14 ms·

>> Grids have also repeatedly been shown to handle more renewables than every previous prediction would make, and we haven't hit the limit. > Yes dispatchable

>> Grids have also repeatedly been shown to handle more renewables than every previous prediction would make, and we haven't hit the limit. > Yes dispatchable generation may fail to materialize at times, but renewables “fail” to provide consistent power every single day, when the sun stops shining at night or wind stops blowing. As I said. You're just repeating the old arguments. People thought that small percentages of renewables would destabilize the grid, then that didn't happen, so then they said a slightly larger percentages would do it, and it didn't. This tired theme has been repeated ad nauseam for the last decade or two. I agree that you need some amount of Base Load, but renewables haven't been the problem yet, and energy storage is the solution, long term, along with Demand Response. Small amounts of grid energy storage have been shown[0] to have disproportionately high effects on improving grid stability. We might need less than you predict. As it is, since we are still successfully adding more and more renewables to the grid, and renewables aren't being the source of blackouts, SMRs have to compete with renewables on cost, and they simply don't. SMRs also don't compete with Combined Cycle plants in terms of cost either, so which one are utilities going to choose? Peak demand for the grid is in the late afternoon / early evening, so the amount of battery storage needed to "shift" solar production by a few hours is not as much as you would think. Wind power produces more power at night than during the day, and it produces more in winter than summer, which is quite convenient given how solar produces more in the summer and during the day.[1] They make quite a complementary pair of power sources. There are seasonal concerns, which is where some combined cycle plants come into play, even if they don't operate for most of the year, but that's also not SMRs. Combined Cycle is way cheaper than these nuclear SMRs. If you over-build on wind and solar, you can go a long way even in times of year with "less" wind and less sunshine, and with the low cost of wind and solar... lots of people are looking to overbuild as a partial solution that doesn't require batteries. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve#Benefits_for_the_consumers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve#Benefi... [1]: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1368867 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1368867

evancox100 4y ago
Every fact you are saying may be true, but “fossil fuels are a bigger cause of blackouts than renewables” doesn’t follow from the facts your gave, you’re just assuming it is true. That is the last thing I will say on this.
- coder543 4y ago
  > you’re just assuming it is true I'm not assuming it. I'm referring to the very real, major blackouts that have occurred in the US over the past couple of years. These events have plenty of reliable sources that tell exactly what happened. In the Texas blackouts, the problems were coal and gas plants going offline due to the cold that they weren't winterized against. It had nothing to do with Wind or Solar failing unexpectedly, despite the governor's claims early in the blackouts. In the recent rolling blackouts in the Southeast, TVA and Duke Energy reported that the cause was their coal and gas plants freezing up. Nothing to do with renewables again. I cannot recall any major blackouts caused by the fossil fuel plants operating normally while renewables failed to produce on schedule. I would love to see some examples, if they exist. The Cleantechnica article that I linked to earlier (which you surely didn't read) also provided quotes on this exact topic, and that analysis agrees with my own, FWIW. I could dig into the specifics of these events and provide more sources, but you don't seem likely to care.
  - jcampbell1 4y ago
    I agree with most of what you say, but renewables can’t be counted on, so they can never be blamed. This is tautologically true and yet a meaningless point. If a hospital loses power to lifesaving equipment, 100% of the time it is due to a failure of backup generators.
    - coder543 4y ago
      > I agree with most of what you say, but renewables can’t be counted on, so they can never be blamed. Renewables are fairly predictable, so they can be counted on. The production is variable, but not unreliable or unpredictable. It's an important distinction, and it gives more time for the grid to coordinate with Demand Response (or peaker plants) to match load and production. Obviously the weather models involved are still improving, but for solar especially, it's easy to predict when the sun will go down. Cloud coverage and wind forecasting are active areas of development to make things easier and more predictable for everyone.
Manuel_D 4y ago
The overwhelming majority of electricity demand is base load. Usually on the order of 70-80% [1]. We don't need "some" base load, almost all our demand is base load. Electricity storage is nowhere near the scale required to make a dent in the electricity grid. To put this in perspective, the US alone uses about 500 GWh of electricity every hour. Worldwide this figure is about 2,500 GWh per hour. The storage facility you linked to was the biggest facility in the world when it was first constructed, and it stored only 129 MWh of electricity. At our current rate of battery production it'd take us a century of dedicating 100% of our battery output to grid storage to reach 1 day's worth of storage. Battery production is expected to increase, but it's unclear whether raw material inputs can keep up with manufacturing demands [2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load 2. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
- coder543 4y ago
  > The overwhelming majority of electricity demand is base load. Usually on the order of 70-80% [1]. We don't need "some" base load, almost all our demand is base load. The article you linked doesn't really back this up, at least in the way this discussion means it. It shows that with flexible production, you can drastically scale back on "traditional" base load power sources, and that is representing a real power grid in Germany. Nothing about the graph actually says "this is as much renewables as you can pack into this power grid". If you look at the graph closely, you'll notice that solar is big during the day, and wind is big during the night. With greater installed wind production capacity, the fossil fuel lines would drop drastically in the graph. It's that simple. We would still need to have "peaker plants" available until there is enough grid energy storage capacity, but combined cycle natural plants work fine for that. We can keep pushing down the time they need to on by building more renewables even without batteries. > The storage facility you linked to was the biggest facility in the world when it was first constructed, and it stored only 129 MWh of electricity. I specifically linked that one because it talks about how ridiculously profitable it has been, and how much of an impact it has had on the local grid. If it can save money for a traditional grid, then it is a no-brainer for utilities to install bigger and bigger grid batteries. More demand for batteries means more battery production facilities, increasing global production capacity over time. However, the world is also transitioning to Electric Vehicles, and most EV manufacturers are offering V2G (vehicle to grid) solutions, so millions of EVs can contribute a portion of their battery capacity to the grid in the future, and the grid can compensate them for their contribution. > Battery production is expected to increase, but it's unclear whether raw material inputs can keep up with manufacturing demands [2]. Lithium is not exactly rare or hard to extract, you can even extract lithium from saltwater, so this argument seems specious. But, various alternative chemistries are being explored which could help in different ways. > At our current rate of battery production it'd take us a century of dedicating 100% of our battery output to grid storage to reach 1 day's worth of storage. How did you determine that we need a full day's worth of energy storage? We can drastically decarbonize the grid (and lower electric costs for consumers) with a lot less than that, based on what I've seen, but this is a highly speculative part of the discussion so it's interesting to hear how that number came to be.

