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Of all the places in the US, Texas has the most open market, where new generation succeeds or fails based on profitability. In that environment, also awash in

Of all the places in the US, Texas has the most open market, where new generation succeeds or fails based on profitability. In that environment, also awash in super cheap natural gas, capitalists are choosing to install battery storage in large amounts. A lot of people's worldviews need to open up to the new technology landscape for energy. It's a bright future, with cheap, clean renewable power, if we are willing to let the market choose it.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
Eventually the tech develops to a price/benefit ratio that makes it dumb not to adopt. Green energy has been there for a few years, mainly with production advances made by China. EVs likewise are advancing at a pace where I think the market on its own would take care of adoption (although I get why China needs to nudge it along due to national security concerns).
jfengel 2y ago
Even a fully open market is never completely efficient at minimizing prices. A fully efficient market allows people's preferences to matter. And for a vast number of people, their preference is to struggle against a vast conspiracy of climatologists and cultural Marxists. Technology can solve questions of producing maximum energy with minimum environmental effect. It cannot solve the problem of just how deeply Americans hate each other.
- throwawaymaths 2y ago
  its not like the reverse problem doesn't exist. Environmentalists and policymakers shy away from obviously good policies because they're too capitalist or dont let them have political controls (carbon auctions a la SOX or NOX auctions, privatized transport like hong kong, singapore, tokyo come to mind)
  - epistasis 2y ago
    > Environmentalists and policymakers shy away from obviously good policies because they're too capitalist or dont let them have political controls Those sorts of argumets are definitely made at the fringes, but they definitely are not the voices of policymakers, and rarely if ever make it into final policy, fortunately. The extreme leftists hate Democrats for it. See for example, this popular leftist Carl Beijer's view of trying to work with Democrats: https://www.carlbeijer.com/p/political-allies-dont-have-to-like https://www.carlbeijer.com/p/political-allies-dont-have-to-l... They can barely bring themselves to work with liberals, but try to at times.
    - throwawaymaths 2y ago
      how many us cities have public transport that is run by a private entity?
      - epistasis 2y ago
        SF had private shuttles for mass transit a few years ago! I'm not sure if it was a pandemic casualty or something else made them go away. And to this day large employers in the Bay Area run private shuttles for their employees, to get around the terrible balkanization of transit systems in the US. I would definitely like to see more. But the biggest impediment to that are the cultural and legal status quo of car-dependent urban design, which mightily resists change. At the state and local levels I'm advocating for massive change to planning laws to make density possible, which makes mass transit possible, but it's a long slog and slow and not making much progress.
        throwawaymaths 2y ago
        neither of those is public transit though. For example of well-run systems with inecntive structures aligned with the public interest see ComfortDelGro or MRT
        vlovich123 2y ago
        From Wikipedia about MRT: > making the network one of the world's costliest on both a per-kilometre and absolute basis. The system is managed in conformity with a semi-nationalised hybrid regulatory framework; construction and procurement fall under the purview of the Land Transport Authority (LTA), a statutory board of the government that allocates operating concessions to the for-profit private corporations SMRT and SBS Transit. These operators are responsible for asset maintenance on their respective lines, and also run bus services, facilitating operational synchronicity and the horizontal integration of the broader public transportation network. Privatization doesn’t work for infrastructure that has no competition. That’s why the cheapest broadband is when the city runs and maintains the fiber & companies pay for access to the customer base.
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
I totally agree with your wider point but I would guess there's federal subsidies involved in the current pricing in Texas. I think those are a good thing, and there should be more of them and more effort removing the explicit and implicit subsidies on gas that they seek to counterbalance. (I'm also now wondering how much the solar panels paid in tariffs and if the two government interventions cancel out) But probably worth acknowledging they exist. Here's a right wing take on it: https://www.texaspolicyresearch.com/federal-energy-subsidies-distort-the-market-and-impact-texas-a-closer-look-at-the-true-costs/ https://www.texaspolicyresearch.com/federal-energy-subsidies... I think Lazard has info on costs before and after incentives.
- epistasis 2y ago
  Lazard's, also points out that solar is the cheapest energy source (on average, this varies by geography). Fossil fuel subsidies are much larger than renewable energy subsidies, as a total dollar amount, but then right now we get much more of our energy from fossil fuels. > For fossil fuels, the nature of subsidies differs. Tax provisions like the expensing of intangible drilling costs defer expenses rather than involve direct payments. Critics argue that these measures should not be classified as subsidies since they do not provide government cash infusions. However, any form of subsidy, whether through direct spending or tax incentives, skews the energy market and undermines the principle of free enterprise. The most shocking thing is the battery, to me. Because the battery subsidy is at most 1-2 years of price drops. So if today, batteries are cost effective, but only because of subsidy, in a short time they will be cost-effective without any subsidy. However, if we want cheap energy we should keep the subsidies in place. Batteries and solar get cheaper the more we build of them, so the faster we make the investment, the faster they get cheaper, and the sooner we have a cheaper energy source, which all in all saves us massive amounts of money. The "Inflation Reduction Act" was a funny name for Biden's on-shoring of massive amounts of factories for renewable energy, but I think in the end it will stop future inflation, long after he has died. Energy price spikes are frequently the cause of inflation, but once we have the coming energy abundance, and most of the cost of electricity is in storage rather than generation, we don't have to worry as much about global geopolitics cutting off our supply. The worst will be a week-long shortage due to a continent-wide weather event that we have not yet seen the likes of, but likely will in the future due to climate change. Or, a volcano eruption that also at the same time destroys crop production, in which case lower electricity levels won't be much of a concern...
