5 ms·

A New Surge in Power Use Is Threatening U.S. Climate Goals

31 points by artur_makly 3y ago

melling 3y ago
“ Some utilities say they need additional fossil fuel capacity because cleaner alternatives like wind or solar power aren’t growing fast enough and can be bogged down by delayed permits and snarled supply chains. ”
happytiger 3y ago
Just install more renewable power. These idiots are literally complaining about excessive demand when they own a power company.
- astrodust 3y ago
  "But muh surge pricing!"
polski-g 3y ago
They should spend more time reforming the NRC to not sandbag every proposed nuclear plant in the past 50 years.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  Agreed, and to add: it cost NuScale half a billion dollars to get their design approved, for which the application was 12,000 pages long in addition to ~2 million pages of supporting documents[0]. [0]https://archive.is/cmHXQ https://archive.is/cmHXQ
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    It’s fair enough to require that kind of diligence for a new design, given the extreme consequences of failure. Half a billion dollars is not much relative to the cost of a catastrophic accident which would be an order of magnitude more, or two. The problem is not the cost of design but rather the cost of deploying a proven design.
    - username332211 3y ago
      A 12 thousand page application and 2 million pages of supporting documentation is not diligence, it's circus. You can write that sort of documents, but nobody will read all of it and understand it. Would anyone even notice if the documents involved contained a few paragraphs T-Rex erotica hidden in them? Hell, would anyone notice if you crammed the entire text of "A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay" in there? If you have any doubt about it, observe that Microsoft wants to use an LLM to generate the application documents.
jes5199 3y ago
this is a short term problem. Solar and batteries are continuing to get cheaper fast, and production is ramping up. Even natural gas will be a stranded asset in a decade
- 7e 3y ago
  Batteries are not a solution, and probably never will be. If you buy and install a Tesla Powerwall, it will cost you $11,500 to store $1.65 worth of electricity. It’s literally ~ten thousand times more expansive than the energy is worth. It’s practical to time shift for a few hours at most. The world needs much cheaper energy storage: compressed air, pumped hydro, and hydrogen electrolysis.
  - _aavaa_ 3y ago
    That’s a rather strong claim against batteries given that they are already being used to large degrees in the power grid. And that they can fill the niche of very rapid response times, unlike the other listed options. As is placing hydrogen in the cheap category.
    - 7e 3y ago
      Like I said, batteries are practical for time shifting a few hours, becauses you can amortize the cost over twenty years and only double the cost of the power, and that is exactly where they are used in grid. https://about.bnef.com/blog/2023-hydrogen-levelized-cost-update-green-beats-gray/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/2023-hydrogen-levelized-cost-upd... puts cheapest green hydrogen LCoE at $1.50/kg. Hydrogen is scalable to store for long periods in salt caverns and large tanks.
      - _aavaa_ 3y ago
        First off, the 1.50 $/kg is the levelized cost of hydrogen not of energy. I can't get access to their full report, so I will have to assume their used a similar approach as [0], numbers are old since it's from 2021 but the analysis hold. LCoH is what the H2 costs as soon as it leaves the electrolyzer. That analysis looks only at electricity and CAPEX and OPEX for the electrolyzers. What is does NOT include is compression, drying, transmission, distribution, or storage. Specifically for this discussion it also does not include any of the costs associated with the fuel cell portion of the stack, i.e. the entire other half of a electricity->hydrogen->electricity scheme. So that will increase costs substantially. The other comment is about the 1.50 $/kg. That is a ridiculously low number. H2 LHV is 33.3 kWh/kg, assuming an optimistic 70% electrolyzer efficiency you need 47.6 kWh/kg of electricty. 1.50 $/kg / 47.6 kWh/kg is ~0.03 $/kWh. And that's if all the cost comes from electricty. Again you still need capex and opex for the electrolyzer. This is the same electricity price as the Lazards reported I linked. That report assumes you'll have the green electricity available 98% of the time. I have no idea where in the world they're going to get such low prices 24/7 on a market once they add the GW worth of demand. Yes certain regions have negative electricity rates, for a few hours a day, but those caused by the mix of renewables and coal/gas/nuclear, and it's the latter which is why costs are negative. I don't think you can count that as green energy, unless it's the nuclear asset that's running. [0]: https://www.lazard.com/media/12qcxl1j/lazards-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen-analysis-vf.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/12qcxl1j/lazards-levelized-cost...
PaulKeeble 3y ago
With Solar and Wind both below $50 a MWH they are the cheapest option for adding capacity at the moment. One of the more wild things about the green power transition is that individuals have been buying their own installations and drastically undercutting the price they pay for power from the grid. In what other industry is your personal DIY solution drastically cheaper than the industrial mass scale of big business. The entire power industry seems to have an aversion to deploying the cheapest options for expansion and more power and new custom. They get the best returns for the cheapest options that also happen to be the greenest and yet they keep building ever more CO2 emitting sources and keeping prices high. Its clearly a manipulated market.
- 7e 3y ago
  Citation please. According to this report, grid solar is 3-5x cheaper than residential solar (LCoE): https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/04/14/average-solar-lcoe-increases-for-first-time-this-year/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/04/14/average-solar-lcoe-in... Solar and wind power is also not dispatchable, so one needs to add storage costs to the off-grid solution. Most people saving money buying solar are taking advantage of net metering legislation which forces the utility to buy their power at retail price (above wholesale cost). They use the grid to store electricity for them for use after the sun goes down, without paying for the cost of their own batteries. That’s not DIY. It’s taking advantage of a grid subsidy.
  - _aavaa_ 3y ago
    Levelized costs refer to the costs the owner of the asset has to pay. For grid solar that’s liekly the utility company, but it’s definitely not you. For your own solar you’re the owner. It’s the minimum breakeven sell price for the owner. except you don’t pay the utilities that price. You are also charge, at a minimum, transmission and distribution fees. Further, the grid isn’t 100% solar and electricity prices are dictated by a variety of factors, lcoe being an estimate for the floor of each asset.
  - rstuart4133 3y ago
    The OP didn't mention LCoE. The comparison was based on quote "the price they pay for power from the grid". That price includes transmission overhead, retail markup and government charges, all of which the "individual" who installs their own power plant avoids. And he's usually right, although I'm not so sure of the "dramatic" bit. It's why people who own their own houses in a sunny location save money by installing solar.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
Slightly more accurate headline would be "grid operators doing stupid stuff due to bad incentives is threatening climate goals". Increased electricity use isn't, in itself, a problem. In fact, given the electrify everything movement, it's a fundamental part of the solution. Those EVs and heat pumps for example, are helping to meet climate goals even if coal powered. But a simple time of use rate and a renewables heavy generation portfolio supercharges their benefits.

