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Solar and wind to top coal power in US for first time in 2024
- tomohawk 3y agoThis is not a base load comparison, so not terribly meaningful.
- Proven 3y ago[dead]
- givemeethekeys 3y agoFor those in the know: - Is the adoption of wind and solar accelerating, or is it linear? - When do you expect 90%+ electricity generation from renewable sources (hydro, wind, solar)? - Will it be cheaper than nuclear? Will we still need nuclear? Thanks!
- aperson_hello 3y agoAccelerating and who knows - everyone is extraordinarily terrible at making predictions about power generation. New solar/wind capacity is already significantly cheaper than new nuclear (and new plants of any sort other than natural gas), but more expensive than running existing nuclear plants. Nuclear is a great way to get stable base load capacity - while wind and solar require significant storage to be used as base load (because the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine). We'll ultimately probably land on a mix of power sources.
- epistasis 3y agoThe best predictions have come from people that know the "least" that make the simplest predictions just extrapolating current trends. To get bad predictions, you need to be "deeply knowledgeable" about energy and come up with all sort of ways to bias the predictions against renewable energy. Greenpeace (not known for being very numerate in the first place) and Ramez Naam did much better: https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/ https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...
- vlovich123 3y agoIt’s been accelerating exponentially for a long time, but generally seems to have taken over secondary energy sources like biofuel more than displacing fossil fuels. Wind is roughly the same price as nuclear & fossil fuels but solar is still expensive. Costs continue to drop & solar bulls contend that it will be cheaper in the long run although I’m skeptical that nuclear couldn’t compete (e.g. MSR or thorium reactors would be much safer & thus cheaper to build reducing nuclear costs too). Additionally, solar bulls conveniently ignore the costs of batteries which complicate the economics by a lot & even fission built today (where costs have been going up rather than down because we don’t build a lot of it) is much cheaper than solar (even without batteries & blows battery-based solutions out of the water). The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors which would require a major social shift to make people comfortable with it (& of course there are always risks but for some reason spilling radioactive material into the ocean scares people a lot but then they conveniently ignore how much fossil fuels we spill into the ocean which creates waaaay more ecological devastation). Finally, it’s the only tech we have right now that’s energy dense enough that we can divert excess capacity into efforts to sequester excess carbon - we’ve already unlocked runaway processes on Earth and sequestration, while insanely expensive, is likely the only mechanism we have to try to undo the runaway processes.
- hgomersall 3y agoYou make a lot of assertions here. Certainly your claims about the cost of solar are not supported by IRENA: https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Aug/Renewable-Power-Generation-Costs-in-2022 https://www.irena.org/Publications/2023/Aug/Renewable-Power-...
- pydry 3y ago>Wind is roughly the same price as nuclear & fossil fuels but solar is still expensive. Its LCOE is roughly 5x lower than nuclear power: https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-solar-and-wind-power-drives-the-energy-transition/94355 https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-sol... >The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors The cost of nuclear power as shown above is *enormous*. The only reason it gets built at all is because it provides economic support to the military for maintaining and building nuclear arms: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-consumers-to-fund-nuclear-weapons-through-hinkley-point-c https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-... Or, in non-nuclear powers (like Sweden or Iran), to provide the skills and industry to quickly ramp up a fully fledged nuclear program while still adhering to the NPT. It's a shame because the money would be far more efficiently spent on solar and wind capacity and also because nuclear weapons are, well, bad.
- matthewdgreen 3y agoI’m not “in the know” but here is a fun chart showing 2023 solar PV adoption compared to past IEA predictions. You can decide which function class you want to assign it to. (I did not make this, see subsequent post in that thread for credit and sources.) https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green/111505497033606507 https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green/111505497033606507
- burkaman 3y agoThat chart is so funny. What will it take for the IEA to consider changing their prediction model?
- sgift 3y agoThere's an "world energy outlook" once a year, here's the one from 2023: https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023 https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023 Haven't yet found the relevant chart, but since the one in the image ends with WEO 2018: They probably already have.
