18 ms·

Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

93 points by goodcanadian 3y ago

nippoo 3y ago
This is a great example of economics at work. Large-scale electricity storage solutions reduce the need for generating capacity from peak load to average load - reducing the demand by the crest factor of the grid. The majority of this extra generation capacity is currently filled by gas (that is incredibly easy to spool up and down in a matter of seconds). Reducing the demand for natural gas will also increase the cost of other fossil fuels (which are mined in the same place), and it's a virtuous loop...
- foobarian 3y ago
  And given the sodium chemistries slowly showing up in production this seems like it will only continue to escalate going forward. It's a hopeful achievement.
- huijzer 3y ago
  I know someone who worked in a gas plant and although it might take seconds once the plant is running (I don’t know), it takes multiple minutes to start it after being off. In comparison, scaling from 0% to 100% load on battery storage takes 0,1 seconds, according to Tesla.
  - triplepoint217 3y ago
    Gas plants can't really change how much they are generating in seconds. What they actually do is use the inertia of the spinning machinery, when the grid frequency drops (which is usually one of the first symptoms of load exceeding demand) the big spinning generators don't change speed instantaneously, they instead come under higher load and and convert more of their kinetic energy into electrical energy and help prop up the grid frequency. This starts the generators slowing down which then causes the control software to do whatever it is they do to feed in more gas and generate more power to try to keep them running at the same speed (I don't know exactly, I worked in grid batteries not gas plants). But yes, the batteries can respond much faster and are way better at this kind of support. It does lead to some situations that felt slightly weird to me where a battery will be selling a "spinning" reserve product. Luckily the weird linguistic artifact did not require us to actually rotate multi-ton batteries ;).
    - skewbone 3y ago
      Gas plants can change load in seconds by increasing or decreasing fuel flow. You can consider the generators as operating at the local grid frequency, and power being the product of torque and frequency, so they just change torque to change load, which is done through fuel control. Aeroderivative gas turbines can go from near 0 to full load in less than 30 seconds, which is obviously an eternity compared to battery system inverters with sub 150ms settling times. You are right that load isn’t independent of frequency, though. For those who are interested, in a simplistic and hand-wavy explanation, the torque imbalance between generation and load causes a change to the frequency. The net torque = torque of generation - torque of load = I*alpha, where alpha is the derivative of omega, or the angular frequency of the grid, and I is analogous to the inertia of the grid. If there is more generation torque than load torque on a generator (and the grid), the frequency increases and vice versa. Keeping the net torque constant, increasing the inertia makes the grid frequency derivative smaller for the same imbalance between generation and load, which is why it was typically desirable to have higher inertia synchronous generators. What you were describing around changing fuel to maintain speed is typically frequency droop, which is where generators change their power as a function of the frequency, which is a distributed scheme for all generators to independently act to drive the torque imbalance to 0, with some insensitivity proportionality constant. For example, in California, gas turbines are assigned a droop value within the range of 3 to 5%, which means a 3 to 5 % reduction in frequency should result in a 100% increase in power, and vice versa. The total power should be provided in less than 30 sec typically. For those that are really motivated to understand the interplay between generation, load, and frequency, look up the swing equation in the context of power system stability. There is another aspect of synchronous generators that enable them to act to stabilize frequency independently, called the inertial response, which also has to do with their rotational energy. A generator at some frequency has KE = 0.5*J*omega^2 where J is rotational inertia and omega is angular frequency. If the frequency changes, it has a change in kinetic energy = 0.5*J*(omega1^2 - omega2^2) which is equal to some power for some period of time (= P*delta_t). This shows that as a generator sees a change in frequency, the shorter the duration, the larger the amount of energy is converted to power. Essentially, generators have an inertial response that act to inject power the faster frequency is falling, and vice versa, which is a self stabilizing function for grid frequency. This loss of synchronous inertia as generators are replaced by inverter based resources (IBRs) is why managing grid frequency stability becomes more difficult. Various techniques are used to abate the loss of inertia, including emulating the swing equation within inverters to make them behave as synchronous generators and provide that inertial response. This is typically called grid forming with virtual synchronous machine.