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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

#101

Post by generatorguy »

tomatocracy wrote: post #74
generatorguy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great examples. These measures in the U.K. were put in place to shift demand due to constraints in total system capacity - total generation, total transmission, total distribution capacity. Eg a substation transformer couldn’t handle normal daily loads plus heating, so heating load is shifted to night. What happens when power at night becomes more expensive due to increases demand such as car charging or low supply s…

Yes, there will always be baseload demand. But I think with the right setup more demand matching is possible for domestic and commercial buildings with relatively little effort. One way this could work is that you have eg a smart heating thermostat which plans which hours of the day/night to turn heating on and then buys power to cover that in a day-ahead market, with the aim of minimising cost on that basis. Wind an…

How much does it cost to implement and run all the demand matching, how much money does it save the loads who are willing to participate, and how much load can reliably be controlled? The marriage of electrical system reliability to real time control of tens of thousands loads over internet or cellular would be an unholy one. This will limit acceptance as the cost of outages immediately outstrips savings. So I’m back to grids requiring solar and wind to come with energy storage to firm them up. Which is a perfectly fine solution and increasingly viable as the cost per MWH of storage comes down.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#102

Post by beat »

fromthestart wrote: post #97
WalterBright wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that if variable electricity pricing for consumers, a great deal of the need for "batteries" will evaporate. Heavy consumer electric uses (charging the car, HVAC, hot water) can easily be time shifted. It isn't time shifted today because consumer electricity rates are constant 24/7.

I don't think forcing people to use electricity only when it's available is a practical solution to the availability problem with wind and solar.

Not forcing... just having market forces encourage good behavior, instead of hiding the underlying cost pressures from them.

Look at it this way. With enough variation over the day, you create a market for storage. Let's say stored electricity costs twice as much as direct, but the price of direct varies by 3x over the course of the day. You've now created an arbitrage market for buying cheap electricity during the day, and selling it at night.

Of course, the more storage gets built, the more the load (and thus cost) increases during the high-availability times, and the lower the selling price during demand spikes. And thus the market attains equilibrium.

The law of supply and demand is a marvelous thing sometimes.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#103

Post by eppp »

sunkenvicar wrote: post #83
jandrese wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about natural gas? I can think of a couple of other renewable resources: Geothermal and Hydroelectric, but Geothermal is geographically limited and Hydroelectric has proven to have more environmental impact than we would like. I have no idea on what the other three could be. I guess you could include Nuclear in the list, but the price points on that make it hard to declare it better than Solar and Win…

What are the severe environmental impacts of hydro?

Dams also result in large methane releases. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/hundreds-new-dams-co...

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#104

Post by mruts »

gibybo wrote: post #77
darksaints wrote: post #64

I'm interested in understanding how this will play out with the electrification of cars. As it stands now, the production and distribution infrastructure is mostly used for homes. But you could easily double your home's electric consumption with an electric car traveling just 10 miles per day. If we see a quick change in electric car adoption, our production and distribution systems are going to be massively strained…

300 wh/mile seems to be about what most electric cars achieve. 10 miles/day * 300 wh/mile * 30 days = 90 kWh. The average monthly energy consumption per capita in the U.S. is about 1000 kWh[1], so in order to double that with electric cars every individual would need to drive an average of 110 miles per day. [1] https://www.worlddata.info/america/usa/energy-consumption.ph...

1000 kWh/month? That seems like a buttload to me. I used to live in the US (though I never measured how much I used there) and currently, average between 6-15 KWh/day. I know this because I live in a 3rd world country and must pre-pay for my electricity by going down to the local equivalent of a corner store to add power. And I don't even turn off most of my lights at night.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#105

Post by adrianmonk »

aqme28 wrote: post #49
perfunctory wrote: post #40

Some time, in not so distant future, we will have abundant, almost infinite, almost free, renewable energy. We will forget what an energy bill is, because administration overhead will be higher than the price of the energy itself. It will just be an inconspicuous tiny item on the city taxes. And we won't think it's amazing. We'll take it for granted. It will become new normal. Just like now we don't remember any more…

I'm more skeptical. I worry that energy demand will rise to the level of supply, more akin to road use than to phone access. As an example, you're going to have to deal with crypto miners and grow-ops.

