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Neither solar nor wind can substitute for a peaking plant, no matter how much "firming for intermittency" you apply. Apples and oranges. The entire raison d'et

Neither solar nor wind can substitute for a peaking plant, no matter how much "firming for intermittency" you apply. Apples and oranges. The entire raison d'etre of a peaking plant is that you can bring it online immediately when a sudden peak in demand occurs. Solar and wind simply can't do that. You can't simply pick up the phone and order the sun to shine or the wind to blow.

_aavaa_ 3y ago
That’s simply not true. One option for firming is to overprovision to account for the capacity factor. The other kind of firming, talked about in the slide I mention, is about short term (hours) battery storage. Taking California as an example, their solar causes negative electricity prices during the day meaning that fossil fuel/nuclear need to dump electricity on the market and pay people to take it since ramping down would be even more expensive. This in turn requires peaking plants on either side of that solar peak. Introducing short term storage allows for that access electricity to be shifted a few hours to address that demand. A complementary, and orthogonal, change is demand side management. People already voluntarily change their behaviour to take advantage of time of use pricing. With strong solar penetration mid day can become the cheap electricity price rather than night time.
- lazide 3y ago
  No amount of overprovisioning is going to help you at 2am with solar (or during a really bad storm), and wind has similar but even less predictable issues. Either way, overprovisioning, storage, etc. add significant costs and it isn't clear what those costs would actually need to be to avoid serious problems with high frequency if we actually take fossil fuels out of the equation. We have experience with fossil fuels enough to say 'store x amount of diesel (or natural gas) onsite so you can handle a 100 year storm' or similar. We have no such experience with solar, battery storage, wind, etc. Also keep in mind, California has pretty much the ideal climate for 'green' energy - almost all it's population is in temperate, sunny climates, and it has huge sunny deserts and wind generating mountains all nearby. Most electrical usage will be air conditioners, and in that climate those are near ideal solar loads. And they're the ones that just pushed to keep their major nuke plant online they were shutting down. It's going to be a lot harder for almost everyone else. Demand side only goes so far - sometimes people do actually need that energy now, and it tends to be when there are real issues that need that energy to address. Like emergencies, storms, cold snaps in the winter, etc.
  - _aavaa_ 3y ago
    2AM is not the usual use case for peaking plants. Yes, voting to keep operating your existing fleet in operation for an extra 5 years is one thing, paying up for a major refurbishment or a brand new plant is another thing. But this is beside the point. If we still need use gas peaking plants for emergencies and outlier events and only that, then 99% of the energy decarbonization battle is won.
    - lazide 3y ago
      2am is the case for base load. Because significant load still occurs then. And there is zero insolation.
      - _aavaa_ 3y ago
        Before your comment the discussion was about comparing the price of renewables to that of fossil fuel plants, specifically it got onto the discussion of peaking power plants. If you wish to change the topic to base load, then you're going to have to make that clear. As for night time, see my comment about storage; build out pumped hydro or dam-based hydro and use it as your battery. When you inevitably have excess solar/wind during the day pump water uphill, and/or decrease you hydro production rate, and then at night time use that pumped storage and/or increase the rate at which you run water through your turbines. If a particular region doesn't believe that it's realistic for them to do this, or show that nuclear will be cheaper, then build that.
        lazide 3y ago
        Nope.

_aavaa_ 3y ago

That’s simply not true. One option for firming is to overprovision to account for the capacity factor. The other kind of firming, talked about in the slide I mention, is about short term (hours) battery storage. Taking California as an example, their solar causes negative electricity prices during the day meaning that fossil fuel/nuclear need to dump electricity on the market and pay people to take it since ramping down would be even more expensive. This in turn requires peaking plants on either side of that solar peak. Introducing short term storage allows for that access electricity to be shifted a few hours to address that demand. A complementary, and orthogonal, change is demand side management. People already voluntarily change their behaviour to take advantage of time of use pricing. With strong solar penetration mid day can become the cheap electricity price rather than night time.

lazide 3y ago
No amount of overprovisioning is going to help you at 2am with solar (or during a really bad storm), and wind has similar but even less predictable issues. Either way, overprovisioning, storage, etc. add significant costs and it isn't clear what those costs would actually need to be to avoid serious problems with high frequency if we actually take fossil fuels out of the equation. We have experience with fossil fuels enough to say 'store x amount of diesel (or natural gas) onsite so you can handle a 100 year storm' or similar. We have no such experience with solar, battery storage, wind, etc. Also keep in mind, California has pretty much the ideal climate for 'green' energy - almost all it's population is in temperate, sunny climates, and it has huge sunny deserts and wind generating mountains all nearby. Most electrical usage will be air conditioners, and in that climate those are near ideal solar loads. And they're the ones that just pushed to keep their major nuke plant online they were shutting down. It's going to be a lot harder for almost everyone else. Demand side only goes so far - sometimes people do actually need that energy now, and it tends to be when there are real issues that need that energy to address. Like emergencies, storms, cold snaps in the winter, etc.
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  2AM is not the usual use case for peaking plants. Yes, voting to keep operating your existing fleet in operation for an extra 5 years is one thing, paying up for a major refurbishment or a brand new plant is another thing. But this is beside the point. If we still need use gas peaking plants for emergencies and outlier events and only that, then 99% of the energy decarbonization battle is won.
  - lazide 3y ago
    2am is the case for base load. Because significant load still occurs then. And there is zero insolation.
    - _aavaa_ 3y ago
      Before your comment the discussion was about comparing the price of renewables to that of fossil fuel plants, specifically it got onto the discussion of peaking power plants. If you wish to change the topic to base load, then you're going to have to make that clear. As for night time, see my comment about storage; build out pumped hydro or dam-based hydro and use it as your battery. When you inevitably have excess solar/wind during the day pump water uphill, and/or decrease you hydro production rate, and then at night time use that pumped storage and/or increase the rate at which you run water through your turbines. If a particular region doesn't believe that it's realistic for them to do this, or show that nuclear will be cheaper, then build that.
      - lazide 3y ago
        Nope.