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Sort of. Thermal generation provides grid services that they get paid for. This revenue is substantial. This means when frequency sags, gas plants were traditionally called on to ramp quickly to maintain grid inertia. Battery storage can do this ("fast frequency response") in milliseconds (vs minutes or tens of minutes for thermal generation, where fuel must be added and momentum of spinning turbines added to), and is eating this valuable revenue distinct from energy arbitrage (charging when power is cheap, free, or negative priced, and discharging when energy prices are higher). This helps kill the economic case for thermal generators, accelerating their phase out. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2022.971704/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2022.9717... https://www.sandia.gov/files/ess/EESAT/2002_papers/00015.pdf https://www.sandia.gov/files/ess/EESAT/2002_papers/00015.pdf https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-begins-providing-inertia-grid-services-at-scale-in-world-first-in-australia/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-beg... https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-earn-big-in-european-ancillary-services-but-investors-warned-of-high-expectations/ https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-earn-big-in-europe...
- triplepoint217 3y ago
  Glad to see this finally happening. This goal was definitely part of the appeal when I was working on the Autobidder team at Tesla! The regulations have some work to do catch up to allowing batteries to operate in a straightforward manner. For example, the big battery we launched in Texas had to be registered as both a generator and a controllable load with all sorts of weird issues around switching from discharging (being a generator) to charging (being a load) that a battery wants to do all the time. We found engineering solutions to them, but it's even better that the market operators are working on properly recognizing batteries as their own unique asset with their own advantages and challenges.
nippoo 3y ago
https://archive.is/ymfQu https://archive.is/ymfQu
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
The Lazard LCOE cost of unsubsidized solar/wind + storage has recently achieved parity with gas turbine combined cycle. So the writing is on the wall for fossil fuels. What's also important is that gas combined cycle kind of represented the end state of maximum power for minimum cost from fossil fuels. Wind and especially solar (perovskites, etc) and storage (sodium chemistries, etc) have lots of runway for further cost drops. So you might squeeze a couple percent out of gas combined cycle for LCOE in the next decade, but solar/wind may still drop by 50%. So if you have a ten year view (which is what you have fore investment in power projects) fossil fuel projects (and alas nuclear, which is 6x more expensive than wind/solar) simply don't balance the sheet. Lots of hope. Lots of work to do. EDIT: response to "why do you think solar/wind have bigger runway to drop in price:" (I hit my post limit) Wind can simply scale up more, and there are other designs coming online. Wind I don't have the holy-crap-this-is-still-coming thing. Solar however has made its gains with silicon, but perovskites are simply dirt cheap to manufacture, IF they can eliminate lead and get them to last long enough. I'm spitballing, but perovskites will probably drop the cost by 50% long term in solar. Solar also really hasn't developed large scale multijunction, and perovskites + silicon may enable that. Multijunction is how you get the higher efficiencies by capturing more wavelengths and the like. As for gas turbine, they already are exceeding the carnot efficiencies by capturing downstream heat cycles and other tricks. And I think the other thing as an energy financeer I'd worry about is that any fossil fuel power generation has to be worried about an eventual carbon tax imposed. As the political power of oil companies wanes as their economic strength withers away as EVs and alternative energy undermine their economic value proposition, their ability to keep the environmental lobby from imposing a proper externality tax on carbon emissions with falter. So any gas generation power plant could overnight have their costs increased by 10-50% or maybe worse. Best case: you have to pay for bullshit offsets, which will probably increase costs 10-20%. Medium case: they have to explicitly pay for the carbon scrubbing/removal, probably 50% increase or more to the generation cost. Worst case: we realize that fossil fuels carbon taxes should include a cost to remove PREVIOUSLY UNTAXED carbon that is sitting in the atmosphere. So then the cost could be exhorbitantly increased. Likely SOMETHING is coming that will increase the cost of fossil fuel power and fuels due to carbon removal. It will start small and increase as the political strength of oil / gas wanes.
- 3y ago
louwrentius 3y ago
For the price of a gas power plant you can buy some *serious amount* of LiFePo4 batteries, and Sodium Ion batteries are now also slowly hitting the market. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361094 At some point we may still need small gas power plants to charge the batteries but how many days a year would we have to do that? It may be a touchy subject, but to me Nuclear power is absolutely not the future because for the money you can deploy so much renewables, including batteries, it just doesn't make sense. And they are never on time and on budget.
