Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study
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Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study
#2I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with wind at under $50/mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60/mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100/mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don't get unhelpfully pedantic!).
These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear. Coal plants are shutting down as fast as replacements can be built, and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now.
The cost of PV solar has dropped over 80% in the past decade, and wind like 50%, due to engineering improvements in operation and economies of scale in manufacturing. But it's a reasonable question how much farther their prices will drop. It seems unlikely to me that we'll see another decade of such radical price drops.
Gas, on the other hand, is vulnerable to markets and availability. How long will it stay so cheap? And what happens if a politically progressive government gets serious about carbon taxing? On the other hand, it's a lot cheaper up-front to build a gas plant, and a lot less painful if it closes early.
Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study
#3Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar and big batteries.
Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.
Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study
#4I don't see batteries being able to store the amount of power (for a practical battery lifetime to be cost effective) needed to make solar a practical primary electricity source.
Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study
#5No they won't, unless the storage issue is solved.
Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study
#6There are at least 5 better alternatives to wind and solar, but we don't teach science any more in public schools.
If we did, there wouldn't even BE climate change alarmist hysteria poised to destroy entire economies.
Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study
#7I don't see batteries being able to store the amount of power (for a practical battery lifetime to be cost effective) needed to make solar a practical primary electricity source.
To make the system close for a single site (without any geographical diversity) is to produce about 3 times as much solar energy you need and install enough batteries to meet 48 hours of average demand. That's enough to deal with seasonality and with cloudy weather to provide a constant output for an entire year.
The 48 hours of battery would last a really long time as typically only about 12 hours will need to be used, thus you'd get very long cycle life. A battery used so lightly could get 10,000 effective full cycles, so probably would last multiples of 25 years from a cycle life perspective (calendar life may be another thing).
EDIT: If you add in geographical diversity and diversity in sources like wind, hydro, and geothermal, then you need to throw away a lot less energy and you need a lot less storage. IMHO, we should just bite the bullet and install a bunch of transmission lines (which could be done in 2 years, enabling us to decommission coal power within about 2 years in the US).
Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study
#8I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I've been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40/mwh, with wind at under $50/mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60/mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100/mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don't get unhelpfully pedantic!). These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear.…
> and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they're losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now
How? My understanding is that most of the cost of nuclear power comes from building the plant and decommissioning it. Running existing power plants for as long as they can seems like the most economical choice.
Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study
#9Excess electric doesn't have to be in stored with chemicals like lithium ion, energy is still energy.
Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study
#10Sorry to thread jack, but- important question: how are people reading Bloomberg now that they shut down incognito mode as of this week? Disabling Javascript doesn't seem to work either. I'm using Outline for the time being, but it's slow and annoying, and it won't load any longforms that contain multiple pictures or graphs. Anyone else have a better solution?