8 ms·

Because to eliminate non-sustainable baseload power the US electricity grid doesn't have enough cheap local energy storage, transmission losses are significant

Because to eliminate non-sustainable baseload power the US electricity grid doesn't have enough cheap local energy storage, transmission losses are significant over inter-regional distances, and we don't have enough cross-continent transmission capacity. Right now there's no sustainable source for baseload power. Perhaps SPARC/ARC will change that in 20 years, or perhaps continuing advances in energy storage will let us store excess energy while the sun shines and the wind blows and use that stored energy as reliable baseload power. Wind power is really cheap. Electrical utilities are now comfortable with it and don't consider it an experimental technology. The profit margins are quite healthy. As soon as there's an economically profitable way to store 120 hours of regional electricity usage, most utilities will jump towards that over continuing to buy expensive fuel for their current baseload plants. Right now the marginal costs of natural gas and coal power are cheaper than energy storage, and the service / operational risks are well known and well-controlled vs. the scary operational unknowns of advanced energy storage solutions. Not talking about environmental risks; utility companies don't really give a damn about those, even if a lot of their employees personally do.

hackermatic 3y ago
Still, it's depressing and confusing that we know the stakes and are still putting money into the status quo (natural gas) instead of racing to solve these problems. I get that people need power now and not later, but power companies are also supposed to be thinking long-term, and their new natural gas plants may very well be stranded assets or simply banned in the next 10-20 years.
- kieranmaine 3y ago
  I'll repost this from another comment reply as it indicates that, in the US, money is not going to natural gas for electricity generation: The FERC "Energy Infrastructure Update for December 2022" [1] reports that between 2021 Jan - 2022 Dec Wind and Solar additions exceeded those of Natural gas. FERC also predicts that between Jan 2023 and Dec 2025 Natural Gas will add a net amount of 511MW of generating capacity. This compares with 18211 MW of Wind and 74642 MW of Solar. These are listed as "High Probability" additions, which I've been unable to find a description for. 1. https://cms.ferc.gov/media/energy-infrastructure-update-december-2022 https://cms.ferc.gov/media/energy-infrastructure-update-dece...
taylodl 3y ago
> we don't have enough cross-continent transmission capacity There's a simple reason for that - it costs roughly $1 million per mile to build new transmission and requires lawyers and real estate people working in multiple jurisdictions. Only the largest of utilities are able to afford this investment and commit the required resources. Even that's not enough - you still need to solve the so-called Community Energy Storage problem. You need a buffer between the generation and consumption of power so that they can vary from one another. That's even more investment.
beembeem 3y ago
> Right now there's no sustainable source for baseload power. To push back on this, there is a centurys' old technology for this in hydro. There's also an emerging field of geothermal. The Pacific Northwest (both sides of the border) has an abundance of hydropower that was installed decades ago and provides clean, reliable, baseload power. Geothermal has its challenges, especially at utility scale where geographic location is important and not typically close to population centers. On a smaller scale it is not geographically a problem, but not as economically viable for individual homeowners. It makes more sense when a large corporate is investing in it [1]. [1] https://news.microsoft.com/2022/04/20/microsoft-redmond-campus-modernization-construction-update-3/ https://news.microsoft.com/2022/04/20/microsoft-redmond-camp...
- reaperman 3y ago
  Hydropower is generally renewable but really is not considered sustainable. I know I slipped that in and moved the goalpost because TFA is titled "renewable" but I said "sustainable" on purpose. So your comments on hydro are fair, and I'm glad you brought it up because it's an important discussion to be had. Geothermal completely slipped my mind! facepalm Obviously the consensus view is that geothermal is sustainable. I have some mild concerns about how many years a installation in a non-geologically/thermally active area can run before it changes the temperature of its lithic heat sink enough to significantly reduce power output, but many installations are proving the success of the technology overall, and that's more an economic challenge (lifetime/ROI of installation) than a question of sustainability.
  - WastingMyTime89 3y ago
    > Hydropower is generally renewable but really is not considered sustainable. Unfamiliar readers have to note that here sustainable is not used in its normal meaning but in the one used by some environmentalists. Hydropower can definitely be sustained indefinitely. It does cause flooding in some area previously I flooded and disturbs fish which some people view as an issue. It’s really hard to have a good discussion about climate change because some people constantly push unrelated agenda into the mix.
