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A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

reneweconomy.com.au

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Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#201

Post by CodeWriter23 »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #59
mattnewton wrote: post #55

Meanwhile in the US, we have states allowing counties to ban solar and wind energy production specifically on privately owned and industrially zoned land. I hope Australia can push through the fossil fuel lobby as they start to fight harder. https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/08/23/nine-ohio-counties...

It's odd that the party that claims to be in favor of a free market is passing laws that actively restrict the free market.

IMO the odd thing is people who believe the "Free Market" is or ever was real.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#202

Post by m463 »

Loudergood wrote: post #193
klyrs wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm real bullish on electrification of everything, but the necessary service upgrades for me to get a level 2 charger on my property would cost on the order of $5-10k. Edit: typo corrected, I said level 3 previously

I'm honestly curious as to why you would need anything more than a Level 2 charger at home.

Maybe they meant Level 2?

A level 3 charger can easily use more electricity than an entire household (250kw is becoming more common now)

Also, many cars can level 2 charge through the onboard inverter at fairly high levels, 48 amps ~ 11.5kw

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#203

Post by toomuchtodo »

tstrimple wrote: post #196
usefulcat wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Texas has over 130GW of renewables in ERCOT’s interconnect queue I'm curious to know where you got the 130 GW figure? Texas consumption rarely exceeds 80 GW, even in summer, so 130 seems like a lot. https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/supplyanddemand (Note: the Y axis in the above chart is megawatts)

I just found a dashboard for the ERCOT interconnect queue. It looks like the previous person understated the amount in the queue if anything. https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiYjM0YjNjZWQtM2U3ZS00Z... Page 4 shows nearly 200 GW just for solar and wind, and a total of 275 GW.

Good find. My figure was from September 2021, this is great to hear. I assume even more projects planned with the Inflation Reduction Act juicing renewables subsidies.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#204

Post by theluketaylor »

dont__panic wrote: post #104
arcticbull wrote: post #49

The Ontario grid has been there for years. 92% zero-carbon. [1] [1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

Wow, that's a lot of hydro and nuclear power! Thanks for sharing. I wonder how the New England and upstate NY power grids compare, since they also have a lot of hydro and nuclear?

New England and upstate NY don't generate nearly enough power for their own needs and buy excess power from Ontario and Quebec. Quebec in particular as Hydro Quebec has a terrifying amount of hydro generation and always has tons of excess. A big chunk of the clean energy in the northeast US comes from Canada.

Super cool tool that shows the CO2 intensity of various grids and where power is flowing:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-NE-ISNE

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#205

Post by trashtester »

iammjm wrote: post #179

each time somebody claims something is impossible, consider how much he is benefiting from the status quo

When somebody claims something is impossible, maybe the status quo will be maintained, or maybe some alternative plan will be started.

On the other hand, if someone argues for doing something that they know is impossible, it may be an even stronger indication that they may benefit from the status quo. In such a situation, those who advocate for an alternative, proven but less sexy option may be those who really seek progress.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#206

Post by trashtester »

kkfx wrote: post #67

Those who made such "simulation" probably do have forgot or never learn a classic engineering practice (at least in Europe engineering) witch is named resilience. We need resilient systems as more resilient as bigger is the impact of their eventual failure. In other terms stating we can made a big and complex enough smart grid to run "almost" an renewable means spend an incredible amount of resource to build a hyper-…

Norway has very little pumped hydro, even though they have 50% of all hydro in Europe. The flexibility is gained by just postponing consumption if demand is low or alternative supply is high.

Of course, these days, there is rarely any surplus power being generated, so Norway is just exporting as much as they can spare (and then some).

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#207

Post by svara »

time_to_smile wrote: post #194
snek_case wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of cynicism around renewable energy and electric cars and I frankly don't get it. The typical cynical approach is to point out one potential problem, and dismiss the entire solution as if it was worthless, which is obviously false. As others have pointed out, there are now HVDC lines that can go over thousands of kilometers (transcontinental scale!) with reasonable losses. There's no reason to believe tha…

> I see a lot of cynicism around renewable energy and electric cars and I frankly don't get it So far, we have never globally replaced fossil fuels with renewable energy, only supplemented their usage (meaning you can't point to a single drop of oil that is designated to never be extracted due to the creation of renewables). The energy required to build an electric car is massive and results in a lot of CO2 productio…

How would you get to CO2 neutrality if degrowth is going to be the strategy? If you go back to the world of 50 years ago, you reduce emissions but you don't solve the problem, and you make it impossible to go to an entirely carbon neutral economy since you won't be able to produce the required tech anymore. Unless the plan is to actually go back to a preindustrial lifestyle.

Massive investment in renewables at least is a theoretically possible strategy for going to carbon neutrality without a total destruction of people's quality of life.

You're right about electric cars et al being energy intensive to produce right now, but this gets better and better with increasing electrification and CO2 reduction in power generation.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#208

Post by klyrs »

Loudergood wrote: post #193
klyrs wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm real bullish on electrification of everything, but the necessary service upgrades for me to get a level 2 charger on my property would cost on the order of $5-10k. Edit: typo corrected, I said level 3 previously

I'm honestly curious as to why you would need anything more than a Level 2 charger at home.

Ack, that was a typo

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#209

Post by pydry »

fallingknife wrote: post #177
fulafel wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demand can be regulated to meet supply using various ways (eg pricing, quotas, etc).

Pricing is a poor tool as the signal doesn't propagate quickly enough. Quotas just means blackouts, and that isn't ever going to fly politically.

Pricing doesnt propogate fast enough only if you assume that we cant predict the weather.

It's already working in the UK - power company sends a message saying between 2am-4am power will be free.

Re: A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

#210

Post by jnsaff2 »

pydry wrote: post #121
jnsaff2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PV can be throttled instantly to anything down to 0. Otherwise no offgrid setup would be feasible. You can mandate smart control signals to PV inverters or don't do anything and let the frequency go up so even inverters installed today will start cutting power as this is a requirement from grid code. Wind has a bigger lag (seconds) but it has brakes to save them in storms. So those are easy problems (technologically)…

It's better to use price signals to ratchet demand up if you can. The UK already has a tariff that can warn you about upcoming periods of free power. Electric car users like it. They like it a lot.

I have a contract that uses nordpool spot market prices that are known ahead for each hour for the next day. I have PV on my roof and an EV. The price volatility is just insane between 2 and 4000 EUR/MWh so 2000x in the last week alone. So I finally connected a smallish house battery (about 14kWh) last week and by purely arbitrage I’ve made about 100 euros in the week. Even with an 8kW feed in cap and such a tiny battery.
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