BirAdam 3y ago
It would be neat to see an alternate universe where there was zero corporate welfare for petroleum and for solar/wind/tidal/hydro. I imagine that in such a world, renewables would have become the default sometime in the 70s and millions of lives would have been saved due to fewer oil wars and cleaner air.
- mdgrech23 3y ago
  Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks. What we need is world where we recognize that everyone owning their own personal automobile is probably a bad idea. We need walkable neighborhoods and public transportation but we also need to recognize how powerful fossil fuels are preserve them for heavy duty tasks that would be near impossible w/ human muscle and or renewables.
  - Emma_Goldman 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Great_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Gre... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
  - snewman 3y ago
    Trains can often be electrified, as can semi trucks, though it will require substantial investment in heavy duty charging infrastructure. Long haul aviation, and probably long haul shipping, will likely continue to require chemical fuels (though Fleetzero aspires to electrify shipping). But multiple startups have promising routes to replacing fossil fuels with e-fuels for those applications (chemical fuels created using electricity, such as electrolysis and carbon capture, instead of pumping fossil fuel out of the ground).
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks. Eh... The only one on your list that is currently a problem is planes. It's expensive powering semi trucks with them, that's why people mostly don't, and it's almost trivial for trains. There is also no fundamental reason why planes should be impossible. There are several well understood possibilities for them, but very few people have focused on solving this problem.
Emma_Goldman 3y ago
> "Without providing price detail, which companies say is commercially sensitive, Clarke said Carlton had struggled to finance the planned gas plant in part because of uncertainty over the revenues it would generate and the number of hours it would run." This is the crucial point. Political uncertainty about the future energy system is jacking up the rate of return investors are demanding of gas plant projects without contracted revenues. This is the main reason why gas projects are falling through. At the same time, there is currently no scalable storage system for time-shifting surplus renewable generation over weeks-to-months, so that it can offset renewable troughs. This means surplus renewable generation is simply being wasted, and for that reason, is so low cost that even hours-to-days battery storage - which is a mature storage system - is economical. It's far less clear this is a long-term proposition for at-scale storage, as the longer you can store energy for the higher the efficiency of matching surplus to deficit. Hydrogen and pumped hydro can store energy for far longer.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Your first point is excellent, that this sends capital market signals to investors to not invest in fossil generation. But to your other point, seasonal storage is not required. All available evidence indicates overbuilding renewables and simply making peace with excess curtailment can solve for that, along with transmission and perhaps pumped hydro where geography allows for that.
  - triplepoint217 3y ago
    The nice thing is as long as these markets stay reasonably competitive, economics can figure out what to do with excess renewables. When renewables are in excess, the spot (instantaneous) energy price will drop to near zero (or sometimes negative in weird situations). That is good for existing (short term) batteries (they can recharge cheaply), but it will also provide price signals to people considering investing in longer term storage (since their cost of energy could be near zero, they only have to recoup the costs of building and operating the storage).
    - 3y ago
hoosieree 3y ago
Now if we could just get the world to run on DC, then HVDC transmission lines would make distribution more efficient.
- snewman 3y ago
  HVDC lines can be integrated into a conventional grid; China is doing it, and NREL models for the US grid include scenarios where we do it as well.
  - triplepoint217 3y ago
    There are a few active in the US already (though it does look like the US is lagging) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
bell-cot 3y ago
The reality is much more complex than "batteries replace gas" - > Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said. > Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate. > "It does become more complex," Nigel Scott, head of structured trade and commodity finance at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, said. > Investors are putting increased scrutiny on the modelling, he added. - so basically, maintaining a large-scale grid is an optimization problem. And batteries merely shift the answer to "how much of which each type of equipment should we have?" around some. Kinda like someone architecting a DC-scale system has to understand trade-offs between L1 cache / L2 cache / L3 cache / local-to-core RAM / more-distant RAM / SSD / HD / Tape - vs. what equipment is actually available - at what prices, lead times, configuration limitations, ...