pdonis 3y ago
> Right now there's no sustainable source for baseload power. Only if you refuse to consider nuclear as "sustainable", which makes no sense technically but unfortunately has a lot of political traction.
- reaperman 3y ago
  I do refuse to. I understand the statistics favor fission's overall safety record, but I've read Voices from Chernobyl[0] and I'm not okay with the costs of what happens when control is lost / the facility is subjected to violence. I'm not okay with how long an area is uninhabitable after a major contamination, and how food grown around Chernobyl continued(s?) to poison unknowing people around Europe for many years and this contamination is covered up by Putin's henchman in Belarus[0]. I do understand that it's better than coal after factoring in all effects of air pollution. But I don't believe that's the dichotomy when we have other options to invest in wind and solar, which carry infinitely less risk. 0: https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=EA979C3CF64D8EF8C12613A100AEAF88 https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=EA979C3CF64D8EF8C12613A... > He was producing stool 25 to 30 times a day. With blood and mucous. His skin started cracking on his arms and legs. He became covered with boils. When he turned his head, there'd be a clump of hair left on the pillow. I tried joking: "It's convenient, you don't need a comb." Soon they cut all their hair. I did it for him myself. While I was there with him, they wouldn't, but when I left—they photographed him. Without any clothes. Naked. One thin little sheet on top of him. I changed that little sheet every day, and every day by evening it was covered in blood. I pick him up, and there are pieces of his skin on my hand, they stick to my hands. I ask him: "Love. Help me. Prop yourself up on your arm, your elbow, as much as you can, I'll smooth out your bedding, get the knots and folds out." Any little knot, that was already a wound on him. I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn't accidentally cut him. None of the nurses could approach him; if they needed anything they'd call me. [After he died] They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn't get it on him, there wasn't a whole body to put it on. It was all—wounds. The last two days in the hospital—I'd lift his arm, and meanwhile the bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it. Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I'd wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. It's impossible to talk about. It's impossible to write about. And even to live through. It was all mine. My love. They couldn't get a single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot. ... After that, in the maternity ward, the skin started coming off my hands. My veins swelled up. And I was so indifferent to everything. I didn't want to get out of bed. [Cries] I'd get to the hospital and then turn around. By then I was pregnant myself. N.B.: The baby she was pregnant with, due to extremely rapid cellular growth, saved her from the radiation she received from performing bedside hospital care for her late husband, because the baby absorbed most of the radioactive elements. After his birth, the child Andrei died as a young schoolboy, essentially sacrificing his life for his mother, after spending half his life sick, reportedly very ill two weeks every month. > In Belarus, very little has changed since these interviews were conducted. Back in 1996, Aleksandr Lukashenka was the lesser-known of Europe's "last two dictators." Now Slobodan Milosevic is on trial at The Hague and Lukashenka has pride of place. He stifles any attempt at free speech and his political opponents continue to "disappear." On the Chernobyl front, Lukashenka has encouraged studies arguing that the land is increasingly safe and that more and more of it should be brought back into agricultural rotation. In 1999, the physicist Yuri Bandazhevsky, a friend and colleague of Vasily Borisovich Nesterenko (interviewed on page 210), authored a report criticizing this tendency in government policy and suggesting that Belarus was knowingly exporting contaminated food. Yuri has been in jail ever since.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
But we already have a lot of natgas plants. I'm willing to bet that we could have handled all of our baseload requirements on all 3 mainland grids using the existing natgas plants as peakers. Sure, once we hit 60% or so of our power from renewables we'll need to have a proper strategy for handling intermittency. But we're far from that number now. Too meet our commitments, all natgas plants will need to be shut down or have carbon capture added by 2035. If you amortize your capital costs over 12 years instead of 50 years, that natgas plant doesn't look so cheap any more.
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  Some new gas plants are sold as being compatible with hydrogen mixes and/or pure hydrogen. https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fueled-gas-turbines https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fuele...
  - binarymax 3y ago
    So the idea is to use excess power to make and store hydrogen? How efficient is making hydrogen?
