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The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

gspp.berkeley.edu

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Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#51

Post by hairytrog »

smabie wrote: post #50
hairytrog wrote: post #21

Exciting. But here are some problems. - Unfortunately, they are averaging the entire US, which is made of several grids, so the bad days are not that bad in their analysis. To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need. - Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid. If Covid has taught us anything, it i…

Say you drop it to 80%, would that work?

Drop what to 80%?

Our economy works really well because electricity is 100% dispatchable. You flip the switch at any time, things work. If you go below that, the economy will follow the weather, which I guess is just a different way to operate. But it's not so fun. I have some friends in South Africa where power rationing is in place. You basically have a few dead hours every day because the grid isn't run well and they haven't built enough capacity. They hate it. You're cooking a nice pie for grandma and then BAM, powers out. You're on your treadmill, and BAM - you hit the wall. You're playing CoD, and BAM. Sucks to suck.

Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#52

Post by dd36 »

m463 wrote: post #45
dd36 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I installed 10kW on my home DIY in AZ. Cost was $1.00W and $0.70W after tax incentive. It took me 3 weekends all by myself. It works out to like 1.7c/kWh over the life of the asset. Next step is to add batteries and go off grid. Right now, the utility pays me 9.6c/kWh so I’m not in a rush until they further sabotage net metering. My cost pre-solar was 14-16c/kWh. Also, the cap on grid connected was 10kW and it’s abou…

That's a wonderful achievement. I've browsed www.sunelec.com for years because they sell pallets of panels for less than 0.50/watt and I think ... someday DIY.

I bought panels from https://www.santansolar.com/. Enphase micros and Ironridge racking from https://tandem-solar-systems.com/. Then I made permits using https://get.solardesigntool.com/.

All-in-all, it was fun and easy.

Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#53

Post by ip26 »

hairytrog wrote: post #21

Exciting. But here are some problems. - Unfortunately, they are averaging the entire US, which is made of several grids, so the bad days are not that bad in their analysis. To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need. - Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid. If Covid has taught us anything, it i…

Instead of dispatchability payments, why not demand response? Thermostats, electric cars, water heaters, dryers, smelters, and data centers can all turn on a dime if an incentive is there.

Also, what's wrong with policy wonks?

Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#54

Post by desdiv »

hairytrog wrote: post #51
smabie wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you drop it to 80%, would that work?

Drop what to 80%? Our economy works really well because electricity is 100% dispatchable. You flip the switch at any time, things work. If you go below that, the economy will follow the weather, which I guess is just a different way to operate. But it's not so fun. I have some friends in South Africa where power rationing is in place. You basically have a few dead hours every day because the grid isn't run well and t…

Headline says: "US can reach 90 percent clean electricity by 2035" and you gave your analysis.

GP is asking how your analysis would change if we drop the target to "US reaching 80 percent clean electricity by 2035".

Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#56

Post by travisporter »

hairytrog wrote: post #29
killjoywashere wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we assume that's correct, those sources have massive impacts under other categories. In contrast, anaerobic bacteria are terribly inefficient with their energy use, yet vastly outperform all animals in terms of biomass. So it's unclear to me that the EROI metric actually matters all that much. If I can produce solar panels with a solar-powered factory at a profit, I don't care about the price of coal or its E…

You can make while society falls around you. You want to make the most efficient use of time, energy, land, and materials. Why? So you can do more with it, give more people more time to think about things unrelated to survival, so you can support more people, whatever. Efficiency is key to civilization and progress. Solar takes 10X the land and 15x the material with no plan to deal with it after it has reached the en…

I see what you're saying, but if you're arguing for advancement of civilization, then carbon should be priced accordingly.

End-of-life for solar is still a young field, but maturing rapidly. Regulations are already being formed in the US at a federal level. I guess gas plants can just close the well. But worst case,solar panels are small and can be buried (after we deal with the cadmium telluride)

I agree with end-of-life for wind though, not sure how it's gonna paly out.