- burkaman 3y agoAt least as of 2022 they had not: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-evans-53091614_solar-activity-7032377193276043265-KvGm/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-evans-53091614_solar-ac... The followup post (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defence-international-energy-agency-iea-world-outlooks-simon-evans/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/defence-international-energy-...) explains that this IEA outlook is not really supposed to be a forecast, it's an explanation of what would happen if all current government policies remained the same. It intentionally does not take into account proposed or predicted future policy changes.
- zizee 3y agoSome of this is still driven by government policy (definitely required to kick start things), but at this stage economic drivers are the dominant force affecting adoption.
- jncfhnb 3y agoAccelerating. Unclear timelines but not soon. It is already cheaper than nuclear. Energy should be priced using the levelized cost of energy. Currently nuclear is way more expensive than utility solar ( but not rooftop solar). The need for nuclear is about base load and making use of space and existing assets and what not.
- ben_w 3y agoAcceleration; naively extrapolating the current growth rate gets us to 100% in 2034-ish; it's already cheaper than nuclear; we will probably want nuclear, but don't strictly need it, other base-load equivalents and load management options exist.
- Ekaros 3y agoCheaper as in it can fully replace nuclear and fully match for demand for also extended periods of no wind, low temperatures and high cloud cover? Without any use of fossil fuels?
- ceejayoz 3y agoHow often is a region with an interconnected grid the size of the USA completely lacking in wind, uniformly cold, and overcast? (Among other things, clouds tend to cause wind. https://www.howitworksdaily.com/how-does-cloud-cover-create-wind/ https://www.howitworksdaily.com/how-does-cloud-cover-create-...)
- natmaka 3y agoThere are many encouraging published studies. Europe: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-could-provide-more-stable/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... US: https://www.cmu.edu/ceic/assets/docs/publications/published-papers/2017-and-2018/handschy-et-al-2017.pdf https://www.cmu.edu/ceic/assets/docs/publications/published-...
- ben_w 3y agoYes, using the current lifetime cost of batteries etc. to cover when solar is unavailable, is currently cheaper than nuclear. (We could also in principle do this with a global power grid, the maths says it's fine and surprisingly affordable even if that grid needs extremely frequent total replacement, but geopolitics will almost certainly kill such an idea).
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- Axsuul 3y agoWith manufacturing coming back to the US, our energy needs will likely be even greater even with accelerating adoption.
- TomK32 3y agoIt's all down to politics. The German government practically killed (predominantely East-) Germany's solar industry by messing around with the Stromeinspeisungsgesetz and didn't protect the local producers against the the Chinese ones who still produce under questionable conditions... http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph240/rojas1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph240/rojas1/ Will the current restart of the german solar panel producers last? No one knows for sure.
- therealdrag0 3y agoPanel production doesn’t need to be tied to panel installation does it? The goal of increasing solar usage doesn’t care if they come from China or not.
- TomK32 3y agoStill, we did have the industry in Germany and it produced quality panels without shady practices like Chinese manfuacturers.
- jltsiren 3y agoDifferent regions are in different parts of the sigmoid curve. In some places, the growth looks exponential. In other places, the market is already saturated and new renewable capacity is only built to meet increases in transmission/storage capacity and demand for intermittent energy.
- vlovich123 3y agoThat’s all fine and good but I have not found any data supporting this good news for net 0 efforts. We’ve been transitioning away from coal power for a while but while the headline implies solar & wind are the beneficiaries, natural gas has benefited much more. While natural gas emits less CO2 than coal, it emits more methane which if I recall correctly means that they’re roughly comparable (natural gas is better for local air quality).
- aperson_hello 3y agohttps://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55719 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55719 Most new capacity is renewable (and it's been that way for years). It's just that there was a whole bunch of natural gas capacity built out over the 90s and 2000s that it'll take a while before we see any significant reduction in natural gas generation
- vlovich123 3y agoBut our energy usage grows with time too. There’s no indication yet that solar is capable of replacing fossil fuels usage in the grid vs just keeping up with new energy usage (platueing is not sufficient)
- aperson_hello 3y agoSolar and wind are on an exponential trajectory. Our usage isn't. That in itself is enough to make a pretty good prediction that they'll make an impact. That said, there are absolutely going to be issues taking the entire grid to solar/wind (namely, storage!). There are potential options to solve those problems...so we'll get there. The question is just how long it'll take.