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      > How efficient is making hydrogen? https://www.iea.org/reports/electrolysers https://www.iea.org/reports/electrolysers https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435121003068 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
    - generic92034 3y ago
      Isn't it infinitely more efficient than just letting the potential power be wasted? If supply surpasses demand eventually wind farms are shut down. That has to change, IMHO.
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      Yeah, we need to generate a lot of green hydrogen anyway, to decarbonise fertilizer, steel production, aviation fuel and a bunch of other stuff (Ideally we'd force fossil fuel producers, the number one users of hydrogen today, to replace their hydrogen with green hydrogen as part of the process of kick starting this). And in that world, using some of your stored hydrogen or ammonia as emergy reserve makes sense, though you'd want to avoid actually using it too much as if you do then you'd probably have been better spending the money on more generation and/or batteries.
_Microft 3y ago
> transmission losses are significant over inter-regional distances Not necessarily: (ultra) high-voltage DC transmission lines have losses in the low single digit percentage per 1000km (~600mi). This is not just theoretical either - for example, there is a transmission line over 3200km/2000mi with 12GW capacity in China for example (not under construction either but completed). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity_transmission_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
- ricw 3y ago
  Last I read it was 1.5% per 1000km. That’s negligible on the grand scale of baseload and price differential between cross-continental regions.
no_wizard 3y ago
Why are we leaving nuclear out of the discussion? Its the perfect moderator for electricity consumption and its not carbon emitting, would this be a better solution to push out natural gas and coal more quickly? It also doesn't have the same distribution problems
- nasmorn 3y ago
  If you commission a new plant today it will not produce before 2040. That is the single biggest issue
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - tracker1 3y ago
    It really is... Unfortunately there's not perfect answer and any near term solutions will need to include a variety of sources. I also think we should be working on water pipelines as well. Energy preservation is another issue, and where Hydrogen is likely one of the better solutions... but that will require a combination of more effective water filtration and desalinization along with transportation of clean water nearer to where energy is generated. We should definitely be breaking ground on more nuclear plants in more stable (geographically) locations. I'm less convinced that current solar tech is a better net good considering what goes into building the things. I have similar reservations on electric cars for that matter. I think the tech is very cool and we will go through a lot of revisions. Of course I also have some skepticism on the eminent dangers of global warming or man's influence in part or whole. Considering there are relatively recent times (about 3-8k years ago) where the understood earth temperature was a bit higher than even the projections for the end of the next couple centuries at worst. Edit: and I'm still waiting for the flying cars I was promised.
  - kgabis 3y ago
    This is simply not true.
    - reaperman 3y ago
_hypx 3y ago
> As soon as there's an economically profitable way to store 120 hours of regional electricity usage, most utilities will jump towards that over continuing to buy expensive fuel for their current baseload plants. You store excess energy in the form of hydrogen from electrolysis for that need. Rapid reductions in cost is making this inevitable. You can even convert existing natural gas plants to run on it. It is far and away the simplest and smartest solution for this problem. IMO, this is the next intellectual showdown between people who have recognized the rapidly dropping cost of green energy technologies and its naysayers. We went through multiple years of what was basically outright denial over the cost of wind and solar. Even after they become cost-effective, certain people still denied it. Hydrogen is in the same boat. It is already at the point where it is competitive, and is only held back by people in outright denial.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > can even convert existing natural gas plants to run on it Do you have more on this? I thought hydrogen generally required special treatment given its tendency to ruin metals. I’ve seen modern gas turbines marketed as being hydrogen compatible, but that comes at a cost and is not commonplace.
  - _hypx 3y ago
    It is not going to be an all-at-once transition: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/gas-turbines-hydrogen-us/ https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/gas-turbines-hydro... We will see blended gas turbines first, with gradual shifting to 100% hydrogen. It's likely that at least some components have to be replaced in order to allow for pure hydrogen combustion.

