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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

#221

Post by klyrs »

r00fus wrote: post #213
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 find this surprising. I specced out an L2 charger and it did cost me $2K for the install + charger a few years ago (in an expensive market). The install required a new 100A line pulled to my garage as I had no existing washer/dryer there. What else would you need to support L2 than an extra breaker entry for a 100A?

We'd need to upgrade our panel, as it's already maxed out. On top of that, we'd also have to pay the power company to upgrade their distribution box and the wiring that's buried in a trench that runs under the garage. And, joy of medium density, we'd need about 10 other households to get in on the action and the price I quoted is per unit.

Basically, the problem that we're experiencing is that everybody in the neighborhood has already maxed out their service. Infrastructure upgrades are painful.

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

#222

Post by Schroedingersat »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #127
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of people live in Texas and California where renewables are already pretty advanced, plus there's nuclear in the north, and they have hydro and grid connections with Canada who have even more hydro and nuclear so the USA should be easier. The US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035 and it di…

The problem is that electrification of fossil fuel applications is going to significantly increase the demand on our grid. So it’s not enough to get to parity in renewables, but we have to go far beyond our current capacity in order to accommodate a world in which almost every car is electric (whether electric hybrid or green hydrogen) and almost every home uses electric rather than natural gas for heating (not to me…

If you can store energy in batteries for days wherever, and store energy for weeks in hydrogen anywhere bigger than a house, and store energy in ammonia for decades and move it wherever there are trained personell, and store energy in NaOH and release it as low grade heat, and store energy in methane and put it through the existing gas network, and all these things cost in the range of $20-100/MWh over and above the energy input...

Do we ever actually need to move our $1-10/MWh peak solar energy through our $100-200/MWh grid?

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

#223

Post by [deleted] »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #149
sremani wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 95% carbon-free generation I am still not clearly getting the picture here - what exactly this means. US has about 30% electricity generated by Coal and I do not see that go away in next 20 years let alone 8. What am I missing here? As of today, US energy portfolio is around 83% fossil. The best case scenario for 2040 is something like 50%, that includes we get Nuclear fusion, massive battery storage, material sci…

All the big developed nations have committed to phase out coal by 2030, the USA skipped it because of politics, but if you read any of the coverage of that they usually say that it would happen with or without a government commitment e.g. Why the U.S. Didn’t Join 40 Other Countries in Pledge to End Coal subtitle: Economics is already playing a large role in curtailing American coal power https://www.scientificamerica…

[deleted]

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

#224

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#225

Post by makomk »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #149
sremani wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 95% carbon-free generation I am still not clearly getting the picture here - what exactly this means. US has about 30% electricity generated by Coal and I do not see that go away in next 20 years let alone 8. What am I missing here? As of today, US energy portfolio is around 83% fossil. The best case scenario for 2040 is something like 50%, that includes we get Nuclear fusion, massive battery storage, material sci…

All the big developed nations have committed to phase out coal by 2030, the USA skipped it because of politics, but if you read any of the coverage of that they usually say that it would happen with or without a government commitment e.g. Why the U.S. Didn’t Join 40 Other Countries in Pledge to End Coal subtitle: Economics is already playing a large role in curtailing American coal power https://www.scientificamerica…

The trouble is, the economics only worked out that way because natural gas was cheap - it's not anymore, and countries have been rolling back their coal shutdowns as a result. There's a good chance it never will be again. The same people who were campaigning for that managed to convince pretty much all developed nations other than the US to end new natural gas investment and extraction, and without the supply there prices won't go down and it won't be feasible to use as a coal replacement. This will probably also cut into the switch to renewables because all of the alternatives to natural gas, like coal, play much less well with them.

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

#226

Post by tomohawk »

Speaking as an electrical engineer with a grid tied PV system for many years, this claim is just bonkers. It's exactly this sort of magical thinking that we don't need more of. Electric utility is a deadly serious business. The cost of getting a massive transition like this wrong is going to be measured not just economically, but in people's lives.

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

#227

Post by trashtester »

snek_case wrote: post #48
wyager wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transmission losses would eat any benefit, unfortunately. Of course, the author didn't model this at all. This is the problem with 99% of "actually we could totally rip out our entire infrastructure right now" posts - it's usually justified with crappy modeling that falls apart under slightly more scrutinizing consideration. Solar-only with low storage overhead might become more viable if we get room-temperature supe…

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…

If there is not wind in Sidney, you may have to transport 10s of GW distances of about 4000km during peak hours. Even using HVDC, there is significant transfer loss and building and operating that kind of infra is not cheap either.

Also, who wants to pay for those interconnects when they expect battery prices to plummet, as you say?

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

#228

Post by nomel »

qqqwerty wrote: post #146
thrown_22 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australian energy prices doubled in the last 6 months. I'm not sure who would ever use the Australian market as a model, other than "under no circumstances follow suit".

Energy prices everywhere are up. That is what happens when the global economy is bouncing back from a pandemic and one of the biggest energy suppliers in the world decides to embark on the first major land war in Europe in over 70 years.

With the energy industry making record profits [1], my naive self has extreme trouble believing that's the whole story.

https://energycommerce.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/pal...

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

#229

Post by teknopaul »

trashtester wrote: post #219
epistasis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to increase the amount of energy flowing through the grid, but there's plenty of excess grid capacity to accommodate that. The grid is a technological marvel, but one weakness about it is that it has never included storage except small amount of hydro (which I've heard some claim is because nuclear needed it so that the reactor could stay always on, but I have my doubts on that origin story) Without storag…

> Electrification has enormous potential to reduce grid cost, and overall energy cost, IMHO. This sounds a bit strange. I'm pretty sure that electric cars and replacing natural gas for heating will require quite significant investment in electric distribution infrastructure. Also, if you want to be able to transfer a significant fraction of power generated from wind and solar across the country, transmission capacity…

Electric vehicles are all a way of moving power, and huge spare battery capacity. They are not a problem, they are the solution.

Just throw software at it. I know Musk does not believe that, but essentially it has to work.

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

#230

Post by nomel »

kickout wrote: post #162
zo1 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one that's kinda off put or frankly disgusted by the thought of ruining our nature by peppering it with giant wind turbines? At what point does it stop?

Your not only one, but we (society) have ruined far prettier landscapes for far less tangible economic benefits. Hardly _any_ prairie ecosystems exist in NA, and we pretty much built a dam on every river with a pulse, ruining countless landscapes.

> Hardly _any_ prairie ecosystems exist in NA

To really understand this, open google maps and zoom in to any random point in the US, where you would expect a prairie. You'll see a farm.

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