3 ms·

You also can't just plug capacity factor in and call it a day either: it is very difficult to black start the power grid if all your intermittents happen to be

by XorNot 3y ago

You also can't just plug capacity factor in and call it a day either: it is very difficult to black start the power grid if all your intermittents happen to be under producing at the same time and you can't shed load fast enough. In the case of most renewables, this fall off can happen very quickly. On a mixed grid this is fine because you just ask your gas plants to up their load contribution and they can do it because they can overbuild fairly cheaply - they just increase their moment to the moment fuel burn. On a theoretical grid which is carbon neutral, you've got a real problem answering that question (in fact on any grid with >30% intermittent renewables you've got a big problem). Storage doesn't save you here either - i.e. the cheapest, largest storage you can build is pumped hydro, but pumped hydro can only be "charged" at about half the rate it discharges. Catching up when you have an outage is not trivial (i.e. you have to overbuild by an enormous amount). You start adding all those problems together, and solar and wind stop looking "cheap" - they get away with being cheap because very much like coal, oil and gas, they avoid pricing in their own externalities (and no, you can't just ignore power grid outages - you lose the grid you lose water and sanitation in cities, and they "die" within a week).

Gasp0de 3y ago
Batteries can save the grid in the short term (all those unused EVs standing around) and more and more loads are designed to be controllable by power grid operators. You're making this a bigger problem than it is. In Germany, many households are currently replacing their old fossil heating with heatpumps, and many of the heatpumps are equipped with technology that allows the grid operators to switch them off remotely within seconds.
oezi 3y ago
The grid doesn't have to be carbon neutral all the time. It can use gas peakers for contingencies.
- XorNot 3y ago
  No one is going to build a power plant they "mostly" can't run and make revenue from. So you're going to be subsidizing the full build and expense of a gas plant that you plan to never actually sell power from. Which means you get to add that cost onto the cost of whatever renewables you're building - both capital, maintenance, and support infrastructure - which you can't offset. Basically just a flat set of costs on top of whatever building your renewables cost, and not insignificant ones (can't run a gas a plant you don't use without gas, therefore you also need gas infrastructure...)
  - oezi 3y ago
    Most of these plants already exist. We just have to pay their upkeep and see how the future unfolds. It isn't necessary to build many additional plants. Cost estimates of attaining net zero are on the order of 100-200% of global GDP. To get this done by 2050 we would need to spend 3-6% of global GDP on the energy transition. This includes all these contingency costs.
    - XorNot 3y ago
      No, you have to buy them. They have owners - they're private infrastructure. The owners intend to sell power from them. If they can't do that, then they're going to either try to sell the asset, or demolish the asset and use the land for something else. The only way to stop gas plants from running would be to ban them from doing so, or charge them a carbon price which means they can't. But, in both cases, the owners then have no reason to hold onto that infrastructure - that's all capital they can't make money off of anymore. So you are talking about an expensive nationalization of a huge amount of existing infrastructure...or a pretty serious correction to the price of power in the national markets to make it plausible to run these plants in "mostly shutdown" condition while still being ready to go. Which seems unlikely: if I can make money selling renewable energy, why would I leave cash locked up in an asset which I can't?
      - oezi 3y ago
        Since the writing is on the wall that these power plants are mostly worthless in the foreseeable future most energy companies had to reduce the asset worth of the power plants already considerably. Who would want to buy such legacy tech? Rather, the price to keep those power plants available as a contingency reserve will have to be negotiated and the price will be somewhere which is more than the cost of keeping them operational but less than building new plants and keeping them operational. I guess it is a good way for existing operators to squeeze some little bit from a doomed tech but it won't cost society very much.
        XorNot 3y ago

by XorNot 3y ago

Gasp0de 3y ago

Batteries can save the grid in the short term (all those unused EVs standing around) and more and more loads are designed to be controllable by power grid operators. You're making this a bigger problem than it is. In Germany, many households are currently replacing their old fossil heating with heatpumps, and many of the heatpumps are equipped with technology that allows the grid operators to switch them off remotely within seconds.

oezi 3y ago

The grid doesn't have to be carbon neutral all the time. It can use gas peakers for contingencies.

XorNot 3y ago
No one is going to build a power plant they "mostly" can't run and make revenue from. So you're going to be subsidizing the full build and expense of a gas plant that you plan to never actually sell power from. Which means you get to add that cost onto the cost of whatever renewables you're building - both capital, maintenance, and support infrastructure - which you can't offset. Basically just a flat set of costs on top of whatever building your renewables cost, and not insignificant ones (can't run a gas a plant you don't use without gas, therefore you also need gas infrastructure...)
- oezi 3y ago
  Most of these plants already exist. We just have to pay their upkeep and see how the future unfolds. It isn't necessary to build many additional plants. Cost estimates of attaining net zero are on the order of 100-200% of global GDP. To get this done by 2050 we would need to spend 3-6% of global GDP on the energy transition. This includes all these contingency costs.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    No, you have to buy them. They have owners - they're private infrastructure. The owners intend to sell power from them. If they can't do that, then they're going to either try to sell the asset, or demolish the asset and use the land for something else. The only way to stop gas plants from running would be to ban them from doing so, or charge them a carbon price which means they can't. But, in both cases, the owners then have no reason to hold onto that infrastructure - that's all capital they can't make money off of anymore. So you are talking about an expensive nationalization of a huge amount of existing infrastructure...or a pretty serious correction to the price of power in the national markets to make it plausible to run these plants in "mostly shutdown" condition while still being ready to go. Which seems unlikely: if I can make money selling renewable energy, why would I leave cash locked up in an asset which I can't?
    - oezi 3y ago
      Since the writing is on the wall that these power plants are mostly worthless in the foreseeable future most energy companies had to reduce the asset worth of the power plants already considerably. Who would want to buy such legacy tech? Rather, the price to keep those power plants available as a contingency reserve will have to be negotiated and the price will be somewhere which is more than the cost of keeping them operational but less than building new plants and keeping them operational. I guess it is a good way for existing operators to squeeze some little bit from a doomed tech but it won't cost society very much.
      - XorNot 3y ago