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At what point does the accumulation of solar deployed start to threaten the economics of power plant creation? That is... power plants are such significant inv

• deleted 4y ago
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• ben_w 4y ago
  > At what point does the accumulation of solar deployed start to threaten the economics of power plant creation? From what I've read… a few years ago, even for existing plants and just counting fuel costs. Although the cause is because it is cheap, not because of how much is installed.
• tuatoru 4y ago
  What guarantee? Are you thinking of nuclear plants? Gas turbine power plants are cheap to build. (They have to be, because they're used as "peakers", only operating 10% - 20% of the time.) The threat to them is battery storage, not renewable generation. Combined-cycle gas turbines (combined with steam powered generation using the turbine exhaust for heat) are slightly less cheap, but nowhere near the same league as nuclear costs. Even so, in some places it's now (2022) cheaper to build new PV than to pay for the gas to run a fully paid-for gas plant. Or so we are told. Long distance high voltage transmission lines sometimes need government involvement, because 1) they affect many land-owners, at least some of whom won't be happy; and 2) the margins are low in the power transmission game. The need for long-distance transmission and gas peakers could be reduced quite a bit in a year or so, if PV, wind, and battery storage prices continue on trend (downwards). Not off-grid, but local grid.
  • belorn 4y ago
    Guarantees on future price is what Germany did/does as subsidies to the renewable sector. If prices fall significantly then it would be the German government that has to pay the difference between what investors expected and what the market is willing to pay. With prices going the other, governments in EU (including Germany) is now considering subsidies again by creating a price roof. Any difference between the roof price and the market price will be paid by the government. Nuclear plants can have similar subsidies. Price guarantees and price roofs are market tools rather than technology dependent tools, but they are more likely to trigger if the market price is fluctuating a lot. The more weather dependent the energy grid is, for now (and in general), the larger and more frequent the difference between max and min price are, the more likely the government will have to pay out in order to offer such subsidies. Of course the government are not required to offer either subsidies.
    • KptMarchewa 4y ago
      >With prices going the other, governments in EU (including Germany) is now considering subsidies again by creating a price roof. Any difference between the roof price and the market price will be paid by the government. Isn't it the other way around? The difference won't be paid; the whole idea is to stop paying over the roof.
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      • belorn 4y ago
        There is multiple different strategies discussed by other countries and EU itself. The EU commission as of 9 days ago suggested a price floor of 180 EUR/MWh on all energy production except gas, coal and hydro, using the difference as an tax to fund lower gas and coal prices. The Norwegian government will pay 50% of their citizens electricity bill of anything that exceeds ~€0.07 per kw/h, a decision they made last year. The Danish government announced today that they will offer any citizen an interest free loan for electricity bills, and removed all the energy taxes for the next 6 months. Germany stepped in 18 days ago to save the energy company Fortums with 150 billions euros of government money. Fortums had a lot of long term contract to deliver cheap gas, betting that the price would remain low, and lost that bet. The government intervention was said to be done in order to prevent an other 2008 crash. The UK announced the "Energy Price Guarantee for families and businesses" at the 1st October. This price guarantee is done through a mix of lowered taxes and direct social support (government stepping in and directly pay part of the bill). It is expected to see a lot of similar initiatives in EU until winter, especially as the energy price is predicted to significant rise when gas supply start to deplete.
• willis936 4y ago
  US energy price hike of 50-100% in the past week. Whatever impact solar has on energy price: it is very much not the dominant effect.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    Solar, despite its fast accelerating installation rate, is still a very, very small fraction of the mix, most places.
    • RestlessMind 4y ago
      To add concrete stats [1], solar is only 2.8% of overall US electricity generation in 2021. But if you look at the "billion kW per year" numbers since 2011, they are: 1.82, 4.33, 9.04, 17.69, 24.89, 36.05, 53.29, 63.83, 71.94, 89.20, 114.68. That's a ~10x growth in 10 years, ~25% growth for each of the last 2 years. At a 15% annual growth rate, you double in 5 years. Throw in economies of scale, tailwinds of regulations and social norms and a 10% electricity generation by 2030 looks probable. [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        It will need to be accelerated. Maybe perovskites on rolls will enable that. I imagine fenceposts with bifacial film stretched between, in fence-rows running north-south in pastures everywhere, high enough to walk under. Cheap enough, it would be OK if they last only five years. Replacing them would be much cheaper than the original installation. Maybe they have foil along each edge, + one, - the other, and you staple or clamp the edges to aluminum bus bars. At one end, bars running between rows gather current from all the rows to a converter box. Voltage everywhere is low, for safety, maybe 24V. Since they are in productive land, density is not necessary. They are far enough apart to avoid shading one another even when the sun is low.
• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Right now. Seriously, companies that are building gas/coal/nuclear plants under the assumption that electricity prices are going to stay at the current levels are making a very fatal mistake. A lot of investments in this space are drying up for this reason or effectively under water. Investors know this and are moving their money elsewhere. Cost per mwh from off-shore wind is below 50$ now in a market where the prices peaking north of 500$ recently. Very profitable business. Solar energy is cheaper than that and even more profitable. Basically as panel prices drop, the life time cost of their energy drops as well. And since that is measured in decades, it's very low to begin with. A 100 watt panel operational for 3 decades producing maybe 0.5kwh per day on average would produce around 5 mwh of power during it's operational life (a bit over 10k days, easy number to work with). More in sunny places, less in cloudy places. You can get solar panels like that at around 50$. Those are consumer prices, power plants would be able get better deals. The higher efficiency ones that people actually put on their roofs are more expensive of course but also produce more energy. The cost of the energy they produce is probably around 30-40$ per mwh That's domestic solar and right now. Prices for commercial solar plants are around 1-2 cents per kwh in some sunny countries (unsubsidized). So 10-20$ per mwh In other places it's a bit higher. We'll see that drop below 10$ very soon. Offshore wind is more expensive typically but still very lucrative. So, in a market where that is true right now, planning to operate new plants where the energy cost is at least 10x that, you are not going to be able to compete long term. Basically operating at 10x the cost of your competitors is a lousy business plan. And when 10x has a chance of becoming 100x or even a 1000x it's basically madness to even consider that. Prices will eventually actually drop below a 10 cents per mwh. It's a bold prediction but you can just look at the cost curves and trends and make some predictions. It will happen in the next 2-3 decades. That's a 10x improvement relative to now. What makes solar panels expensive is all the exotic materials, glass, and energy needed to produce them. Energy cost is trending down. So, that helps. And there are companies producing solar with organic materials that are essentially printing them on rolls. This is a new and emerging business but you'd find those on some EV car roofs for example. That sounds like something that could drop prices a lot and would also be really scalable. Lower material cost, lower energy cost, economies of scale. A 10x cost drop is a conservative estimate. It might turn int 50x or even 100x eventually. So, relative to the 10x difference we have today that adds up to a very depressing outlook for anything else. So, coal/nuclear/gas power plant creation is not a great investment currently. These plants need to operate for decades to generate meaningful return on investment. Short term there's plenty of demand for expensive energy, long term energy is going to be so cheap and plentiful that that business will dry up rapidly. More so than is already happening. Many power plants are of course already unsustainable economically and only survive because of government support and protectionist measures. There are a lot of coal companies that went bankrupt in recent years. And gas plants aren't doing much better. Nuclear plants have similar issues. Yes they are clean but way too expensive. People are building new ones not because they are cheap but because securing access to energy is strategically important to countries. But unless somebody figures out how to make them 100x cheaper than they are now, they are not going to ever be competitive. And there's no guarantee that 100x would be enough even.
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  This happened a while ago. Before renewables actually. Peaker plants only run some of the time. They charge more for their power because they need to cover their fixed costs. That's partly why people use gas plants, theyre relatively cheap to build, which matters when you are effectively acting as a backup. We could in theory let these businesses gamble on how often they will be needed but grids/governments already found it better to pay capacity fees to these generators to ensure they are available if needed. Notably, that money goes to the people who build the plant, not the fossil fuel suppliers, unless the capacity is actually needed. But even those people are having their business model challenged because batteries that are installed to shift daily solar peaks can bid for the same peaks. And as the gas gets burnt less, the price goes up, in a vicious circle that leads to more and more battery deployment.
  • pfdietz 4y ago
    The peakers are still needed for the last few percent that batteries can't economically cover. The price of power at those times will rise to the point that the peakers can still cover their costs, but it will be cheaper than having enough batteries to handle it. What's needed is to expose those prices to the end users so demand dispatch can handle some of it. Very low capacity factor peakers could be run with hydrogen (or other e-fuels) without greatly affecting their costs, since they'd use so little of it.
