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

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

#111

Post by godelski »

manfredo wrote: post #110
godelski wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A statement they keep making to placate anti-nuclear advocates but keep postponing and postponing. Because there's no way to reliably generate the majority of electricity using wind and solar, and only small parts of France are suitable for hydroelectricity. This is really confusing. Me, nor France, said that they are going to go to 0% nuclear. In fact, I remember saying > No they aren't going to 0% or even 50% May…

> Maybe I should be more clear and say "Less than 50%". > So I'm confused because I'm reading your response as disagreeing what IS happening (decommissioning IS happening) and taking it to mean that ALL reactors are being proposed to be decommissioned. Which is definitely not true. They keep delaying their supposed nuclear cutbacks: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/11/20/frances-decision-to-d... The reality is that w…

You seem to be taking my statements to well past a good faith misinterpretation so I am not going to continue this further. There is no point discussing something when the other person doesn't respond to what you're saying but something completely different.

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

#113

Post by cinquemb »

manfredo wrote: post #108
cinquemb wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Things like kinetic storage are geographically limited. Most places with available hydroelectric storage already generate electricity from dams. Chemical storage in the form of natural gas produced by the Sabatier process is very inefficient. Currently it's at 55% efficiency to go from power to gas. Even the most efficient combined cycle plants are currently 65% efficient. End to end efficiency is ~1/3. Also, using s…

There's also many kinds of thermal energy storage systems in use (I think molten salt systems are the most promising[0], esp if you design salt mixtures that have have higher delta k's[1] and more efficient HEX and steam turbines to about ~60% efficiency of converting heat to electricity[2]), not limited by geography.

Going of the example powering 100MW turbine with a working temp range of ~278C[0] and using an eutectic mixture of calcium chloride and magnesium chloride (ionic halide salt)[1] with a working temp range of ~1440C, can make the "tank of about 9.1 metres (30 ft) tall and 24 metres (79 ft) in diameter to drive it for four hours by this design." last for nearly a day, though with higher upfront cost than a typical NaNO3 + KNO3 system, but nowhere near nuclear costs (except for the similarities with dealing with supercritical water for electricity generation).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage#Molten-...

[1]: https://gist.github.com/cinquemb/015f8b0775db2381513f0e20186...

[2]: https://www.solarpaces.org/vc-funded-thermal-battery-based-m...

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

#114

Post by WizardAustralis »

ouchjars wrote: post #73
WizardAustralis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Tesla battery only powers about 30k homes for about and hour and a half. Dont get me wrong, it is an amazing piece of tech for stabalising the grid and reducing the dependence on the gas peaker plants but it is a very long way from mass storage for want is a fairly small Aussie state. SA still regularly pulls a lot of power from the Victoria grid which is still dependent a lot on dirty brown coal. Hopefully it is…

The battery plant capacity is growing in hand with decentralised battery storage, an interconnector to New South Wales which is building hydro storage capacity, and demand management. Apparently generation and transmission costs are falling nationwide too, but not to the extent that my bills are going down.

That's good to see, it has been about a year or so since I last checked in any detail. That plus from what I have heard even conservative numbers put Snow hydro 2 as being a big win in terms of storage capacity.

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

#115

Post by m463 »

dd36 wrote: post #93
cinquemb wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty cool, I wonder what your $/kwh would jump to with battery storage… probably a significant jump compared to 1.7 cents/kwh over the lifetime (esp consider degradation of electrochemical batteries over charging cycles) 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 a…

So 2 Powerwalls should cover me. That’s 27kWh but only 14kWac peak. It’s the peak that’s really the issue. If I’m running a furnace and my stove, it may go over. But currently 2 PW is $17,000 with 10 year warranty. That’s $142/mo. If they work for 20 years, that’s half. Enphase is coming out with its own system. Anyways, it already makes sense but for peak usage. I only use 15kWh max a night but my peak can be up to…

I expect with grid-tied and reasonable utility policies, you can reach zero and batteries would just be an added expense.

It's just when they start "regulatory capture", batteries can take you out of the drama.

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

#116

Post by manfredo »

godelski wrote: post #111
manfredo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I should be more clear and say "Less than 50%". > So I'm confused because I'm reading your response as disagreeing what IS happening (decommissioning IS happening) and taking it to mean that ALL reactors are being proposed to be decommissioned. Which is definitely not true. They keep delaying their supposed nuclear cutbacks: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/11/20/frances-decision-to-d... The reality is that w…

You seem to be taking my statements to well past a good faith misinterpretation so I am not going to continue this further. There is no point discussing something when the other person doesn't respond to what you're saying but something completely different.

