Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables • Hacker News Board

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#161

Post by qchris » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:02 PM UTC

avianlyric wrote: post #143

wcoenen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might work, but it's not necessarily going to be very profitable. The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs. For the same reason, it's not a good idea to have bitcoin mining equipment sitting around waiting for cheap electricity. The hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, so there's only limited time t…

With negative electricity rates you can do crazy things like buy thousands of space heaters, and just heat the outside. Space heaters don’t become obsolete, and they’re not very capital intensive, or require much maintenance. You just need space to put them in.

Alternatively, maybe in an era of climate change, there could be an incentive to use the extra to run processes like carbon capture. If carbon credits became a thing in a global economy, I could see some companies in a cap-and-trade scenario use that as a convenient way to offset their total footprint.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#162

Post by hristov » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:03 PM UTC

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

Negative electricity prices are not a crisis but a great business opportunity. There is a lot of money to be made from free energy, or even better energy that someone is paying you to take.

There are, for example aluminum plants, whose major cost is electricity. There is steel, which can be made by electric arc furnaces (this is not the only way to make steel, but it certainly the more environmentally friendly). There is cement. Cement is currently not made by electricity and it is currently one of the most polluting and carbon intensive industries out there. But, as the major power input in cement is heat, I am sure there is a way to make it profitably from electricity given low enough electricity prices.

There will also be electric cars. One can choose when to charge an electric car, and if the power companies decide to pass on some of the savings on consumers, consumers can choose to charge up their cars when there is plentiful wind power.

So no, this will not be a "crisis" for long. And really if things get very bad, one can always slam the brakes on the windmills so you won't have power you don't want. But I expect there will be a lot of businesses that will pop up to use intermittent cheap electric power.

Just because some change is required, we shouldn't call it a crisis or put negative connotations about it. And of all the crisises that could happen, having cheap or free energy is not the worst crisis one could have, to put it mildly.

Say you had a rare meterological condition in your town, where it started raining little nuggets of gold. Would that be a crisis. It would certainly require action. You'd have to improvise a protective hat of some sort, and then you would have to drop everything and run out and gather all the gold. But I would not call it a crisis.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#163

Post by dahfizz » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:04 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #45

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

>There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me. There are tons of potential applications for "free" electricity. * Storage heating/cooling that's basically free * Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel * Cheaper aluminium production It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap…

Is electricity the primary cost for the things you list? Once you have paid for the factory, equipment, employees, materials to manufacture aluminum or jet fuel, I can't imagine the stakeholders just shutting everything down if the cost of electricity fluctuates.

For actual buffers to be developed, we need applications that are super cheap to set up but expensive to run. Storage heating / cooling is a good idea, I can't come up with others from the top of my head.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#164

Post by lkbm » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:06 PM UTC

circlefavshape wrote: post #57

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

Better batteries may not be the answer. Possible other options - electrolysis of seawater https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258929912... - scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere directly https://cen.acs.org/synthesis/catalysis/Electrochemical-meth... Neither of these is energy-efficient, but if the energy is negatively priced they don't need to be

These tend to be capital-intensive, though. The big problem with most of our solutions is that you spending $50MM on a hydrogen plant and then leaving it idle half the time costs you $25MM amortized over the lifetime of the plant, so you need to be saving that much on your power bill. It's likely more economical for you to just run it on full all the time, regardless of the hourly energy prices.

We do this some with aluminum smelting, but it's not as free as it initially appears. You need a high energy usage to capital cost ratio for it to be economical. (Ideally, you'd also be able to ramp up and down somewhat quickly as-needed. IIRC, there's a big aluminum plant in Germany that can do this, but it's unusual.)

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#165

Post by sbeller » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #45

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

>There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me. There are tons of potential applications for "free" electricity. * Storage heating/cooling that's basically free * Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel * Cheaper aluminium production It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap…

Traditional plants to manufacture aluminium do not work on-demand though. If they are not shut down orderly, you can rebuild the whole plant essentially.

So there will be some innovation needed to shutdown (and boot up) these plants quickly, I would think?

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#166

Post by ThomPete » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

hristov wrote: post #162

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

Negative electricity prices are not a crisis but a great business opportunity. There is a lot of money to be made from free energy, or even better energy that someone is paying you to take. There are, for example aluminum plants, whose major cost is electricity. There is steel, which can be made by electric arc furnaces (this is not the only way to make steel, but it certainly the more environmentally friendly). Ther…

As long as the powersource isn't reliable it's a problem. A problem that doesn't have any solutions in sight that are closer than something like fusion which would be the preferable solution rather than unreliables like wind and solar.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#167

Post by ThomPete » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #45

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

>There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me. There are tons of potential applications for "free" electricity. * Storage heating/cooling that's basically free * Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel * Cheaper aluminium production It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap…

As long as you don't have a reliable way to deliver this electricity all you have done is making the energy system more complicated and expensive.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#168

Post by Reason077 » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:11 PM UTC

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

> "There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices"

I'm not sure if you can call it a crisis. A problem, yes, but one that will sort itself out over time. Negative prices are a huge incentive to any form of flexible demand. And by 2030 there will be millions of electric vehicles on UK roads, representing hundreds of GWh of flexible storage. Free fuel by charging at the right time, handled automatically by your smart charger / app? Or even paid to charge? That's a pretty powerful incentive to soak up excess supply.

> "And we are still going need masses of gas backup"

We already have masses of gas backup. But it will become less important in the future as more diversity in renewables, more interconnections, more storage, more nuclear, etc, come online. We'll still need gas for the foreseeable future, but the less it is used, the better.

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#169

Post by bluGill » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:12 PM UTC

pojzon wrote: post #37

martinald wrote: post #11

Really misleading article IMO. What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and "exported" the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources/imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different. There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunn…

Serious question, why not simply stop generating energy by wind istead of stopping nuclear stallar ? You „can” stop generating power using wind. Get up to 30% from nuclear and rest from automated wind farms.

You can stop windmills. However that changes the investment nature of wind farms. There are a lot of ways to structure this, and no one answer so it is hard to type up all the different issues. I'll pick one simple case, but don't assume this applies to all.

An investor (group) gets a contract to supply wind to a utility for $x. This price is pretty low since wind is variable, but it is enough to predict over a year how much they will make and so for the investors it works out.

For the utility they need more green energy in the mix, and so they are willing to sign the contract even though sometimes they will buy electricity and they pay someone to take it on the spot market. They also know how much wind they expect to get, and so those times wind is negative are made up by times that wind is blowing when they would otherwise have to buy much more expensive peak plant power. So for the utility over the course of the year the wind power is profitable even though at some moments it is unprofitable.

The problem is in the above separation the windmill owner is paid for all power produced, and so if they shut down there is no money for them. (or they have to agree with the utility on a fair payment)

Re: Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables

#170

Post by matsemann » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:14 PM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #119

Glench wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah exactly. That is the level of commitment needed to stay below 2 degrees of warming. The authors of that report worked backward from the goal of staying below 2 degrees and said, "what needs to happen in what timeframe to make that happen?" They found that if we started decades ago we wouldn't need a WWII-level of effort but since we waited so long we now have to move incredibly fast to electrify everything. But…

I just mean that it's a disingenuous way to say you're "creating jobs". Any mass government investment will create demand for labor, whether it's a massive investment in renewables, or in oil exploration, or in waging war, or anything else. It's not specific to green energy

Note that many dismiss climate goals because of "costing jobs". Like, "they will shut down our coal plant and hundreds will lose their job". So in that regard it's useful to point out that no, it will most likely be a net positive.