- triplepoint217 3y ago
  I like that analogy. Batteries are kind of the RAM/cache in the system: - Big merchant batteries like Hornsdale are kind of like more distant ram RAM - Batteries co-located with renewables are kind of the local to core ram - UPS and similar are cache - Pumped hydro is probably Tape ;) It feels like we might still be lacking a good/widely deployed HD/SSD equivalent in this space, hopefully new/emerging technologies (maybe the sodium chemistries others are mentioning) will be able to fill that in.
  - Maxion 3y ago
    I think in terms of the energy grid batteries are currently more like your L1 cache or similar. I.e. very expensive to have, and has specific requirements so you have little of it. Hydro would be more like your RAM.
- samus 3y ago
  It is probably smart to keep around a certain capacity of nonrenewables to provide at least some base load. Long periods of low sunshine and slow winds could deplete batteries to a critical level. Also, the turbines of big powerplants act as grid frequency stabilizer. Do grid-scale batteries use alternators or might they run flywheels?
lebuffon 3y ago
We should take a moment to acknowledge the Power MOSFet in this story. For a guy who paid money for his first germanium transistor generating grid scale power with transistors is TOTALLY amazing.
- zafka 3y ago
  Can you explain this? I agree that Power MOSFets played a major part, but what are you referring to?
  - lebuffon 3y ago
    In the 60s and 70s it was impossible to generate really large amounts of power with the bipolar transistors that were available. Large transmitters for example were still using Vacuum tubes into the 1990s.
- gothroach 3y ago
  IGBT's changed power conversion as we know it!
formerly_proven 3y ago
This is actually great because it reduces the vastly outsized impact of gas prices on short-term electricity prices through peaker plants via the merit order system.
j-a-a-p 3y ago
Tomorrow's fuel should be the battery. A battery can only solve a local issue: a system for locally produced and consumed electricity, If the sourcing solar or wind is transformed to fuel, you also have storage, probably a gas or liquid. And you catch two birds with one stone: storage and distribution. That could be shipping, pipelines but also gas stations. Infrastructure we already have.
Enogoloyo 3y ago
Germany paid 4 billion for energy dispatch in 2023. That would be enough to buy 80000 cars with 100kWh and provide 8gWh and would be 8x more than Germans biggest water energy storage. Did I miss something? Sounds absolutely doable in a few years to have massive more energy storage available. Combined with a lot more and cheaper renewable energy
anovikov 3y ago
There goes the "you'll always need a lot of gas generation to balance renewables" mantra.
gwbas1c 3y ago
A few years ago I scraped some publicly-accessible data from https://www.iso-ne.com/ https://www.iso-ne.com/ regarding the spot cost of electricity. Then I fed it into a battery simulator that I wrote. Based on my estimated cost of a grid-scale battery, I estimated a payoff in ~2 years; and then a lot of profit. The biggest challenge is the politics and red tape of connecting something to the grid. The grid operators are used to power plants being multi-year projects.
- TMWNN 3y ago
  >Based on my estimated cost of a grid-scale battery, I estimated a payoff in ~2 years; and then a lot of profit. Is this applicable to the South Australia Powerwall installation?
  - gwbas1c 3y ago
    My simulations were based on the iso-new England grid's spot fees. I estimated the cost of a grid scale battery based on what I paid for my powerwall, because I couldn't get data on the price of the mega pack. I couldn't tell you if you'll save money with a powerwall in Australia. You'll need to look up local incentives for that. Understanding the economics of a power grid, it's only worth it if you have solar and don't have typical American-style "net metering," or you have solar and need backup for power outages. What I can tell you is that, in the US, in 2019, I got a rebate for my powerwall that made it price competitive with a standby generator. (Cost a little more, but I don't pay for annual maintenance or fuel.) I don't feed into the grid with it. The incentives would need to be pretty lucrative, though, because if there's a power outage overnight, it'll drain fast! (All my outages since I got it happened during the day.) What I can also tell you is that Tesla made a lot of headlines hooking up a grid scale battery to balance out an Australian wind farm. It prevented a frequency drop when a coal plant went offline.
    - TMWNN 3y ago
      > What I can also tell you is that Tesla made a lot of headlines hooking up a grid scale battery to balance out an Australian wind farm. It prevented a frequency drop when a coal plant went offline. This is what I was referring to; I was wondering whether your calculation would apply to it.
wolpoli 3y ago
It seems the core issue is that electricity pricing isn't taking into account that some power sources could just go offline for days/weeks. Perhaps they need to find a politically correct way to apply a tariff against unreliable sources and just pay for standby capacity. This will cause renewable energy to become somewhat less attractive financially, but the alternative is a grid that becomes unreliable over time as gas power plants are decommissioned and don't get replaced.

