8 ms·

The Future Dominance of Solar and Wind Energy

41 points by hannob 4y ago

sendfoods 4y ago
I a huge fan of residential solar and photovoltaics. Under the right conditions (summer, adequate battery storage) it's possible to be self-sufficient, just absolutely incredible. That being said, where is the disconnect between people claiming industrial-scale solar and wind is cheaper than burning fossil fuels, and the reality (in Europe, others?) that electricity prices have risen steadily with an increase in renewable energy production (even before COVID and Ukraine)? Is it the largely unaddressed battery storage problems? Other effects?
- credit_guy 4y ago
  The disconnect is due, in part, to a selection bias. The cost estimates for new solar and wind (for example Lazard's report [1]) is based on existing plants. These plants were built in the best places, for example in the US lots of solar power plants were built in sunny California, and lots of wind turbines in places with plenty of wind (the so-called wind corridor). If you take solar and install it in Europe, you will not get the same bang for your buck, for the simple reason that Europe is well north of California. As for wind, most of Europe is less windy than the US wind corridor, but offshore areas in the North and Baltic seas appear to be exceptionally good. Still, building offshore wind can't be done at a snap of your fingers. Going forward, both solar and wind will see huge increases in installed capacity, but only in the places where it makes sense. [1] 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-... [2] https://earthlymission.com/wind-resource-map-europe/ https://earthlymission.com/wind-resource-map-europe/ [3] https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325 https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325
- Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
  The EU has a pricing system where all the electricity is sold at the price of the most expensive source. For example, if at a given moment you need 100 MW of solar at €10, 100 MW of wind at €12, and 1 MW of gas at €150, consumers will be billed €150 for each and every MW they consume. I get the intended logic behind the system, which is to incentivize cheap sources (if you run cheap sources, you keep the difference with respect to gas as pure profit), but IMO it's prone to gaming (a lot of incentive to have that single MW of gas up, and electricity companies are an oligopoly...) and doesn't work well even without gaming (if the price of gas is disproportionately high with respect to the rest of sources, things begin to just not make sense). Spain and Portugal negotiated to (temporarily, I think) get out of this system and change it to something saner (with the same basic principles but some compensations so that gas price doesn't dominate anything). The so-called Iberian exception. And it's working: while our prices are still high with respect to historical standards (due to Ukraine and the general underlying energy crisis), they now tend to be much lower than the rest of the EU most of the time.
  - ragebol 4y ago
    > or example, if at a given moment you need 100 MW of solar at €10, 100 MW of wind at €12, and 1 MW of gas at €150, consumers will be billed €150 for each and every MW they consume. Since the power is exactly the same, people don't buy a MW of solar or wind, they just buy a MW, regardless of the source. If you were (owning) a generator, why would you sell your electricity for €12/unit when people are willing to buy it at €150/unit? And since it's a free market, otherwise a middleman will come swooping in to rake in the difference. Market dynamics dictate that when people/businesses are no longer willing to buy a MW for €150, the demand drops, the most expensive generators are not needed anymore and the overall price drops to the new equilibrium price. Also: my fixed contract price per kWh is about €0.81 always, which is, uh, a lot. A friend of mine recently switched to a dynamic tariff and payed about €0.30-0.40 when I last asked him about it. Pondering...
    - implements 4y ago
      > Market dynamics dictate that when people/businesses are no longer willing to buy a MW for €150, the demand drops, the most expensive generators are not needed anymore and the overall price drops to the new equilibrium price. Not an economist, but “inelastic market / supply” answers that, I think.
      - ragebol 4y ago
        It might drop, but a little only. Apparently, paying €150 for a MW is acceptable for companies. But the alternative is shutting down, so the cost gets forwarded to consumers of their products eventually. This is of course dampened by middlemen who sell for a fixed price and take the risk of having buy for a high price. And a few small NL energy companies (or rather middlemen) have gone bankrupt when they didn't have the reserves.
    - dustymcp 4y ago
      I Also switchede from static to variable billing and saved about 50% on my bill, the static pricing contracts are not worth it currently, they where in August tho, at that point my contract was 50% cheaper than the variable price..
