M every ten minutes extra on top of what will be on bills anyway. Even at "normal" prices recently, those wind farms are basically free. Only in the middle of the night when there's no power need and the reservoirs and batteries are full do they drive prices briefly negative and thus their subsidy actually pays them, all day the prices are above subsidy levels and they pay us.
      - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
        It's been the cheapest for a decade, even when gas prices were low. You need to include health costs etc. in that, but if we're worrying about poor people, then simply ignoring the pollution that will make them sick seems weird.
        oblio 5y ago
        That's much harder to quantify and neither regular people nor governments work like that. Unfortunate, but that's how it is.
      - thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
        The silver lining here is that it make energy storage economical without any subsidies. Looking at local Finnish spot prices - one could charge for 30e/MWh and discharge at 500e/MWh. Companies like GridScale tout 60% round-trip efficiency at a price of 60e/kWh. With such uneven prices, the installation pays for itself within a single year, which is crazy high ROI
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Your argument is incoherent, we are talking about electricity generation and you started ranting about cars built in the last decade. Anyway I love how the pro fossil fuel people claim to be thinking about the poor. In general the policies that reduce carbon emissions will make life a lot easier for the poor (better public transport, support for cycling, cleaner air, etc).
    - dmix 5y ago
      Original OP: > You run into the same issues when talking about EV adoption. Yes, it's good that they make up say 10% of cars sold this year, but you're still selling 90% gasoline fleet, and it lasts 15 years and it takes a long time to displace. The problem in home energy is no different than in EVs. If you make no gas cars... poor people are still stuck using whatever gas cars they can still afford (since they will be instantly high demand = you get expensive or really old) and there wont be a widespread solution to powering all of those EV vehicles the middle class gets for at least a decade. The reason it's not happening is because it's very very expensive not only for the cars (lithium/cobalt/etc costs would ramp up really fast) but there's no good solutions to charge your car in most places like apartment buildings, where in my city most poor people live. Telling them all to sit for hours waiting for a charging station that is hopefully near your apartment building is crazy, even if current numbers only hit 2-3x, not 10x. And multi-level underground parking lots aren't going to have plugs available for every car. Mine had 2 plugs available and it was used 100% of the time. But most relevant that adding supercharger/any car chargers to homes everywhere is also going to apply tons of pressure on... you guess it home energy demands.
      - yellowapple 5y ago
        > but there's no good solutions to charge your car in most places like apartment buildings Sure there is: add chargers to more parking spaces. They don't even necessarily need to be fast chargers; cars parked at apartments will typically be parked for multiple hours at a time (heck, possibly even days). There are benefits for non-EV owners, too (namely: that power could just as well be used to run a battery tender or block heater). Yeah, it ain't cheap (yet), but when you compare to the cost of gas (even without wars in Eastern Europe), it pays for itself.
  - Heneeqr 5y ago
    You are not adding to the disucssion with this. Yes this is a problem, but it has to be fixed different and should not block us to continue doing what is best for all overall. Guess who is getting hurt most through climate change? the poor.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Coal + gas is no longer 80% of supply in the US. Your numbers are out of date: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php A lot of coal disappeared in recent years and there are quite a few more coal plants closing soon. Coal is not economical anymore. Even keeping existing plants running has become uneconomical. So, it's more like 58% for gas and coal combined at this point. Some of the coal capacity is replaced with gas but actually most of it is replaced with wind/solar. Gas is actually declining as well the last few years because not all planned gas plants actually make it to completion and some plants that do get built basically are reduced to the role of a peaker plant that only runs when there's a shortage. Some plans for new plants actually got shelved entirely and there are also some older plants that are no longer economical that are actually getting shut down. Hence the net decline for gas power generation. So, take that 40% new gas generation with a grain of salt. That might not actually happen. There might be permits and plans for this but that doesn't mean they'll actually build the plants. My guess is that nobody is in a hurry to build new gas power plants right now given the current gas prices. The cost just doesn't add up anymore relative to cheap wind and solar. Even before Russia invaded Ukraine. Anyway, according to this, renewables grew from around 5% in 2005 to about 13% this year. It will swap third place with nuclear in a few years and number two position shortly after when coal continues to crash.
- jeffwass 5y ago
  Thanks for that link, pretty illuminating. For anyone curious, breakdown of US power generation in 2021 was (4200 TWh total): Coal : 22% Natural Gas : 38% Nuclear : 19% Hydroelectric : 6% Other Renewables : 14% Curiously, hydroelectric power production has been flat for the past decade. Is that because we've already tapped out most places where hydro can be productive?
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    There are also projects to tear out hydro dams, especially smaller ones, because they are ecologically destructive. So while huge dams may generate enough power to justify the ecological cost, a 1MW dam on some relatively minor river may not justify its existence and so it gets torn back out to enable the river to be restored. You can put a bunch of solar panels on malls and office blocks and make up a big chunk of that power without destroying a river, the malls and offices are already our fault because we put them there, so adding solar panels probably doesn't worsen the impact.
vegetablepotpie 5y ago
The fossils generation assets that have 50 year lifetimes and financing structured over that period are called stranded assets. Calling for an early retirement of these assets is not easy, but there are policy levers in the US, which can be employed, to accelerate the transition. Carbon pricing would make coal and NG less viable long term and motivate early retirement, despite financing. Locally, cities and counties in 10 states are using Community Choice Aggregation to decouple electricity generation from utility monopolies and are buying their own renewables off the wholesale market, on behalf of residents. By making small policy tweaks and enabling more market based competition, will drive higher renewable adoption in the US.
maxerickson 5y ago
Are gas peakers built with a 50 year lifetime?

