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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

#11

Post by Emma_Goldman »

> "Without providing price detail, which companies say is commercially sensitive, Clarke said Carlton had struggled to finance the planned gas plant in part because of uncertainty over the revenues it would generate and the number of hours it would run."

This is the crucial point. Political uncertainty about the future energy system is jacking up the rate of return investors are demanding of gas plant projects without contracted revenues. This is the main reason why gas projects are falling through. At the same time, there is currently no scalable storage system for time-shifting surplus renewable generation over weeks-to-months, so that it can offset renewable troughs. This means surplus renewable generation is simply being wasted, and for that reason, is so low cost that even hours-to-days battery storage - which is a mature storage system - is economical. It's far less clear this is a long-term proposition for at-scale storage, as the longer you can store energy for the higher the efficiency of matching surplus to deficit. Hydrogen and pumped hydro can store energy for far longer.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#12

Post by mdgrech23 »

BirAdam wrote: post #9

It would be neat to see an alternate universe where there was zero corporate welfare for petroleum and for solar/wind/tidal/hydro. I imagine that in such a world, renewables would have become the default sometime in the 70s and millions of lives would have been saved due to fewer oil wars and cleaner air.

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.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#14

Post by Emma_Goldman »

mdgrech23 wrote: post #12
BirAdam wrote: post #9

It would be neat to see an alternate universe where there was zero corporate welfare for petroleum and for solar/wind/tidal/hydro. I imagine that in such a world, renewables would have become the default sometime in the 70s and millions of lives would have been saved due to fewer oil wars and cleaner air.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Gre...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#15

Post by snewman »

BirAdam wrote: post #9

It would be neat to see an alternate universe where there was zero corporate welfare for petroleum and for solar/wind/tidal/hydro. I imagine that in such a world, renewables would have become the default sometime in the 70s and millions of lives would have been saved due to fewer oil wars and cleaner air.

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 the point where that's feasible.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#16

Post by bell-cot »

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 become more complex," Nigel Scott, head of structured trade and commodity finance at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, said.

> Investors are putting increased scrutiny on the modelling, he added.

- so basically, maintaining a large-scale grid is an optimization problem. And batteries merely shift the answer to "how much of which each type of equipment should we have?" around some. Kinda like someone architecting a DC-scale system has to understand trade-offs between L1 cache / L2 cache / L3 cache / local-to-core RAM / more-distant RAM / SSD / HD / Tape - vs. what equipment is actually available - at what prices, lead times, configuration limitations, ...

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#17

Post by toomuchtodo »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #11

> "Without providing price detail, which companies say is commercially sensitive, Clarke said Carlton had struggled to finance the planned gas plant in part because of uncertainty over the revenues it would generate and the number of hours it would run." This is the crucial point. Political uncertainty about the future energy system is jacking up the rate of return investors are demanding of gas plant projects withou…

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.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#18

Post by snewman »

mdgrech23 wrote: post #12
BirAdam wrote: post #9

It would be neat to see an alternate universe where there was zero corporate welfare for petroleum and for solar/wind/tidal/hydro. I imagine that in such a world, renewables would have become the default sometime in the 70s and millions of lives would have been saved due to fewer oil wars and cleaner air.

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.

Trains can often be electrified, as can semi trucks, though it will require substantial investment in heavy duty charging infrastructure. Long haul aviation, and probably long haul shipping, will likely continue to require chemical fuels (though Fleetzero aspires to electrify shipping). But multiple startups have promising routes to replacing fossil fuels with e-fuels for those applications (chemical fuels created using electricity, such as electrolysis and carbon capture, instead of pumping fossil fuel out of the ground).

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#19

Post by snewman »

hoosieree wrote: post #13

Now if we could just get the world to run on DC, then HVDC transmission lines would make distribution more efficient.

HVDC lines can be integrated into a conventional grid; China is doing it, and NREL models for the US grid include scenarios where we do it as well.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#20

Post by margorczynski »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #6

The Lazard LCOE cost of unsubsidized solar/wind + storage has recently achieved parity with gas turbine combined cycle. So the writing is on the wall for fossil fuels. What's also important is that gas combined cycle kind of represented the end state of maximum power for minimum cost from fossil fuels. Wind and especially solar (perovskites, etc) and storage (sodium chemistries, etc) have lots of runway for further c…

> Wind and especially solar (perovskites, etc) and storage (sodium chemistries, etc) have lots of runway for further cost drops

Could you tell on what you base this assumption?

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