- jahnu 4y ago
  > people claiming industrial-scale solar and wind is cheaper than burning fossil fuels It's a lot cheaper if you price in the externalities.
  - Omin 4y ago
    It's also cheaper if you don't. It's by far cheaper if you do.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      Solar & renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels even without pricing in externalities. There are places where solar energy is priced below $1 / MW, and no place where fossil energy gets anywhere close to that.
    - sendfoods 4y ago
      That does not answer my question. Why doesn't the cheap price reach the consumer?
  - ratdragon 4y ago
    Depends on when, that's why we need gas and other dispatchables. We've no grid-scale energy storage as of now. So saying they're cheaper isn't comparing apples to apples.
    - jahnu 4y ago
      The storage problem is wildly overstated when we look at data from real world experience. Great thread here explaining how we need far less storage than is often claimed: https://twitter.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1565923581246091264 https://twitter.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1565923581246091264
- ragebol 4y ago
  The majority of power generation in Europe is still based on fossil fuels. And thus those are the price setters according to the Merit order curve [0], since they have the highest cost still. [0] https://docs.energytransitionmodel.com/main/merit-order/ https://docs.energytransitionmodel.com/main/merit-order/
  - antupis 4y ago
    And countries which relies on renewables have pretty cheap electricity(Nordics).
    - doikor 4y ago
      Nordic’s also have a lot of nuclear (well Sweden and Finland does)
      - the_third_wave 4y ago
        ...which is under constant pressure from "green" parties to be closed down in Sweden. The current government makes different noises and may in fact allow more nuclear power plants to be established but nearly all "progressive" governments in the last decades have worked to reduce reliance on nuclear power. Half of the available nuclear capacity has been closed down for political reasons - "green" politicians claim it was the market which decided to close down these plants but their claims are false [1]. Some of the recently closed down plants could possibly be restarted but this remains to be seen. Given the current "energy crisis" in Europe - which has driven up electricity prices in Sweden 5- to 10-fold for end users and with that is driving many companies into bankruptcy even though the actual cost for ~75% of power producers - hydro and remaining nuclear capacity - in Sweden has not changed. The profits from these price hikes mostly (~65%) flow to the state [2] through increased taxation, the so-called "flaskhalsavgift" (bottle neck surcharge) on electricity produced in the north but used in the south or abroad and the increased VAT income due to the higher prices. [1] https://naringslivets-medieinstitut.se/det-var-marknaden-som-stangde-karnkraften/ https://naringslivets-medieinstitut.se/det-var-marknaden-som... [2] https://www.dagensps.se/privatekonomi/bostad/analys-staten-stor-vinnare-pa-hoga-elpriser/ https://www.dagensps.se/privatekonomi/bostad/analys-staten-s...
- _Microft 4y ago
  Isn't the answer simply that the cost of producing something and the price that customers pay for it are different things?
- paganel 4y ago
  > Is it the largely unaddressed battery storage problems? Afaik those are not solved at scale, as in they're not even "problems" yet, the "battery storage" just doesn't exist at an industrial scale. As in many other past cases a form of pseudo-religiousness has taken over the discourse, hence the disconnect between what certain people believe can be done and reality.
kevinak 4y ago
Still no answer to how they’re going to solve those moments when there is no wind or sun. Are we just going to accept that businesses and residences have to turn off all their appliances and machines when that happens?
- justatdotin 4y ago
  I've been on solar for years. I have over 12 hours every day where I get by with no sun, thanks to an amazing technology called a battery.
  - draven 4y ago
    This may work for a single house, I don't think it's easy to scale to a whole city or a factory.
    - ragebol 4y ago
      Doesn't need to be easy. It's being worked on by many many people.
      - eof 4y ago
        Thanks for saying it. Industrial energy storage hardly strikes the intuition as less tractable than a skyscraper in the desert or a tunnel under the ocean
    - justatdotin 4y ago
      https://www.cefc.com.au/where-we-invest/case-studies/sa-big-battery-a-game-changer/ https://www.cefc.com.au/where-we-invest/case-studies/sa-big-...
    - defrost 4y ago
      It's already scaled to an entire Australian state, see peer comment ^^ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34336253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34336253