parasense 2y ago
The natural gas situation is still sketchy because the incentive to build more capacity is very low, but the natural gas alongside coal electricity generation is know as baseband power. Very reliable inertial generators (turbines) smooth over the unstable electrical from wind turbines or solar. As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site. Better would be magnetically suspended flywheels in a hard vacuum buried under ground. These are more ecological and have the same baseband quality as a turbine constant spin generator, and require very little energy to up-keep. I would say a hybrid way of having these flywheels in large numbers with on-site lithium batteries to provide site power, and line-leveling as the relays switch over to the flywheels, similar to how batteries in a data center last just long enough to let the diesel gen spin up... The problem is if all these renewable eco friendly sources crowd out the dirty more reliable sources, then there will eventually not be any reliable sources. It's a nasty paradox.
- epistasis 2y ago
  > because the incentive to build more capacity is very low, The incentive for new gas generation is the same as for new solar generation: selling electricity profitably on the grid. If you are saying that new gas generation has trouble competing with batteries and solar, I would agree. I would go further and say that new solar and batteries are cheaper than merely the fuel and operating costs of many existing fossil fuel plants. Especially coal. And a lot of gas too, particularly the peaker plants that burn for short amounts of time to capture price spikes on the market. > Very reliable inertial generators (turbines) smooth over the unstable electrical from wind turbines or solar. There's two very different concepts here: inertial generators for frequency regulation and supplying reactive power, which solar does not generate natively, but is now with grid-forming inverters. Also, batteries have been serving frequency regulation for more than a decade, starting in the PJM market. The need for inertial generation has been replaced even with very old and expensive battery technology. The second concept of "reliable" is dispatchable power: can you put power on the grid when it's needed? Batteries also solve this, and are being deployed, profitably, in Texas, as opposed to new gas generation. > As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site. That's a fairly minor implementation detail, and the installers are taking on all that risk on their own, as they will lose everything if there's a fire that spreads. A battery going up in smoke is still far better than the amounts of natural gas that get burned in its place. > Better would be magnetically suspended flywheels in a hard vacuum buried under ground. These are more ecological and have the same baseband quality as a turbine constant spin generator, and require very little energy to up-keep. I would say a hybrid way of having these flywheels in large numbers with on-site lithium batteries to provide site power, and line-leveling as the relays switch over to the flywheels, similar to how batteries in a data center last just long enough to let the diesel gen spin up... Flywheels are a completely impractical technology that doesn't scale and is far too expensive. Especially in vacuum underground. Inverters are a far better solution than fly-wheels: cheaper, more battle-tested, actually deployed in practice instead of just in the lab, and widespread.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> capitalists are choosing to install battery storage in large amounts Texas is building massive amounts of natural gas, too. Solar + natural gas makes sense for America. (It doesn’t for Europe, but whatever.)
perrygeo 2y ago
But this data fully destroys the idea of a binary economic choice presented by the current political landscape. It's not renewables vs fossil fuels. It's renewables AND fossil fuels and whatever else we can use to make stuff move. The whole ideological split is a fabricated culture war. The economy demands energy, full stop. Another thing to be wary of in this title: headlines like this are written specifically to sound like renewables are winning this ideological battle against fossil fuels. It's so vital to understand: that is not happening at all. Renewables and fossil fuels capacity are BOTH increasing (though renewables at a faster rate - don't confuse the derivative with the scalar value of interest). We are not "replacing" fossil fuels by any metric, and saying so is outright greenwashing. The atmosphere responds to CO2 concentration, not good intentions.
- epistasis 2y ago
  I don't know what "idea of binary economic choice presented by the current political landscape means." Are you saying that the political sphere is saying that only one of natural gas or renewables could be built? If that's what you're saying, I don't think it's a widespread idea, it's just the Republican idea spread to straw man against building any renewables at all. If it's something else, I'm very interested! It takes a long time for people to adapt to new reality, and I would expect natural gas to continue to be build even after it is no longer economically feasible until people learn the hard way. Also, batteries are continuously dropping in cost. Gas might be able to reach a tiny decrease, but it does not benefit from the continual improvement of technology like batteries do. We are not replacing fossil fuels, yet, but only becuase energy use is expanding, and the energy capacity additions are eating up our entire production capacity of renewables. As we build out more and more factories for renewables, and as existing natural gas turbines reach end of life, the switchover will happen. Globally, fossil fuels are barely expanding. The IEA, a famously pro-fossil fuel org, thinks that China reached peak fossil fuel consumption in 2024, and will decrease fossil fuel use in the future even as every consumption grows. IEA also thinks that more than half of electricity generation will be carbon free, worldwide, by 2030: https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-242-iea-outlook-2025/ https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-242-iea-outlook-2... We are not transitioning the energy system fast enough to get the cheapest possible energy, or to meet reasonable climate goals, but that's entirely because of politics instead of technical or economic feasibility.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

