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I found this podcast with Jesse Jenkins to be a really helpful start to understand non fixed energy resources. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-s

I found this podcast with Jesse Jenkins to be a really helpful start to understand non fixed energy resources. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-sun-isnt-always-shining/id1548554104?i=1000633373832 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-sun-isnt-alwa... I thought that the most cost effective way to supply energy would require a certain amount of base load. It seems like this is a misunderstanding because of how much cheaper and more available these non fixed resources are than fixed resources. Energy this cheap gives us a huge incentive to change our energy use patterns to match power abundance rather than to take energy demand as a constant.

specialist 3y ago
Yes and: I appreciated Jenkins' explanation of the different variability time scales. "Base load" is folk understanding and not especially helpful for planning our future green energy grid. IIRC, seconds, minutes, hours-days (diurnal), and months-years (seasonal). Meaning there's huge opportunity for all sorts of novel energy storage (and demand shifting) systems. Dynamic load balancing might use modestly sized of Li-ion batteries scattered around the grid. And thermal batteries could be used for long-term storage. The opportunities are insurmountable. -- Yogi Bera
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  Yes, but please keep things in context. We're transitioning away from baseload, but it's a major endeavor and not going to happen over night. I think the HN crowd is a little overzealous in this area. NERC is reporting the potential for energy shortages in many regions in the United States. This was once virtually unheard of. Solar alone isn't going to fix this in the next few years and many regions still have only tiny amounts of demand that is responsive to price.
  - Retric 3y ago
    The ramp up is inherently slow, we’re still generally seeing cheaper nighttime rates than daytime rates even after years of ‘heavy’ investment in solar. Solar’s impact on prices is going to remain fairly trivial for the next few years. But start looking 20 years out and a great deal of nighttime load will shift, which dramatically reduces the need for storage even as decades of X0 GW per year adds up. Aka it’s not just one trend you need to follow but several.
    - 7thaccount 3y ago
      The merit order effect of renewables like solar and wind has already been substantial on wholesale prices with the spot price being $0 or below $0 in significant percentages of the year. This probably hasn't trickled down to retail rates as we're stuck paying for the fixed costs of many of those assets via the PPAs that the utilities sign.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Thus the rapidly expanding introduction of storage, which can take advantage of those periods.
    - matthewdgreen 3y ago
      3400GW of solar nameplate is expected to be built from 2023 to 2028 globally, which is maybe 40% of all existing global electrical generation. So I don’t think “20 years” is the right time period to be thinking in.
      - delecti 3y ago
        That's shifting generation, not demand. Most people won't respond immediately, so 20 years isn't a crazy guess for a significant amount of the equipment in peoples' houses to cycle out.
      - Retric 3y ago
        US produced ~4% of its electricity from solar in 2023 and it’s predicted to hit 5.6% in 2024 and 7.0% in 2025. So ~4 years to break 10% of total generation which still doesn’t offset higher daytime demand. Thus for the next few years we’ll see higher daytime rates than nighttime outside of specific regions and specific times of the year. Beyond that you need to consider increasing EV adoption, energy storage etc. Cheaper daytime rates is going to happen faster than people realize, but not fast.
        matthewdgreen 3y ago
        Looking to the US to be on the cutting edge of the energy transition is like looking to the US to be on the cutting edge of steam engine development during the early Industrial Revolution. In a global sense, prices are going to change rapidly and huge amounts of industry will adapt to intermittent sources. The US will catch up a decade later, adopting whatever ideas worked overseas.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    > Yes, but please keep things in context. We're transitioning away from baseload, but it's a major endeavor and not going to happen over night. I think the HN crowd is a little overzealous in this area. NERC is reporting the potential for energy shortages in many regions in the United States. This was once virtually unheard of. What do you mean? Do you recall Enron? Also when I was living in Tennessee for a year in the 90s brown outs occurred at least a couple of times and some of my US friends tell me about interrupted power happening quite regularly still. I'd call that energy shortage.
    - 7thaccount 3y ago
      Enron was a special case when California first started their electricity market and made many mistakes in not having processes to take care of market manipulation. An entity deliberately and unethically putting a generator on outage to drive prices up is not what I'm referring to. I'm saying the reserve margins of baseload generation have shrunk.
- cycomanic 3y ago
  Others and myself have been arguing against the baseload myth on HN and other places for ages, but it just persists. The thing is, while we are still ramping up renewables wind and solar compete with the traditional "base load" large nuclear and coal plants, they are not replacing load following gas turbines until much later. Even Wikipedia says that variable supply like wind and solar are one of the sources to supply base load.
dfxm12 3y ago
We're already incentivized to do things like running the dishwasher in the evening do to costs, no? Or is the implication that it would be considerably even more cheap?
- dpkirchner 3y ago
  Depends on where you live -- where I'm at, there's no time of day based savings (unless you're a big industrial user, IIUC).
  - axus 3y ago