I am not making any misrepresentation. Yes, you did not say that France is going to reduce their share of nuclear power generation to 0%, or even 50%. Their reduction plans are more modest than that. I understand this, contrary to your insistence that I am misrepresenting your claims.

And my point, is that France has repeatedly postponed even these much more modest plans for denuclearization.

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

#117

Post by cinquemb »

hairytrog wrote: post #104
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…

I think I came out a little strong and biased here. My apologies. Some more thoughts on this article. - They group nukes in the clean %, so today we're at 37% clean already. not bad. Going to higher clean % with mix of wind/solar expansion + new storage + dispatchable nukes is very possible and the political momentum to throw a lot of money at this is there. - I think it's unlikely costs can be reduced much in most p…

> I think it's unlikely costs can be reduced much in most parts of the US if we still want 100% dispatch capability.

I disagree, if there was a desire to transport molten salt tanks and retrofit coal plants with supercritical steam turbines and build large molten salt storage reservoirs on such sites, we could do it today for under 5 cents/kwh for 24/7 availability.

See comments [0] and [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23588691

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581910

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

#118

Post by manfredo »

cinquemb wrote: post #113
manfredo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like kinetic storage are geographically limited. Most places with available hydroelectric storage already generate electricity from dams. Chemical storage in the form of natural gas produced by the Sabatier process is very inefficient. Currently it's at 55% efficiency to go from power to gas. Even the most efficient combined cycle plants are currently 65% efficient. End to end efficiency is ~1/3. Also, using s…

There's also many kinds of thermal energy storage systems in use (I think molten salt systems are the most promising[0], esp if you design salt mixtures that have have higher delta k's[1] and more efficient HEX and steam turbines to about ~60% efficiency of converting heat to electricity[2]), not limited by geography. Going of the example powering 100MW turbine with a working temp range of ~278C[0] and using an eutec…

Solar thermal plants [1] effectively already use this system. They heat a model salt container, which drives a heat engine. The molten salt remains hot enough enough to keep producing energy through the night. However this scheme requires both solar collectors (in the form of mirrors) as well as the molten salt tank plus a heat engine. The resulting levelized cost is about the same as nuclear power [2].

If this startup does manage to produce energy storage at the efficiencies and costs as advertised that'd make intermittent sources more viable. Ultimately building solar and wind is betting that we'll be able to build efficient, cheap, and massively scalable energy storage.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

2. https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

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

#119

Post by cinquemb »

manfredo wrote: post #118
cinquemb wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also many kinds of thermal energy storage systems in use (I think molten salt systems are the most promising[0], esp if you design salt mixtures that have have higher delta k's[1] and more efficient HEX and steam turbines to about ~60% efficiency of converting heat to electricity[2]), not limited by geography. Going of the example powering 100MW turbine with a working temp range of ~278C[0] and using an eutec…

Solar thermal plants [1] effectively already use this system. They heat a model salt container, which drives a heat engine. The molten salt remains hot enough enough to keep producing energy through the night. However this scheme requires both solar collectors (in the form of mirrors) as well as the molten salt tank plus a heat engine. The resulting levelized cost is about the same as nuclear power [2]. If this start…

Yes, I had CSP in mind, however most CSP systems today use the kn03+ nano3 eutectic mixtures, and the LCOE is based on that assumption, as well as assuming you can have no baseload from the storage, and cannot distribute storage separately from collection. And even with their assumptions the range for solar thermal capital costs/kwh is about 20% less than nuclear on the top end, 41% less on the bottom end. One also has to consider the political costs that nuclear comes with and that CSP doesn't.

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

#120

Post by bretpiatt »

evgen wrote: post #90
bretpiatt wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Cool. Would love to hear more about how they managed that trick.

The grid isn't one big national national. Our national grid is a bunch of separate grids. Since San Antonio is on the middle of Texas it is on the Texas Interconnection manged by ERCOT [1].

Here's information on the overall grid generation where if you look at the fuel mix report for 2020 YTD you'll see 26% is Wind so overall it is also above 20% [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection

[2] http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation/

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