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

>Getting old countries to pay to replace what they already bought is just too hard. This is too defeatist. We shouldn't be building any fossil fuel based plants now and all those existing plants will need replacing in time.

dmix 5y ago
Yeah poor people shouldn’t have cars built in the last decade or affordable energy bills. I agree!
- adrianN 5y ago
  Which poor person drives a car built in the last decade? The median car in Germany is approximately ten years old. Almost all the poor people I know ride the bus, but that's probably my city bubble. The remaining ones can't even afford that and ride a bike exclusively. Also, renewable energy is cheap. That renewable energy is expensive is a meme that was born when the prices were ten times higher than today.
  - thanatos519 5y ago
    Don't forget, the US is a car-oriented country with inadequate public transit and rail infrastructure. Many poor people are forced to own a car because they can't afford to live near where they work. No able-bodied person in an urban area should need to own a car, but that's not reality.
    - Aeolos 5y ago
      And this could change within a very short period of time if need be. The current skyrocketing prices may very well be that need.
      - fomine3 5y ago
        Does "a very short period of time" means like a few decades?
      - oblio 5y ago
        Change how? EVs? EVs are expensive cars and our production capacity for them is limited, despite the growth. For the average poor person an EV is 5-10 years into the future. Good public transportation is even farther away, you need a ton of committment, which many places don't even have, and then a good network takes 30-50 years to build.
- xupybd 5y ago
  Renewables at present cost more than dirty energy. At least in capital costs. You're not going to get poor people affordable energy that way. Your best bet is to develop the technology in the countries that can afford it. Then introduce the renewables when it's affordable. That's not far off.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    Because world gas prices are so high, renewable energy is by far the cheapest option for new electricity generation in the UK already. Let's take this morning's peak, electricity wholesale spot prices were £600 per MWh. A "subsidised" wind farm in the North Sea might be paid £150 per MWh, which ordinarily is indeed very expensive, but right now that means £450 per MWh comes to the government as the other side of the "subsidy". There's maybe 13GW of wind power this morning (of maybe 35GW used in Britain). If that was all gas power instead, it would have cost us almost £1M every ten minutes extra on top of what will be on bills anyway. Even at "normal" prices recently, those wind farms are basically free. Only in the middle of the night when there's no power need and the reservoirs and batteries are full do they drive prices briefly negative and thus their subsidy actually pays them, all day the prices are above subsidy levels and they pay us.
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      It's been the cheapest for a decade, even when gas prices were low. You need to include health costs etc. in that, but if we're worrying about poor people, then simply ignoring the pollution that will make them sick seems weird.
      - oblio 5y ago
        That's much harder to quantify and neither regular people nor governments work like that. Unfortunate, but that's how it is.
    - thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
      The silver lining here is that it make energy storage economical without any subsidies. Looking at local Finnish spot prices - one could charge for 30e/MWh and discharge at 500e/MWh. Companies like GridScale tout 60% round-trip efficiency at a price of 60e/kWh. With such uneven prices, the installation pays for itself within a single year, which is crazy high ROI
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Your argument is incoherent, we are talking about electricity generation and you started ranting about cars built in the last decade. Anyway I love how the pro fossil fuel people claim to be thinking about the poor. In general the policies that reduce carbon emissions will make life a lot easier for the poor (better public transport, support for cycling, cleaner air, etc).
  - dmix 5y ago
    Original OP: > You run into the same issues when talking about EV adoption. Yes, it's good that they make up say 10% of cars sold this year, but you're still selling 90% gasoline fleet, and it lasts 15 years and it takes a long time to displace. The problem in home energy is no different than in EVs. If you make no gas cars... poor people are still stuck using whatever gas cars they can still afford (since they will be instantly high demand = you get expensive or really old) and there wont be a widespread solution to powering all of those EV vehicles the middle class gets for at least a decade. The reason it's not happening is because it's very very expensive not only for the cars (lithium/cobalt/etc costs would ramp up really fast) but there's no good solutions to charge your car in most places like apartment buildings, where in my city most poor people live. Telling them all to sit for hours waiting for a charging station that is hopefully near your apartment building is crazy, even if current numbers only hit 2-3x, not 10x. And multi-level underground parking lots aren't going to have plugs available for every car. Mine had 2 plugs available and it was used 100% of the time. But most relevant that adding supercharger/any car chargers to homes everywhere is also going to apply tons of pressure on... you guess it home energy demands.
    - yellowapple 5y ago
      > but there's no good solutions to charge your car in most places like apartment buildings Sure there is: add chargers to more parking spaces. They don't even necessarily need to be fast chargers; cars parked at apartments will typically be parked for multiple hours at a time (heck, possibly even days). There are benefits for non-EV owners, too (namely: that power could just as well be used to run a battery tender or block heater). Yeah, it ain't cheap (yet), but when you compare to the cost of gas (even without wars in Eastern Europe), it pays for itself.
- Heneeqr 5y ago
  You are not adding to the disucssion with this. Yes this is a problem, but it has to be fixed different and should not block us to continue doing what is best for all overall. Guess who is getting hurt most through climate change? the poor.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Coal + gas is no longer 80% of supply in the US. Your numbers are out of date: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php A lot of coal disappeared in recent years and there are quite a few more coal plants closing soon. Coal is not economical anymore. Even keeping existing plants running has become uneconomical. So, it's more like 58% for gas and coal combined at this point. Some of the coal capacity is replaced with gas but actually most of it is replaced with wind/solar. Gas is actually declining as well the last few years because not all planned gas plants actually make it to completion and some plants that do get built basically are reduced to the role of a peaker plant that only runs when there's a shortage. Some plans for new plants actually got shelved entirely and there are also some older plants that are no longer economical that are actually getting shut down. Hence the net decline for gas power generation. So, take that 40% new gas generation with a grain of salt. That might not actually happen. There might be permits and plans for this but that doesn't mean they'll actually build the plants. My guess is that nobody is in a hurry to build new gas power plants right now given the current gas prices. The cost just doesn't add up anymore relative to cheap wind and solar. Even before Russia invaded Ukraine. Anyway, according to this, renewables grew from around 5% in 2005 to about 13% this year. It will swap third place with nuclear in a few years and number two position shortly after when coal continues to crash.