- jaidhyani 3y agohttps://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy Quick stats for the US: In 2022, 11.3% of energy was generated by renewables (hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal, bioenergy, wave, and tidal). It's been growing at just under 0.5pp/year since 2007, when it was at 4.4%. This is primarily driven by wind and solar. Wind power took off around 2000, and in the years since has grown from 5.6TWh to 434.3TWh in 2022. Solar power took off around 2011 and has since grown from 1.82TWh to 205.1TWh. Hydropower remains the #2 renewable in the US, with a noisy-but-nondirectional generation between 200TWh and 350TWh going back to the 60's, but solar appears poised to overtake it by 2024. All other renewables combined are holding steady or slightly dropping at ~75TWh (though anecdotally there may be some large geothermal capacity coming online in the medium-term future that would change this). Narrowing the focus from all-energy-generation (e.g. including fuel) to specifically electricity, the US is currently generating 22.3% of its electricity from renewables, a number that has been steadily increasing at about 1pp/year since it was 8.4% in 2007. Naïve extrapolation suggests we're about 75 years out from 100% renewables for electricity, but of course there are reasons to doubt that. For one, we've recently passed the tipping point where renewables are just straightforwardly cheaper than other sources of energy in many circumstances, and improvements in technology and infrastructure will just continue to make this true in more and more cases.
- riffraff 3y agoI think this has more to do with replacing coal with gas than about the growth of renewables: coal production has been dropping father than renewables have come online. Still, good news anyway.
- aperson_hello 3y agoRenewables have replaced roughly half of the coal production decrease (and the other half is gas). Gas just had its growth moment before renewables did. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960
- melling 3y agoThis is because coal is dropping to 15%. Here’s a direct link to the EIA document: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/pdf/steo_full.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/pdf/steo_full.pdf It says renewables already passed coal. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong page?
- defrost 3y agoWe've very probably hit global "peak coal" and looking at future declining world use: International Energy Agency Global Coal Report December 2023 (released Friday 15th December 2023) Global coal production is forecast to have risen by 1.8% in 2023, with continued growth in India, China and Indonesia more than offsetting declines in the United States and the European Union. Thus, 2023 marks another all-time high in global coal production, totalling 8 741 Mt. [...] For the forecast period, we expect a net reduction in global coal production starting in 2024, which would mean global coal production peaking in 2023 in line with global coal demand. Ongoing declines in the United States and the European Union are likely to be complemented by reduced production volumes in Indonesia, as Chinese demand for seaborne thermal coal is likely to decrease. The last bastion of remarkable growth in production is India, serving the growing demand from its power sector. Our model suggests that declines in other countries will more than offset this growth, resulting in global production of 8 394 Mt in 2026. https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023/supply https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023/supply Global coal use to reach record high in 2023, energy agency says https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/15/global-coal-use-to-reach-record-high-in-2023-iea https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/15/global-coal-use-to... But the IEA noted that overall coal use is not expected to drop until 2026, when the major expansion of renewable capacity in the next three years should help lower usage by 2.3 percent compared with 2023 levels, even with the absence of stronger clean energy policies. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652273
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoPeople underestimate the RAPID pace wind and solar are making on phasing out fossil fuels. Carbon emissions have barely been growing while energy consumption has been growing enormously over the last 10 years. By 2030, carbon emissions could be substantially power. By 2050 it looks like it'll basically be a Brave New World in terms of energy.
