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Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

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Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#111

Post by thx-2718 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #101
thx-2718 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you say it's militarized? I mean, the command structure of Star Fleet mirrors the military, but as far I know the the mirror universe is the 'militarized' society.

> the command structure of Star Fleet mirrors the military This. For someone with a longing for a culture that values duty, and with it, a sense of place and responsibility, a community with hierarchy, et cetera , Star Trek delivers. Today, those elements largely live within conservative America.

It is kind of interesting which parts of Roddenberry's creation people focus the most on.

iirc He wanted to promote egalitarian values whilst portraying the efficiencies and comradery of a uniform service.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#112

Post by pydry »

ftth_finland wrote: post #98
pfdietz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to hear someone else beating the hydrogen (or some e-fuel) drum for that last few percent.

"Combustion turbines for 100% hydrogen are not commercially available today." https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e... How are you going to use hydrogen to generate electricity without generating CO2 and other emissions? How are you going to make e-fuel or other synthetic fuels cost effectively? Even if electricity is free, the plants aren't.

Theyre not commercially available because theres no market for it not because theres anything infeasible about it - cost-wise or otherwise.

The amount of deployed solar and wind around the world isnt even enough to turn off the gas turbines during the sunniest windiest days yet. Theres little point to electrolyzing gas into existence until it routinely overproduces and beyond existing storage capacity and by a lot. Needing to close that 3% gap? That'd be a good problem to have but we are years away.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#113

Post by karmakurtisaani »

There is this idea that we are building wind and solar plants to match the consumption of an average cloudy day with not much wind. If we are able to reach that level of production, we will have an overwhelming excess of essentially free energy on days when when the weather is actually favorable for renewables. As a consequence, on those days we can do energy intensive activities such as produce synthetic fuels or hydrogen, etc. very very cheaply. To me that is pretty exciting.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#114

Post by ftth_finland »

mikeyouse wrote: post #79
ftth_finland wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we start building nuclear now, in a number of years we we have nuclear power plants. If we wait the same number of years, we might have some form of viable long term storage. Or not.

The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost. If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15). Or you could spend $1 billion/year and end up with probably 15GW of utility solar in the same time frame? Even at a 20% capacity factor instead of a 95% one, you'd be making far more money from Day 1…

> The problem with nuclear is and has always been the opportunity cost.

What opportunity cost? What else are you going to spend the money on that gives you non-polluting 24/7 power output rain or shine?

> If you have $15 billion today -- you could tie it up for a decade and you might get a working 1GW reactor in 10 years (though probably more like 15).

The best time to build a nuclear power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

What we need is to build nuclear power at scale. Doing the same thing repeatedly for years in bound to bring both the construction time and cost down.

> Or you could spend $1 billion/year and end up with probably 15GW of utility solar in the same time frame?

What use is 15GW of solar in northern climes when you cannot use it when you need it and you cannot store it? In Finland solar has no output three months of the year and an additional two months of marginal output. Additional we need power 24/7, especially in winter.

> Even at a 20% capacity factor instead of a 95% one, you'd be making far more money from Day 1 with solar and since we're not remotely at the saturation point of renewables, every watt generated would still be useful.

I must confess I am unsure how the long term economics of renewables will work out. Around here renewables are pushing prices into the negative and increasing volatility.

As a funny aside, 15 GW is the peak power usage in Finland. Adding that much generation capacity would totally saturate the market.

> The right answer to whatever qualms people have about time-of-use / duck curves would be to invest more like $800M/year in generation and $200M/year in storage -- but still -- literal multiples of energy produced with almost zero ongoing costs.

How many GWh of storage can you get for $200M? My guess is far from enough.

We need days at a minimum, weeks for preference. 4 hours is nowhere enough.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#115

Post by pfdietz »

pydry wrote: post #112
ftth_finland wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Combustion turbines for 100% hydrogen are not commercially available today." https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e... How are you going to use hydrogen to generate electricity without generating CO2 and other emissions? How are you going to make e-fuel or other synthetic fuels cost effectively? Even if electricity is free, the plants aren't.

Theyre not commercially available because theres no market for it not because theres anything infeasible about it - cost-wise or otherwise. The amount of deployed solar and wind around the world isnt even enough to turn off the gas turbines during the sunniest windiest days yet. Theres little point to electrolyzing gas into existence until it routinely overproduces and beyond existing storage capacity and by a lot. N…

And then, there is little reason to burn that gas in turbines until existing consumers of hydrogen (like ammonia plants) have had their fill of it. Even before it's used in turbines, it would operate as dispatchable demand. And when it's used in turbines, it will be mixed with natural gas at first. Below about 20% H2 existing combustors work fine.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#116

Post by jacquesm »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #66
jacquesm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense, until 100% of daytime generation is solar/wind every KW added still offsets generation from other sources. This myth is mostly perpetrated by the suppliers of power based on more expensive and more polluting sources who see the value of their investments slashed.

