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Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

ourworldindata.org

41–50 of 642 posts

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#41
post #12

The article says the world relies on fossil fuel for energy because it's cheaper. That's true. It doesn't mention that the world relies on it because it's reliable. It doesn't disappear for 6 months of the year, or stop producing for 3 out of 5 days or during peak demand periods. Make renewables cheaper and more reliable and they will replace fossil fuels in a snap. Cheaper is not enough if it doesn't do the job.

in the past they were cheaper. Now renewables are cheaper.

Right now, intermittent renewables actually drives up the cost of fossil fuels! Renewables do wacky things to the spot price of power - sometimes electricity is free or even has negative value, sometimes it's expensive. Ideally fossil fuel plants would only spin up when they could sell power at a profit, but they can't dispatch so quickly, so they end up selling power at a loss for minutes or hours after the solar panels or wind turbines kick back on.

This is producing market conditions that are favorable to batteries and super-capacitors, because they can dispatch in seconds, or milliseconds. Arbitraging between times of cheap power to times of expensive power can already be competitive with fossil fuels some of the time. And batteries are getting cheaper, too.

There's some question about what the ideal mix of generation vs storage will end up being. While storage is expensive, we'll tend to over-provision wind and solar, and end up throwing power away... unless we can come up for some use for it when we have moments of surplus. There's some talk of using it for things like ocean water desalination, but most of our machinery has such a high investment cost right now that the cost of electricity is not the biggest expense, so we don't actually have many machines that we idle until power gets cheap. Maybe that'll change eventually.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#42
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running a power cable across the Pacific is going to be rife with expensive engineering problems, but sure, you could send electrons from Three Gorges to Google at some cost. I wouldn't call it cheaper, though.

In the spirit of "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." I wonder if shipping big piles of fully charged batteries around has any chance of being a practical power distribution method?

The value of the electricity can be measured by comparing it to the value of a petroleum product. transportable energy can be made using from CO2 in the air using Fischer-Tropsch.

It's energy intensive, and uneconomic - which is why people are stringing HVDC links across bodies of water - Denmark/Sweden, Australia/Tasmania, NZ North/South Islands instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#43

> Fossil fuels dominate the global power supply because until very recently electricity from fossil fuels was far cheaper than electricity from renewables. This has dramatically changed within the last decade. In most places in the world power from new renewables is now cheaper than power from new fossil fuels. This is the thing our great-grandkids will ask us about. ("were you alive back when?") Millenia from now, h…

I'd vote for "post-advanced batteries" instead of "post-solar". Solar will only be one of the energy sources and the thing that will take us to the next level will be advanced battery tech, in my opinion.

Imagine something with the energy density of kerosene but rechargeable. My brain can't even imagine what we'd do with it, but it would probably transform our daily lives more than the invention of the automobile did.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#44
post #12

The article says the world relies on fossil fuel for energy because it's cheaper. That's true. It doesn't mention that the world relies on it because it's reliable. It doesn't disappear for 6 months of the year, or stop producing for 3 out of 5 days or during peak demand periods. Make renewables cheaper and more reliable and they will replace fossil fuels in a snap. Cheaper is not enough if it doesn't do the job.

Wood and biomass are renewable. Fossil fuels "disappear" after being consumed. The sun, however will reliably be around for quite some time.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#45
post #43

> Fossil fuels dominate the global power supply because until very recently electricity from fossil fuels was far cheaper than electricity from renewables. This has dramatically changed within the last decade. In most places in the world power from new renewables is now cheaper than power from new fossil fuels. This is the thing our great-grandkids will ask us about. ("were you alive back when?") Millenia from now, h…

I'd vote for "post-advanced batteries" instead of "post-solar". Solar will only be one of the energy sources and the thing that will take us to the next level will be advanced battery tech, in my opinion. Imagine something with the energy density of kerosene but rechargeable. My brain can't even imagine what we'd do with it, but it would probably transform our daily lives more than the invention of the automobile did…

[deleted]

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#46
post #5

Too bad that low cost is invisible for the consumers. California has one of the most, if not the most, expensive electricity in spite of years of investment in renewables.

> California has one of the most, if not the most, expensive electricity in spite of years of investment in renewables

Some municipalities have improved a lot on that issue. See Santa Clara, Silicon Valley Power. Prices are most lower than PG&E.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#47
post #24

This is the source they are using: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... Does lazard include subsidies in their numbers or not? I can't figure it out. I'm having trouble making sense of the lazard report, but to me it seems that it does, and ourworldindata.org is using their numbers while claiming they are without subsidies.

It doesn't matter. The subsidy is 22% and the gap is more than 22%.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#48

So fossil fuels, at least for power generation, is already obsolete. Fantastic! Since the power plant replacement cycle is much slower than for phones, it will take a while to propagate the shift, but it is already inevitable.

There's still the problem of what to do between 4pm and 8 am on a day without wind, which means we won't be able to shut down too many power plants until cheap energy storage exists.

Solar beamed power from orbital facilities?

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#49
post #5

Too bad that low cost is invisible for the consumers. California has one of the most, if not the most, expensive electricity in spite of years of investment in renewables.

this is why rooftop solar, which has the highest LCOE of any power generation, still ends up making sense for consumers. Because it doesn't have to compete on the open market, it just has to be plausibly cheaper than your utility bill

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind power is centuries older than fossil fuel engines, but actually using it to do the sort of things we expect from power generation takes some doing.

Yes, solar is even older, with plants and other organisms on the forefront of energy production and development. It is kind of an untapped source of renewable energy.

If we are going to include organisms here... ALL of our energy production is or was at some point solar, with the exception of geothermal and nuclear.

Coal? Solar. Wood burning? Solar. The food you eat? Solar. Wind? Solar. Gasoline? Solar too.

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