31 points by artur_makly 3y ago

“ Some utilities say they need additional fossil fuel capacity because cleaner alternatives like wind or solar power aren’t growing fast enough and can be bogged down by delayed permits and snarled supply chains. ”

happytiger 3y ago

Just install more renewable power. These idiots are literally complaining about excessive demand when they own a power company.

astrodust 3y ago
"But muh surge pricing!"

polski-g 3y ago

They should spend more time reforming the NRC to not sandbag every proposed nuclear plant in the past 50 years.

MostlyStable 3y ago
Agreed, and to add: it cost NuScale half a billion dollars to get their design approved, for which the application was 12,000 pages long in addition to ~2 million pages of supporting documents[0]. [0]https://archive.is/cmHXQ https://archive.is/cmHXQ
- zarzavat 3y ago
  It’s fair enough to require that kind of diligence for a new design, given the extreme consequences of failure. Half a billion dollars is not much relative to the cost of a catastrophic accident which would be an order of magnitude more, or two. The problem is not the cost of design but rather the cost of deploying a proven design.
  - username332211 3y ago
    A 12 thousand page application and 2 million pages of supporting documentation is not diligence, it's circus. You can write that sort of documents, but nobody will read all of it and understand it. Would anyone even notice if the documents involved contained a few paragraphs T-Rex erotica hidden in them? Hell, would anyone notice if you crammed the entire text of "A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay" in there? If you have any doubt about it, observe that Microsoft wants to use an LLM to generate the application documents.

jes5199 3y ago

this is a short term problem. Solar and batteries are continuing to get cheaper fast, and production is ramping up. Even natural gas will be a stranded asset in a decade

