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Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

sciencemag.org

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Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#111

Post by castratikron »

rmuesi wrote: post #84

I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…

In that sense it's an investment. Your savings are determined by the price of energy, so there's no guarantee the price will stay the same (or increase) over 10 years.

It isn't just the utility's price that can change. There can also be changes to laws regarding net metering. In fact there's loads of cases where local/municipal/state utilities will try to change the law and eliminate net metering so that they don't have to pay for residential solar.

I really think there needs to be some kind of state owned grid where market forces determine the cost of energy. Everyone who wants to hop on the grid gets a meter installed and there would be a marketplace where people would be free to pick where their energy comes from. In that way the cost of energy becomes democratized and takes power away from entrenched utilities that have every incentive to keep them in control of the energy supply and to keep the price of that energy high.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#112

Post by kortilla »

ourmandave wrote: post #81

Meanwhile in Iowa, Mid American Energy is well on their way to 100% renewal by 2021 with an endless array of wind farms. Their final phase of the project started in 2018 with a $922M investment. Iowa Public Radio toured one of the windmills back in January. https://www.iowapublicradio.org/post/skyscrapers-fields-wind...

What is the base load supply?

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#113

Post by ZeroGravitas »

dv_dt wrote: post #58
Animats wrote: post #7

$0.02/Kwh for the solar part is pretty good. A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California. Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas…

> Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. In general, yes, but if you look for a term called the duck curve which characterizes that frequently the load comes up after peak output, or even after sunset. For coastal CA wind often helps fill that offset as winds frequently come up near sunset, but it's not always a guaranteed thing. So there does need to…

I can't tell if the duck curve thing is intentionally misleading, but people all seem to jump to the wrong conclusion.

The demand isn't greater in the evening, the relative demand, after you subtract all the energy provided by solar, is in the evening, during periods of the year when demand is low but solar supply is high.

It's like someone cured cancer and then someone came up with the llama curve, showing that some of the people who survived cancer got pushed off cliffs by llamas ten years later and everyone was like "Oh no, that cancer cure has caused the llama curve, what will we do?"

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#114

Post by [deleted] »

rmuesi wrote: post #84

I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…

[deleted]

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#115

Post by merpnderp »

sp332 wrote: post #75
mikestew wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate it when they list battery prices this way, it's very misleading. Misleading to some, flat-out useless to others. The replacement cost of the 24KWh battery in our Nissan Leaf is about $5K. So I'll take two of those $187 MWh batteries, please. Oh, of course they're not speaking the same language as I am with that kind of price difference. But then I guess I don't know what in the hell they're talking about if no…

Person A: I'd like you to store one megawatt-hour of electricity that I will give you, and then later, I want you to give that electricity back to me. Person B: Certainly. That will be $187. It's not the cost of the battery. It's the cost of storing and releasing one megawatt-hour of electricity once. This has to pay for the capital cost over time, as well as overhead and depreciation.

How would this type of sales pitch work with nuclear?

Person A: I'd like to buy power from you. Person B: Certainly. That will be $50/MwH.

Accurate, but misleading.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#116

Post by snarf21 »

rmuesi wrote: post #84

I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…

There are two data points you are missing.

Land purchase and annual taxes add cost. To get to the scale of 1000 house, let's just pretend you need 100 acres. So where are you going to get that much land close to people so you cheaply transport it? Also, developers will make far more from that land near a suburban neighborhood than you can as a solar farm provider meaning you would have to overpay for the land. Most solar farms you see are in useless desert land. If solar farms were cheaper and more profitable than coal plants, the energy companies would have switched years ago.

The flip side is that people installing this on their house don't have this issue. They already own the land and pay the same taxes. They also gain some level of energy independence which is important to some people. Additionally, a lot of these were installed to take advantage of generous tax breaks or other discounts. That is why one of the big hopes of SolarCity was that new construction could come with panels built in and remove a lot of the installation costs. Eventually, we'll all probably have solar shingles and this all won't matter much.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#117

Post by Chirael »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #33
krferriter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm renting a house in central NC and May-September our power bill skyrockets from AC. The windows are not insulated at all and we have a lot of them. Even the floors, walls, and ceilings leak heat like crazy, you can feel it just putting your hand close to the wall or ceiling. We run AC to get it down to 76F and it's still crazy expensive and using a lot of unnecessary power. We need to encourage insulation, es…

> The US needs to heavily encourage these sorts of improvements to buildings, it's good for everyone. Is it though? I imagine your landlord doesn't think it's good for them. It's not bad for them, but why would they spend hundreds or thousands of dollars improving your apartments insulation when it costs them nothing to keep the poor thermal in place. I too lived in rentals that had terrible thermal protection. It wa…

If two or three tenants in a row move out and cite sky high power costs due to poor insulation as the reason, the landlord will notice and do something about it. One tenant is a fluke, several all saying the same thing over a few years is a problem that will get dealt with. Nothing costs a landlord money like high turnover. But departing tenants DO need to communicate that as the issue, otherwise the landlord would never really know since s/he isn’t the one paying the bill.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#118

Post by nexuist »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #70

> the cost to decarbonize the U.S. grid alone would be $4.5 trillion They make this sound like a lot but that strikes me as actually pretty cheap. I don't think that number can be right. Edit: I mean seriously think. The F-35 has cost us 1.45 trillion dollars so far. That's roughly 1/3 of the price they're asserting here. Localizing our entire energy dependence has got to have some serious national security benefits.…

>Localizing our entire energy dependence has got to have some serious national security benefits

It would also cause extreme instability by shooting up unemployment, destroying large corporations that offered valuable careers with good benefits, and exacerbate polarization between those who believe in man made climate change and those who don't.

Don't get me wrong - I think energy independence is the way to go - but paying $4.5 trillion to effectively ruin the lives of millions of people is not a popular position, especially given that we have terrible safety nets to allow these people to find other jobs.

I think the much more likely, less rough path is to continue renewable research until it becomes cheaper than fossil fuels in almost all cases. At which point the market will do the rest. The vast majority of fossil fuel users do not actually care that they use fossil fuel - they just care about energy generation. If you can give them a cheaper means to achieve that, they will go for it.

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