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

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

#61

Post by omarhaneef »

Robotbeat wrote: post #13
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.…

Numbers for wind and solar are now about $40/MWh unsubsidized according to current LCOE analysis: https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... ...as you say, this is not the whole story as you still need storage (etc). But the floor for (unsubsidized) solar may be a lot lower than that. About $14/MWh: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-u... And we're already seeing bids near…

Yes, we are seeing very low bids. $26-$30/MWh for solar doesn't even turn heads anymore.

And battery costs are coming down too, and I think that curve looks more linear, but its coming down.

One of the issues is that these costs are so capital intensive that the financing costs drive a lot of the price drop. With near zero or negative rates in so much of the world, I think its hard to tell what the real rates would be.

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

#62

Post by beat »

Robotbeat wrote: post #13
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.…

Numbers for wind and solar are now about $40/MWh unsubsidized according to current LCOE analysis: https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... ...as you say, this is not the whole story as you still need storage (etc). But the floor for (unsubsidized) solar may be a lot lower than that. About $14/MWh: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-u... And we're already seeing bids near…

I really hope so! I think we need to see wind/solar at half the cost of gas to really break gas as an energy source. And battery storage is quite expensive for now - hundreds of dollars per mwh. Of course, there are other interesting alternatives, too - thermal storage, gravity, compressed air, etc. But conversion losses will probably always limit those systems to 25-35% efficiency at best, plus much higher construction cost relative to solar panels.

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

#64

Post by darksaints »

I'm interested in understanding how this will play out with the electrification of cars. As it stands now, the production and distribution infrastructure is mostly used for homes. But you could easily double your home's electric consumption with an electric car traveling just 10 miles per day. If we see a quick change in electric car adoption, our production and distribution systems are going to be massively strained. We might be keeping gas and coal powerplants online just for capacity reasons alone.

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

#65

Post by beat »

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.

They're shutting down because it's cheaper to shutter them (even including the loss of interest on money set aside for decommissioning) than to continue operating them.

Whatever seems "obvious" to us, the hardnosed managers responsible for the actual financial decisions are pulling the plug on dozens of reactors. If it seems irrational to us, it's because there are other cost factors we don't understand. That's why I like to look at the end, rather than make assumptions on what I think I know about the means.

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

#66

Post by generatorguy »

tomatocracy wrote: post #54
generatorguy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a lot of hope for people changing their behaviour based on time of day pricing. Sure aluminum smelters etc might have to flag it for a day once every 5 years but they do that currently because there isn't enough power for everyone so please help us out and shutdown for a day instead cause we are going to dump you anyway because we have to decide between giving you power or this other major load such as a…

We've had time of day based pricing in the UK for years - it's called "Economy 7" (and there are variants like Economy 10). Historically this was designed for electric storage heaters which were switched on a separate circuit at night and you had two sets of wiring into the house but nowadays it can be done based on pure time of day by a smart meter. People who have those tariffs do tend to alter behaviour to suit th…

Great examples.

These measures in the U.K. were put in place to shift demand due to constraints in total system capacity - total generation, total transmission, total distribution capacity. Eg a substation transformer couldn’t handle normal daily loads plus heating, so heating load is shifted to night.

What happens when power at night becomes more expensive due to increases demand such as car charging or low supply such as high renewable penetration and no wind?

It’s all about having the firm capacity to deliver power for hours on end. So the $/mwh of wind or solar power has to go up because grids are going to say you can only have more if you can supply firm capacity. This is already happening in Hawaii.

I implemented hot water tank load switching through smart meters on at a town with its own power plant of only 850 kw so they wouldn’t run out of power at dinner time when the river was low (and we didn’t have to fire up the diesel either)

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

#67

Post by gwbas1c »

aqme28 wrote: post #49
perfunctory wrote: post #40

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…

I'm more skeptical. I worry that energy demand will rise to the level of supply, more akin to road use than to phone access. As an example, you're going to have to deal with crypto miners and grow-ops.

Something to keep in mind is the growing trend of electrification in the 2020s. This will be both electric cars, and heat pumps for heating.

> “Our story for gas plants is, if you build it, they won’t run -- they won’t run at their expected capacity factors,” said Mark Dyson, who co-wrote both reports. “And that filters down to pipelines, too.”

I suspect that the demand for electricity will mean that we'll need gas plants much longer than the article believes.

This will be a good thing, because electric cars and heat pumps running off of natural gas generators is much less carbon than gasoline cars and natural gas furnaces.

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

#68

Post by gwbas1c »

twoelfer wrote: post #44
perfunctory wrote: post #40

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…

And at that point in time, in a cloudy night, the wind will stop blowing. And the lights will go dark.

That's why we have batteries and active development on ways to manufacture hydrogen without emitting carbon.

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

#69

Post by baking »

war1025 wrote: post #19

My understanding (which is probably uninformed at best) has been that coal, nuclear, etc are used to cover base load, and basically work best when up and running at 100% all the time. Natural gas has the advantage that it can be spun up and down pretty quickly, which has meant that it is used primarily for "peak" load, which I think used to be covered a lot of the time by things such as diesel and oil plants and have…

Excellent point. This should be the top comment. Buying up cheap solar and wind power during peak supply times and storing it for peak demand times should be more cost effective than building expensive gas/steam plants which would only operate for a few hours a day.

It doesn't mean that we've found a solution for base load yet.

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

#70

Post by beat »

bilbo0s wrote: post #27
GuB-42 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In a word, price. As a consumer, do you want a bill for 2 cents a kWh? Or one for 15 cents a kWh? This example explainsa lot of what's happening: [1]. By way of a brief explanation, wind is expanding so fast in a lot of places that the combination of wind+LNG is just too cheap to compete with. Iowa is particularly bad, because wind is not "unreliable" in Iowa. There's a lot of wind and it's almost always blowing. So…

An interesting factoid I ran across when researching this stuff a while back is that no one has ever built a new reactor in a deregulated electricity market. Period. The time frame of nuclear reactors is very long - like 50 years. So they're very sensitive to capital costs, and capital is sensitive to risk.

Now, if you were doing the risk analysis on financing for a multibillion-dollar nuclear project, and you just saw the cost of a major competitor (solar) drop 80% in a decade... well, how would that factor into your risk analysis? How much would your interest rates increase?

The only safe way to finance a reactor is government-based guarantees for price regulation - the nation will consume X megawatts for Y dollars, no matter what the market thinks the price should be. And do it in such a way that some government two generations down the road can't just throw it all out and screw you.

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