jeffwass 5y ago
Thanks for that link, pretty illuminating. For anyone curious, breakdown of US power generation in 2021 was (4200 TWh total): Coal : 22% Natural Gas : 38% Nuclear : 19% Hydroelectric : 6% Other Renewables : 14% Curiously, hydroelectric power production has been flat for the past decade. Is that because we've already tapped out most places where hydro can be productive?
- tialaramex 5y ago
  There are also projects to tear out hydro dams, especially smaller ones, because they are ecologically destructive. So while huge dams may generate enough power to justify the ecological cost, a 1MW dam on some relatively minor river may not justify its existence and so it gets torn back out to enable the river to be restored. You can put a bunch of solar panels on malls and office blocks and make up a big chunk of that power without destroying a river, the malls and offices are already our fault because we put them there, so adding solar panels probably doesn't worsen the impact.

vegetablepotpie 5y ago

The fossils generation assets that have 50 year lifetimes and financing structured over that period are called stranded assets. Calling for an early retirement of these assets is not easy, but there are policy levers in the US, which can be employed, to accelerate the transition. Carbon pricing would make coal and NG less viable long term and motivate early retirement, despite financing. Locally, cities and counties in 10 states are using Community Choice Aggregation to decouple electricity generation from utility monopolies and are buying their own renewables off the wholesale market, on behalf of residents. By making small policy tweaks and enabling more market based competition, will drive higher renewable adoption in the US.

maxerickson 5y ago

Are gas peakers built with a 50 year lifetime?