hackermatic 3y ago

Still, it's depressing and confusing that we know the stakes and are still putting money into the status quo (natural gas) instead of racing to solve these problems. I get that people need power now and not later, but power companies are also supposed to be thinking long-term, and their new natural gas plants may very well be stranded assets or simply banned in the next 10-20 years.

kieranmaine 3y ago
I'll repost this from another comment reply as it indicates that, in the US, money is not going to natural gas for electricity generation: The FERC "Energy Infrastructure Update for December 2022" [1] reports that between 2021 Jan - 2022 Dec Wind and Solar additions exceeded those of Natural gas. FERC also predicts that between Jan 2023 and Dec 2025 Natural Gas will add a net amount of 511MW of generating capacity. This compares with 18211 MW of Wind and 74642 MW of Solar. These are listed as "High Probability" additions, which I've been unable to find a description for. 1. https://cms.ferc.gov/media/energy-infrastructure-update-december-2022 https://cms.ferc.gov/media/energy-infrastructure-update-dece...

taylodl 3y ago

> we don't have enough cross-continent transmission capacity There's a simple reason for that - it costs roughly $1 million per mile to build new transmission and requires lawyers and real estate people working in multiple jurisdictions. Only the largest of utilities are able to afford this investment and commit the required resources. Even that's not enough - you still need to solve the so-called Community Energy Storage problem. You need a buffer between the generation and consumption of power so that they can vary from one another. That's even more investment.

beembeem 3y ago

> Right now there's no sustainable source for baseload power. To push back on this, there is a centurys' old technology for this in hydro. There's also an emerging field of geothermal. The Pacific Northwest (both sides of the border) has an abundance of hydropower that was installed decades ago and provides clean, reliable, baseload power. Geothermal has its challenges, especially at utility scale where geographic location is important and not typically close to population centers. On a smaller scale it is not geographically a problem, but not as economically viable for individual homeowners. It makes more sense when a large corporate is investing in it [1]. [1] https://news.microsoft.com/2022/04/20/microsoft-redmond-campus-modernization-construction-update-3/ https://news.microsoft.com/2022/04/20/microsoft-redmond-camp...

reaperman 3y ago
Hydropower is generally renewable but really is not considered sustainable. I know I slipped that in and moved the goalpost because TFA is titled "renewable" but I said "sustainable" on purpose. So your comments on hydro are fair, and I'm glad you brought it up because it's an important discussion to be had. Geothermal completely slipped my mind! facepalm Obviously the consensus view is that geothermal is sustainable. I have some mild concerns about how many years a installation in a non-geologically/thermally active area can run before it changes the temperature of its lithic heat sink enough to significantly reduce power output, but many installations are proving the success of the technology overall, and that's more an economic challenge (lifetime/ROI of installation) than a question of sustainability.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  > Hydropower is generally renewable but really is not considered sustainable. Unfamiliar readers have to note that here sustainable is not used in its normal meaning but in the one used by some environmentalists. Hydropower can definitely be sustained indefinitely. It does cause flooding in some area previously I flooded and disturbs fish which some people view as an issue. It’s really hard to have a good discussion about climate change because some people constantly push unrelated agenda into the mix.

pdonis 3y ago

> Right now there's no sustainable source for baseload power. Only if you refuse to consider nuclear as "sustainable", which makes no sense technically but unfortunately has a lot of political traction.