Eventually the tech develops to a price/benefit ratio that makes it dumb not to adopt. Green energy has been there for a few years, mainly with production advances made by China. EVs likewise are advancing at a pace where I think the market on its own would take care of adoption (although I get why China needs to nudge it along due to national security concerns).

jfengel 2y ago

Even a fully open market is never completely efficient at minimizing prices. A fully efficient market allows people's preferences to matter. And for a vast number of people, their preference is to struggle against a vast conspiracy of climatologists and cultural Marxists. Technology can solve questions of producing maximum energy with minimum environmental effect. It cannot solve the problem of just how deeply Americans hate each other.

throwawaymaths 2y ago
its not like the reverse problem doesn't exist. Environmentalists and policymakers shy away from obviously good policies because they're too capitalist or dont let them have political controls (carbon auctions a la SOX or NOX auctions, privatized transport like hong kong, singapore, tokyo come to mind)
- epistasis 2y ago
  > Environmentalists and policymakers shy away from obviously good policies because they're too capitalist or dont let them have political controls Those sorts of argumets are definitely made at the fringes, but they definitely are not the voices of policymakers, and rarely if ever make it into final policy, fortunately. The extreme leftists hate Democrats for it. See for example, this popular leftist Carl Beijer's view of trying to work with Democrats: https://www.carlbeijer.com/p/political-allies-dont-have-to-like https://www.carlbeijer.com/p/political-allies-dont-have-to-l... They can barely bring themselves to work with liberals, but try to at times.
  - throwawaymaths 2y ago
    how many us cities have public transport that is run by a private entity?
    - epistasis 2y ago
      SF had private shuttles for mass transit a few years ago! I'm not sure if it was a pandemic casualty or something else made them go away. And to this day large employers in the Bay Area run private shuttles for their employees, to get around the terrible balkanization of transit systems in the US. I would definitely like to see more. But the biggest impediment to that are the cultural and legal status quo of car-dependent urban design, which mightily resists change. At the state and local levels I'm advocating for massive change to planning laws to make density possible, which makes mass transit possible, but it's a long slog and slow and not making much progress.
      - throwawaymaths 2y ago
        neither of those is public transit though. For example of well-run systems with inecntive structures aligned with the public interest see ComfortDelGro or MRT
        vlovich123 2y ago
        From Wikipedia about MRT: > making the network one of the world's costliest on both a per-kilometre and absolute basis. The system is managed in conformity with a semi-nationalised hybrid regulatory framework; construction and procurement fall under the purview of the Land Transport Authority (LTA), a statutory board of the government that allocates operating concessions to the for-profit private corporations SMRT and SBS Transit. These operators are responsible for asset maintenance on their respective lines, and also run bus services, facilitating operational synchronicity and the horizontal integration of the broader public transportation network. Privatization doesn’t work for infrastructure that has no competition. That’s why the cheapest broadband is when the city runs and maintains the fiber & companies pay for access to the customer base.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

