Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by Robotbeat » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

lstodd wrote: post #32

Robotbeat wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make the system close for a single site (without any geographical diversity) is to produce about 3 times as much solar energy you need and install enough batteries to meet 48 hours of average demand. That's enough to deal with seasonality and with cloudy weather to provide a constant output for an entire year. The 48 hours of battery would last a really long time as typically only about 12 hours will need to be us…

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.

FWIW, to arrive at my numbers, I used hourly sun data for a single site for a whole year and then optimized the amount of solar versus storage to minimize costs and prevent total depletion of the batteries while assuming a constant load for the whole year (and then iterating so that the amount of energy in the batteries at the beginning of the year is the same as that at the end). It turns out that even rainy days produce some solar power, which helps stretch the 48 hours of storage.

To make it work, it's cheaper to throw away about 2/3rds of your energy than to build 150 hours worth of storage. Some amount of "curtailment" is going to be optimal, and in my case, because solar is so cheap and my starting assumptions allowed no other energy sources, a LOT of curtailment is used. Literally most of the energy is unused.

If you ignore massive curtailment as a possibility, then yeah, haha, it's not going to work.

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

#192

Post by beat » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 3:17 PM UTC

wahern wrote: post #130

beat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have links to any published research? Is it published separately or as part of larger studies? I'm having trouble finding simple numbers. Such numbers would be useful for determining a theoretical floor for gas, nuclear, etc providing baseline capacity.

https://energynews.us/2015/02/13/midwest/blowing-away-myths-...

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

#193

Post by matthewdgreen » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 3:25 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #186

matthewdgreen wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow. That's quite a lot. I've seen price estimates as low as $387/kWh, which seems to come from NREL [1]. At that price it comes to something like $9.6bn. That's huge, but maybe doable. Alternatively, couldn't Texas just build some HVDC lines to other parts of the US grid to get more stability, as China is doing?

ETA [1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/01/02/utility-scale-solar-p...

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

#194

Post by godelski » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 4:02 PM UTC

baking wrote: post #177

godelski wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't know what experts you are listening to, but the idea of shutting down a nuclear reactor by lowering the control rods when the sun shines or the wind blows is just plain silly, for economic and safety reasons. Maybe for some future Gen IV design without fuel rods, but what you are talking about would require doubling the staffing and would defeat any cost savings in fuel use. Better to curtail the wind and sol…

No I mean vary the output levels. Not complete shutdown and restart. That's how the spin up and down phrase was being used in the context of this thread (I had also used the phrase "scale back"). So you and I are in agreement.

Edit: you also replied to me twice.

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

#195

Post by baking » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #194

baking wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what experts you are listening to, but the idea of shutting down a nuclear reactor by lowering the control rods when the sun shines or the wind blows is just plain silly, for economic and safety reasons. Maybe for some future Gen IV design without fuel rods, but what you are talking about would require doubling the staffing and would defeat any cost savings in fuel use. Better to curtail the wind and sol…

No I mean vary the output levels. Not complete shutdown and restart. That's how the spin up and down phrase was being used in the context of this thread (I had also used the phrase "scale back"). So you and I are in agreement. Edit: you also replied to me twice.

HN won't let you edit a comment after a certain amount of time has passed, thus a second reply with the links.

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

#196

Post by philipkglass » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 7:05 PM UTC

powerbroker wrote: post #159

On the week of August 12, the Texas grid, managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) maxed out at around 75,000 MW of load. On one of the worst days, the approx. 24,000 MW nameplate capacity wind farms on that grid produced about 4,500 MW at the absolute peaks of demand. In other words, wind farms produced 18% or so of their maximum rated capacity. This is a typical pattern during the dog days of Au…

The renewable capacity on the ERCOT grid is overwhelmingly wind-based since wind has been much cheaper than solar until the last handful of years. Its output tends to peak at night. I think a lot of the peak-demand opportunity for gas in Texas is going to be blunted by solar and battery projects coming online soon.

"Can more solar help Texas meet peak demand?"

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/08/13/can-solar-help-ercot-...

There is a truly awesome amount of solar on the way in Texas, with ERCOT’s July interconnection report showing 62 GW of solar projects. And while given the highly speculative nature of project development most of those will likely not be built, there are nearly 9 GW of projects that have interconnection agreements, including 3.2 GW that have a full interconnection study completed.

Those projects that can secure financing and get built will come online over the next few years. It is difficult to say which ones will be online by next summer, but a June ERCOT report identified 1.3 GW of projects with interconnection agreements and financial security posted that are expected to come online later this year, a number which should grow as the year progresses.

"Developer eyes world's largest solar+storage facility for Texas"

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/developer-eyes-worlds-large...

"Energy Storage Developer Buys Texas Windfarms With Major Battery Retrofit Planned"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnparnell/2019/08/24/energy-s...

"GlidePath Builds Merchant Battery Plant in ERCOT, Bucking Industry Wisdom"

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/glidepath-bucke...

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

#197

Post by rstuart4133 » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 2:25 AM UTC

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…

Negative electricity prices happen in Australia fairly regularly. The last time was just a few days ago:

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/11489188

Interestingly is isn't generally caused by renewables. It's caused by those "base load" generators: coal and if Australia had any, nuclear. Base load actually means "can't vary their output quickly". If you can't vary your output and you ramp down your output too early, you missing out on selling power. Too late, and the price plummets and have to sell it at loss - or worse pay someone to absorb the energy released by your boiler cooling down.

But renewables have made this worse by unpredictably flooding the market with cheap power. They don't really care if the price drops to near zero as the wind and sun cost them nothing. But jeeze it must hurt to be selling electricity for less than it cost you to dig the coal out of the ground. I'm pretty sure that's one of the things driving the early retirement of coal and nuclear.

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

#198

Post by rstuart4133 » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 2:44 AM UTC

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…

> Wind and solar are intermittent.

True, but the story is actually worse than they paint it. Electricity from renewables + storage is now cheaper than electricity from a new coal or nuclear plant. As those old plants close, they won't be replaced. https://www.abc.net.au/news/11495558

In the tussle between renewables vs fossil fuels it's all over bar the shouting, which is to say all we will have to put up with the coal and gas industry screaming how unfair it all is until the last of them die off.

But it's is just as well renewables do cost less because if someone had to plan on losing money to save the planet it would be a gonner.

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

#199

Post by rstuart4133 » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 2:48 AM UTC

luc4sdreyer wrote: post #134

beat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it's not like the world lacks places to put new pumped storage: https://nationalmap.gov.au/renewables/#share=s-oDPMo1jDBBtwB...

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

#200

Post by HocusLocus » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 11:37 AM UTC

No they won't, unless the storage issue is solved.

(A comment someone else made and it got greyed out by the "we hate your poopy face!" crowd.)

And even if it IS solved. After outside wind and solar infrastructure is destroyed by the next continent wide Winter superstorm, how would having a few hours (or days) of storage help?