viknesh 4y ago
It's really interesting to see that pretty much everybody in the industry agrees that wind and solar are the future after having read https://www.lynalden.com/energy-problems/ https://www.lynalden.com/energy-problems/. That piece seems to argue that wind & solar are some of the least efficient energy generation sources.
- efnx 4y ago
  Efficient in what sense? Compared to how much energy it costs to get energy out over the lifetime of the mechanical device, or simply turning the fuel into energy?
- ehnto 4y ago
  It's because efficiency is only a small part of the conversation. Someone putting panels on their roof only cares insofar as it helps decide which solar panels to buy. They are buying solar because it goes on their roof, costs less than grid power, and they own the generation (what that means to someone changes) Likewise a municipality putting in a solar farm is probably doing it because it's cheap and easy to maintain, easier to distribute across your city, and when compared to a big machinery based plant like a fossil fuel plant, both wind and solar take less educated skills from the municipality to install and maintain. Solar is essentially commoditized at this point, it's barrier for entry is for a municipality is just money. Wind is productized too, just more complex and difficult to install and maintain than solar.
  - viknesh 4y ago
    That makes sense, and also suggests that governments with more centralized planning might skew more heavily towards nuclear. I'm not sure if that's actually true in practice (because obviously there are many non-efficiency related reasons that people don't like nuclear), but it would be interesting to see if there is a relationship between centralized energy planning and amount of solar/wind/nuclear energy consumed.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  If the actual source is extremely powerful, does the efficiency matter? The whole life on earth is solar powered since billions of years and it works very well and organisms did develop efficient energy storage for the times when the sun isn't shining. IMHO solar is a proven source of energy that just needs more engineering to improve practicality. It kind of feel like we are getting there. What I would like to see is nuclear power dedicated in producing solar energy hardware. After all, these things are not exotic and it's matter of putting energy into converting some abundant raw materials into solar cells.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
theshrike79 4y ago
The current electricity price shock in Europe will (hopefully) force people to think about their energy usage profile a bit more. Yes it's true that 1:1 replacing the current power generation capacity with solar and wind is going to be really difficult. BUT if we combine that with small-scale production (local solar/wind) and storage (small batteries in buildings) controlled by a smart grid, with the addition of automatically moving consumption to cheaper hours it's perfectly doable. You don't NEED to run your dish/clothes washer and dryer the second you come home from work. You can fill them and time them to start so that they run during the night and are ready in the morning, for example. You get cheap electricity and the grid likes it when it gets use on quieter hours too.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > You don't NEED to run your dish/clothes washer and dryer the second you come home from work. You can fill them and time them to start so that they run during the night and are ready in the morning, for example The problem with this is that the majority of people live in appartement buildings, where a washing machine's sound can traverse walls. Dishwasher too in older buildings with poor sound insulation.
  - ljf 4y ago
    That may be, but if only those who were able to did this I'm sure the impacts could be high. For those in apartments, timers could be set to run during the day when more people are out at work.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    "Regular living sounds" are OK over here, by law. And you can buy a damper mat for your washing machine for 10€ that takes away a huge bit of the vibration it causes.
TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
Solar and Wind are not feasible for European winters, because they are backed up by natural gas. Where that natural gas comes from? Well Russia. You need energy storage first, which does not exists, because it is too expensive to build it. So therefore there is going to be no dominance of solar and wind clearly from practical reasons.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Europe has tons of energy storage in the form of natural gas storage tanks. If they only used gas out of those tanks when there was no sun & wind they could easily keep them topped off via LNG input terminals and they'd be fine.
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    Oh yes, that's because natural gas is renewable source of energy, I have completely forget.