I totally agree with your wider point but I would guess there's federal subsidies involved in the current pricing in Texas. I think those are a good thing, and there should be more of them and more effort removing the explicit and implicit subsidies on gas that they seek to counterbalance. (I'm also now wondering how much the solar panels paid in tariffs and if the two government interventions cancel out) But probably worth acknowledging they exist. Here's a right wing take on it: https://www.texaspolicyresearch.com/federal-energy-subsidies-distort-the-market-and-impact-texas-a-closer-look-at-the-true-costs/ https://www.texaspolicyresearch.com/federal-energy-subsidies... I think Lazard has info on costs before and after incentives.

epistasis 2y ago
Lazard's, also points out that solar is the cheapest energy source (on average, this varies by geography). Fossil fuel subsidies are much larger than renewable energy subsidies, as a total dollar amount, but then right now we get much more of our energy from fossil fuels. > For fossil fuels, the nature of subsidies differs. Tax provisions like the expensing of intangible drilling costs defer expenses rather than involve direct payments. Critics argue that these measures should not be classified as subsidies since they do not provide government cash infusions. However, any form of subsidy, whether through direct spending or tax incentives, skews the energy market and undermines the principle of free enterprise. The most shocking thing is the battery, to me. Because the battery subsidy is at most 1-2 years of price drops. So if today, batteries are cost effective, but only because of subsidy, in a short time they will be cost-effective without any subsidy. However, if we want cheap energy we should keep the subsidies in place. Batteries and solar get cheaper the more we build of them, so the faster we make the investment, the faster they get cheaper, and the sooner we have a cheaper energy source, which all in all saves us massive amounts of money. The "Inflation Reduction Act" was a funny name for Biden's on-shoring of massive amounts of factories for renewable energy, but I think in the end it will stop future inflation, long after he has died. Energy price spikes are frequently the cause of inflation, but once we have the coming energy abundance, and most of the cost of electricity is in storage rather than generation, we don't have to worry as much about global geopolitics cutting off our supply. The worst will be a week-long shortage due to a continent-wide weather event that we have not yet seen the likes of, but likely will in the future due to climate change. Or, a volcano eruption that also at the same time destroys crop production, in which case lower electricity levels won't be much of a concern...

parasense 2y ago

The natural gas situation is still sketchy because the incentive to build more capacity is very low, but the natural gas alongside coal electricity generation is know as baseband power. Very reliable inertial generators (turbines) smooth over the unstable electrical from wind turbines or solar. As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site. Better would be magnetically suspended flywheels in a hard vacuum buried under ground. These are more ecological and have the same baseband quality as a turbine constant spin generator, and require very little energy to up-keep. I would say a hybrid way of having these flywheels in large numbers with on-site lithium batteries to provide site power, and line-leveling as the relays switch over to the flywheels, similar to how batteries in a data center last just long enough to let the diesel gen spin up... The problem is if all these renewable eco friendly sources crowd out the dirty more reliable sources, then there will eventually not be any reliable sources. It's a nasty paradox.