93 points by goodcanadian 3y ago

This is a great example of economics at work. Large-scale electricity storage solutions reduce the need for generating capacity from peak load to average load - reducing the demand by the crest factor of the grid. The majority of this extra generation capacity is currently filled by gas (that is incredibly easy to spool up and down in a matter of seconds). Reducing the demand for natural gas will also increase the cost of other fossil fuels (which are mined in the same place), and it's a virtuous loop...

foobarian 3y ago
And given the sodium chemistries slowly showing up in production this seems like it will only continue to escalate going forward. It's a hopeful achievement.
huijzer 3y ago
I know someone who worked in a gas plant and although it might take seconds once the plant is running (I don’t know), it takes multiple minutes to start it after being off. In comparison, scaling from 0% to 100% load on battery storage takes 0,1 seconds, according to Tesla.
- triplepoint217 3y ago
  Gas plants can't really change how much they are generating in seconds. What they actually do is use the inertia of the spinning machinery, when the grid frequency drops (which is usually one of the first symptoms of load exceeding demand) the big spinning generators don't change speed instantaneously, they instead come under higher load and and convert more of their kinetic energy into electrical energy and help prop up the grid frequency. This starts the generators slowing down which then causes the control software to do whatever it is they do to feed in more gas and generate more power to try to keep them running at the same speed (I don't know exactly, I worked in grid batteries not gas plants). But yes, the batteries can respond much faster and are way better at this kind of support. It does lead to some situations that felt slightly weird to me where a battery will be selling a "spinning" reserve product. Luckily the weird linguistic artifact did not require us to actually rotate multi-ton batteries ;).
  - skewbone 3y ago
    Gas plants can change load in seconds by increasing or decreasing fuel flow. You can consider the generators as operating at the local grid frequency, and power being the product of torque and frequency, so they just change torque to change load, which is done through fuel control. Aeroderivative gas turbines can go from near 0 to full load in less than 30 seconds, which is obviously an eternity compared to battery system inverters with sub 150ms settling times. You are right that load isn’t independent of frequency, though. For those who are interested, in a simplistic and hand-wavy explanation, the torque imbalance between generation and load causes a change to the frequency. The net torque = torque of generation - torque of load = I*alpha, where alpha is the derivative of omega, or the angular frequency of the grid, and I is analogous to the inertia of the grid. If there is more generation torque than load torque on a generator (and the grid), the frequency increases and vice versa. Keeping the net torque constant, increasing the inertia makes the grid frequency derivative smaller for the same imbalance between generation and load, which is why it was typically desirable to have higher inertia synchronous generators. What you were describing around changing fuel to maintain speed is typically frequency droop, which is where generators change their power as a function of the frequency, which is a distributed scheme for all generators to independently act to drive the torque imbalance to 0, with some insensitivity proportionality constant. For example, in California, gas turbines are assigned a droop value within the range of 3 to 5%, which means a 3 to 5 % reduction in frequency should result in a 100% increase in power, and vice versa. The total power should be provided in less than 30 sec typically. For those that are really motivated to understand the interplay between generation, load, and frequency, look up the swing equation in the context of power system stability. There is another aspect of synchronous generators that enable them to act to stabilize frequency independently, called the inertial response, which also has to do with their rotational energy. A generator at some frequency has KE = 0.5*J*omega^2 where J is rotational inertia and omega is angular frequency. If the frequency changes, it has a change in kinetic energy = 0.5*J*(omega1^2 - omega2^2) which is equal to some power for some period of time (= P*delta_t). This shows that as a generator sees a change in frequency, the shorter the duration, the larger the amount of energy is converted to power. Essentially, generators have an inertial response that act to inject power the faster frequency is falling, and vice versa, which is a self stabilizing function for grid frequency. This loss of synchronous inertia as generators are replaced by inverter based resources (IBRs) is why managing grid frequency stability becomes more difficult. Various techniques are used to abate the loss of inertia, including emulating the swing equation within inverters to make them behave as synchronous generators and provide that inertial response. This is typically called grid forming with virtual synchronous machine.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
Sort of. Thermal generation provides grid services that they get paid for. This revenue is substantial. This means when frequency sags, gas plants were traditionally called on to ramp quickly to maintain grid inertia. Battery storage can do this ("fast frequency response") in milliseconds (vs minutes or tens of minutes for thermal generation, where fuel must be added and momentum of spinning turbines added to), and is eating this valuable revenue distinct from energy arbitrage (charging when power is cheap, free, or negative priced, and discharging when energy prices are higher). This helps kill the economic case for thermal generators, accelerating their phase out. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2022.971704/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2022.9717... https://www.sandia.gov/files/ess/EESAT/2002_papers/00015.pdf https://www.sandia.gov/files/ess/EESAT/2002_papers/00015.pdf https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-begins-providing-inertia-grid-services-at-scale-in-world-first-in-australia/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-beg... https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-earn-big-in-european-ancillary-services-but-investors-warned-of-high-expectations/ https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-earn-big-in-europe...
triplepoint217 3y ago
Glad to see this finally happening. This goal was definitely part of the appeal when I was working on the Autobidder team at Tesla! The regulations have some work to do catch up to allowing batteries to operate in a straightforward manner. For example, the big battery we launched in Texas had to be registered as both a generator and a controllable load with all sorts of weird issues around switching from discharging (being a generator) to charging (being a load) that a battery wants to do all the time. We found engineering solutions to them, but it's even better that the market operators are working on properly recognizing batteries as their own unique asset with their own advantages and challenges.