- defrost 3y ago"barely been growing" is still growing - and a reversal of the much needed drop that occurred during the pandemic years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi... There's still a lot of FUD about the need for change coming from the major fossil fuel players who are knowingly responsible for the current situation: Best estimates show a total of 1,499 gigatons of global-warming–exacerbating CO2 have been added to the Earth's atmosphere by the actions of us humans since 1751, only 342 gigatons of those were emitted up to 1964 — 23 percent of the total emissions during those 213 years, which was 80 percent per cent of that full time frame. On the other hand, 1,157 gigatons were emitted between 1965 and 2015 — that’s 77 percent of total emissions emitted during only the remaining 20 percent of the period in question. Again: 77 percent of total emissions have taken place since fossil fuel companies became aware of what the dangers of burning their products would be. "Instead of using that knowledge to change their business practices, or to alert the public or policymakers about what the dangers of burning fossil fuels would be, they’ve doubled down on their business models. They have funded climate obstruction on every level from global to local." https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/16/fossil_fuels_wildfires/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/16/fossil_fuels_wildfire...
- bigtunacan 3y agoHonestly I'm starting to feel a bit alarmed by the growth of solar energy. I live in Midwest farm country and solar farms are just being built in place of food farms at a scary rate. While I believe in the idea of cleaner renewable energy I'm concerned if it comes at the price of a reduced food supply.
- hgomersall 3y agoThere's plenty of land for food and energy, we just have to eat less meat.
- Ekaros 3y agoAnd really we should optimize the land use in general. Single family housing is also huge waste of energy. A few square meters per person in massive shared places is enough to survive. We could bulldoze all single family homes and then fill the now vacant office spaces with bunk beds for more sustainable living...
- hgomersall 3y agoWho's advocating that? My point was in response to unspecified concerns that I took to be that we wouldn't be able to support the population if we have too much solar, which is emphatically not true.
- Ekaros 3y agoYou were advocating for absolutely massive lowering of living standards. As clearly eating less meat is making live lot worse. I just took on myself to present next logical and less bad step. We do not need more than handful of square meters to live. So as quality of life does not matter in this conversation. We should explore next steps we can take to save the planet. By getting rid of anything that is not absolutely needed for survival.
- hgomersall 3y ago
- hermitcrab 3y agoWe spent 3 weeks this year driving all over Florida ('the sunshine state') and solar panels and wind turbines were pretty much non-existent, as far as we could see. So where does this US solar and wind power come from?
- ceejayoz 3y agoPlaces where hurricanes won't wipe them out every few years. Florida's grid is connected to sources as far west as Nebraska and as far north as Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Interconnection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Interconnection
- therealdrag0 3y agoSouthwest has most solar potential. https://www.nrel.gov/gis/assets/images/solar-annual-ghi-2018-usa-scale-01.jpg https://www.nrel.gov/gis/assets/images/solar-annual-ghi-2018... But residential solar is still a minority of houses 4%. And wind generation tends to be in isolated rural places based on geography.
- seattle_spring 3y agoIn addition to the other answers already provided, i would also guess they're installed primarily in states run with less regressive leadership.
- ceejayoz 3y agoNot as big a factor as you'd think; Texas has lots of wind and solar. Florida just isn't a good place for infrastructure of that kind when 150 mph winds come through for a visit. Wind turbines, especially. The parent poster's "I didn't see any driving around Florida" argument would also serve to disprove the existence of ski resorts.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
- abtinf 3y agoHow about in terms of power consumed? When I was a kid, it was cheapest to use electricity at night, because that’s when industrial demand was reduced. Now, my rates for electricity at night are significantly higher than during the day, because power output collapses from solar.
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agohttps://archive.is/9p3xZ https://archive.is/9p3xZ
- 1905 3y agoEnd goal is to push the majority of of the world into nuclear power which will be controlled by a small few
- cde-v 3y agoAre you saying coal is more egalitarian than nuclear? Or that 'they' will outlaw solar eventually because it is easy to build a decentralized grid?
- Dylan16807 3y agoControlled... how? You need government approval to mess with nuclear fuel, but you also need it to make a coal plant. And if that is the end goal, why are we building so few nuclear plants? Getting to that goal via solar and wind makes no sense.