What gets my goat is people don't bat an eye for granite countertops at home for 20-25k, but then solar roofs or battery storage is considered an expense.

Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#57

Post by Retric »

koheripbal wrote: post #39
spenrose wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! You don't seem to like renewables much [1][2]. (You do post about the promise of nuclear energy, including fusion, which for whatever reason seems to be associated with skepticism about renewables [3].) Finally, you called our attention to the need to be skeptical about COVID-19's impacts in mid-April [4]. Cool, cool. "To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewa…

Argue the argument, not the arguer.

That’s a great idea when people are arguing in good faith. It’s kind of pointless when people don’t. “Report is Berkeley and GridLab, mostly policy wonks”

When people start with ad hominem attacks it just doesn’t stop. Making a host of unsubstantiated arguments without support and a few trigger points to deflect rational arguments is the core of effective trolling.

Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#58

Post by dmix »

hairytrog wrote: post #51
smabie wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you drop it to 80%, would that work?

Drop what to 80%? Our economy works really well because electricity is 100% dispatchable. You flip the switch at any time, things work. If you go below that, the economy will follow the weather, which I guess is just a different way to operate. But it's not so fun. I have some friends in South Africa where power rationing is in place. You basically have a few dead hours every day because the grid isn't run well and t…

Apparently the battery plant Tesla built in Australia only powers 30k homes which is a tiny amount. They are working to 'double' the capacity, which I assume goes from 30k to 60k.

It seems to be making net-positive amount of money and Tesla built it in record time but sourcing that much lithium to build it for millions of people across the country sounds like a tall order, not to mention the 2-5x costs/time any major public works infrastructure project would add based on recent history of all of them in western countries (for ex: both of Obama's clean coal and solar project went bust, before roll out, after billions spent each and many years, so outright failure of even top-down federal-level projects must also be considered).

I'd be curious to hear an expert speculation on the matter for what a practical battery farm deployment would look like. Which would likely need to exist, assuming we're abandoning backup energy sources like nuclear and natural gas.

Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#59

Post by hairytrog »

ip26 wrote: post #53
hairytrog wrote: post #21

Exciting. But here are some problems. - Unfortunately, they are averaging the entire US, which is made of several grids, so the bad days are not that bad in their analysis. To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need. - Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid. If Covid has taught us anything, it i…

Instead of dispatchability payments, why not demand response? Thermostats, electric cars, water heaters, dryers, smelters, and data centers can all turn on a dime if an incentive is there. Also, what's wrong with policy wonks?

it's just difficult to coordinate all these things top down and there's a bunch of extra infrastructure and IT, and more regulation and rules and complexity. People telling you when you can and can't do things, etc. Eh. Seems unAmerican.

But given the total enthusiasm and commitment, I bet it could be made to work. But maybe we have to accept that it's gonna cost more, and that we'll probably lose on other sides. This renewable world just might not be such a nice place. Power would be less taken for granted because it would not always be available. a lot more people would have to work in the industry to keep it going (low EROI for renewables) and they wouldn't be working in other industries. Ironically, that's a plus in the article, which touts immense job creation. lol - not a very good objective. The landscape near populated areas would be dominated with wind turbines and solar plants.

Re: The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

#60

Post by [deleted] »

hairytrog wrote: post #47
spenrose wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! You don't seem to like renewables much [1][2]. (You do post about the promise of nuclear energy, including fusion, which for whatever reason seems to be associated with skepticism about renewables [3].) Finally, you called our attention to the need to be skeptical about COVID-19's impacts in mid-April [4]. Cool, cool. "To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewa…

Something else I really like: flipping the switch and seeing things turn on. Regarding the immense capacity required for wind/solar: see Figure 10 of https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424... . They essentially optimize the renewable mix to minimize cost while considering different scenarios for storage costs. The optimization must meet 100% of the demand at 100% of times for the grid in a few d…

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