    In my area, summer "peak hours" often make up half my electricity usage. The off-peak hours are the other half. The price at peak times is more than double the flat rate, but only 30% cheaper for off-peak. I'm already reducing my energy use as much as is comfortable, if I want to maintain that I'd be paying more money than the flat rate. The scheme only saves energy if its not optional.
  - jakewins 3y ago
    This is rapidly changing worldwide though: as more variable production comes online, the value of shaping demand grows. Missouri is moving to hourly rates this year IIRC. EU already is on 60-min day-ahead prices and pushing hard to get to 15minutely prices.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Depends on whether your jurisdiction has time of use pricing.
- dylan604 3y ago
  This is where I'm really intrigued of all-house battery packs like the Tesla Powerwall (it's the only name of one I'm familiar to call out). I like the idea that it charges at night during the lower rates, and during the day the house is powered from the battery. Just haven't seen any longevity reports on them in general vs brochure data.
  - 3y ago
anonporridge 3y ago
Jenkins is a worthwhile follow. https://twitter.com/jessejenkins https://twitter.com/jessejenkins https://bsky.app/profile/jessejenkins.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/jessejenkins.bsky.social
klabb3 3y ago
> Energy this cheap gives us a huge incentive to change our energy use patterns to match power abundance rather than to take energy demand as a constant. I have not listened to the podcast, but I know for a fact that’s much harder than it sounds. Parking spaces, highways, factories, offices, parks, beaches, hiking trails, skiing, museums, stadiums, even grocery stores have an extreme variability in demand. Almost all demand comes from human activity, and like all other animals that activity is highly variable and intermittent. Yes, there are a few exceptions: batteries, some household appliances like washers, and perhaps certain factories/refineries that could be run with minimal operations at night. Incentives don’t even work to suppress leisure: people go through massive traffic, no parking and crowds to get to the beach on sunny weekends. Imagine chores or even actual needs: like keeping the heat or AC on. Electricity is survival-critical in many parts of the world. In short, I think the incentives needed to alter fundamental human behavior are less like cute coupons and more like a gun to your head. In most places, there won’t be enough political lunacy to push that through, and instead the glorious green energy programs will be stalled, delayed and eventually scrapped. I can’t think of a better outcome for fossil fuel companies.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  You can replace a significant proportion of the grid with intermittent generation without any trouble. Using solar for the air conditioning load in the summer is perfect. Use whatever you want to charge electric car batteries because they're batteries and most cars are parked >90% of the time. You can can't shift 100% of the load based on time of day through pricing, but you can do a non-trivial amount. Then you pick the low-hanging fruit and start trying to find a solution to power heat pumps in the winter at night and it's... not as easy. But a grid can be 0% fossil fuels without being 100% solar and wind.
  - stcredzero 3y ago
    Using solar for the air conditioning load in the summer is perfect. Ish. They don't completely correspond.
    - 3y ago
bilsbie 3y ago
I’ve always said this! Make daytime energy 100x cheaper and the market will respond. Appliances will start building in batteries, behaviors will change , and who knows what else the market will come up with.
- DennisP 3y ago
  That's just externalizing costs though. Instead of building a large battery at the power station, you're building lots of little batteries everywhere else. Even demand management can be an externalized cost. If a factory shuts down half the time, then you need twice as many factories to produce the same stuff.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    > If a factory shuts down half the time, then you need twice as many factories to produce the same stuff. No. It means you might need twice as much of whatever the bottleneck is, assuming that's a real time manufacturing resource which it might well not be. You definitely don't need twice as many whole factories. And if that bottlebeck isn't energy intensive that's not the problem at all, you can just re-arrange the energy intensive parts and you won't even need more factory.
  - tshaddox 3y ago
    I'm not sure I would call it "externalizing costs" if the only change was making daytime energy significantly cheaper (and not increasing off-peak energy prices). You could simply not add any batteries and your costs would still go down. You would presumably only decide to add batteries if the cost of doing so was less than the money you'd save by shifting energy usage to cheaper times.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  How is daytime energy supposed to get 100x cheaper and still allow solar, which only generates during the daytime, to recover its costs? Unless you mean for the nighttime price to increase by a huge factor, but then how would that out-compete existing technologies for generation at night?
outside1234 3y ago
AND how we manage our personal energy - for example, adding batteries to arbitrage the cheap daytime energy during the night
- danans 3y ago
  I do this today with residential batteries on a time-of-use rate plan that is highest between 3PM and midnight (with an average $0.30/kWh price difference between peak and low rates). I end up arbitraging about 5kWh/day (1825kWh/yr ) of usage between those rates, which works out to about ~$500/year in utility bill savings. Compared to the cost of the battery system, that's not much and the payback period is well beyond the life of the battery. In some locations (alas not mine), you can sell your battery's charge back to the grid during, providing grid ancillary services, for an even better ROI. There is still, however, some resistance against opening the gates to leaf-node distributed energy resources from traditional utilities and generators.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