41 points by hannob 4y ago

I a huge fan of residential solar and photovoltaics. Under the right conditions (summer, adequate battery storage) it's possible to be self-sufficient, just absolutely incredible. That being said, where is the disconnect between people claiming industrial-scale solar and wind is cheaper than burning fossil fuels, and the reality (in Europe, others?) that electricity prices have risen steadily with an increase in renewable energy production (even before COVID and Ukraine)? Is it the largely unaddressed battery storage problems? Other effects?

credit_guy 4y ago
The disconnect is due, in part, to a selection bias. The cost estimates for new solar and wind (for example Lazard's report [1]) is based on existing plants. These plants were built in the best places, for example in the US lots of solar power plants were built in sunny California, and lots of wind turbines in places with plenty of wind (the so-called wind corridor). If you take solar and install it in Europe, you will not get the same bang for your buck, for the simple reason that Europe is well north of California. As for wind, most of Europe is less windy than the US wind corridor, but offshore areas in the North and Baltic seas appear to be exceptionally good. Still, building offshore wind can't be done at a snap of your fingers. Going forward, both solar and wind will see huge increases in installed capacity, but only in the places where it makes sense. [1] 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-... [2] https://earthlymission.com/wind-resource-map-europe/ https://earthlymission.com/wind-resource-map-europe/ [3] https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325 https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325
Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
The EU has a pricing system where all the electricity is sold at the price of the most expensive source. For example, if at a given moment you need 100 MW of solar at €10, 100 MW of wind at €12, and 1 MW of gas at €150, consumers will be billed €150 for each and every MW they consume. I get the intended logic behind the system, which is to incentivize cheap sources (if you run cheap sources, you keep the difference with respect to gas as pure profit), but IMO it's prone to gaming (a lot of incentive to have that single MW of gas up, and electricity companies are an oligopoly...) and doesn't work well even without gaming (if the price of gas is disproportionately high with respect to the rest of sources, things begin to just not make sense). Spain and Portugal negotiated to (temporarily, I think) get out of this system and change it to something saner (with the same basic principles but some compensations so that gas price doesn't dominate anything). The so-called Iberian exception. And it's working: while our prices are still high with respect to historical standards (due to Ukraine and the general underlying energy crisis), they now tend to be much lower than the rest of the EU most of the time.
- ragebol 4y ago
  > or example, if at a given moment you need 100 MW of solar at €10, 100 MW of wind at €12, and 1 MW of gas at €150, consumers will be billed €150 for each and every MW they consume. Since the power is exactly the same, people don't buy a MW of solar or wind, they just buy a MW, regardless of the source. If you were (owning) a generator, why would you sell your electricity for €12/unit when people are willing to buy it at €150/unit? And since it's a free market, otherwise a middleman will come swooping in to rake in the difference. Market dynamics dictate that when people/businesses are no longer willing to buy a MW for €150, the demand drops, the most expensive generators are not needed anymore and the overall price drops to the new equilibrium price. Also: my fixed contract price per kWh is about €0.81 always, which is, uh, a lot. A friend of mine recently switched to a dynamic tariff and payed about €0.30-0.40 when I last asked him about it. Pondering...
  - implements 4y ago
    > Market dynamics dictate that when people/businesses are no longer willing to buy a MW for €150, the demand drops, the most expensive generators are not needed anymore and the overall price drops to the new equilibrium price. Not an economist, but “inelastic market / supply” answers that, I think.
    - ragebol 4y ago
