151–160 of 204 posts
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…
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.
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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.
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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 chea…
That's not necessary. The utility can make the current price available via an internet API. The water heater can be connected to the internet and can read that data. Heat the water to 130 or so when electricity is cheap, heat it only to 100 or so when it is expensive. From personal experience, the water remains hot enough for a comfortable shower 3 days after the power goes out. This is more than a workable system. The hot water itself becomes the "battery".
And that's only the hot water heater. You can do it with the HVAC system (the thermal mass of the house becomes the "battery"), and with charging your car.
Right there it's a huge chunk of one's electricity consumption, all without needing grid storage batteries.
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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…
Vs solar or wind farms where default is much more likely to be 'soft'. Maybe the plant defaults on it bonds, but it still produces power. Which is preferable to both defaulting and shutting down.
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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…
Negative prices are not uncommon. Happens nearly every spring in the Pacific Northwest when the mountain snowpack melts, flooding the rivers and surging the output of many hydroelectric dams. The negative prices are factored into the annual revenue, and consumer prices are sort-of averaged over the year which is why you never see it on your electric bill.
Assuming that's true, I assume they'd also shutdown to protect thier pocket book.
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> How many people will refrain from charging because it is going to cost you $50 instead of $10? [..] Given that traffic never gets better I would say none! Are you honestly trying to argue it doesn't have any effect? "What day of the week is best to fill your tank" is like an age-old question. Obviously within reason. Not if your tank is empty and you have to be somewhere. Less so for people who think this to be ben…
Do people with electric cars only charge once per week? I concede There could be some demand response if people could know that they can charge for less every Sunday night. But as you say when you are empty you are a price taker. I live near Vancouver which features the most expensive gas in North America, and decent public transportation, and I believe traffic is the only thing that keeps people from driving more, n…
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…
> 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.
This is a typical pattern during the dog days of August. Winds lull during the late afternoon, and pickup after midnight. Winds farms, on an annual basis, provide 22% of Texas electricity generation. However, during these peak demand hours, natural gas contributed about 50,000 MW, with coal and nuclear distant second and third place. If Texas wind farms are to displace the gas-fired plants, there will need to be 10-fold increase in their numbers, or somehow solar and battery storage will have to step in.
Saying that wind is going to crush gas, is only half true. Currently, the pipeline of new generators being built in Texas has slightly more wind (capacity factor ~ 40%) being installed than gas. Solar, during the next 5 years, is being built (allowing for capacity factor ~ 20%) at about the same rate (~12,000 averaged MW). You could call these technologies the 'three amigos', as they will be appearing, as new generating capacity, in (very) roughly equal amounts. Nevertheless, gas plants are a unique, and necessary part of the future, due to their dispatch ability. They can literally be called upon to deliver electricity 24/7/365.
Importantly, one hour of generation during these peak periods costs 450 times the average generator's fees for electricity. In other words, one hour of a natural gas plant's output, during these near-black-out conditions (properly termed Energy Emergency Alert), earns them as much as running those plants, non-stop, the previous 19 days. These extreme spikes haven't happened in Texas for a few years. Still, there is lots of opportunity for the gas plants to be the 'high rollers' of the Texas grid during their expected 30+ years of operation.
Peak usage week: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/August_PUC_Pre... Energy Emergency alert: http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/164134/EEA_OnePager_F...
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!…
I think Three Mile Island and Fukushima also had issues with getting rid of residual heat during a shut-down that at a minimum damaged the fuel and resulted in a loss of the unit at TMI and a melt-down and major cleanup at Fukushima. It seems to be the basic safety issue with fission and not one that can be dismissed so easily. 6-10 hours for a controlled shut-down seems to be the minimum safety margin.