nippoo 3y ago

https://archive.is/ymfQu https://archive.is/ymfQu

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

The Lazard LCOE cost of unsubsidized solar/wind + storage has recently achieved parity with gas turbine combined cycle. So the writing is on the wall for fossil fuels. What's also important is that gas combined cycle kind of represented the end state of maximum power for minimum cost from fossil fuels. Wind and especially solar (perovskites, etc) and storage (sodium chemistries, etc) have lots of runway for further cost drops. So you might squeeze a couple percent out of gas combined cycle for LCOE in the next decade, but solar/wind may still drop by 50%. So if you have a ten year view (which is what you have fore investment in power projects) fossil fuel projects (and alas nuclear, which is 6x more expensive than wind/solar) simply don't balance the sheet. Lots of hope. Lots of work to do. EDIT: response to "why do you think solar/wind have bigger runway to drop in price:" (I hit my post limit) Wind can simply scale up more, and there are other designs coming online. Wind I don't have the holy-crap-this-is-still-coming thing. Solar however has made its gains with silicon, but perovskites are simply dirt cheap to manufacture, IF they can eliminate lead and get them to last long enough. I'm spitballing, but perovskites will probably drop the cost by 50% long term in solar. Solar also really hasn't developed large scale multijunction, and perovskites + silicon may enable that. Multijunction is how you get the higher efficiencies by capturing more wavelengths and the like. As for gas turbine, they already are exceeding the carnot efficiencies by capturing downstream heat cycles and other tricks. And I think the other thing as an energy financeer I'd worry about is that any fossil fuel power generation has to be worried about an eventual carbon tax imposed. As the political power of oil companies wanes as their economic strength withers away as EVs and alternative energy undermine their economic value proposition, their ability to keep the environmental lobby from imposing a proper externality tax on carbon emissions with falter. So any gas generation power plant could overnight have their costs increased by 10-50% or maybe worse. Best case: you have to pay for bullshit offsets, which will probably increase costs 10-20%. Medium case: they have to explicitly pay for the carbon scrubbing/removal, probably 50% increase or more to the generation cost. Worst case: we realize that fossil fuels carbon taxes should include a cost to remove PREVIOUSLY UNTAXED carbon that is sitting in the atmosphere. So then the cost could be exhorbitantly increased. Likely SOMETHING is coming that will increase the cost of fossil fuel power and fuels due to carbon removal. It will start small and increase as the political strength of oil / gas wanes.

3y ago

louwrentius 3y ago

For the price of a gas power plant you can buy some *serious amount* of LiFePo4 batteries, and Sodium Ion batteries are now also slowly hitting the market. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361094 At some point we may still need small gas power plants to charge the batteries but how many days a year would we have to do that? It may be a touchy subject, but to me Nuclear power is absolutely not the future because for the money you can deploy so much renewables, including batteries, it just doesn't make sense. And they are never on time and on budget.

