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Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

bloomberg.com

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Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#31

Post by Retric »

GuB-42 wrote: post #8
beat wrote: post #2

I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with wind at under $50/mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60/mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100/mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don't get unhelpfully pedantic!). These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear.…

> and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now How? My understanding is that most of the cost of nuclear power comes from building the plant and decommissioning it. Running existing power plants for as long as they can seems like the most economical choice.

Nuclear also has high operating costs, just not fuel costs.

Solar can generally just be left alone for weeks or months at a time. Nuclear however needs security guards, regular maintenance, a highly trained workforce, large insurance premiums etc. On top of that it also needs some fuel.

What’s happening with Nuclear is these older power plants occasionally need a significant overhaul and it’s at that point where they are considered too expensive.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#32

Post by lstodd »

Robotbeat wrote: post #7
timw4mail wrote: post #4

I don't see batteries being able to store the amount of power (for a practical battery lifetime to be cost effective) needed to make solar a practical primary electricity source.

To make the system close for a single site (without any geographical diversity) is to produce about 3 times as much solar energy you need and install enough batteries to meet 48 hours of average demand. That's enough to deal with seasonality and with cloudy weather to provide a constant output for an entire year. The 48 hours of battery would last a really long time as typically only about 12 hours will need to be us…

Haha lol.

Even in equatorial Africa 48h is not enough. Neither for actual usage, nor for battery life (and no one ever got marketing-leaflet-aka-datasheet-stated lifetime out of them batteries). Two years max, and hope either the project dies, or the company dies, or someone steals the batteries.

Source: been there maintaning solar offgrid.

And then --- geodiversity can only make it worse, never better.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#33

Post by perfunctory »

hash872 wrote: post #10

Sorry to thread jack, but- important question: how are people reading Bloomberg now that they shut down incognito mode as of this week? Disabling Javascript doesn't seem to work either. I'm using Outline for the time being, but it's slow and annoying, and it won't load any longforms that contain multiple pictures or graphs. Anyone else have a better solution?

Buy subscription?

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#34

Post by weregiraffe »

jessaustin wrote: post #30
weregiraffe wrote: post #5

No they won't, unless the storage issue is solved.

When the future arrives, lots of people will be amazed at how little of the solution to this "issue" ended up being storage as such and how much turned out to be demand management and reasonable system architecture.

When the future arrives, we will build enough nuclear reactors.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#36

Post by inflatableDodo »

GuB-42 wrote: post #3

Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar and big batteries . Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.

The other technical alternative is constructing a global network of electricity interconnects, though storage is probably politically more achievable and cheaper, given lithium batteries are already being used instead of upgrading existing interconnects.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#37

Post by gridlockd »

fulafel wrote: post #29
GuB-42 wrote: post #3

Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar and big batteries . Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.

This assumes that we keep supply and demand pricing models mismatched. The current "fixed price 24/7" model is not set in stone. AC/heating, EV charging, many industrial processes can shift demand and make good forecasts about how flexible their demand is vs average intra-day variation in electricity prices.

Not really, because seasonal variance is far greater than intraday variance.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#39

Post by surfmike »

beat wrote: post #2

I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with wind at under $50/mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60/mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100/mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don't get unhelpfully pedantic!). These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear.…

Do those prices for solar and wind factor in storage?

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#40

Post by perfunctory »

Some time, in not so distant future, we will have abundant, almost infinite, almost free, renewable energy. We will forget what an energy bill is, because administration overhead will be higher than the price of the energy itself. It will just be an inconspicuous tiny item on the city taxes. And we won't think it's amazing. We'll take it for granted. It will become new normal. Just like now we don't remember any more what it feels like not being reachable by phone when you go out for dinner with your friends.

Mark my words.

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