61–70 of 124 posts
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…
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…
Also, hydro is a massive part of the energy mix going forward and excluding it gives meaningless results.
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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…
Hopefully it is just the first steps towards a clean grid and not an example of a Concorde like moon shot failure.
* This study assumes that we can ramp up purchases of solar and wind generation to match this graph: https://imgur.com/lMU252r while costs continue to decrease. That's not how markets work. Rapidly buy solar panels and the cost of solar panels go up. Put solar panels in all the places where it's easy to install and now you have to pay extra to put them in places where it's not so convenient.
* This study thinks we can achieve this with only ~200 MWh of storage. This is an optimistic projection. To put this in perspective, daily US energy use is 11.5TWh. We're giving solar and wind generation only ~15% allowed variability before we're dipping into gas. Yeah, it does say that it's only 90% clean electricity, but even reaching this figure is optimistic.
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…
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…
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…
In my county in California, the county purchases the electricity while PG&E provides the infrastructure. The 50/50% solar/wind plan is only around $4/month more than the standard plan. https://ebce.org/residents/
California still generates 45% of its energy from fossil fuels. And another 10% from nuclear which some don't consider renewable. Solar and wind account for 21% of electricity generation: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo....
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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.
SolarReserve bid under 5 cents/kwh in Chile in 2017 for a grid scale 24/7 CSP/molten salt storage system… we'd probably need a safer way to transport molten salt tanks from high Irradiance areas to local grids to give 5 cents/kwh for most people though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Natural gas costs more than solar power under 50% utilization. As in the fuel it’s self costs more than solar power plants that waste half of all power produced at current prices. This means a vast over abundance of supply is part of any rational minimal cost strategy. Storage costs are so high it further makes solar tracking arrays cost effective for mitigation of the duck curve. Also, hydro is a massive part of the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
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The flaw with renewables is they are so dam cheap and so dam finicky. Basically, renewables force nukes and nat gas to sell power at a loss or sit idly by for most of the time. This becomes worse and worse as the renewable's market share increases and they eat away at the profitability of the dispatchable sources. The limit is something like 20% at which point nukes and nat gas just can't make any money and so a free market system would just get rid of them. But yet, they need to be there, just in case, because they are dispatchable and you want shit to work at all times. Unfortunately, prices for consumers don't go down because you need the super dispatchable power sources which just sit there for a lot of the time and cost just about the same if you have em on or off, and you also just built a bunch of renewables which are cheap and make money for the guys who built them, but hurt the rest of the grid because you have a bunch of idle equipment (gas/nukes during the day and most of the year, panels at night). Lower cost storage is a way to address that, but has to be really low cost, especially when you increase wind/solar market share. Keep in mind, there's not yet a good solution for long term storage (days or weeks or months).
To go beyond 20% renewables you need a power market that rewards dispatchable sources, essentially preventing solar and wind from taking all the money and bidding everyone into oblivion. If the market is fair, there will be little incentive to push renewables because they just make things more expensive. There's a bunch of ideas on how to do this like capacity payments. Might work, but it's gonna cost more because of all the unused equipment. Everything is possible, you just need to be willing to pay for it.
In an 80% renewables grid, most of the time, renewables will be meeting 100% of demand and producing much more than needed. 20% of the power is delivered by nat gas. But they will mostly be called to do that only on the bad days where they will have to be able to match closer to 100% of the demand. So you've basically got two nearly complete fleets. Who's gonna pay for the idle equipment? The solar power producers should right?
One data point: Germany is 30% renewables and pays 50% higher than EU average. That's old prices in a country not ideal for renewables. It's no Arizona or Washington.