I am fully pro solar, but the duck curve is a real thing. Time value of money and time value of electricity. If there is nobody to consume that extra juice it is of limited utility.

Extra solar power that doesn't get consumed simply isn't metered at the source. That's a direct function of how the grid works, as long as everybody plays by the transport rules regarding minimum and maximum voltage overcapacity is dealt with by simply reducing the amount of production. I see this up close almost every day on the local grid here, you can tell by 1 pm or so that the local grid is saturated and after that inverters start dropping off one-by-one until the voltage has dropped sufficiently for them to come back online again after a cool-down period (typically about an hour).

There is not such thing as 'extra juice', all that happens is that some panels are not generating. After all, if there were 'extra juice' that would imply forced consumption or some kind of giant sink load to take excess power. Neither of these happen, it's financial until some lower bound and then it gets technical.

The lower the impedance of the local grid the more margin there is for such adjustments to take place, if you are on a high impedance subnet in an otherwise low impedance grid chances are that your inverter(s) will shut down well before the grid itself has maxed out.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#117

Post by pydry »

ftth_finland wrote: post #95
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not understand why there is not more focus on fuel synthesis. If electricity becomes “free” for hours a day, even crummy roundtrip efficiency seems like a great option to soak up extra capacity and get long term (seasonal?) storage.

Can you run fuel synthesis profitably purely on intermittent renewable power and scale up and down in real-time? Capital costs are high and utilization will be low.

Sort of. Doing that would still be cheaper than nuclear power whose capital costs are insane. Does that count as profitable?

It would be cheaper still to throw pumped storage and batteries into the mix.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#118

Post by slashdev »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #113

There is this idea that we are building wind and solar plants to match the consumption of an average cloudy day with not much wind. If we are able to reach that level of production, we will have an overwhelming excess of essentially free energy on days when when the weather is actually favorable for renewables. As a consequence, on those days we can do energy intensive activities such as produce synthetic fuels or hy…

It is exciting. As long as overbuilding renewables is cheaper than grid scale storage, that will be the outcome. Battery advancements will probably eat away at this quite a lot though.

What really will also be amazing is when the cost of renewals plus some storage (like a days worth) crosses below the price of operating a natural gas power plant. At that point the whole grid will go green very quickly. We’re a ways from there, but it’s also probably not as far away as many think.

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#119

Post by crznp »

bwb wrote: post #77
xyzzyz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same can be said about cities: they are vulnerable to water issues (if a city loses access to water, it’s a major disaster), and military can weaponize them as fortification. Does it mean that we shouldn’t build cities? No, obviously not, that’s silly: it just means that you have to make sure water is flowing, and that military invasions are hugely destructive.

That isn't a good analogy. Cities have multiple water sources, and it is a very complex system. Not to mention we have special trucks and responses when that happens (at least in the USA). Nuclear has some problems.

Do cities have redundant water sources though? Not all of NYC's water goes through Hillview Reservoir, but it seems like a pretty serious vulnerability to me. It doesn't seem like a terrible analogy.

But cities are worth the risk, can you say the same about nuclear plants? Most established designs can't operate as peaker plants, or even seasonal plants (eg: covering for solar in the winter when there is less sun and more load for heating). They are expensive because they are mired in political issues and red tape. I don't think it has to be like that, and I wish it weren't. But is fixing nuclear an easier problem to solve than to invest in grid storage and more dynamic pricing?

Re: Global Solar Power Investment Will Top $1B per Day This Year

#120

Post by pfdietz »

ftth_finland wrote: post #50
pydry wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civilian nuclear power help share costs with the nuclear military industrial complex (e.g. Russia, France, UK, USA) and it's useful for countries that have a clear and pressing desire to be able to develop a nuclear bomb in a hurry (Sweden, South Korea, Japan), but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it. Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive tha…

> but without those caveats there isn't much point to it which is why nobody else builds it. Having power and not freezing to death when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow is a pretty solid point. We just put a new nuclear power plant into service in Finland. > Its LCOE is 5x that of solar and between 1.5x-3x more expensive than solar/wind paired with just about all viable forms of green large scale stor…

In fairness, in a renewably powered world Finland is going to be a really bad place to be. It's one of the worst places for energy (I'd call it the energy butthole of that world but I'll reserve that label for Russia). Solar is seasonal and wind is relatively sparse there.

What this means is you're going to lose your heavy energy intensive industry. Going with nuclear won't save you from that, if you're then competing with industry in places where solar is available all year at costs likely to be below $0.01/kWh.

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