specialist 3y ago

Yes and: I appreciated Jenkins' explanation of the different variability time scales. "Base load" is folk understanding and not especially helpful for planning our future green energy grid. IIRC, seconds, minutes, hours-days (diurnal), and months-years (seasonal). Meaning there's huge opportunity for all sorts of novel energy storage (and demand shifting) systems. Dynamic load balancing might use modestly sized of Li-ion batteries scattered around the grid. And thermal batteries could be used for long-term storage. The opportunities are insurmountable. -- Yogi Bera

7thaccount 3y ago
Yes, but please keep things in context. We're transitioning away from baseload, but it's a major endeavor and not going to happen over night. I think the HN crowd is a little overzealous in this area. NERC is reporting the potential for energy shortages in many regions in the United States. This was once virtually unheard of. Solar alone isn't going to fix this in the next few years and many regions still have only tiny amounts of demand that is responsive to price.
- Retric 3y ago
  The ramp up is inherently slow, we’re still generally seeing cheaper nighttime rates than daytime rates even after years of ‘heavy’ investment in solar. Solar’s impact on prices is going to remain fairly trivial for the next few years. But start looking 20 years out and a great deal of nighttime load will shift, which dramatically reduces the need for storage even as decades of X0 GW per year adds up. Aka it’s not just one trend you need to follow but several.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    The merit order effect of renewables like solar and wind has already been substantial on wholesale prices with the spot price being $0 or below $0 in significant percentages of the year. This probably hasn't trickled down to retail rates as we're stuck paying for the fixed costs of many of those assets via the PPAs that the utilities sign.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Thus the rapidly expanding introduction of storage, which can take advantage of those periods.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    3400GW of solar nameplate is expected to be built from 2023 to 2028 globally, which is maybe 40% of all existing global electrical generation. So I don’t think “20 years” is the right time period to be thinking in.
    - delecti 3y ago
      That's shifting generation, not demand. Most people won't respond immediately, so 20 years isn't a crazy guess for a significant amount of the equipment in peoples' houses to cycle out.
    - Retric 3y ago
      US produced ~4% of its electricity from solar in 2023 and it’s predicted to hit 5.6% in 2024 and 7.0% in 2025. So ~4 years to break 10% of total generation which still doesn’t offset higher daytime demand. Thus for the next few years we’ll see higher daytime rates than nighttime outside of specific regions and specific times of the year. Beyond that you need to consider increasing EV adoption, energy storage etc. Cheaper daytime rates is going to happen faster than people realize, but not fast.
      - matthewdgreen 3y ago
        Looking to the US to be on the cutting edge of the energy transition is like looking to the US to be on the cutting edge of steam engine development during the early Industrial Revolution. In a global sense, prices are going to change rapidly and huge amounts of industry will adapt to intermittent sources. The US will catch up a decade later, adopting whatever ideas worked overseas.
- cycomanic 3y ago
  > Yes, but please keep things in context. We're transitioning away from baseload, but it's a major endeavor and not going to happen over night. I think the HN crowd is a little overzealous in this area. NERC is reporting the potential for energy shortages in many regions in the United States. This was once virtually unheard of. What do you mean? Do you recall Enron? Also when I was living in Tennessee for a year in the 90s brown outs occurred at least a couple of times and some of my US friends tell me about interrupted power happening quite regularly still. I'd call that energy shortage.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    Enron was a special case when California first started their electricity market and made many mistakes in not having processes to take care of market manipulation. An entity deliberately and unethically putting a generator on outage to drive prices up is not what I'm referring to. I'm saying the reserve margins of baseload generation have shrunk.
cycomanic 3y ago
Others and myself have been arguing against the baseload myth on HN and other places for ages, but it just persists. The thing is, while we are still ramping up renewables wind and solar compete with the traditional "base load" large nuclear and coal plants, they are not replacing load following gas turbines until much later. Even Wikipedia says that variable supply like wind and solar are one of the sources to supply base load.

dfxm12 3y ago

We're already incentivized to do things like running the dishwasher in the evening do to costs, no? Or is the implication that it would be considerably even more cheap?

