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Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

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Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#111

Post by pinkgolem »

applied_heat wrote: post #35

Look at the stock prices of the companies installing owning and operating solar and wind farms. They are dogshit. I think the boom is to capture the transmission system capacity near the best wind/solar sites, try and stay in business for the duration of the 20 year energy purchase agreement signed with local utility, and then mergers and aquisitions so that the larger entity can exert leverage upon renewal. Power ou…

There is just no barrier to entry in the market.

You can get a small PV going for a few hundred bucks, and it scales more or less linear from that point on.

And cost to entry is reducing over time

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#112

Post by looofooo0 »

Retric wrote: post #105
throwaway87651 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear had much lower capacity factors in the past, which brings the lifetime capacity factor down. But the relevant point is that the capacity factor of nuclear plants running today is >90%

US Nuclear had a capacity factor of 86.1% as recently as 2012, it just varies through time and over a 40+ year lifetime you don’t have outstanding results every single year. So sure you can argue 71.1% in 1997 no longer applies, but it was almost exactly the same fleet of reactors in use back then. Yet the person I was replying to said “about 93%” when averaging over 93% has been achieved exactly once in 2019. That k…

Planned or unplanned is the question.

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#113

Post by throwaway5959 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #20
pfdietz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you don't understand exponential growth without saying you don't understand exponential growth.

There's no way solar can grow geometrically for long. It consumes real estate like there's no tomorrow. Land is limited; sunlight is limited. It has a hard, hard limit. Unlike many other kinds of power generation, which are land-frugal and work 24 hours a day. So, let's rethink who doesn't understand growth.

California has a lot of desert. A lot a lot.

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#114

Post by hef19898 »

looofooo0 wrote: post #109
TomK32 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia writes: "As of early September 2022, 32 of France's 56 nuclear reactors were shut down due to maintenance or technical problems" and "In 2022, Europe's driest summer in 500 years had serious consequences for power plant cooling systems, as the drought reduced the amount of river water available for cooling."

What has this to do with building? Summer gets you cheap PV battery electric energy anyhow. Lack of cooling towers etc. gives you trouble....

French reactors suffered a lack of suffciently cool water, what little water they had was too hot. Cooling towers numbers actually are sufficient.

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#115

Post by richardw »

sowbug wrote: post #88
gamepsys wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think space is a concern in North America.

If space isn't a concern, then transmission is.

There are some very long transmission lines:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1305820/longest-power-tr...

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#116

Post by callalex »

hef19898 wrote: post #89
Maakuth wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course those capacity factors hide one important bit, the dispatchability. While the capacity factor is the same in this list for wind and hydro, the wind and solar generation are naturally capped by nature. When demand exceeds the natural availability of these, you need to dispatch some extra generation. Hydro and natural gas are well suited for this, coal can do it even if dirtily. Nuclear generation could be ma…

Take a close look at the title again, second word after "solar", you have to pass by "and" to get there.

Please say what you mean.

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#117

Post by Zanfa »

nekoashide wrote: post #29

The cool thing about batteries is that they are great as an investment. You can charge them when power is cheap and sell back power when you have high demand and market prices for power. Typically Peaker Plants fill this role but at much higher cost for electricity and emissions. Batteries just make much more sense for this kind of power.

Last time I ran the numbers for this, price arbitrage alone using lithium batteries is not gonna be profitable.

Current lithium batteries are just too expensive, store too little energy and degrade too quickly for true grid-scale storage.

That’s why they typically offer services, other than price arbitrage, that actually makes building them make sense. There’s still no equivalent of a peaker plant using non-hydro storage.

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#118

Post by Retric »

looofooo0 wrote: post #112
Retric wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US Nuclear had a capacity factor of 86.1% as recently as 2012, it just varies through time and over a 40+ year lifetime you don’t have outstanding results every single year. So sure you can argue 71.1% in 1997 no longer applies, but it was almost exactly the same fleet of reactors in use back then. Yet the person I was replying to said “about 93%” when averaging over 93% has been achieved exactly once in 2019. That k…

Planned or unplanned is the question.

The larger question is what capacity factors would look like if you tried to double the amount of nuclear as many advocates wish. And what that would do to profitability / the need for subsidies.

Or as the industry has been concerned with for a decade, what happens when renewable energy is regularly sending wholesale prices near zero for hours a day.

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#119

Post by pbazarnik »

Calculation of battery capacity one can build for 34B

0.3k$ per 1kWh of battery storage [1] (0.3$/Wh)

Battery capacity = 34B$ /(0.3$/Wh) =113.3GWh (1G$=1B$)

The 34B battery capacity will be equivalent to 113hours of operation of 1GW power plant. (4.7 days)

[1] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf

Re: Solar and battery to make up 81% of new US electric-generating capacity in 2024

#120

Post by mynameisnoone »

fbdab103 wrote: post #101
throwaway2037 wrote: post #67

> Nuclear. Start-up of the fourth reactor (1.1 GW) at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear power plant I checked the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... > Two additional units utilizing Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were under construction since 2009, with Unit 3 being completed in July 2023.[9][10][11] This last report blames the latest increase in costs on the contractor not completing wor…

What specifically is so expensive about the reactors? Having played the simulator[0] and now being an expert in running a nuclear power plant, the idea is "simple". Seemingly not much more complex than any other steam/heat power plant, so how do the costs run so high? Are the tolerances on everything turned to 11 to minimize chance of errors? Triple-checking all work? As a point of comparison, the Large Hadron collid…

I worked for a Campbell, CA nuclear engineering partial employee-owned co-op formed by mostly ex-General Electric engineers (Stanford and Berkeley alums) ultimately acquired by Curtiss-Wright Corp. (And yes, computers were named after Simpsons' characters.)

Costs are related to the assurance of safety through careful documentation and processes beginning with regulation and insurance underwriting of design engineering, construction, operations, and maintenance. This sort of thing only makes sense to do so at large scale to make it economical. Scale also has its costs. Safety isn't something that can be Boeing'ed because the NRC can and will shut the whole thing down if it were to be found unsafe.

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