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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

#131

Post by godelski »

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…

> As a consumer, do you want a bill for 2 cents a kWh? Or one for 15 cents a kWh?

If that energy produces zero carbon then I'll take the later. But we're also only talking a difference of 7c for PV and 10c for nuclear and competitive prices for coal and natural gas. I'll gladly pay more for the nuclear than pay less for coal and natural gas.

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

#132

Post by gridlockd »

beat wrote: post #92
batmansmk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are totally correct. US, France, Japan and UK all decided to extend the filetime of their nuclear power plants. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclearpower/u-s-to-e... Wind is cheap because when the wind blows, everybody is trying to sell their wind produced energy at the same time and the country often overproduces. In Germany, we even see negative prices when the wind blows; The price is low not because…

Negative prices? You'll pay me to take electricity off your hands that I can sell later? That's the best argument for the battery storage market I've seen yet... (And really, it makes sense. Generate surplus when the sun is shining or wind is especially strong, run from storage when demand exceeds supply, build both until there's enough. As long as the costs are less than current baseline systems, which seems possibl…

They won't pay you, unless you're literally running part of the power grid.

> Generate surplus when the sun is shining or wind is especially strong, run from storage when demand exceeds supply, build both until there's enough.

That's the idea, but the battery capacity required would be enormous:

https://www.oulu.fi/blogs/how-much-storage-does-the-energiew...

> As long as the costs are less than current baseline systems, which seems possible, then it wins.

Batteries don't seem likely for a cost-effective replacement, but alternatives may develop down the road.

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

#133

Post by cma »

beat wrote: post #65
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.

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…

> If it seems irrational to us, it's because there are other cost factors we don't understand.

Since they are shielded from almost all liability by law (something like $150 million liability cap + $12.5 billion industry fund; plausible disasters could reach $1 trillion+ depending on winds), it seems like there would probably be even more shutdowns if they had to pay for real insurance.

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

#134

Post by luc4sdreyer »

beat wrote: post #62
Robotbeat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 construct…

> But conversion losses will probably always limit those systems to 25-35% efficiency at best

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but the "alternative" energy storage systems you mentioned have about 80% or more round-trip energy efficiency: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/energy-storage-2019#2

I quoted alternative because pumped-storage hydro accounts for 95% of grid energy storage in the world.

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

#135

Post by llukas »

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.

Is 10x overnight demand close to 48h of average demand? If yes then original post was right.

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

#136

Post by generatorguy »

tomatocracy wrote: post #110
generatorguy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does it cost to implement and run all the demand matching, how much money does it save the loads who are willing to participate, and how much load can reliably be controlled? The marriage of electrical system reliability to real time control of tens of thousands loads over internet or cellular would be an unholy one. This will limit acceptance as the cost of outages immediately outstrips savings. So I’m back…

I'm not talking about real-time demand matching/load shedding here as a consumer solution - as I mentioned, I think matching on a day-ahead (and perhaps also eg 6-hour ahead) basis could well be a lot better than we have now because wind and solar generation is quite predictable on a day-ahead basis, as are outside temperatures (so eg for space heating energy consumption may be relatively well predictable too). The b…

Thanks for the discussion. The information we are missing is what the percentage of total load can or would be willing to be shifted, and how strong the incentive (savings) is for the load to allow themselves to be shifted versus their inconvenience.

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

#137

Post by jessaustin »

weregiraffe wrote: post #34
jessaustin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who is "we"? There don't seem to be any investors eager to build these...

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

#138

Post by generatorguy »

llukas wrote: post #135
generatorguy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is 10x overnight demand close to 48h of average demand? If yes then original post was right.

My average day and night load was the same so I went from 12 hours to 120 hours worth of batteries and then could get through the 5 day storm, but with batteries depleted so badly they were essentially damaged. Now we have about 150 hours worth of stored energy for our loads.

we added a wind turbine as well which was great since some of the rainy stormy days had lots of wind. I don't understand my original posts parent's comment about (geo) diversity not helping.

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

#140

Post by etimberg »

WalterBright wrote: post #89
batmansmk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get fooled by simple price comparison. It's comparing apples and oranges. Gas, nuclear, coal, reversible dams, geothermy... are all controllable energy sources: they produce when we need it. Wind and solar are intermittent. Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment. What's happening is that countries migrating towar…

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.

While there is already variable pricing (Time-of-use) in some jurisdictions, I don't think that's what you're thinking of. "Transactive Energy" is more towards the concept of running the distribution system as a market akin to the transmission system. The company I work for has deployed a pilot program of this concept in New York. https://www.opusonesolutions.com/news/national-grid-launches...
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