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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

#81

Post by autokad »

hairytrog wrote: post #70
desdiv wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Short answer: anything above 20% is unproven and will cost significantly more if you expect to have 100% uptime/reliability. If you're okay with 95% uptime, wind/solar can get the job done, and I believe cheaper based on https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424... ____ The flaw with renewables is they are so dam cheap and so dam finicky. Basically, renewables force nukes and nat gas to sell power…

That's interesting, I didn't know of these limitations.

I wonder if we could end up doing something like we do with farming and pay farmers not to grow crops

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

#82

Post by bretpiatt »

hairytrog wrote: post #70
desdiv wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Short answer: anything above 20% is unproven and will cost significantly more if you expect to have 100% uptime/reliability. If you're okay with 95% uptime, wind/solar can get the job done, and I believe cheaper based on https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424... ____ The flaw with renewables is they are so dam cheap and so dam finicky. Basically, renewables force nukes and nat gas to sell power…

> Short answer: anything above 20% is unproven and will cost significantly more if you expect to have 100% uptime/reliability

CPS Energy, serving the San Antonio, TX metro is already above 20% renewable[1] and its rates are very low, to the point San Antonio is a preferred data center location.

[1] https://cpsenergy.com/en/about-us/programs-services/energy-g...

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

#83

Post by noir_lord »

noneeeed wrote: post #80
ip26 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

People always nay-say demand management, but here in the UK the National Grid already does this. They have contracts with many large industrial companies who presumably get lower rates in return for being able to turn down their demand on request.

They do, agreements are typically in place with companies that use a lot of power but can live without it for a fair few hours.

aluminium production/smelting uses a colossal amount of electricity but they can shut down quickly for a few hours (as long as they don't let things get too cold and freeze which is expensive as it destroys equipment and takes a long time to restart - which is what happened in the ransomware attack against norsk, they had to switch to manual line processes to keep it moving).

For anyone interested the people responsible for monitoring our grid have a good website with a tonne of info.

https://www.nationalgrideso.com/

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

#84

Post by Nasrudith »

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…

Seriously? Trying to fearmonger what as dangerous crystaline silicon and fiberglass materials lying around? There are natural minerals more dangerous out there without disposal plans.

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

#85

Post by noir_lord »

hairytrog wrote: post #59
ip26 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Thi…

> 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.

I honestly read that as "it requires people to communicate and co-ordinate in a way that is a net benefit to everyone, seems un-american" and thought yeah that seems about right.

For what it's worth national grids with co-operation agreements and a strict regulatory regime absolutely do work when well implemented, the UK has had one for decades.

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

#86

Post by ethanwillis »

kelnos wrote: post #78
ethanwillis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic a bit because if you dig into spenrose's comment history they're critical of nuclear.. and seem to mostly comment on articles like this one. I think this person has an agenda they want to push and they want to shout down anyone with ad-hominems who doesn't share their world view. Is this not against hacker news guidelines? Dang?

> It's ironic a bit because if you dig into spenrose's comment history they're critical of nuclear Huh? spenrose's most recent comment about nuclear power starts with: > I am rooting for lots and lots of new nuclear

Even that comment chain is in fact not pro nuclear. If you read further they're basically arguing against nuclear saying that why even bother because it's not economical. And the only nuclear they want is "safe nuclear"

> Safe micro-nuclear plants are an excellent start on the "economy" side of "political economy." Now y'all need to build a political coalition—and pro-variable-renewable peeps such as myself must be part of your core coalition if you are going to get anywhere. So start treating us as allies.

It's a lot of double speak so I can see how it would be confusing. But definitely take a closer look.

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

#87

Post by cinquemb »

manfredo wrote: post #64

A few things stick out to me: * 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 conveni…

> This study thinks we can achieve this with only ~200 MWh of storage.

Agree, very unrealistic.

One thing that always disappointing to me about these conversations is that solar == photovoltaics, batteries == li-ion electrochemical… luckily the world isn't limited to these asumptions and developments have been and continue to be made, even if they are mostly ignored/overlooked by the HN crowd.

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

#88

Post by koheripbal »

Retric wrote: post #57
koheripbal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are not arguing with the person you reply to. You are arguing in front of an audience of the rest of us.

Pointing out the ad hominem's goes further in discrediting the argument, than throwing your own insults and trolling through their history.

All he did was discredit himself in front of the rest of us.

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

#89

Post by alblue »

The UK has recently ended its coal-free streak for power generation; up until a few days ago we had been coal free for 67 days, the longest time since the start of the industrial revolution.

https://twitter.com/alblue/status/1274290853817827328

The plan is for the national grid to close coal plants by 2024 leaving just natural gas (the gas, not the American car fuel) as a high carbon source in our power grid.

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

#90

Post by evgen »

bretpiatt wrote: post #82
hairytrog wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer: anything above 20% is unproven and will cost significantly more if you expect to have 100% uptime/reliability. If you're okay with 95% uptime, wind/solar can get the job done, and I believe cheaper based on https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424... ____ The flaw with renewables is they are so dam cheap and so dam finicky. Basically, renewables force nukes and nat gas to sell power…

> Short answer: anything above 20% is unproven and will cost significantly more if you expect to have 100% uptime/reliability CPS Energy, serving the San Antonio, TX metro is already above 20% renewable[1] and its rates are very low, to the point San Antonio is a preferred data center location. [1] https://cpsenergy.com/en/about-us/programs-services/energy-g...

So CPS energy and it’s grid are disconnected from the rest of the national grid and have no reliance upon external sources to ensure dispatchability? Cool. Would love to hear more about how they managed that trick.
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