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Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

sciencemag.org

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Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#331

Post by kragen »

astanway wrote: post #326
kragen wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about an average net-metering cost of about US$0.12/kWh, right? That's 3.3¢/MJ in SI units, US$120/MWh in the units used in most real-time electrical markets. LMPs do sometimes get as high as US$120/MWh and even higher — I've seen US$160 at times — but never anywhere close to US$12000/MWh, as your "cost thousands of times that" comment suggests. (US$40 is more typical, and sometimes prices go negative,…

RTM prices in ERCOT can easily spike to the price cap of $9000/MWh during bad days: https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...

Interesting! So even if the demand would justify paying $12000/MWh, ERCOT just permits brownouts or blackouts instead of paying that much? (I can't load the article you linked.)

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#332

Post by astanway »

kragen wrote: post #331
astanway wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RTM prices in ERCOT can easily spike to the price cap of $9000/MWh during bad days: https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...

Interesting! So even if the demand would justify paying $12000/MWh, ERCOT just permits brownouts or blackouts instead of paying that much? (I can't load the article you linked.)

Realistically a price higher than that wouldn't really have any effect on incentivizing generators any more, since there is a limit to how fast they can ramp up, how much spinning reserve capacity they have etc. So, it mostly just serves to protect the market from falling off the rails. The grid operation itself is actually largely disconnected from the market - the ISO primarily calls the shots with scheduling regardless of what the market is doing.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#334

Post by PeterStuer »

rmuesi wrote: post #84

I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…

An undervalued aspect of distributed rooftop solar is the resilience of it in face of grid breakdown, either intentionally through targeted attack or as a result of systemic collapse.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#335

Post by sagarm »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #33
krferriter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm renting a house in central NC and May-September our power bill skyrockets from AC. The windows are not insulated at all and we have a lot of them. Even the floors, walls, and ceilings leak heat like crazy, you can feel it just putting your hand close to the wall or ceiling. We run AC to get it down to 76F and it's still crazy expensive and using a lot of unnecessary power. We need to encourage insulation, es…

> The US needs to heavily encourage these sorts of improvements to buildings, it's good for everyone. Is it though? I imagine your landlord doesn't think it's good for them. It's not bad for them, but why would they spend hundreds or thousands of dollars improving your apartments insulation when it costs them nothing to keep the poor thermal in place. I too lived in rentals that had terrible thermal protection. It wa…

Require landlords to pay for heat? That would align incentives somewhat, though then the tenant has no incentive to be efficient.

A 50/50 split might work, since landlord is responsible for energy efficiency of the home and the tenant is responsible for setting the thermostat sanely?

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#336

Post by charliebrownau »

Gday

Has anyone actually released info to the public domain or open source to create your own DIY battery

from scratch and diy solar panel from scratch

or is this tech like so much in business/corporations and chinas hands and out of the ability for the average person to make yourself

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#337

Post by bartimus »

namibj wrote: post #273
qserasera wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a moderate sized location goes out of business would solar panels have decent resale value?

Unless you need to demolish, you want to keep them in-place.

Why would we not want to move them elsewhere?

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#338

Post by aoeusnth1 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #122
rmuesi wrote: post #84

I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…

I bought my panels via a loan. Based on my loan, my current cost of energy is much lower than if I bought it from the grid. (About 4-5 cents per kwh, instead of 20 cents per kwh.) My monthly payment never goes up, but it's unlikely that my cost of grid electricity will fall below 4-5 cents per kwh during the lifetime of my loan. Remember, the cost we pay for electricity includes the cost to run and maintain the grid…

Wow, what was your price per W? At ~$2.5/W before tax breaks, and a 5% yearly discounting rate, I calculated my TCO was about $0.08/KWh after tax breaks using a spreadsheet to calculate the net present value of the future electricity.

Usually the salesmen will quote you a cost per KWh based on the total energy generated over 25 years divided by the cost of the system. This is usually very far off (in their favor) for two reasons:

- Time discounting: at a generous 5%/year, discounting makes electricity in 20 years only worth 37.6% as much as electricity now.

- Risk: presumably, future increases in panel efficiency and manufacturing techniques will make electricity even cheaper than it is now. By signing a contract or buying a system, you're buying future electricity flows without knowing how much they'll be worth yet.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#339

Post by adrianN »

colechristensen wrote: post #207
ourmandave wrote: post #81

Meanwhile in Iowa, Mid American Energy is well on their way to 100% renewal by 2021 with an endless array of wind farms. Their final phase of the project started in 2018 with a $922M investment. Iowa Public Radio toured one of the windmills back in January. https://www.iowapublicradio.org/post/skyscrapers-fields-wind...

I wonder how people would feel about ethanol plants fired by wind farms. The one built near my family home is coal fired and the idea of growing crops to be turned into car fuel is ... less appealing. But if you had electric or ethanol powered tractors growing biomass to ferment and distill into more ethanol with a plant fired with wind, maybe there are some different environmental considerations there. For one it wo…

It probably makes more sense to use the energy to make Methane, or charge batteries.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#340

Post by caf »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #255
astanway wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wholesale price is definitely not “zero”. It fluctuates wildly, and if a retailer is exposed to the real time market at the flow date, they can expect to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. RTM prices can easily spike from $50/MW to $8000/MW in an instant if a generator trips. So, retailers buy hedges to cover this risk, at price premiums that reflect the inherent exposure insurance.

I didn't know this, thanks for clarifying. Further investigation for my local area: Here's a link to the Australian wholesale spot price and peak price https://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/National-Electricity-Mar... Where I live, Tasmania, the average for 2019 is $147.91 / MWh and the peak is $163. That works out to Au$0.163. I pay AU$0.26 / kWh, plus a daily supply charge of, if memory serves me correctly, $2.30 - t…

The "peak" price they're talking about on that page is the average spot price over the peak electricity consumption time (7AM to 10PM weekdays).

It's not the highest spot price seen in the market. This time of year the east coast electricity market seldom spikes, but if you go to the historical data page you can see that in January this year the 30 minute spot price in Tasmania spiked above $2000/MWh four times (22-Jan 17:00, 23-Jan 12:30, 23-Jan 13:30 and 30-Jan 16:00).

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