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Unfortunately, it has significant costs as well as benefits: -What makes you think we'll get huge economic growth from building very expensive infrastructure?
by Straw 3y ago
Unfortunately, it has significant costs as well as benefits:
-What makes you think we'll get huge economic growth from building very expensive infrastructure?
-An excellent goal, but we can get this for example with gas turbines which provide cheap, reliable power, or nuclear.
- If renewables provide cheaper electricity, then we don't need to do anything, they'll dominate the market! Although they do provide cheap power when operating, reliable power remains expensive and people want reliable power. Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't build wind/solar!
- The US has energy independence with fossil fuels now. Its expensive to convert renewables to storable form, whereas fossil fuels can be stockpiled in huge quantities.
The primary negative is cost! To give an example, a recent report estimated solar at $20/MWh, gas at 45, and solar with four hours of storage at 160! That's for electricity, the easiest area to reduce fossil fuels, but only 20% of energy consumption.
Currently, 20% of US power generation comes from coal. Replacing this with gas would halve CO2, as well as providing huge air quality benefits. Just one example of a relatively easy small win that we have available short of green everything.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago8 minute energy is selling solar with four hours of storage to California for $40/MWh. If it's actually costing them $160/MWh, they're losing a lot of money!
- labster 3y agoThey’ll make it up in volume.
- Straw 3y agoPerhaps California taxpayers make up the difference?
- bryanlarsen 3y agoSorry, I should have made the sarcasm more obvious. $40/MWh pricing is profitable for 8minute energy, their costs are less than $40/MWh. Anybody saying it costs $160/MWh is using outdated figures.
- Straw 3y agoI'm having trouble believing that its that cheap- battery prices have not fallen 8x in the last two years. I believe the report I was reading was from 2021.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoThe report is from 2021. The sources they used for prices are from earlier. 160 -> 40 is 4x. That's about 3 years worth of price drops at the rate they fell in the 2010s.
- Straw 3y agoAccording to this recent source, its currently 100-130 $/MWh: https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... And that's for 100MW solar with 50MW of 4-hour storage
- bryanlarsen 3y agoSure, but only 1/6 (or less) of the energy uses the battery. $10 + $130/6 = $31.67. Sell for $40/MWh and profit.
- Straw 3y agoSure, you can sell solar for cheaper when the sun shines. But if we want to consider replacing the entire grid, we need to look at the cost including storage and not accounting for slack in other generation sources!