BirAdam 3y ago

It would be neat to see an alternate universe where there was zero corporate welfare for petroleum and for solar/wind/tidal/hydro. I imagine that in such a world, renewables would have become the default sometime in the 70s and millions of lives would have been saved due to fewer oil wars and cleaner air.

mdgrech23 3y ago
Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks. What we need is world where we recognize that everyone owning their own personal automobile is probably a bad idea. We need walkable neighborhoods and public transportation but we also need to recognize how powerful fossil fuels are preserve them for heavy duty tasks that would be near impossible w/ human muscle and or renewables.
- Emma_Goldman 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Great_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Gre... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
- snewman 3y ago
  Trains can often be electrified, as can semi trucks, though it will require substantial investment in heavy duty charging infrastructure. Long haul aviation, and probably long haul shipping, will likely continue to require chemical fuels (though Fleetzero aspires to electrify shipping). But multiple startups have promising routes to replacing fossil fuels with e-fuels for those applications (chemical fuels created using electricity, such as electrolysis and carbon capture, instead of pumping fossil fuel out of the ground).
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks. Eh... The only one on your list that is currently a problem is planes. It's expensive powering semi trucks with them, that's why people mostly don't, and it's almost trivial for trains. There is also no fundamental reason why planes should be impossible. There are several well understood possibilities for them, but very few people have focused on solving this problem.

Emma_Goldman 3y ago

> "Without providing price detail, which companies say is commercially sensitive, Clarke said Carlton had struggled to finance the planned gas plant in part because of uncertainty over the revenues it would generate and the number of hours it would run." This is the crucial point. Political uncertainty about the future energy system is jacking up the rate of return investors are demanding of gas plant projects without contracted revenues. This is the main reason why gas projects are falling through. At the same time, there is currently no scalable storage system for time-shifting surplus renewable generation over weeks-to-months, so that it can offset renewable troughs. This means surplus renewable generation is simply being wasted, and for that reason, is so low cost that even hours-to-days battery storage - which is a mature storage system - is economical. It's far less clear this is a long-term proposition for at-scale storage, as the longer you can store energy for the higher the efficiency of matching surplus to deficit. Hydrogen and pumped hydro can store energy for far longer.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Your first point is excellent, that this sends capital market signals to investors to not invest in fossil generation. But to your other point, seasonal storage is not required. All available evidence indicates overbuilding renewables and simply making peace with excess curtailment can solve for that, along with transmission and perhaps pumped hydro where geography allows for that.
- triplepoint217 3y ago
  The nice thing is as long as these markets stay reasonably competitive, economics can figure out what to do with excess renewables. When renewables are in excess, the spot (instantaneous) energy price will drop to near zero (or sometimes negative in weird situations). That is good for existing (short term) batteries (they can recharge cheaply), but it will also provide price signals to people considering investing in longer term storage (since their cost of energy could be near zero, they only have to recoup the costs of building and operating the storage).
  - 3y ago

hoosieree 3y ago

Now if we could just get the world to run on DC, then HVDC transmission lines would make distribution more efficient.

snewman 3y ago
HVDC lines can be integrated into a conventional grid; China is doing it, and NREL models for the US grid include scenarios where we do it as well.
- triplepoint217 3y ago
  There are a few active in the US already (though it does look like the US is lagging) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

bell-cot 3y ago

The reality is much more complex than "batteries replace gas" - > Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said. > Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate. > "It does become more complex," Nigel Scott, head of structured trade and commodity finance at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, said. > Investors are putting increased scrutiny on the modelling, he added. - so basically, maintaining a large-scale grid is an optimization problem. And batteries merely shift the answer to "how much of which each type of equipment should we have?" around some. Kinda like someone architecting a DC-scale system has to understand trade-offs between L1 cache / L2 cache / L3 cache / local-to-core RAM / more-distant RAM / SSD / HD / Tape - vs. what equipment is actually available - at what prices, lead times, configuration limitations, ...

