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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

#181

Post by maigret »

timw4mail wrote: post #4

I don't see batteries being able to store the amount of power (for a practical battery lifetime to be cost effective) needed to make solar a practical primary electricity source.

Don’t understand battery too narrowly here. It can be an artificial lake where you pump up the water from below, or a train full of stones that you pull up a hill.

Many countries like Israel have black water containers on top of every home to heat their water, so it stays there warm for the night.

Storing energy can be made in diverse and original ways, mostly adapted to the local constraints.

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

#182

Post by zaarn »

beat wrote: post #108
Retric wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear also has high operating costs, just not fuel costs. Solar can generally just be left alone for weeks or months at a time. Nuclear however needs security guards, regular maintenance, a highly trained workforce, large insurance premiums etc. On top of that it also needs some fuel. What’s happening with Nuclear is these older power plants occasionally need a significant overhaul and it’s at that point where they…

And a nuclear plant costs about the same to run whether it's running at 100%, or 20%. Fuel costs are negligible relative to capital and operational costs. So when lower-cost competition appears and eats into the demand for nuclear power, it actually increases the per-unit cost of nuclear power, which makes alternatives more compelling, which eats into demand, which turns into a cost death spiral.

Nuclear plants are great for base demand for these reasons (ie, the power that is always needed 24 hours round the clock, 365 days a year).

Alternative energies can provide some of that, meaning that plants need to shut down because outside of providing base demand, they're incredibly expensive to make power from.

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

#183

Post by zaarn »

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…

Essentially you don't get paid to take the energy of their hands; you get paid to use energy so the grid doesn't overload. Crashing the grid is expensive as it means you won't be able to sell power (at 52Hz or so the grid operators start disconnecting larger power sources like nuclear power, above and the grid may have to be collapsed). So it's in the best interests of the power generator sites to sell energy at a loss if there is too much in the grid to push consumers (ie, big production plants) to burn more energy.

In the other direction, if there is not enough, the grid operators will disconnect power consumers, so in that case it's in the best interest of generators to prevent people from consuming power, thus raising the price dramatically.

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

#184

Post by fulafel »

generatorguy wrote: post #136
tomatocracy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We know that the answer is 100% as the price has no upper limit, no?

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

#185

Post by matthewdgreen »

bob1029 wrote: post #165
beat wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a Texas resident who lives in the ERCOT region, I am going to have to vehemently disagree regarding the "consistent base load" that should allegedly be supplied by our wind farms. We had a day no fewer than 4 weeks ago that broke every record in terms of energy cost - for over 90 minutes our electricity cost 9 entire American dollars per KWh. We were <500MW of capacity away from rolling blackouts. The cause is the…

So help me with the costs here. Adding 25,000 MWh (5,000MW * 5 hours emergency supply) of lithium battery storage would cost... what? As compared to constructing and operating new natural gas plants? I can't get clear numbers that I trust.

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

#186

Post by bob1029 »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #185
bob1029 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Texas resident who lives in the ERCOT region, I am going to have to vehemently disagree regarding the "consistent base load" that should allegedly be supplied by our wind farms. We had a day no fewer than 4 weeks ago that broke every record in terms of energy cost - for over 90 minutes our electricity cost 9 entire American dollars per KWh. We were <500MW of capacity away from rolling blackouts. The cause is the…

So help me with the costs here. Adding 25,000 MWh (5,000MW * 5 hours emergency supply) of lithium battery storage would cost... what? As compared to constructing and operating new natural gas plants? I can't get clear numbers that I trust.

The largest battery farm on earth is 100MWh and it cost about 90 million dollars. For a 25GWh battery installation, you'd be looking at 22~23 billion dollars using basic linear extrapolation, and I still question if this is enough reserve capacity for our summer peak demand.

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

#187

Post by gridlockd »

snowwindwaves wrote: post #178
gridlockd wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 syst…

It is unfortunate that link didn't pursue non worst case scenarios, like being able to import some power, or have some non renewable generation used just enough that it was economic to exist at normal energy prices, with the biggest payoff being the avoided cost of energy storage for October and November. that link is kind of unrealistically dismissive.

The question is, can you really go fully renewable with battery storage? If power can be sourced elsewhere but it comes from nuclear or fossil fuels (as in the case of Germany and France), it would be a sham. If everyone went renewable, everyone would also have the same problem of seasonal variance.

If you want to go "mostly renewable" and do the buffering e.g. with natural gas as it is currently done, that's of course a far more plausible scenario.

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

#188

Post by beat »

imtringued wrote: post #150
beat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Yeah. A lot of my attitude about pricing turns into pro-nuclear advocates treating me as Treehugging Enemy of Progress, and one of the things they point to is the always-in-the-future dream of small, simple thorium molten salt reactors. But the best I've seen on that is a company that promises 30 cent megawatts in 2030, but doesn't really have a working prototype yet. And it would take, what, two decades past that to really get that going at scale? We can't wait 30 years to do something about greenhouse gasses just because we really really really want to do it with nuclear.

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

#189

Post by beat »

Recurecur wrote: post #145
beat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And maybe someday, they'll be an actual alternative that actual power companies can by on an actual market.

But they aren't, not today, and they won't be for at least a decade. I don't want to wait, and even if I did, the market definitely will not.

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

#190

Post by baking »

godelski wrote: post #173
baking wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chernobyl happened during a scheduled shut-down test that was delayed by 10 hours because there was higher than expected electricity demand. They tried to speed-up the shut-down and the results did not go as expected. I think it may be a little naive to say that nuclear can spin up and down by controlling the fuel rods. I think Three Mile Island and Fukushima also had issues with getting rid of residual heat during a…

> I think it may be a little naive to say that nuclear can spin up and down by controlling the fuel rods. I'm not sure. Because that's exactly what control rods do. The carbon is a neutron moderator. Neutrons are the "heat" in the reaction (that creates actual heat). Less neutrons the colder the reaction is. You'll find this in any elementary nuclear or atomic textbook (which I have read). As for Chernobyl the show a…

Here a some experts you might want to listen to:

https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-shut-down-a-n...

https://whatisnuclear.com/decay-heat.html

"In risk assessments, loss of decay heat removal accidents are usually the highest-risk scenario to release radiation to the public."

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