      It might drop, but a little only. Apparently, paying €150 for a MW is acceptable for companies. But the alternative is shutting down, so the cost gets forwarded to consumers of their products eventually. This is of course dampened by middlemen who sell for a fixed price and take the risk of having buy for a high price. And a few small NL energy companies (or rather middlemen) have gone bankrupt when they didn't have the reserves.
  - dustymcp 4y ago
    I Also switchede from static to variable billing and saved about 50% on my bill, the static pricing contracts are not worth it currently, they where in August tho, at that point my contract was 50% cheaper than the variable price..
jahnu 4y ago
> people claiming industrial-scale solar and wind is cheaper than burning fossil fuels It's a lot cheaper if you price in the externalities.
- Omin 4y ago
  It's also cheaper if you don't. It's by far cheaper if you do.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Solar & renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels even without pricing in externalities. There are places where solar energy is priced below $1 / MW, and no place where fossil energy gets anywhere close to that.
  - sendfoods 4y ago
    That does not answer my question. Why doesn't the cheap price reach the consumer?
- ratdragon 4y ago
  Depends on when, that's why we need gas and other dispatchables. We've no grid-scale energy storage as of now. So saying they're cheaper isn't comparing apples to apples.
  - jahnu 4y ago
    The storage problem is wildly overstated when we look at data from real world experience. Great thread here explaining how we need far less storage than is often claimed: https://twitter.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1565923581246091264 https://twitter.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1565923581246091264
ragebol 4y ago
The majority of power generation in Europe is still based on fossil fuels. And thus those are the price setters according to the Merit order curve [0], since they have the highest cost still. [0] https://docs.energytransitionmodel.com/main/merit-order/ https://docs.energytransitionmodel.com/main/merit-order/
- antupis 4y ago
  And countries which relies on renewables have pretty cheap electricity(Nordics).
  - doikor 4y ago
    Nordic’s also have a lot of nuclear (well Sweden and Finland does)
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      ...which is under constant pressure from "green" parties to be closed down in Sweden. The current government makes different noises and may in fact allow more nuclear power plants to be established but nearly all "progressive" governments in the last decades have worked to reduce reliance on nuclear power. Half of the available nuclear capacity has been closed down for political reasons - "green" politicians claim it was the market which decided to close down these plants but their claims are false [1]. Some of the recently closed down plants could possibly be restarted but this remains to be seen. Given the current "energy crisis" in Europe - which has driven up electricity prices in Sweden 5- to 10-fold for end users and with that is driving many companies into bankruptcy even though the actual cost for ~75% of power producers - hydro and remaining nuclear capacity - in Sweden has not changed. The profits from these price hikes mostly (~65%) flow to the state [2] through increased taxation, the so-called "flaskhalsavgift" (bottle neck surcharge) on electricity produced in the north but used in the south or abroad and the increased VAT income due to the higher prices. [1] https://naringslivets-medieinstitut.se/det-var-marknaden-som-stangde-karnkraften/ https://naringslivets-medieinstitut.se/det-var-marknaden-som... [2] https://www.dagensps.se/privatekonomi/bostad/analys-staten-stor-vinnare-pa-hoga-elpriser/ https://www.dagensps.se/privatekonomi/bostad/analys-staten-s...
_Microft 4y ago
Isn't the answer simply that the cost of producing something and the price that customers pay for it are different things?
paganel 4y ago
> Is it the largely unaddressed battery storage problems? Afaik those are not solved at scale, as in they're not even "problems" yet, the "battery storage" just doesn't exist at an industrial scale. As in many other past cases a form of pseudo-religiousness has taken over the discourse, hence the disconnect between what certain people believe can be done and reality.

