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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

#111

Post by fromthestart »

beat wrote: post #102
fromthestart wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think forcing people to use electricity only when it's available is a practical solution to the availability problem with wind and solar.

Not forcing... just having market forces encourage good behavior, instead of hiding the underlying cost pressures from them. Look at it this way. With enough variation over the day, you create a market for storage. Let's say stored electricity costs twice as much as direct, but the price of direct varies by 3x over the course of the day. You've now created an arbitrage market for buying cheap electricity during the d…

I understand your point, but GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead. If you're not using batteries, supply during dark or windless hours is inelastic, because there's nothing being generated - in other words you're not solving the problem and you can't really charge anyone anyway because there's nothing to deliver.

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

#112

Post by WalterBright »

mruts wrote: post #93
WalterBright wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that if variable electricity pricing for consumers, a great deal of the need for "batteries" will evaporate. Heavy consumer electric uses (charging the car, HVAC, hot water) can easily be time shifted. It isn't time shifted today because consumer electricity rates are constant 24/7.

The price for electricity already varies hour by hour. Maybe not as much as solar would, but most people (including me) are not paying a pegged price for electricity 24/7.

Not in the Pacific Northwest (Puget Power).

Also, to make this work best, appliances need to be connected to the internet and the power companies need to have an internet ABI where the current power price can be extracted by those appliances.

At last, an actual use for internet connected appliances!

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

#113

Post by bobcostas55 »

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.…

The $/mwh for renewables is only part of the story. The intermittency costs they impose on the system as a whole is higher than the direct cost of producing the energy, and the only way to solve this is through improving battery technology by orders of magnitude. Additionally, the intermittency costs per mwh will increase as the share of renewable energy increases.

In general, renewable energy investments right now are completely irrational in terms of the environmental impact, as they cost up to 10x more than the total social cost of the carbon emissions they are displacing. (And also much more than _current_ carbon sequestration tech!) [0]

[0] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFIEPIC_WP_20196...

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

#114

Post by WalterBright »

fromthestart wrote: post #111
beat wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not forcing... just having market forces encourage good behavior, instead of hiding the underlying cost pressures from them. Look at it this way. With enough variation over the day, you create a market for storage. Let's say stored electricity costs twice as much as direct, but the price of direct varies by 3x over the course of the day. You've now created an arbitrage market for buying cheap electricity during the d…

I understand your point, but GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead. If you're not using batteries, supply during dark or windless hours is inelastic, because there's nothing being generated - in other words you're not solving the problem and you can't really charge anyone anyway because there's nothing to deliver.

> GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead.

Nope, I talked about incentivizing consumers to shift their demand based on a volatile price. I pointed out that much of this can be accomplished without need of batteries.

For example, have the hot water tank heat up water higher than normal when electricity is cheaper, and lower when electricity is more expensive. Hot water tanks lose heat very slowly, this could result in never needing to heat water during the expensive times.

It's a heluva lot cheaper than having a battery do it.

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

#115

Post by jandrese »

sunkenvicar wrote: post #83
jandrese wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about natural gas? I can think of a couple of other renewable resources: Geothermal and Hydroelectric, but Geothermal is geographically limited and Hydroelectric has proven to have more environmental impact than we would like. I have no idea on what the other three could be. I guess you could include Nuclear in the list, but the price points on that make it hard to declare it better than Solar and Win…

What are the severe environmental impacts of hydro?

I didn't say severe, but there are environmental impacts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_reserv...

The biggest is the destruction of migrating fish habitat, sometimes reversible with specialized structures (salmon ladders), sometimes not. There is also some evidence for increased CO2 emissions from artificial reservoirs.

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

#116

Post by thfuran »

beat wrote: post #78
flyinglizard wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just how reliable are we talking? The odds of being unable to fully service demand for even a single day should be really, really low for infrastructure like electrical or water supply.

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

#117

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#118

Post by dmix »

the8472 wrote: post #58
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…

The fuel (or lack thereof) may be free, but in the foreseeable future generation capacity and transmission infrastructure is not. Someone has to build and maintain it according to demand. If efficiency or consumption limits are not incentivized then you risk demand exceeding capacity. Civilization grows with available energy. People would start desalinating the oceans to green deserts, speed-boat cargo around the wor…

Windmills break down too, plenty of moving parts. idk what the maintenance window is for solar.

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

#119

Post by philipkglass »

makomk wrote: post #80
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 e…

I think that you're probably right about gaps remaining, for basically the reasons you have given. And for that reason I don't expect mass demolition of American gas plants in the 2030s the way there was mass demolition of American coal plants in the 2010s.

The growth of gas capacity is alarming to many environmentalists; the phrase is that we're "locking in" decades of high emissions from gas fired electrical generators. But gas plants release the vast majority of their emissions during operation, not construction. Diminishing the plant load factor of gas plants is as good from an emissions-cuts standpoint as tearing them down. What do you do when the wind isn't blowing, the batteries are discharged, and it's night time? Burn gas. But the number of hours per year where at least one of {batteries, wind, solar} can bid below gas will go up year after year, whereas that number was essentially holding steady at zero through the whole 20th century.

This brief sketch is most applicable to deregulated electricity markets. In markets with regulated utility monopolies, unfortunately, gas plants will be subject to less competition even if the cost of storage-backed renewables keeps declining steadily. The majority of US electricity consumption now takes place in deregulated states but it's far from universal.

https://www.electricchoice.com/map-deregulated-energy-market...

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

#120

Post by [deleted] »

makomk wrote: post #80
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 e…

[deleted]
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