7e 3y ago
Batteries are not a solution, and probably never will be. If you buy and install a Tesla Powerwall, it will cost you $11,500 to store $1.65 worth of electricity. It’s literally ~ten thousand times more expansive than the energy is worth. It’s practical to time shift for a few hours at most. The world needs much cheaper energy storage: compressed air, pumped hydro, and hydrogen electrolysis.
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  That’s a rather strong claim against batteries given that they are already being used to large degrees in the power grid. And that they can fill the niche of very rapid response times, unlike the other listed options. As is placing hydrogen in the cheap category.
  - 7e 3y ago
    Like I said, batteries are practical for time shifting a few hours, becauses you can amortize the cost over twenty years and only double the cost of the power, and that is exactly where they are used in grid. https://about.bnef.com/blog/2023-hydrogen-levelized-cost-update-green-beats-gray/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/2023-hydrogen-levelized-cost-upd... puts cheapest green hydrogen LCoE at $1.50/kg. Hydrogen is scalable to store for long periods in salt caverns and large tanks.
    - _aavaa_ 3y ago
      First off, the 1.50 $/kg is the levelized cost of hydrogen not of energy. I can't get access to their full report, so I will have to assume their used a similar approach as [0], numbers are old since it's from 2021 but the analysis hold. LCoH is what the H2 costs as soon as it leaves the electrolyzer. That analysis looks only at electricity and CAPEX and OPEX for the electrolyzers. What is does NOT include is compression, drying, transmission, distribution, or storage. Specifically for this discussion it also does not include any of the costs associated with the fuel cell portion of the stack, i.e. the entire other half of a electricity->hydrogen->electricity scheme. So that will increase costs substantially. The other comment is about the 1.50 $/kg. That is a ridiculously low number. H2 LHV is 33.3 kWh/kg, assuming an optimistic 70% electrolyzer efficiency you need 47.6 kWh/kg of electricty. 1.50 $/kg / 47.6 kWh/kg is ~0.03 $/kWh. And that's if all the cost comes from electricty. Again you still need capex and opex for the electrolyzer. This is the same electricity price as the Lazards reported I linked. That report assumes you'll have the green electricity available 98% of the time. I have no idea where in the world they're going to get such low prices 24/7 on a market once they add the GW worth of demand. Yes certain regions have negative electricity rates, for a few hours a day, but those caused by the mix of renewables and coal/gas/nuclear, and it's the latter which is why costs are negative. I don't think you can count that as green energy, unless it's the nuclear asset that's running. [0]: https://www.lazard.com/media/12qcxl1j/lazards-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen-analysis-vf.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/12qcxl1j/lazards-levelized-cost...

PaulKeeble 3y ago

With Solar and Wind both below $50 a MWH they are the cheapest option for adding capacity at the moment. One of the more wild things about the green power transition is that individuals have been buying their own installations and drastically undercutting the price they pay for power from the grid. In what other industry is your personal DIY solution drastically cheaper than the industrial mass scale of big business. The entire power industry seems to have an aversion to deploying the cheapest options for expansion and more power and new custom. They get the best returns for the cheapest options that also happen to be the greenest and yet they keep building ever more CO2 emitting sources and keeping prices high. Its clearly a manipulated market.

7e 3y ago
Citation please. According to this report, grid solar is 3-5x cheaper than residential solar (LCoE): https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/04/14/average-solar-lcoe-increases-for-first-time-this-year/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/04/14/average-solar-lcoe-in... Solar and wind power is also not dispatchable, so one needs to add storage costs to the off-grid solution. Most people saving money buying solar are taking advantage of net metering legislation which forces the utility to buy their power at retail price (above wholesale cost). They use the grid to store electricity for them for use after the sun goes down, without paying for the cost of their own batteries. That’s not DIY. It’s taking advantage of a grid subsidy.
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  Levelized costs refer to the costs the owner of the asset has to pay. For grid solar that’s liekly the utility company, but it’s definitely not you. For your own solar you’re the owner. It’s the minimum breakeven sell price for the owner. except you don’t pay the utilities that price. You are also charge, at a minimum, transmission and distribution fees. Further, the grid isn’t 100% solar and electricity prices are dictated by a variety of factors, lcoe being an estimate for the floor of each asset.
- rstuart4133 3y ago
  The OP didn't mention LCoE. The comparison was based on quote "the price they pay for power from the grid". That price includes transmission overhead, retail markup and government charges, all of which the "individual" who installs their own power plant avoids. And he's usually right, although I'm not so sure of the "dramatic" bit. It's why people who own their own houses in a sunny location save money by installing solar.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

Slightly more accurate headline would be "grid operators doing stupid stuff due to bad incentives is threatening climate goals". Increased electricity use isn't, in itself, a problem. In fact, given the electrify everything movement, it's a fundamental part of the solution. Those EVs and heat pumps for example, are helping to meet climate goals even if coal powered. But a simple time of use rate and a renewables heavy generation portfolio supercharges their benefits.