5 ms·

Yes and: I appreciated Jenkins' explanation of the different variability time scales. "Base load" is folk understanding and not especially helpful for planning

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.
        Retric 3y ago
        The US close to average in terms of solar with most countries are on a similar curve +/- a few years. However, I used the US because our electricity demand is fairly static. The US is only up 13% since 2000 unlike Africa’s electricity demand which doubled, or China’s 600% increase over that period.
- 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.

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.
      - Retric 3y ago
        The US close to average in terms of solar with most countries are on a similar curve +/- a few years. However, I used the US because our electricity demand is fairly static. The US is only up 13% since 2000 unlike Africa’s electricity demand which doubled, or China’s 600% increase over that period.
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.