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If that's the reason then those people are misinformed. Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.

by kjksf 3y ago

If that's the reason then those people are misinformed. Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage. The cost advantage is not true everywhere but the future is clear. Coal and gas will not become cheaper. Solar and wind is most expensive today it'll ever be. Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead. And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes. Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.

throwaway60742 3y ago
No way they are misinformed, look at German power mix. Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU. > Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage. That did not happen anywhere in Europe. New gas plants are being constructed right now, and coal powerplants had to be restarted when Germans dropped nuclear. > Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead. We need to decarbonize today though. People don't want to pay the high prices, so how does the drop happen? > And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes. Again, ask Germans about that. Their universal healthcare is going to get expensive soon if they continue on their "green" path. > Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars. Completely orthogonal, people mostly agree on that, but they (where I live) want to charge the electric cars from nuclear energy.
- svnt 3y ago
  Germany’s repeated renewables efforts were long subject to the fact that Germany was Russia’s European project to keep fossil fuels going as long as possible. No other European country with as much technical competence has inexplicably failed so hard at renewables over and over. Now Germany is experiencing a transition in market conditions that is uncomfortably quick.
- bondant 3y ago
  > Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU. Are they? Looks like it's Poland who is generating the most CO2 for electricity production. https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-intensity-13/#tab-chart_4 https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...
  - js8 3y ago
    I frequently hear that talking point (about Germany) from my fellow Czechs, and it's incredible, because we need more fossil fuels than Germans and also are poorer. (Even more paradoxically, more than a decade back, Czechia was ahead of Germany in solar power.) The conservatives have just taken over.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Can you elaborate, to a fellow (?) German, about just how a "green" political agenda will increase public health care costs? Or a re you just mixing multiple talking points (renewables bad, nuclear good, public health care bad, private health care good) without making any sense at all?
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
  > Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar According to whom. There is lots of pushback against renewables - in particular wind- in Germany. It takes something crazy like 7 years to approve a wind farm here. The current government is trying to improve the situation. But I would strongly question the premise of your comment e.g. Denmark seems a lot more successful.
Detrytus 3y ago
>> Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage. First of all, I'm not aware of any large scale battery storage facilities anywhere, they are prohibitively expensive. Second, coal and gas plant's main cost, at least in EU, is carbon tax. So the fact that they can't compete on price is a result of political decision, not of any shortcomings of the technology itself. >> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. Battery costs will be rising for at least the next decade, before they can fall: we need to ramp up lithium production first, before we can do that there will be significant shortages driving the prices up. The more popular EVs will become the worse it will be.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Gas can't compete, because gas is too expensive. Coal actually could compete, it usually was the second type of power plant able to sell on the electricity markets, becasue CO2 certificates are just dirt cheap, way to cheap to move the needle, and coal as fuel was the least expensive (sun and win being free).
  - Detrytus 3y ago
    CO2 certificates are not "dirt cheap", for Polish coal-based power plants they amount to 59% of the cost of producing electricity.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Still cheap enough to make coal one of the cheapest source on electricity markets, measured in generation cost per kWh. Since coal is the dirtiest fuel we have, those certificates should be expebsive enough to price out coal most of the time. That would be an ingenious combination of setting incenzives for market players im way that the result of market activities benefits everyone.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Sun and wind aren't 'free' but they have the lowest operating costs compared to alternatives and they have the lowest capital cost per W of installed power. But you probably should account for a storage component as well once those hit deployment in volume. I'm holding out for the next generation of storage batteries and then I'll pull the trigger on a system large enough to do both arbitrage and cover the day/night cycle of this house for a week. That works out to 70 to 100 KWh of storage, which is right now both too expensive to make sense (we still have net metering here) and a safety concern. But I expect the next generation storage to both be substantially cheaper and safer than what's out there today.
jacquesm 3y ago
> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead. You can add at least two more zeros there, and possibly three or more. Storage right now is mostly dams and all the easy places have been done. Battery storage is really at the proof of concept state and if you take hydro out of the equation you're looking at a tenth of a percent at best.
- natmaka 3y ago
  A continental-scale mix (wind, solar...) is an efficient way to reduce the impact of intermittency on electricity production, and therefore storage ( https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... ). V2G ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ) and gas turbines burning green hydrogen (generated by water electrolysis using over-produced electricity) are ramping up.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    There is a good chance that with present day technology we could satisfy all of our energy needs using HVDC transmission lines. The main problem is that these are going to be easy infrastructure to attack in case of war or through terrorism.
    - natmaka 3y ago
      True, however continental-scale grids interconnecting more and more interdependent nations/states are needed whatever the type of energy source used (even nuclear), and at least as exposed to terrorism as long-haul (U)HVDC lines.