Or to use an example closer to home, more akin to software bloat.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#106

Post by generatorguy »

Faark wrote: post #100
generatorguy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a lot of hope for people changing their behaviour based on time of day pricing. Sure aluminum smelters etc might have to flag it for a day once every 5 years but they do that currently because there isn't enough power for everyone so please help us out and shutdown for a day instead cause we are going to dump you anyway because we have to decide between giving you power or this other major load such as a…

> How many people will refrain from charging because it is going to cost you $50 instead of $10? [..] Given that traffic never gets better I would say none! Are you honestly trying to argue it doesn't have any effect? "What day of the week is best to fill your tank" is like an age-old question. Obviously within reason. Not if your tank is empty and you have to be somewhere. Less so for people who think this to be ben…

Do people with electric cars only charge once per week? I concede There could be some demand response if people could know that they can charge for less every Sunday night. But as you say when you are empty you are a price taker.

I live near Vancouver which features the most expensive gas in North America, and decent public transportation, and I believe traffic is the only thing that keeps people from driving more, not cost. So demand seems inflexible over the long term, and with electric cars I think you have even less flexibility to choose your time and place to charge, unless charging becomes ubiquitously available.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#107

Post by trenning »

Something I'm curious about is how this will affect plant manufacturers. Specifically I'm thinking about generator manufacturers like MHI, Siemens, GE, Toshiba. Do they just shut those divisions down and move on?

There's also a lot of other businesses that exist for building/maintaining/repairing plants and equipment that are non-OE and their futures seem grim.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#108

Post by beat »

Retric wrote: post #31
GuB-42 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Nuclear also has high operating costs, just not fuel costs. Solar can generally just be left alone for weeks or months at a time. Nuclear however needs security guards, regular maintenance, a highly trained workforce, large insurance premiums etc. On top of that it also needs some fuel. What’s happening with Nuclear is these older power plants occasionally need a significant overhaul and it’s at that point where they…

And a nuclear plant costs about the same to run whether it's running at 100%, or 20%. Fuel costs are negligible relative to capital and operational costs. So when lower-cost competition appears and eats into the demand for nuclear power, it actually increases the per-unit cost of nuclear power, which makes alternatives more compelling, which eats into demand, which turns into a cost death spiral.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#109

Post by beat »

omarhaneef wrote: post #61
Robotbeat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Numbers for wind and solar are now about $40/MWh unsubsidized according to current LCOE analysis: https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o... ...as you say, this is not the whole story as you still need storage (etc). But the floor for (unsubsidized) solar may be a lot lower than that. About $14/MWh: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-floor-for-u... And we're already seeing bids near…

Yes, we are seeing very low bids. $26-$30/MWh for solar doesn't even turn heads anymore. And battery costs are coming down too, and I think that curve looks more linear, but its coming down. One of the issues is that these costs are so capital intensive that the financing costs drive a lot of the price drop. With near zero or negative rates in so much of the world, I think its hard to tell what the real rates would b…

Capital costs are a legit concern. If something happens in international markets that causes interest rates to spike globally, it will set back the pace of conversion tremendously.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#110

Post by tomatocracy »

generatorguy wrote: post #101
tomatocracy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there will always be baseload demand. But I think with the right setup more demand matching is possible for domestic and commercial buildings with relatively little effort. One way this could work is that you have eg a smart heating thermostat which plans which hours of the day/night to turn heating on and then buys power to cover that in a day-ahead market, with the aim of minimising cost on that basis. Wind an…

How much does it cost to implement and run all the demand matching, how much money does it save the loads who are willing to participate, and how much load can reliably be controlled? The marriage of electrical system reliability to real time control of tens of thousands loads over internet or cellular would be an unholy one. This will limit acceptance as the cost of outages immediately outstrips savings. So I’m back…

I'm not talking about real-time demand matching/load shedding here as a consumer solution - as I mentioned, I think matching on a day-ahead (and perhaps also eg 6-hour ahead) basis could well be a lot better than we have now because wind and solar generation is quite predictable on a day-ahead basis, as are outside temperatures (so eg for space heating energy consumption may be relatively well predictable too).

The beauty of this type of approach is that it can be done by incrementally building on things which already exist.

There's already an electricity market, including day-ahead pricing in most pools. Professional power traders already trade these markets. Smart meters already exist and are capable of dealing with pool prices not just flat rates. Smart thermostats already exist. EVs already have the capability to stop/start charging based on more than just whether they're plugged in or not. Even better, most of these already have standardised APIs.

What's missing is the software stack which ties all of these together - and that can be done incrementally, device by device (on the load side).

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