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I'd be curious to hear your take on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cm7HOAqZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cm7HOAqZY (California's Renewable Energy

I'd be curious to hear your take on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cm7HOAqZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cm7HOAqZY (California's Renewable Energy Problem by the Youtube channel Real Engineering) Walks through the numbers on what it would take to run California on renewables + storage alone. Because of the intermittency, it seems like the costs of storage (even though it gets better/cheaper each year) maker it not possible.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
I feel like the "wind and solar only!" crowd love to point out externalities of other forms of power generation but not wind and solar. It's not magic; we don't just conjure up windmills and solar panels from thin air and magically suck electricity from them. There are real costs, risks, and suboptimal function of all these systems.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  > real costs Smaller real costs. It costs less to build and operate a solar or wind farm than just to operate an already-paid-for coal plant. It costs, just now, about the same to build and operate a solar or wind farm as to just operate an already-paid-for nuke. But renewable costs are still falling fast. Cost of storage is falling faster than wind or solar ever did. By the time Cali needs to build storage -- after there is renewable generation capacity to charge it from -- it will be very cheap.
  - MagnumOpus 4y ago
    It costs less... in California or adjacent states with both massive insolation and good infrastructure. It doesn't cost less in Germany or Poland which is north of the 50th latitude and has about a third of the insolation per year. And storage has some very hard physical limits on scaling up that will prevent costs from falling a lot - mostly the actual amount of the elements on earth that are needed for the batteries.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      In fact storage has no physical limits on scaling up. Costs are low and falling faster than solar and wind ever did, and there is no reason to doubt it will continue. The overwhelming majority of storage is not batteries, and will not be batteries. If you have to lie to make your case, what does that tell your readers?
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
California is very well placed to take advantage of cheap solar energy. I watched the video and I'm not sure I even caught what the problem was supposed to be? There was a vague implication that solar and batteries were expensive, but I didn't see any actual comparison to how much gas and nuclear would cost as an alternative. Solar PV is the cheapest available energy, and California will probably generate about 3/4 of its energy with it. Currently about 50% of their electricity is gas, so whenever the sun is shining they can stop burning gas and save money and carbon. Solar PV plus lithium batteries are already cheaper than peaking gas and so being rolled out for purely financial reasons and the price gap is only widening. So when do the problems start?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Any analysis that uses lithium batteries as the reference storage technology gives at best an upper bound on cost. More often it signals incompetence or bad faith. Real utilities will rely on whatever storage is cheapest at the time they need to build it. Batteries will remain among the most expensive storage, but are good for load-smoothing. Synthetic fuels cost more, but have desirable externalities: utilities can sell excess production. Those costs are falling fast, too.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  After renewables become a large enough fraction of the generating capacity, then it becomes necessary to start adding storage. It is legitimate to ask whether there will ever be enough lithium battery production capacity to to provide for both cars and utilities, but it is a made-up problem because almost all utility storage will not be lithium batteries, but something cheaper. California already has quite a lot of pumped hydro capacity in place, and could add more cheaply by adding pumps to existing reservoir penstocks.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Due to forward looking regulations, California (like China) is just about to have a dramatic storage boom over the next few years. They have 40GWh of EV batteries and are likely to quadruple that in a few years, but I'm not even counting that in the boom, basically every planned grid solar deployment includes a big chunk of batteries. I feel like we're back at the point in the cycle were the detractors say "solar is a net negative" or "wind can never supply more than 17%". It's not based on science or economics just pessimism. Fundamentally, solar and lithium batteries are cheap, abundant alternative that cost less than the next best thing. They're going to be a lot bigger than most people currently expect, especially in sunny regions like California with good regulations in the short term, and long term they will utterly dominate in Equatorial regions on market price alone. Daily cycle storage has been a known solved issue for a while, we're just waiting for the pricing and deployment to catch up. And seasonal storage now looks likely to be green hydrogen, again solved before we really need it. Just the queue of planned projects today in California, Chile and China is enough to show this is true. Growth pains of a rapidly growing battery manufacturing sector should provide the opposite impression that people seem to take. Always with the "at current rates" stats to make change seem impossible. Yes, new things that don't exist don't exist, that's why we invented them and built big factories to make them, because we wanted them to exist in large numbers.
idlehand 4y ago
We're going to see more interconnected grids, the sun is usually shining somewhere and the wind is blowing somewhere. And when it isn't, we're going to see higher prices. Private companies will absorb some part of the societal cost of intermittent electricity, by letting factories and workplaces stay idle when power costs are high - this will filter down to lower wages for the employees of those companies.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
It would certainly help if the water reservoirs weren't so empty because they could serve as giant batteries. But maybe a water source or desalination could help. The "engineering calculations" are so extremely simplified that I would call them wrong. You need a lot of water for nuclear plants btw. to conduct away the heat. And especially in that dry regions with insane amounts of space solar energy would outcompete nuclear on every possible metric and it isn't close.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The lower a reservoir is, the more water you can pump up to it.