dpkirchner 3y ago
Depends on where you live -- where I'm at, there's no time of day based savings (unless you're a big industrial user, IIUC).
- axus 3y ago
  In my area, summer "peak hours" often make up half my electricity usage. The off-peak hours are the other half. The price at peak times is more than double the flat rate, but only 30% cheaper for off-peak. I'm already reducing my energy use as much as is comfortable, if I want to maintain that I'd be paying more money than the flat rate. The scheme only saves energy if its not optional.
- jakewins 3y ago
  This is rapidly changing worldwide though: as more variable production comes online, the value of shaping demand grows. Missouri is moving to hourly rates this year IIRC. EU already is on 60-min day-ahead prices and pushing hard to get to 15minutely prices.
MattGaiser 3y ago
Depends on whether your jurisdiction has time of use pricing.
dylan604 3y ago
This is where I'm really intrigued of all-house battery packs like the Tesla Powerwall (it's the only name of one I'm familiar to call out). I like the idea that it charges at night during the lower rates, and during the day the house is powered from the battery. Just haven't seen any longevity reports on them in general vs brochure data.
- 3y ago

anonporridge 3y ago

Jenkins is a worthwhile follow. https://twitter.com/jessejenkins https://twitter.com/jessejenkins https://bsky.app/profile/jessejenkins.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/jessejenkins.bsky.social

klabb3 3y ago

> Energy this cheap gives us a huge incentive to change our energy use patterns to match power abundance rather than to take energy demand as a constant. I have not listened to the podcast, but I know for a fact that’s much harder than it sounds. Parking spaces, highways, factories, offices, parks, beaches, hiking trails, skiing, museums, stadiums, even grocery stores have an extreme variability in demand. Almost all demand comes from human activity, and like all other animals that activity is highly variable and intermittent. Yes, there are a few exceptions: batteries, some household appliances like washers, and perhaps certain factories/refineries that could be run with minimal operations at night. Incentives don’t even work to suppress leisure: people go through massive traffic, no parking and crowds to get to the beach on sunny weekends. Imagine chores or even actual needs: like keeping the heat or AC on. Electricity is survival-critical in many parts of the world. In short, I think the incentives needed to alter fundamental human behavior are less like cute coupons and more like a gun to your head. In most places, there won’t be enough political lunacy to push that through, and instead the glorious green energy programs will be stalled, delayed and eventually scrapped. I can’t think of a better outcome for fossil fuel companies.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
You can replace a significant proportion of the grid with intermittent generation without any trouble. Using solar for the air conditioning load in the summer is perfect. Use whatever you want to charge electric car batteries because they're batteries and most cars are parked >90% of the time. You can can't shift 100% of the load based on time of day through pricing, but you can do a non-trivial amount. Then you pick the low-hanging fruit and start trying to find a solution to power heat pumps in the winter at night and it's... not as easy. But a grid can be 0% fossil fuels without being 100% solar and wind.
- stcredzero 3y ago
  Using solar for the air conditioning load in the summer is perfect. Ish. They don't completely correspond.
  - 3y ago

bilsbie 3y ago

I’ve always said this! Make daytime energy 100x cheaper and the market will respond. Appliances will start building in batteries, behaviors will change , and who knows what else the market will come up with.

DennisP 3y ago
That's just externalizing costs though. Instead of building a large battery at the power station, you're building lots of little batteries everywhere else. Even demand management can be an externalized cost. If a factory shuts down half the time, then you need twice as many factories to produce the same stuff.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  > If a factory shuts down half the time, then you need twice as many factories to produce the same stuff. No. It means you might need twice as much of whatever the bottleneck is, assuming that's a real time manufacturing resource which it might well not be. You definitely don't need twice as many whole factories. And if that bottlebeck isn't energy intensive that's not the problem at all, you can just re-arrange the energy intensive parts and you won't even need more factory.
- tshaddox 3y ago
  I'm not sure I would call it "externalizing costs" if the only change was making daytime energy significantly cheaper (and not increasing off-peak energy prices). You could simply not add any batteries and your costs would still go down. You would presumably only decide to add batteries if the cost of doing so was less than the money you'd save by shifting energy usage to cheaper times.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
How is daytime energy supposed to get 100x cheaper and still allow solar, which only generates during the daytime, to recover its costs? Unless you mean for the nighttime price to increase by a huge factor, but then how would that out-compete existing technologies for generation at night?

outside1234 3y ago

AND how we manage our personal energy - for example, adding batteries to arbitrage the cheap daytime energy during the night

danans 3y ago
I do this today with residential batteries on a time-of-use rate plan that is highest between 3PM and midnight (with an average $0.30/kWh price difference between peak and low rates). I end up arbitraging about 5kWh/day (1825kWh/yr ) of usage between those rates, which works out to about ~$500/year in utility bill savings. Compared to the cost of the battery system, that's not much and the payback period is well beyond the life of the battery. In some locations (alas not mine), you can sell your battery's charge back to the grid during, providing grid ancillary services, for an even better ROI. There is still, however, some resistance against opening the gates to leaf-node distributed energy resources from traditional utilities and generators.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]