Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 153 posts

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#21

Post by triplepoint217 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17
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.

The nice thing is as long as these markets stay reasonably competitive, economics can figure out what to do with excess renewables.

When renewables are in excess, the spot (instantaneous) energy price will drop to near zero (or sometimes negative in weird situations). That is good for existing (short term) batteries (they can recharge cheaply), but it will also provide price signals to people considering investing in longer term storage (since their cost of energy could be near zero, they only have to recoup the costs of building and operating the storage).

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#22

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

> Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks.

Eh... The only one on your list that is currently a problem is planes. It's expensive powering semi trucks with them, that's why people mostly don't, and it's almost trivial for trains.

There is also no fundamental reason why planes should be impossible. There are several well understood possibilities for them, but very few people have focused on solving this problem.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#23

Post by 7thaccount »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17
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.

That's at a cost of trillions though - perhaps annually (just something to keep in mind). Transmission is crazy expensive and hard to secure right of way for. The investment costs on renewables are also pretty high.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#24

Post by wolfram74 »

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…

When thinking of load balancing over years, you need to weigh seasonal loads that have low capital costs and high energy costs running for 30~50% of the year vs a battery that only discharges ~once a year. The amortization prospects of such a storage medium are grim.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#25

Post by snewman »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17
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.

Source?

My understanding is that this can be true in some regions but requires fairly aggressive use of, not only overbuilt renewables (which may pose challenges in land use and siting), but also long haul transmission (also difficult to site), demand response, etc. And then there's the scary possibility of an extended weather anomaly (several weeks with no wind and minimal solar).

Having some long term storage in the mix, probably in the form of green hydrogen or another e-fuel, greatly increases our options for building a robust fossil-free grid.

Putting more clean firm sources such as nuclear or advanced geothermal in the mix also helps, but I am not optimistic regarding nuclear, and advanced geothermal is still pretty immature.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#26

Post by triplepoint217 »

bell-cot wrote: post #16

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…

I like that analogy.

Batteries are kind of the RAM/cache in the system: - Big merchant batteries like Hornsdale are kind of like more distant ram RAM - Batteries co-located with renewables are kind of the local to core ram - UPS and similar are cache - Pumped hydro is probably Tape ;)

It feels like we might still be lacking a good/widely deployed HD/SSD equivalent in this space, hopefully new/emerging technologies (maybe the sodium chemistries others are mentioning) will be able to fill that in.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#27

Post by noelherrick »

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.

There are examples of all three that are electric, although planes are the hardest to make happen. Train electrification is so common that in English it is used in an expression: "touching the third rail".

As with the debate between cars vs. trains, semis lose out to trains by a lot, even when trains use fossil fuels. Trains rule.

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#28

Post by triplepoint217 »

snewman wrote: post #19
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.

There are a few active in the US already (though it does look like the US is lagging)

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

Re: Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

#30

Post by zafka »

lebuffon wrote: post #29

We should take a moment to acknowledge the Power MOSFet in this story. For a guy who paid money for his first germanium transistor generating grid scale power with transistors is TOTALLY amazing.

Can you explain this? I agree that Power MOSFets played a major part, but what are you referring to?
Post reply on HN