kevinak 4y ago

Still no answer to how they’re going to solve those moments when there is no wind or sun. Are we just going to accept that businesses and residences have to turn off all their appliances and machines when that happens?

justatdotin 4y ago
I've been on solar for years. I have over 12 hours every day where I get by with no sun, thanks to an amazing technology called a battery.
- draven 4y ago
  This may work for a single house, I don't think it's easy to scale to a whole city or a factory.
  - ragebol 4y ago
    Doesn't need to be easy. It's being worked on by many many people.
    - eof 4y ago
      Thanks for saying it. Industrial energy storage hardly strikes the intuition as less tractable than a skyscraper in the desert or a tunnel under the ocean
  - justatdotin 4y ago
    https://www.cefc.com.au/where-we-invest/case-studies/sa-big-battery-a-game-changer/ https://www.cefc.com.au/where-we-invest/case-studies/sa-big-...
  - defrost 4y ago
    It's already scaled to an entire Australian state, see peer comment ^^ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34336253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34336253

viknesh 4y ago

It's really interesting to see that pretty much everybody in the industry agrees that wind and solar are the future after having read https://www.lynalden.com/energy-problems/ https://www.lynalden.com/energy-problems/. That piece seems to argue that wind & solar are some of the least efficient energy generation sources.

efnx 4y ago
Efficient in what sense? Compared to how much energy it costs to get energy out over the lifetime of the mechanical device, or simply turning the fuel into energy?
ehnto 4y ago
It's because efficiency is only a small part of the conversation. Someone putting panels on their roof only cares insofar as it helps decide which solar panels to buy. They are buying solar because it goes on their roof, costs less than grid power, and they own the generation (what that means to someone changes) Likewise a municipality putting in a solar farm is probably doing it because it's cheap and easy to maintain, easier to distribute across your city, and when compared to a big machinery based plant like a fossil fuel plant, both wind and solar take less educated skills from the municipality to install and maintain. Solar is essentially commoditized at this point, it's barrier for entry is for a municipality is just money. Wind is productized too, just more complex and difficult to install and maintain than solar.
- viknesh 4y ago
  That makes sense, and also suggests that governments with more centralized planning might skew more heavily towards nuclear. I'm not sure if that's actually true in practice (because obviously there are many non-efficiency related reasons that people don't like nuclear), but it would be interesting to see if there is a relationship between centralized energy planning and amount of solar/wind/nuclear energy consumed.
mrtksn 4y ago
If the actual source is extremely powerful, does the efficiency matter? The whole life on earth is solar powered since billions of years and it works very well and organisms did develop efficient energy storage for the times when the sun isn't shining. IMHO solar is a proven source of energy that just needs more engineering to improve practicality. It kind of feel like we are getting there. What I would like to see is nuclear power dedicated in producing solar energy hardware. After all, these things are not exotic and it's matter of putting energy into converting some abundant raw materials into solar cells.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

theshrike79 4y ago

The current electricity price shock in Europe will (hopefully) force people to think about their energy usage profile a bit more. Yes it's true that 1:1 replacing the current power generation capacity with solar and wind is going to be really difficult. BUT if we combine that with small-scale production (local solar/wind) and storage (small batteries in buildings) controlled by a smart grid, with the addition of automatically moving consumption to cheaper hours it's perfectly doable. You don't NEED to run your dish/clothes washer and dryer the second you come home from work. You can fill them and time them to start so that they run during the night and are ready in the morning, for example. You get cheap electricity and the grid likes it when it gets use on quieter hours too.

sofixa 4y ago
> You don't NEED to run your dish/clothes washer and dryer the second you come home from work. You can fill them and time them to start so that they run during the night and are ready in the morning, for example The problem with this is that the majority of people live in appartement buildings, where a washing machine's sound can traverse walls. Dishwasher too in older buildings with poor sound insulation.
- ljf 4y ago
  That may be, but if only those who were able to did this I'm sure the impacts could be high. For those in apartments, timers could be set to run during the day when more people are out at work.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  "Regular living sounds" are OK over here, by law. And you can buy a damper mat for your washing machine for 10€ that takes away a huge bit of the vibration it causes.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago

Solar and Wind are not feasible for European winters, because they are backed up by natural gas. Where that natural gas comes from? Well Russia. You need energy storage first, which does not exists, because it is too expensive to build it. So therefore there is going to be no dominance of solar and wind clearly from practical reasons.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
Europe has tons of energy storage in the form of natural gas storage tanks. If they only used gas out of those tanks when there was no sun & wind they could easily keep them topped off via LNG input terminals and they'd be fine.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  Oh yes, that's because natural gas is renewable source of energy, I have completely forget.