triplepoint217 3y ago
I like that analogy. Batteries are kind of the RAM/cache in the system: - Big merchant batteries like Hornsdale are kind of like more distant ram RAM - Batteries co-located with renewables are kind of the local to core ram - UPS and similar are cache - Pumped hydro is probably Tape ;) It feels like we might still be lacking a good/widely deployed HD/SSD equivalent in this space, hopefully new/emerging technologies (maybe the sodium chemistries others are mentioning) will be able to fill that in.
- Maxion 3y ago
  I think in terms of the energy grid batteries are currently more like your L1 cache or similar. I.e. very expensive to have, and has specific requirements so you have little of it. Hydro would be more like your RAM.
samus 3y ago
It is probably smart to keep around a certain capacity of nonrenewables to provide at least some base load. Long periods of low sunshine and slow winds could deplete batteries to a critical level. Also, the turbines of big powerplants act as grid frequency stabilizer. Do grid-scale batteries use alternators or might they run flywheels?

lebuffon 3y ago

We should take a moment to acknowledge the Power MOSFet in this story. For a guy who paid money for his first germanium transistor generating grid scale power with transistors is TOTALLY amazing.

zafka 3y ago
Can you explain this? I agree that Power MOSFets played a major part, but what are you referring to?
- lebuffon 3y ago
  In the 60s and 70s it was impossible to generate really large amounts of power with the bipolar transistors that were available. Large transmitters for example were still using Vacuum tubes into the 1990s.
gothroach 3y ago
IGBT's changed power conversion as we know it!

formerly_proven 3y ago

This is actually great because it reduces the vastly outsized impact of gas prices on short-term electricity prices through peaker plants via the merit order system.

j-a-a-p 3y ago

Tomorrow's fuel should be the battery. A battery can only solve a local issue: a system for locally produced and consumed electricity, If the sourcing solar or wind is transformed to fuel, you also have storage, probably a gas or liquid. And you catch two birds with one stone: storage and distribution. That could be shipping, pipelines but also gas stations. Infrastructure we already have.

Enogoloyo 3y ago

Germany paid 4 billion for energy dispatch in 2023. That would be enough to buy 80000 cars with 100kWh and provide 8gWh and would be 8x more than Germans biggest water energy storage. Did I miss something? Sounds absolutely doable in a few years to have massive more energy storage available. Combined with a lot more and cheaper renewable energy

anovikov 3y ago

There goes the "you'll always need a lot of gas generation to balance renewables" mantra.

gwbas1c 3y ago

A few years ago I scraped some publicly-accessible data from https://www.iso-ne.com/ https://www.iso-ne.com/ regarding the spot cost of electricity. Then I fed it into a battery simulator that I wrote. Based on my estimated cost of a grid-scale battery, I estimated a payoff in ~2 years; and then a lot of profit. The biggest challenge is the politics and red tape of connecting something to the grid. The grid operators are used to power plants being multi-year projects.

TMWNN 3y ago
>Based on my estimated cost of a grid-scale battery, I estimated a payoff in ~2 years; and then a lot of profit. Is this applicable to the South Australia Powerwall installation?
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  My simulations were based on the iso-new England grid's spot fees. I estimated the cost of a grid scale battery based on what I paid for my powerwall, because I couldn't get data on the price of the mega pack. I couldn't tell you if you'll save money with a powerwall in Australia. You'll need to look up local incentives for that. Understanding the economics of a power grid, it's only worth it if you have solar and don't have typical American-style "net metering," or you have solar and need backup for power outages. What I can tell you is that, in the US, in 2019, I got a rebate for my powerwall that made it price competitive with a standby generator. (Cost a little more, but I don't pay for annual maintenance or fuel.) I don't feed into the grid with it. The incentives would need to be pretty lucrative, though, because if there's a power outage overnight, it'll drain fast! (All my outages since I got it happened during the day.) What I can also tell you is that Tesla made a lot of headlines hooking up a grid scale battery to balance out an Australian wind farm. It prevented a frequency drop when a coal plant went offline.
  - TMWNN 3y ago
    > What I can also tell you is that Tesla made a lot of headlines hooking up a grid scale battery to balance out an Australian wind farm. It prevented a frequency drop when a coal plant went offline. This is what I was referring to; I was wondering whether your calculation would apply to it.

wolpoli 3y ago

It seems the core issue is that electricity pricing isn't taking into account that some power sources could just go offline for days/weeks. Perhaps they need to find a politically correct way to apply a tariff against unreliable sources and just pay for standby capacity. This will cause renewable energy to become somewhat less attractive financially, but the alternative is a grid that becomes unreliable over time as gas power plants are decommissioned and don't get replaced.