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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

#141

Post by godelski »

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…

Pretty accurate, but nuclear can spin up and down, by controlling the fuel rods. This is one of the major advantage of the technology and why many suggest it be used in combination with solar, wind, and hydro (many as in the IPCC, which is why CNN pushed hard on everyone during the climate debates). It can be used to provide a base load (greatly reducing the need for batteries (or the need to invent good enough ones!) And can also scale back when it's sunny and windy. All while producing no emissions when running.

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

#142

Post by api_or_ipa »

batmansmk wrote: post #85
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.…

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…

> 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.

Wind just doesn't stop blowing across the world all at once. When one place is in the doldrums, another is likely windy. With a sufficiently connected grid, a large deployment of wind turbines can smooth out production in ways smaller, regionally focused deployments cannot. I posit that a global distribution of wind power is _more_ available than a regional one, not less, as your comment seems to imply.

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

#144

Post by hairytrog »

I downloaded the study - it's long and filled with pictures so haven't read yet.

I expect they made the mistake of not taking into account the increase in cost due to a primarily renewable grid. Such massive changes in the type of generating supply will yield massive changes in the costs to supply power. As you remove all the dispatchable power sources (power generators that you can put on line at will) you have to build really big heat or electricity storage and would have to have emergency generating capacity for the potential of extremely low wind and sun for days and weeks at a time. Basically, you'd have to have all the natural gas generators and pipelines for the eventuality of bad renewable conditions. Who will pay for that? Just leaving them idle 95% of the time is not the best use of money and it's possible the government may have to pay for renewable's storage problems.

Geography is also a serious concern. Texas will have vastly different economics than than Washington or New York.

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

#145

Post by Recurecur »

beat wrote: post #70
bilbo0s wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

And that's one of the major arguments for mass produced small modular reactors.

No one-off construction, flexible siting due to no water cooling, underground for security, and meltdown proof. Just walkaway safe electricity at five cents a KWH or less. :-)

terrapower.com thorcon.com x-energy.com

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

#146

Post by batmansmk »

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.

Electricity price is already adapted hour per hour on the European Market. When the wind blows in Germany, price sometimes even go negative: it costs operationally less to energy producers to pay people to use the energy than stopping equipment. No change has been noted on the electricity usage.

Electricity bill is on average $100 per household per month. People won't shift their usage because electricity is too cheap anyway. 1.6% of your revenue === 1.6% of your saving effort.

Note that the periodicity of wind blowing is days and weeks, so it's too long and too intermittent to align daily routines on it. Forget about charging your car or hot water aligned on it, the only solution we have scaled to use this wind energy is reversible dams / potential energy, and of that we have no more unexploited geography to support wind turbines. Feb 2019 we produced in Germany 10,000GWh with wind versus 3,000GWh in July 2019. And between 2 consecutive weeks, it can be a factor of x10 of difference. http://energynumbers.info/capacity-factors-at-danish-offshor...

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

#147

Post by usrusr »

hairytrog wrote: post #144

I downloaded the study - it's long and filled with pictures so haven't read yet. I expect they made the mistake of not taking into account the increase in cost due to a primarily renewable grid. Such massive changes in the type of generating supply will yield massive changes in the costs to supply power. As you remove all the dispatchable power sources (power generators that you can put on line at will) you have to b…

> Basically, you'd have to have all the natural gas generators and pipelines for the eventuality of bad renewable conditions. Who will pay for that?

Ideally the operators of facilities that tackle the storage problem with power-to-gas technology. It's by far the most scalable storage option and the discharge part of the cycle is already up and running.

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

#148

Post by eukaryote31 »

theklub wrote: post #59
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.

Check this out... https://energyvault.com/energy-vault-closes-series-b-funding...

More complexity and cost than pumped hydro, and no real benefit? Sign me up!

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

#149

Post by toomuchtodo »

beat wrote: post #109
omarhaneef wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Capital costs are a legit concern. If something happens in international markets that causes interest rates to spike globally, it will set back the pace of conversion tremendously.

Any way to leverage negative interest rates from developed countries into renewables? Very interested if someone knows how to facilitate such a bond issue.

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

#150

Post by imtringued »

beat wrote: post #70
bilbo0s wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

The complexity of reactors needs to go down and they need to be smaller. Big reactors can only be cooled if they are near the ocean, otherwise they have to be shutdown when the flow rate of the river is too low, this usually happens during heatwaves. It's easier to achieve economies of scale with 16 identical small scale reactors instead of designing a custom reactor for each plant and then building only 2.

I don't see this happening. Relying on new reactor designs to save nuclear power isn't going to solve the problem in time. Right now governments are busy with massive power plant designs that suffer from multi billion cost overruns. After that experience they will probably stop building more power plants and funding for new reactor designs will be reduced.

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