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Because storage is incredibly expensive and thus, for every GW of installed solar capacity you need and an exact another GW reserve capacity from other sources
by elzbardico 11mo ago
Because storage is incredibly expensive and thus, for every GW of installed solar capacity you need and an exact another GW reserve capacity from other sources for the rare times when the sun doesn't shine (like, for example, during the night or during large spells of bad weather).
Besides being intermittent, solar and wind are not really dispatchable, that is, the grid operator doesn't have many levers to control the power output of a plan, and thus this imposes more stress on the other dispatchable power sources.
Some of those backup sources are not very flexible and take a long time to turn on and off, like coal based, and a lot of nuclear plants. Others, can be brought up online, ramped up and down faster, like gas turbines and hydro.
But other than gas turbine, most other firm sources economics are based on a predictable demand and a minimum duty cycle. A nuclear plant is very capital expensive, have an excellent capacity factor, but, it can't pay itself and its investor if it is not going to be run most of the time.
Base load is cheaper, because you dilute fixed costs, peak load is more expensive, because you sell less units to dilute your fixed costs.
Despite whatever the renewable lobby says, experience has shown over and over, that after a certain proportion of intermittent generation in a grid, large frequency excursions, deteriorated economics and frequent load shedding events are rather the norm than the exception.
AC grids are stupidly complex beasts. Most politicians, journalists and investors that drive our current discourse on the grid don't have even the most basic pre-requirements to understand it.
- k1musab1 11mo agoThis exact issue lead me to follow the grid orchestration research out of the Oak Ridge Laboratory. The building blocks already exist to enable this. An interconnected smart network of renewables can become a stabilizing force in the overall grid. Off-peak storage would still be required, but would no longer need to be "stabilizing" (turbine or other similar generator), and can be simple batteries.
- londons_explore 11mo agoAll these problems become solved if you have realtime market pricing. Nobody would bother to install rooftop solar if daytime power was super cheap on every sunny day, yet expensive at night when their solar isn't working.
- kryogen1c 11mo agoWouldn't this model price out poor people? Doesn't that mean the most vulnerable people cant afford the services when they need them most, ie max hot/cold? Changing the utility to a market sort of defeats the point of trying to optimize the utility.
- londons_explore 11mo agoA typical user still pays the same on average in a market. Just they might pay more in some hours and less in others. Some market systems have gotten bad press over huge bills (eg. Texas), but that only happens when only a small chunk of users participate in the market, whilst others are on fixed pricing and therefore don't care about usage. When everyone participates, supply and demand make sure the price never goes super high, simply because there are enough people who will turn off stuff to save money.
- spacebanana7 11mo agoIt’s better to give welfare / benefits directly to help poor people in that situation, rather than fix prices to make energy appear artificially scarce during daylight and abundant at night.
- elzbardico 11mo agoOn the contrary right now poor people are subsidizing fat cats like me that were early enough to have net metering
- adrianN 11mo agoMy solar system has a battery than smooths out the generation over a day or two so that I can satisfy my night time demand too.
- gpm 11mo agoThis is all true except for the fact that storage is not incredibly expensive anymore, which invalidates every single conclusion you reach. Storage is now reasonably affordable, and the trend suggests it will soon be incredibly cheap.
- spwa4 11mo agoWhich will make the problems of the rich disappear and the problems of the poor and the state ... worse. (because the costs of the state are paying off loans for expensive generation, costs which they recover from the poor)
- triceratops 11mo agoThe state can default on the loans too. It sucks and it will make future financing more difficult. But it remains an option. No such thing as risk-free lending.
- spwa4 11mo ago... which would cut off imports in a non-self-sufficient state (Pakistan is a country that if it ever were isolated internationally, the people would just start dieing). For the poor the situation is simple: either they pay the loans or they lose everything they have and probably even die of hunger. A lot of muslim and African states are in that boat. If the US, yes, the international monetary system is under US control, frankly because nobody else will pay for it. If the US ever decides not to cover Pakistan's debts starvation is exactly what will happen in Pakistan.
- triceratops 11mo agoIdk there have been other examples of bigger sovereign defaults - Argentina (multiple times), Thailand, Mexico - that didn't have anything like that effect. I'm not an economist or an expert on this topic. But investors losing their money due to changing market conditions is pretty common.
- 11mo ago