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Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

reuters.com

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Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#51

Post by marcosdumay »

samus wrote: post #41
bell-cot wrote: post #16

The reality is much more complex than "batteries replace gas" - > Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said. > Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate. > "It does…

It is probably smart to keep around a certain capacity of nonrenewables to provide at least some base load. Long periods of low sunshine and slow winds could deplete batteries to a critical level. Also, the turbines of big powerplants act as grid frequency stabilizer. Do grid-scale batteries use alternators or might they run flywheels?

It's quite likely that in the future electricity sellers will need to pay a tariff to cover the operation of flywheels.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#52

Post by s1artibartfast »

triplepoint217 wrote: post #21
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first point is excellent, that this sends capital market signals to investors to not invest in fossil generation. But to your other point, seasonal storage is not required. All available evidence indicates overbuilding renewables and simply making peace with excess curtailment can solve for that, along with transmission and perhaps pumped hydro where geography allows for that.

The nice thing is as long as these markets stay reasonably competitive, economics can figure out what to do with excess renewables. When renewables are in excess, the spot (instantaneous) energy price will drop to near zero (or sometimes negative in weird situations). That is good for existing (short term) batteries (they can recharge cheaply), but it will also provide price signals to people considering investing in…

>since their cost of energy could be near zero, they only have to recoup the costs of building and operating the storage

If cost of storage and operation is lower than battery operators can sell it for, then eventually the cost producers will sell at will increase. It will be interesting to watch

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#53

Post by Enogoloyo »

samus wrote: post #41
bell-cot wrote: post #16

The reality is much more complex than "batteries replace gas" - > Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said. > Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate. > "It does…

It is probably smart to keep around a certain capacity of nonrenewables to provide at least some base load. Long periods of low sunshine and slow winds could deplete batteries to a critical level. Also, the turbines of big powerplants act as grid frequency stabilizer. Do grid-scale batteries use alternators or might they run flywheels?

I believe they just switch on and off fast enough.

Tesla power wall does that.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#54

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #22
mdgrech23 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks. What we need is world where we recognize that everyone owning their own personal automobile is probably a bad idea. We need walkable neighborhoods and public transportation but we also need to recognize how powerful fossil fuels are preserve them for heavy duty tasks that would be near impossible w/ human muscle and or renewables.

> Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks. Eh... The only one on your list that is currently a problem is planes. It's expensive powering semi trucks with them, that's why people mostly don't, and it's almost trivial for trains. There is also no fundamental reason why planes should be impossible. There are several well understood possibilities for them, but very few people have focused on sol…

It's cheap powering semi trucks with electric compared to deisel costs. The only issue is infrastructre

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#55

Post by amoshebb »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #40
bumby wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semis/tractor-trailers are still a problem. Sure, they can make them run off batteries, but you have to forgo a lot of cargo capacity to do so, which makes the economics tough.

No discussion of battery trucks can go very far without reaching the conclusion that more freight must travel by rail. That's a correct conclusion, but for the same reasons it has never carried the day in the US for 75 years, that transition will continue to not happen.

I've always dreamed of trolley-bus like wires strung along interstates paired with robotic self-attaching trolley-poles.

In my head, semi-trucks (and maybe all cars?) only need 50-100 miles or so of range for low-speed (where batteries shine) warehouse/ports/downtown deliveries (or garage-charged commutes?).

Almost every trip I've ever taken beyond ~20 miles included at least some portion on a highway. Electric interstates could allow NY to LA in one shot and pulling off the highway with 100 miles to make the round-trip to wherever a load needed to be dropped off.

If attaching and detaching was automatic, there would be no need to electrify onramps or intersections or underpasses or anything expensive, just find the cheapest, straightest, easiest to electrify 80% of roads and slap up wires there.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#56

Post by marcosdumay »

triplepoint217 wrote: post #21
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first point is excellent, that this sends capital market signals to investors to not invest in fossil generation. But to your other point, seasonal storage is not required. All available evidence indicates overbuilding renewables and simply making peace with excess curtailment can solve for that, along with transmission and perhaps pumped hydro where geography allows for that.

The nice thing is as long as these markets stay reasonably competitive, economics can figure out what to do with excess renewables. When renewables are in excess, the spot (instantaneous) energy price will drop to near zero (or sometimes negative in weird situations). That is good for existing (short term) batteries (they can recharge cheaply), but it will also provide price signals to people considering investing in…

> the spot (instantaneous) energy price will drop to near zero

Yes, and that means generation will become unprofitable.

We seem to be a decade or so away from the point where the investment on generation can't be decided by direct ROI. And nobody is preparing for this. Governments need a long time to regulate that kind of thing... so we can expect some problems on the near future.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#57

Post by j-a-a-p »

Tomorrow's fuel should be the battery.

A battery can only solve a local issue: a system for locally produced and consumed electricity, If the sourcing solar or wind is transformed to fuel, you also have storage, probably a gas or liquid. And you catch two birds with one stone: storage and distribution. That could be shipping, pipelines but also gas stations. Infrastructure we already have.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#58

Post by bluescrn »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #40
bumby wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semis/tractor-trailers are still a problem. Sure, they can make them run off batteries, but you have to forgo a lot of cargo capacity to do so, which makes the economics tough.

No discussion of battery trucks can go very far without reaching the conclusion that more freight must travel by rail. That's a correct conclusion, but for the same reasons it has never carried the day in the US for 75 years, that transition will continue to not happen.

We can't really build useful railways any more, though.

Towns and cities are too large and too dense and too insanely expensive in terms of property prices to get new lines into or even close to.

(This might be less of a problem for freight compared to moving people, but many lines are mixed freight/passenger use, aren't they?)

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#59

Post by empath-nirvana »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #49
snewman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you run the numbers on this, or are you just imagining? In the 70s, solar and (to a lesser but still substantial extent) wind were still extremely expensive, impractical for large scale use. As were the batteries that are needed to smooth out periods of low renewable generation. I'm an absolute supporter of renewables, and I'd love to see support for fossil fuels phased out, but it's been a long climb to reach t…

The appropriate counterfactual here is if we'd made investments into renewables back in the 70s/80s/90s of a scale similar to those we made in the 00s/10s/20s. It's not really clear what the result would have been. To really answer this you'd need to unpack the past two decades' worth of cost decreases in (e.g.,) PV and see how many of them would have been possible with late-20th century technology. My uneducated gue…

> The appropriate counterfactual here is if we'd made investments into renewables back in the 70s/80s/90s of a scale similar to those we made in the 00s/10s/20s.

I'm not really sure it would have gone faster instead of just having been a very large waste of money. A lot of the reason that renewables are cheaper now has to do with 30 years of advancements in electronics and power storage and semiconductors and solid state materials etc etc etc that just _took that long to invent_. It's not like people decided a few years ago that 'oh it's time to invent better batteries'. There's always been motivation to build better batteries and people have been working on that non-stop since electricity was discovered.

That counterfactual is like: What if we had invested more in building neural networks in 1970, where would we be today. Well, the problem is we didn't have cheap powerful GPUs back then, so it probably wouldn't have mattered?

We sort of got cheap renewable energy "for free" from a lot of technologies that we invested in for other reasons.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#60

Post by Enogoloyo »

Germany paid 4 billion for energy dispatch in 2023.

That would be enough to buy 80000 cars with 100kWh and provide 8gWh and would be 8x more than Germans biggest water energy storage.

Did I miss something?

Sounds absolutely doable in a few years to have massive more energy storage available.

Combined with a lot more and cheaper renewable energy

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