epistasis 2y ago
> because the incentive to build more capacity is very low, The incentive for new gas generation is the same as for new solar generation: selling electricity profitably on the grid. If you are saying that new gas generation has trouble competing with batteries and solar, I would agree. I would go further and say that new solar and batteries are cheaper than merely the fuel and operating costs of many existing fossil fuel plants. Especially coal. And a lot of gas too, particularly the peaker plants that burn for short amounts of time to capture price spikes on the market. > Very reliable inertial generators (turbines) smooth over the unstable electrical from wind turbines or solar. There's two very different concepts here: inertial generators for frequency regulation and supplying reactive power, which solar does not generate natively, but is now with grid-forming inverters. Also, batteries have been serving frequency regulation for more than a decade, starting in the PJM market. The need for inertial generation has been replaced even with very old and expensive battery technology. The second concept of "reliable" is dispatchable power: can you put power on the grid when it's needed? Batteries also solve this, and are being deployed, profitably, in Texas, as opposed to new gas generation. > As far as battery capacity goes, that's also sketchy because ERCOT is allowing dangerous risky lithium packs to be installed in a tightly packed together industrial space optimized way that could result in disaster when one unit catches fire, spreading to the whole site. That's a fairly minor implementation detail, and the installers are taking on all that risk on their own, as they will lose everything if there's a fire that spreads. A battery going up in smoke is still far better than the amounts of natural gas that get burned in its place. > Better would be magnetically suspended flywheels in a hard vacuum buried under ground. These are more ecological and have the same baseband quality as a turbine constant spin generator, and require very little energy to up-keep. I would say a hybrid way of having these flywheels in large numbers with on-site lithium batteries to provide site power, and line-leveling as the relays switch over to the flywheels, similar to how batteries in a data center last just long enough to let the diesel gen spin up... Flywheels are a completely impractical technology that doesn't scale and is far too expensive. Especially in vacuum underground. Inverters are a far better solution than fly-wheels: cheaper, more battle-tested, actually deployed in practice instead of just in the lab, and widespread.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> capitalists are choosing to install battery storage in large amounts Texas is building massive amounts of natural gas, too. Solar + natural gas makes sense for America. (It doesn’t for Europe, but whatever.)

perrygeo 2y ago

But this data fully destroys the idea of a binary economic choice presented by the current political landscape. It's not renewables vs fossil fuels. It's renewables AND fossil fuels and whatever else we can use to make stuff move. The whole ideological split is a fabricated culture war. The economy demands energy, full stop. Another thing to be wary of in this title: headlines like this are written specifically to sound like renewables are winning this ideological battle against fossil fuels. It's so vital to understand: that is not happening at all. Renewables and fossil fuels capacity are BOTH increasing (though renewables at a faster rate - don't confuse the derivative with the scalar value of interest). We are not "replacing" fossil fuels by any metric, and saying so is outright greenwashing. The atmosphere responds to CO2 concentration, not good intentions.

epistasis 2y ago
I don't know what "idea of binary economic choice presented by the current political landscape means." Are you saying that the political sphere is saying that only one of natural gas or renewables could be built? If that's what you're saying, I don't think it's a widespread idea, it's just the Republican idea spread to straw man against building any renewables at all. If it's something else, I'm very interested! It takes a long time for people to adapt to new reality, and I would expect natural gas to continue to be build even after it is no longer economically feasible until people learn the hard way. Also, batteries are continuously dropping in cost. Gas might be able to reach a tiny decrease, but it does not benefit from the continual improvement of technology like batteries do. We are not replacing fossil fuels, yet, but only becuase energy use is expanding, and the energy capacity additions are eating up our entire production capacity of renewables. As we build out more and more factories for renewables, and as existing natural gas turbines reach end of life, the switchover will happen. Globally, fossil fuels are barely expanding. The IEA, a famously pro-fossil fuel org, thinks that China reached peak fossil fuel consumption in 2024, and will decrease fossil fuel use in the future even as every consumption grows. IEA also thinks that more than half of electricity generation will be carbon free, worldwide, by 2030: https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-242-iea-outlook-2025/ https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-242-iea-outlook-2... We are not transitioning the energy system fast enough to get the cheapest possible energy, or to meet reasonable climate goals, but that's entirely because of politics instead of technical or economic feasibility.