reaperman 3y ago
I do refuse to. I understand the statistics favor fission's overall safety record, but I've read Voices from Chernobyl[0] and I'm not okay with the costs of what happens when control is lost / the facility is subjected to violence. I'm not okay with how long an area is uninhabitable after a major contamination, and how food grown around Chernobyl continued(s?) to poison unknowing people around Europe for many years and this contamination is covered up by Putin's henchman in Belarus[0]. I do understand that it's better than coal after factoring in all effects of air pollution. But I don't believe that's the dichotomy when we have other options to invest in wind and solar, which carry infinitely less risk. 0: https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=EA979C3CF64D8EF8C12613A100AEAF88 https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=EA979C3CF64D8EF8C12613A... > He was producing stool 25 to 30 times a day. With blood and mucous. His skin started cracking on his arms and legs. He became covered with boils. When he turned his head, there'd be a clump of hair left on the pillow. I tried joking: "It's convenient, you don't need a comb." Soon they cut all their hair. I did it for him myself. While I was there with him, they wouldn't, but when I left—they photographed him. Without any clothes. Naked. One thin little sheet on top of him. I changed that little sheet every day, and every day by evening it was covered in blood. I pick him up, and there are pieces of his skin on my hand, they stick to my hands. I ask him: "Love. Help me. Prop yourself up on your arm, your elbow, as much as you can, I'll smooth out your bedding, get the knots and folds out." Any little knot, that was already a wound on him. I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn't accidentally cut him. None of the nurses could approach him; if they needed anything they'd call me. [After he died] They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn't get it on him, there wasn't a whole body to put it on. It was all—wounds. The last two days in the hospital—I'd lift his arm, and meanwhile the bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it. Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I'd wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. It's impossible to talk about. It's impossible to write about. And even to live through. It was all mine. My love. They couldn't get a single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot. ... After that, in the maternity ward, the skin started coming off my hands. My veins swelled up. And I was so indifferent to everything. I didn't want to get out of bed. [Cries] I'd get to the hospital and then turn around. By then I was pregnant myself. N.B.: The baby she was pregnant with, due to extremely rapid cellular growth, saved her from the radiation she received from performing bedside hospital care for her late husband, because the baby absorbed most of the radioactive elements. After his birth, the child Andrei died as a young schoolboy, essentially sacrificing his life for his mother, after spending half his life sick, reportedly very ill two weeks every month. > In Belarus, very little has changed since these interviews were conducted. Back in 1996, Aleksandr Lukashenka was the lesser-known of Europe's "last two dictators." Now Slobodan Milosevic is on trial at The Hague and Lukashenka has pride of place. He stifles any attempt at free speech and his political opponents continue to "disappear." On the Chernobyl front, Lukashenka has encouraged studies arguing that the land is increasingly safe and that more and more of it should be brought back into agricultural rotation. In 1999, the physicist Yuri Bandazhevsky, a friend and colleague of Vasily Borisovich Nesterenko (interviewed on page 210), authored a report criticizing this tendency in government policy and suggesting that Belarus was knowingly exporting contaminated food. Yuri has been in jail ever since.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