nathanaldensr 4y ago

I feel like the "wind and solar only!" crowd love to point out externalities of other forms of power generation but not wind and solar. It's not magic; we don't just conjure up windmills and solar panels from thin air and magically suck electricity from them. There are real costs, risks, and suboptimal function of all these systems.

ncmncm 4y ago
> real costs Smaller real costs. It costs less to build and operate a solar or wind farm than just to operate an already-paid-for coal plant. It costs, just now, about the same to build and operate a solar or wind farm as to just operate an already-paid-for nuke. But renewable costs are still falling fast. Cost of storage is falling faster than wind or solar ever did. By the time Cali needs to build storage -- after there is renewable generation capacity to charge it from -- it will be very cheap.
- MagnumOpus 4y ago
  It costs less... in California or adjacent states with both massive insolation and good infrastructure. It doesn't cost less in Germany or Poland which is north of the 50th latitude and has about a third of the insolation per year. And storage has some very hard physical limits on scaling up that will prevent costs from falling a lot - mostly the actual amount of the elements on earth that are needed for the batteries.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    In fact storage has no physical limits on scaling up. Costs are low and falling faster than solar and wind ever did, and there is no reason to doubt it will continue. The overwhelming majority of storage is not batteries, and will not be batteries. If you have to lie to make your case, what does that tell your readers?

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

California is very well placed to take advantage of cheap solar energy. I watched the video and I'm not sure I even caught what the problem was supposed to be? There was a vague implication that solar and batteries were expensive, but I didn't see any actual comparison to how much gas and nuclear would cost as an alternative. Solar PV is the cheapest available energy, and California will probably generate about 3/4 of its energy with it. Currently about 50% of their electricity is gas, so whenever the sun is shining they can stop burning gas and save money and carbon. Solar PV plus lithium batteries are already cheaper than peaking gas and so being rolled out for purely financial reasons and the price gap is only widening. So when do the problems start?

ncmncm 4y ago
Any analysis that uses lithium batteries as the reference storage technology gives at best an upper bound on cost. More often it signals incompetence or bad faith. Real utilities will rely on whatever storage is cheapest at the time they need to build it. Batteries will remain among the most expensive storage, but are good for load-smoothing. Synthetic fuels cost more, but have desirable externalities: utilities can sell excess production. Those costs are falling fast, too.
ncmncm 4y ago
After renewables become a large enough fraction of the generating capacity, then it becomes necessary to start adding storage. It is legitimate to ask whether there will ever be enough lithium battery production capacity to to provide for both cars and utilities, but it is a made-up problem because almost all utility storage will not be lithium batteries, but something cheaper. California already has quite a lot of pumped hydro capacity in place, and could add more cheaply by adding pumps to existing reservoir penstocks.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Due to forward looking regulations, California (like China) is just about to have a dramatic storage boom over the next few years. They have 40GWh of EV batteries and are likely to quadruple that in a few years, but I'm not even counting that in the boom, basically every planned grid solar deployment includes a big chunk of batteries. I feel like we're back at the point in the cycle were the detractors say "solar is a net negative" or "wind can never supply more than 17%". It's not based on science or economics just pessimism. Fundamentally, solar and lithium batteries are cheap, abundant alternative that cost less than the next best thing. They're going to be a lot bigger than most people currently expect, especially in sunny regions like California with good regulations in the short term, and long term they will utterly dominate in Equatorial regions on market price alone. Daily cycle storage has been a known solved issue for a while, we're just waiting for the pricing and deployment to catch up. And seasonal storage now looks likely to be green hydrogen, again solved before we really need it. Just the queue of planned projects today in California, Chile and China is enough to show this is true. Growth pains of a rapidly growing battery manufacturing sector should provide the opposite impression that people seem to take. Always with the "at current rates" stats to make change seem impossible. Yes, new things that don't exist don't exist, that's why we invented them and built big factories to make them, because we wanted them to exist in large numbers.

idlehand 4y ago

We're going to see more interconnected grids, the sun is usually shining somewhere and the wind is blowing somewhere. And when it isn't, we're going to see higher prices. Private companies will absorb some part of the societal cost of intermittent electricity, by letting factories and workplaces stay idle when power costs are high - this will filter down to lower wages for the employees of those companies.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

It would certainly help if the water reservoirs weren't so empty because they could serve as giant batteries. But maybe a water source or desalination could help. The "engineering calculations" are so extremely simplified that I would call them wrong. You need a lot of water for nuclear plants btw. to conduct away the heat. And especially in that dry regions with insane amounts of space solar energy would outcompete nuclear on every possible metric and it isn't close.

ncmncm 4y ago
The lower a reservoir is, the more water you can pump up to it.