- nostrademons 3y agoSolar's become dirt cheap - it's replacing coal not because of subsidies or policy, but just because it's cheaper. Bodes well for its continued usage. The bottleneck for continued electrification is going to become storage shortly. Solar can produce all the electricity we need, but it only does it during daylight hours, while we consume the most energy between 4-10 PM. Natural gas is currently bridging the gap, but utilities can't install more base-load solar than is consumed during peak daylight hours. So the key to letting solar replace more gas is time-shifting consumption from 4-10 PM to 9 AM - 3 PM. Here's my plan of inexpensive solutions for this: 1. Subsidize workplace EV charging, and create a standard that lets workplaces pass along energy costs from it to employees. 2. Invest in smart grid-aware EV & home battery charging technologies. Instead of charging whenever you first plug them in (which is usually ~6 PM), load from EV charging should be distributed to whenever the grid has excess power available, with a random factor so that not all EVs charge at once. 3. Subsidize insulation upgrades for homes. This turns them into thermal batteries where you can heat/cool them during the day and they will retain that temperature at night. Insulation materials are also really cheap for what you get now; it's installation that's the bottleneck in many cases. 4. Subsidize heat pumps, to make all heating/cooling electric. 5. Adopt V2H/V2G charging technology on all EVs, so that energy already stored in the car's battery can power home electronics at night. 6. Meet demand for EV batteries. There, you're done, at least as far as residential consumers are concerned. Transportation + HVAC are by far the largest energy draws in the consumer sector. Timeshift them so that they happen during peak solar hours, and the problem of creating enough grid-scale energy storage to shift production from 9-3 to 4-10 reduces to the problem of creating enough batteries so that everyone can have an EV. A Ford F-150 Lightning has as much battery capacity as 7 PowerWalls; take HVAC out of the equation and you can easily power a home for weeks off it.
- nick222226 3y agoOne of the key stories for ev adoption though is that you can charge overnight at lower electric rates to save on gas, so we still need a clean baseload power supply for overnight.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kmax12 3y agoThe US electrical grid is changing fast. I built a site to track instantaneous solar generation and other records in real time across different parts of the country. New solar records are done until next summer but still interesting stuff happening. For example, California hit a new battery charging record a few weeks ago. All the records and more real time information about US grid are here: https://www.gridstatus.io/records https://www.gridstatus.io/records
- dojomouse 3y agoThis is extremely cool! Nice work. What data does it rely on and do you have any plans to support other countries?
- kmax12 3y agoIt’s a wide range of sources but basically the different Independent System Operators in the US and the Energy Information Agency (EIA) All of our data scrappers are open source: https://github.com/kmax12/gridstatus https://github.com/kmax12/gridstatus
- amboar 3y agoRelated, have something similar for the major grid in Australia and it's smaller counterpart in Western Australia: https://opennem.org.au/ https://opennem.org.au/
- vijayr02 3y agoAnd for the UK: https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/
- wortelefant 3y agoThere is lots of potential, but as we see in Germany, a glass ceiling for solar and wind power exists where backup is needed - when there is little wind for only one hour at night, you still need another controllable source of energy with an output that does not vary by weather. Few are available with low CO2, such as hydro, nuclear, geothermal
- lannisterstark 3y agoJust do nuclear until they have proper infrastructure for US ffs. Nuclear power is cheap in the long run, and relatively safe.
- powerbroker 3y agoOn November 20, 37 Gigawatt hours of excess wind were produced by wind turbines. That surplus occurred at night, when there is room to spare on the transmission lines running from West Texas to the urban centers in the East. If Texas had 3.7 million EVs they would have had their daily needs met with the wind electricity that was curtailed for lack of demand. Let that sink in. Surplus like that is nuclear power plant levels of electricity. Now, admittedly, November 20 had wind potential that was near record-breaking. Further, many nights of the week, wind is not producing at surplus levels -- and the idea of million EVs charging would unleash dozens of natural gas plans to fill their nightly needs. This problem of 'extra wind' plagues about 18 states covered by Southwest Power Pool and Midcontinent ISOs. Further, the cost savings in moving EV demand from wind-poor nights to wind-rich nights only saves about 1¢/kWh in wholesale electric costs. Accordingly, there isn't much of a price signal to get people to change their habits.