by kjksf 3y ago

throwaway60742 3y ago

No way they are misinformed, look at German power mix. Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU. > Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage. That did not happen anywhere in Europe. New gas plants are being constructed right now, and coal powerplants had to be restarted when Germans dropped nuclear. > Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead. We need to decarbonize today though. People don't want to pay the high prices, so how does the drop happen? > And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes. Again, ask Germans about that. Their universal healthcare is going to get expensive soon if they continue on their "green" path. > Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars. Completely orthogonal, people mostly agree on that, but they (where I live) want to charge the electric cars from nuclear energy.

svnt 3y ago
Germany’s repeated renewables efforts were long subject to the fact that Germany was Russia’s European project to keep fossil fuels going as long as possible. No other European country with as much technical competence has inexplicably failed so hard at renewables over and over. Now Germany is experiencing a transition in market conditions that is uncomfortably quick.
bondant 3y ago
> Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU. Are they? Looks like it's Poland who is generating the most CO2 for electricity production. https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-intensity-13/#tab-chart_4 https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...
- js8 3y ago
  I frequently hear that talking point (about Germany) from my fellow Czechs, and it's incredible, because we need more fossil fuels than Germans and also are poorer. (Even more paradoxically, more than a decade back, Czechia was ahead of Germany in solar power.) The conservatives have just taken over.
hef19898 3y ago
Can you elaborate, to a fellow (?) German, about just how a "green" political agenda will increase public health care costs? Or a re you just mixing multiple talking points (renewables bad, nuclear good, public health care bad, private health care good) without making any sense at all?
_fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
> Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar According to whom. There is lots of pushback against renewables - in particular wind- in Germany. It takes something crazy like 7 years to approve a wind farm here. The current government is trying to improve the situation. But I would strongly question the premise of your comment e.g. Denmark seems a lot more successful.

Detrytus 3y ago

>> Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage. First of all, I'm not aware of any large scale battery storage facilities anywhere, they are prohibitively expensive. Second, coal and gas plant's main cost, at least in EU, is carbon tax. So the fact that they can't compete on price is a result of political decision, not of any shortcomings of the technology itself. >> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. Battery costs will be rising for at least the next decade, before they can fall: we need to ramp up lithium production first, before we can do that there will be significant shortages driving the prices up. The more popular EVs will become the worse it will be.

hef19898 3y ago
Gas can't compete, because gas is too expensive. Coal actually could compete, it usually was the second type of power plant able to sell on the electricity markets, becasue CO2 certificates are just dirt cheap, way to cheap to move the needle, and coal as fuel was the least expensive (sun and win being free).
- Detrytus 3y ago
  CO2 certificates are not "dirt cheap", for Polish coal-based power plants they amount to 59% of the cost of producing electricity.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Still cheap enough to make coal one of the cheapest source on electricity markets, measured in generation cost per kWh. Since coal is the dirtiest fuel we have, those certificates should be expebsive enough to price out coal most of the time. That would be an ingenious combination of setting incenzives for market players im way that the result of market activities benefits everyone.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Sun and wind aren't 'free' but they have the lowest operating costs compared to alternatives and they have the lowest capital cost per W of installed power. But you probably should account for a storage component as well once those hit deployment in volume. I'm holding out for the next generation of storage batteries and then I'll pull the trigger on a system large enough to do both arbitrage and cover the day/night cycle of this house for a week. That works out to 70 to 100 KWh of storage, which is right now both too expensive to make sense (we still have net metering here) and a safety concern. But I expect the next generation storage to both be substantially cheaper and safer than what's out there today.

jacquesm 3y ago

> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead. You can add at least two more zeros there, and possibly three or more. Storage right now is mostly dams and all the easy places have been done. Battery storage is really at the proof of concept state and if you take hydro out of the equation you're looking at a tenth of a percent at best.

natmaka 3y ago
A continental-scale mix (wind, solar...) is an efficient way to reduce the impact of intermittency on electricity production, and therefore storage ( https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... ). V2G ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ) and gas turbines burning green hydrogen (generated by water electrolysis using over-produced electricity) are ramping up.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  There is a good chance that with present day technology we could satisfy all of our energy needs using HVDC transmission lines. The main problem is that these are going to be easy infrastructure to attack in case of war or through terrorism.
  - natmaka 3y ago
    True, however continental-scale grids interconnecting more and more interdependent nations/states are needed whatever the type of energy source used (even nuclear), and at least as exposed to terrorism as long-haul (U)HVDC lines.