But we already have a lot of natgas plants. I'm willing to bet that we could have handled all of our baseload requirements on all 3 mainland grids using the existing natgas plants as peakers. Sure, once we hit 60% or so of our power from renewables we'll need to have a proper strategy for handling intermittency. But we're far from that number now. Too meet our commitments, all natgas plants will need to be shut down or have carbon capture added by 2035. If you amortize your capital costs over 12 years instead of 50 years, that natgas plant doesn't look so cheap any more.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago
Some new gas plants are sold as being compatible with hydrogen mixes and/or pure hydrogen. https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fueled-gas-turbines https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fuele...
- binarymax 3y ago
  So the idea is to use excess power to make and store hydrogen? How efficient is making hydrogen?
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    > How efficient is making hydrogen? https://www.iea.org/reports/electrolysers https://www.iea.org/reports/electrolysers https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435121003068 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
  - generic92034 3y ago
    Isn't it infinitely more efficient than just letting the potential power be wasted? If supply surpasses demand eventually wind farms are shut down. That has to change, IMHO.
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    Yeah, we need to generate a lot of green hydrogen anyway, to decarbonise fertilizer, steel production, aviation fuel and a bunch of other stuff (Ideally we'd force fossil fuel producers, the number one users of hydrogen today, to replace their hydrogen with green hydrogen as part of the process of kick starting this). And in that world, using some of your stored hydrogen or ammonia as emergy reserve makes sense, though you'd want to avoid actually using it too much as if you do then you'd probably have been better spending the money on more generation and/or batteries.

_Microft 3y ago

> transmission losses are significant over inter-regional distances Not necessarily: (ultra) high-voltage DC transmission lines have losses in the low single digit percentage per 1000km (~600mi). This is not just theoretical either - for example, there is a transmission line over 3200km/2000mi with 12GW capacity in China for example (not under construction either but completed). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity_transmission_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...

ricw 3y ago
Last I read it was 1.5% per 1000km. That’s negligible on the grand scale of baseload and price differential between cross-continental regions.

no_wizard 3y ago

Why are we leaving nuclear out of the discussion? Its the perfect moderator for electricity consumption and its not carbon emitting, would this be a better solution to push out natural gas and coal more quickly? It also doesn't have the same distribution problems

nasmorn 3y ago
If you commission a new plant today it will not produce before 2040. That is the single biggest issue
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tracker1 3y ago
  It really is... Unfortunately there's not perfect answer and any near term solutions will need to include a variety of sources. I also think we should be working on water pipelines as well. Energy preservation is another issue, and where Hydrogen is likely one of the better solutions... but that will require a combination of more effective water filtration and desalinization along with transportation of clean water nearer to where energy is generated. We should definitely be breaking ground on more nuclear plants in more stable (geographically) locations. I'm less convinced that current solar tech is a better net good considering what goes into building the things. I have similar reservations on electric cars for that matter. I think the tech is very cool and we will go through a lot of revisions. Of course I also have some skepticism on the eminent dangers of global warming or man's influence in part or whole. Considering there are relatively recent times (about 3-8k years ago) where the understood earth temperature was a bit higher than even the projections for the end of the next couple centuries at worst. Edit: and I'm still waiting for the flying cars I was promised.
- kgabis 3y ago
  This is simply not true.
  - reaperman 3y ago

_hypx 3y ago

> As soon as there's an economically profitable way to store 120 hours of regional electricity usage, most utilities will jump towards that over continuing to buy expensive fuel for their current baseload plants. You store excess energy in the form of hydrogen from electrolysis for that need. Rapid reductions in cost is making this inevitable. You can even convert existing natural gas plants to run on it. It is far and away the simplest and smartest solution for this problem. IMO, this is the next intellectual showdown between people who have recognized the rapidly dropping cost of green energy technologies and its naysayers. We went through multiple years of what was basically outright denial over the cost of wind and solar. Even after they become cost-effective, certain people still denied it. Hydrogen is in the same boat. It is already at the point where it is competitive, and is only held back by people in outright denial.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> can even convert existing natural gas plants to run on it Do you have more on this? I thought hydrogen generally required special treatment given its tendency to ruin metals. I’ve seen modern gas turbines marketed as being hydrogen compatible, but that comes at a cost and is not commonplace.
- _hypx 3y ago
  It is not going to be an all-at-once transition: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/gas-turbines-hydrogen-us/ https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/gas-turbines-hydro... We will see blended gas turbines first, with gradual shifting to 100% hydrogen. It's likely that at least some components have to be replaced in order to allow for pure hydrogen combustion.