evancox100 4y ago

Every fact you are saying may be true, but “fossil fuels are a bigger cause of blackouts than renewables” doesn’t follow from the facts your gave, you’re just assuming it is true. That is the last thing I will say on this.

coder543 4y ago
> you’re just assuming it is true I'm not assuming it. I'm referring to the very real, major blackouts that have occurred in the US over the past couple of years. These events have plenty of reliable sources that tell exactly what happened. In the Texas blackouts, the problems were coal and gas plants going offline due to the cold that they weren't winterized against. It had nothing to do with Wind or Solar failing unexpectedly, despite the governor's claims early in the blackouts. In the recent rolling blackouts in the Southeast, TVA and Duke Energy reported that the cause was their coal and gas plants freezing up. Nothing to do with renewables again. I cannot recall any major blackouts caused by the fossil fuel plants operating normally while renewables failed to produce on schedule. I would love to see some examples, if they exist. The Cleantechnica article that I linked to earlier (which you surely didn't read) also provided quotes on this exact topic, and that analysis agrees with my own, FWIW. I could dig into the specifics of these events and provide more sources, but you don't seem likely to care.
- jcampbell1 4y ago
  I agree with most of what you say, but renewables can’t be counted on, so they can never be blamed. This is tautologically true and yet a meaningless point. If a hospital loses power to lifesaving equipment, 100% of the time it is due to a failure of backup generators.
  - coder543 4y ago
    > I agree with most of what you say, but renewables can’t be counted on, so they can never be blamed. Renewables are fairly predictable, so they can be counted on. The production is variable, but not unreliable or unpredictable. It's an important distinction, and it gives more time for the grid to coordinate with Demand Response (or peaker plants) to match load and production. Obviously the weather models involved are still improving, but for solar especially, it's easy to predict when the sun will go down. Cloud coverage and wind forecasting are active areas of development to make things easier and more predictable for everyone.

Manuel_D 4y ago

The overwhelming majority of electricity demand is base load. Usually on the order of 70-80% [1]. We don't need "some" base load, almost all our demand is base load. Electricity storage is nowhere near the scale required to make a dent in the electricity grid. To put this in perspective, the US alone uses about 500 GWh of electricity every hour. Worldwide this figure is about 2,500 GWh per hour. The storage facility you linked to was the biggest facility in the world when it was first constructed, and it stored only 129 MWh of electricity. At our current rate of battery production it'd take us a century of dedicating 100% of our battery output to grid storage to reach 1 day's worth of storage. Battery production is expected to increase, but it's unclear whether raw material inputs can keep up with manufacturing demands [2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load 2. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

coder543 4y ago
> The overwhelming majority of electricity demand is base load. Usually on the order of 70-80% [1]. We don't need "some" base load, almost all our demand is base load. The article you linked doesn't really back this up, at least in the way this discussion means it. It shows that with flexible production, you can drastically scale back on "traditional" base load power sources, and that is representing a real power grid in Germany. Nothing about the graph actually says "this is as much renewables as you can pack into this power grid". If you look at the graph closely, you'll notice that solar is big during the day, and wind is big during the night. With greater installed wind production capacity, the fossil fuel lines would drop drastically in the graph. It's that simple. We would still need to have "peaker plants" available until there is enough grid energy storage capacity, but combined cycle natural plants work fine for that. We can keep pushing down the time they need to on by building more renewables even without batteries. > The storage facility you linked to was the biggest facility in the world when it was first constructed, and it stored only 129 MWh of electricity. I specifically linked that one because it talks about how ridiculously profitable it has been, and how much of an impact it has had on the local grid. If it can save money for a traditional grid, then it is a no-brainer for utilities to install bigger and bigger grid batteries. More demand for batteries means more battery production facilities, increasing global production capacity over time. However, the world is also transitioning to Electric Vehicles, and most EV manufacturers are offering V2G (vehicle to grid) solutions, so millions of EVs can contribute a portion of their battery capacity to the grid in the future, and the grid can compensate them for their contribution. > Battery production is expected to increase, but it's unclear whether raw material inputs can keep up with manufacturing demands [2]. Lithium is not exactly rare or hard to extract, you can even extract lithium from saltwater, so this argument seems specious. But, various alternative chemistries are being explored which could help in different ways. > At our current rate of battery production it'd take us a century of dedicating 100% of our battery output to grid storage to reach 1 day's worth of storage. How did you determine that we need a full day's worth of energy storage? We can drastically decarbonize the grid (and lower electric costs for consumers) with a lot less than that, based on what I've seen, but this is a highly speculative part of the discussion so it's interesting to hear how that number came to be.