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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

#71

Post by beat »

surfmike wrote: post #39
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?

Depends. But wind doesn't really need storage... a broad-based wind grid delivers a pretty consistent base load, as we've learned from early adopters like Iowa and Texas that have over a decade of wind data at scale.

edit: There's enough variation in wind farm output to maybe make some storage financially beneficial - production costs could actually go negative when there's enough wind.

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

#72

Post by Merrill »

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?

View source.

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

#73

Post by beat »

dpflan wrote: post #50
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 believe this kind of technological breakthrough is the main point of Diamandis' book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think . That would be a liberating event -- the key would be then getting the energy technology to societies in need - mainly a technological leap frogging, like mobile phones in developing nations did. > https://www.diamandis.com/abundance

The book Fully Automated Luxury Communism gets into this as well.

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

#74

Post by tomatocracy »

generatorguy wrote: post #66
tomatocracy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Yes, there will always be baseload demand. But I think with the right setup more demand matching is possible for domestic and commercial buildings with relatively little effort.

One way this could work is that you have eg a smart heating thermostat which plans which hours of the day/night to turn heating on and then buys power to cover that in a day-ahead market, with the aim of minimising cost on that basis.

Wind and solar power are relatively preditable a day out so you wouldn't be paying too much to power traders for providing day-ahead liquidity vs on-demand pricing.

Likewise, EVs all end up parked somewhere during the day - the challenge is ensuring that as many of those places as possible (car parks, workplaces, etc) have charging points too; you could do something very similar there with an algorithm deciding whether to charge based on a spot price and how much is in the battery (say, owner programs car to top up to 65% and then only continue charging if power is cheap).

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

#75

Post by foota »

darksaints wrote: post #64

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…

Really? A quick Google shows a Tesla gets ~3 miles per kwh, so 10 miles would only be about 3 kwh. A kwh is about ten cents where I live iirc. Power's like $50 a month. So I use about ($50/10 cents)/30 ~ 13-14 kwh a day.

So 10 miles a day would be more like 20%.

That said though, a quick search shows vehicle miles travelled per capita in the US is 10k, so closer to 30 miles a day, or 9 kwh.

However, vehicles can be charged off peak in a lot of places (hot places peak during the day in the summer) so can be charged at night.

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

#76

Post by Merrill »

>"The authors of the study say they analyzed the costs of construction, fuel and anticipated operations for 68 gigawatts of gas plants proposed across the U.S. They compared those costs to building a combination of solar farms, wind plants and battery systems that, together with conservation efforts, could supply the same amount of electricity and keep the grid stable."

If the same amount of electricity is being supplied, why are conservation efforts needed? Has anyone downloaded the reports from Rocky Mountain Institute? They want your email address.

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

#77

Post by gibybo »

darksaints wrote: post #64

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…

300 wh/mile seems to be about what most electric cars achieve. 10 miles/day * 300 wh/mile * 30 days = 90 kWh.

The average monthly energy consumption per capita in the U.S. is about 1000 kWh[1], so in order to double that with electric cars every individual would need to drive an average of 110 miles per day.

[1] https://www.worlddata.info/america/usa/energy-consumption.ph...

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

#78

Post by beat »

flyinglizard wrote: post #42
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…

It's not so simple, because energy consumption is restrained by its cost. There are also grids that will need expansion and maintenance, and both solar and winds need either baseline energy backing (such as nuclear or gas) and/or storage.

A wind-based grid, at scale, is actually a reliable baseline. We have over a decade of solid data on it now, from Iowa and Texas. Wind is much more reliable than you think.

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

#79

Post by sunkenvicar »

generatorguy wrote: post #53
lstodd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't know why you are downvoted. I used to run solar powered sites that would have 5 rainy days in a row in which only about 10% of solar generation was delivered during daylight hours. We started with only enough batteries to last overnight and ended up with 10x that. Then we added 33% more when the first set of batteries had a short life due to getting so deeply discharged.

He’s downvoted because he’s bringing on-the-ground facts to a political discussion about solar and wind.

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

#80

Post by makomk »

philipkglass wrote: post #57

1) I think it's certainly possible , but 2035 is still some time out. Extrapolating battery costs 16 years from now is not at all straightforward. 2) The headline result can be true even if solar/wind/storage have significant annual gaps in availability. If a gas plant was originally built on the assumption that it could run profitably for 5000 hours per year, but in the future there are only 2000 hours a year it can…

I'd venture a guess that solar/wind/storage would have significant gaps in availability in this scenario. The economics of battery storage solutions scales really badly as the length of the gaps they need to fill increases. Not only does the capital cost of batteries increase in proportion to the runtime required, the utilization plummets due to longer gaps being less common and predictable than shorter ones. I can easily see it becoming uneconomical to provide a reliable electricity grid. Unfortunately, one of the other anti-global-warming measures that's being pushed for in this timescale in at least some European countries is switching to electricity for heating.
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