    • tuatoru 4y ago
      If grid battery prices fall another 90% (on trend, this will be in 10 - 15 years, and there is no reason to think that it cannot happen), the economics will probably be different. Need to skate where the puck's going, not where it is.
      • pfdietz 4y ago
        Hydrogen costs about $1/kWh of energy storage capacity when stored underground in solution mined caverns in salt formations, so that's a tough target for batteries to reach. Even a 10x reduction will not get them there. The higher efficiency of batteries also becomes proportionally less important as the cost of renewable energy itself declines. It will be interesting to see where the crossover point between hydrogen (and other e-fuels) and current batteries lies. There are also technologies that will fall between them, including certain battery technologies with low current density (Form Energy's batteries are in this category) and various flavors of thermal storage. The latter has the possibility of shifting over to reheat with hydrogen in emergency situations when the directly stored heat is exhausted.
• ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  As long as the earth turns, we'll need power at night too (and on cloudy days), and current energy storage devices are not good enough to cover all of that usage.
  • ben_w 4y ago
    A true fact about what we built yesterday isn't a necessary limit to what we can build tomorrow. The storage tech works (as would a global power grid), we "only" need to scale it up, and at current prices a global grid would cost about the same as current annual spending on fossil fuels, while the cost of batteries depends on your estimate for storage requirements, which depends on the diversity (location and energy sources) of the grid, but could be in a similar range. (Batteries are also the most expensive of the seriously considered solutions, other storage methods exist and work just fine but aren't so good for cars and we need the batteries for cars anyway). I'm not sure how long either approach would last before needing servicing/replacement, but I'd be surprised if it was less than a year. Anyone here know how long underwater HVDC cables last?
    • snovv_crash 4y ago
      That's assuming that prices stay the same for the materials needed to build the grid. Have you looked into the amount of copper required to build this grid? It is many multiples of the current annual production, this would cause prices to rise enormously.
      • ben_w 4y ago
        > Have you looked into the amount of copper required to build this grid? It is many multiples of the current annual production Yes, I have, and it is, even including aluminium (surprisingly a better choice for various reasons). I think I'm one of the main proponents of this on Hacker News, so you might have even seen my previous comments calculating this. WRT economics, not my field; all I can say is that higher demand increasing prices will encourage (but not necessarily ultimately create) an increase in supply, which has a difficult to forecast feedback relationship when planning for a specific total output.
• Retric 4y ago
  In the daytime grid solar is already the cheapest option in terms of cost per kWh, but demand is on a second by second basis not simply a question of producing enough total power each month. That means there isn’t a single tipping point, just increased adoption as costs drop. Cheaper grid storage increase the amount of PV grid operators will want etc. As to going fully off grid, [Rooftop solar + inverters etc + batteries + installation] vs [paying for the same things + an electric grid] seems to favor home installation before you consider economies of scale. When panels where expensive rooftop solar was more competitive because the primary costs where the panels themselves, but as they drop other costs become more relevant and solar farms are pulling ahead. Though specific tax breaks for rooftop solar muddles the issue.
• djtango 4y ago
  Not sure why you were downvoted, seems like a very valid concern. If we turned off oil and coal tomorrow the world would fall apart. The OddLots podcast has been covering this issue on various episodes but the world of energy is a super complex system of competing interests. Ultimately we need energy to power our transition away to clean energy but the old energy industries have suffered from chronic underinvestment. There was some stat where a university course for oil (or coal?) had dropped to 1 student. But as we're seeing, without supply prices start to shoot up so unless the world is prepared to undergo huge reduction of consumption, the transition will need to be gradual.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    There is no danger or possibility of turning off oil or coal tomorrow, so it is a wholly idle concern. Concern trolling, really. Demand will fall continuously, and supply will track it. The less of it utilities use, the less sensitive they will become to price, i.e. willing to pay more for it, when they need any at all. But as demand falls off, it will be harder to place what you have, if you have extra. So expect investment in sourcing to fall. These factors will make price volatile. Industries still using mined hydrocarbons will look to get off them well before alternatives cost matches it, just because prices for alternatives will be more stable, falling on a predictable downward trend.
• geoduck14 4y ago
  I had a fascinating talk with an executive at a power dustrobution company a couple of years ago. He looked forward to Solar. He said the #1 biggest cost of electricity was 2 fold: 1) running cable everywhere and 2) anticipating demand 10 years away and running cable for that demand So, putting solar on your roof really helps them with demand "far" from the plant
• deleted 4y ago
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