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Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

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Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#111

Post by jariel »

HighlandSpring wrote: post #8
albertop wrote: 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.

Why is this? Is there no competition?

The state has no incentive to give you something for free that used to cost a lot. Why would they do it? Votes?

The 'carriage' fee, ie the fee used to transport the electricity will grow quite a lot as the entity in charge of that finds reason to charge that much more and gov. will find reasons to tax.

There's the cost of electricity - but also distributors and government in that equation.

If the cost of making parts for the Google Phone were $1, and there were only 1 type of phone in the US and everyone had to have one ... would Google drop the price of the phone? Probably not. They would capture more surpluses.

This will be the same everywhere.

If electricity were purchased at 'independent stations' etc it would be another story entirely. As energy got cheaper, power usage would increase, and efficiency of households would go down.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#112

Post by eldaisfish »

jes5199 wrote: post #41
bregma wrote: 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 sell…

>Now renewables are cheaper.

Yes, provided you ignore the cost of balancing an increasingly volatile grid, a volatility that is created by renewables. Also provided you ignore the cost to provide energy when said renewables aren't generating any.

Claims to back up your statment, such as from Lazard, are horribly flawed because they use the metric of LCOE - levelised cost of energy - to claim that renewable energy is cheaper. It is, provided you ignore the slew of costs that are not borne by renewable generators but which ARE borne by consumers.

Yes, batteries are getting cheaper but not at the scale required for the grid. Before you quote the Australian Tesla battery, remember that it can only provide energy for minutes - yes, minutes.

What is needed today for a low-carbon future is nuclear and hydro. Renewables will get there one day but that day is not tomorrow or next year.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#113

Post by reitzensteinm »

99_00 wrote: post #99
reitzensteinm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have time to check that report in particular, but past Lazard studies have included both subsidized and unsubsidized figures side by side. And as Bryan says in the sibling comment, there's not a large gap between the prices. Residential solar was heavily subsidized in many countries but wind and utility scale solar aren't as much, and they're also the cheap ones. If they're not clearly marked, you may need to…

What does this mean? >Lazard’s latest annual Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE 14.0) shows that as the cost of renewable energy continues to decline, certain technologies (e.g., onshore wind and utility-scale solar), which became cost-competitive with conventional generation several years ago on a new-build basis, continue to maintain competitiveness with the marginal cost of selected existing conventional gene…

Yeah, they're saying that it's cheaper to build renewables than continuing to run fossil fuel plants. The marginal costs are for additional power once you own the plant.

I believe around 80% of the lifetime cost of a fossil fuel plant is the fuel itself, so even if you're gifted a plant for free it may not be economical to run.

The fly in the soup is intermittency, but grids are generally able to absorb more renewables (wholesale price dropping below 0 is the indicator saturation has happened). And electric cars are going to mean a bunch more dispatchable demand and eventually V2G.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#114

Post by BurningFrog »

BurningFrog wrote: post #25
bregma wrote: 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?

OK, shipping batteries between continents is far from feasible now.

But what about electrifying a small collection of households by batteries that are replaced from a truck every N weeks, instead of building many miles of power lines through (perhaps flammable) wilderness?

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#115

Post by rini17 »

throwaway12319 wrote: post #105

The "safest and cleanest" chart is VERY misleading when in comes to nuclear. It completely ignores the LONG-TERM risk for human survival: catastrophic release of large quantities of active fuel or waste (due to events like war, terrorism, natural disasters).

Big disasters too happen with fossils and hydro.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#116

Post by ralfd »

throwaway12319 wrote: post #105

The "safest and cleanest" chart is VERY misleading when in comes to nuclear. It completely ignores the LONG-TERM risk for human survival: catastrophic release of large quantities of active fuel or waste (due to events like war, terrorism, natural disasters).

Surely this theoretical risk of that is dwarved by the concrete risk of climate change.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#117

Post by xyzzyz »

mrDmrTmrJ wrote: post #98
99_00 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Germany's experience a success or failure? What is the counter to this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/09/05...

Great question! Here's what Germany did: They invested a vast amount in local renewables, at above market prices, that had the effect of dramatically driving down the global price of wind and solar. Because they radically expanded production capacity. Effectively, Germany gave the world a 'gift'! This had the long-term affect of dramatically increasing global solar + wind deployments (b/c prices fell) and transferrin…

> CA wholesale power prices are very low globally, while retail prices are sky high b/c PG&E is a monopoly combined with an inadvertent domestic terrorist organization.

What "inadvertent domestic terrorist organization"? BTW, PG&E prices are set by California government.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#118

Post by nomel »

matthias509 wrote: post #54
the_economist wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe use excess electricity to produce hydrogen using electrolysis and then burn it in a turbine later?

Here's a comparison: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/energy-storage-2019

Electrolysis isn't very efficient without nasty electrolytes. For massive scale, pumped water/air is still probably the most feasible in a reasonable timeframe and cost.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#119

Post by dragonwriter »

mrDmrTmrJ wrote: post #98
99_00 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Germany's experience a success or failure? What is the counter to this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/09/05...

Great question! Here's what Germany did: They invested a vast amount in local renewables, at above market prices, that had the effect of dramatically driving down the global price of wind and solar. Because they radically expanded production capacity. Effectively, Germany gave the world a 'gift'! This had the long-term affect of dramatically increasing global solar + wind deployments (b/c prices fell) and transferrin…

> PG&E is a monopoly combined with an inadvertent domestic terrorist organization.

You can't be an inadvertent terrorist organization. Not everyone who is responsible for multiple lethal felonies is a terrorist.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#120

Post by maxerickson »

gandalfian wrote: post #61

The Germans paid for it creating the market/industry. Vast amounts. Then the Chinese thought it looked like a good industry to be in and threw unbelievable money at developing manufacturing capacity. If the Germans keep voting green and being parsimonious savers then we may yet get cheap batteries and survive.

It's basically inevitable at this point, regardless of what Germany does.
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