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Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

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Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#51

Post by hyperbovine »

twoelfer wrote: post #44
perfunctory wrote: post #40

Some time, in not so distant future, we will have abundant, almost infinite, almost free, renewable energy. We will forget what an energy bill is, because administration overhead will be higher than the price of the energy itself. It will just be an inconspicuous tiny item on the city taxes. And we won't think it's amazing. We'll take it for granted. It will become new normal. Just like now we don't remember any more…

And at that point in time, in a cloudy night, the wind will stop blowing. And the lights will go dark.

Improved stargazing and no more blackout curtains? Sign me up. :-)

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#52

Post by altcognito »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #43
perfunctory wrote: post #40

Some time, in not so distant future, we will have abundant, almost infinite, almost free, renewable energy. We will forget what an energy bill is, because administration overhead will be higher than the price of the energy itself. It will just be an inconspicuous tiny item on the city taxes. And we won't think it's amazing. We'll take it for granted. It will become new normal. Just like now we don't remember any more…

So you're officially saying that it will be too cheap to meter? As you surely know, that's been said before, mostly about nuclear fusion and fission breeder reactors, both of which have inexhaustible resources. What's different this time? There's still absolutely massive amounts of major equipment needed in a wind/solar dominated energy system.

Often people consider 50-70 years to be a long time. I think the point is that we will get there, and it will seem like it had always been this way.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#53

Post by generatorguy »

lstodd wrote: post #32
Robotbeat wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make the system close for a single site (without any geographical diversity) is to produce about 3 times as much solar energy you need and install enough batteries to meet 48 hours of average demand. That's enough to deal with seasonality and with cloudy weather to provide a constant output for an entire year. The 48 hours of battery would last a really long time as typically only about 12 hours will need to be us…

Haha lol. Even in equatorial Africa 48h is not enough. Neither for actual usage, nor for battery life (and no one ever got marketing-leaflet-aka-datasheet-stated lifetime out of them batteries). Two years max, and hope either the project dies, or the company dies, or someone steals the batteries. Source: been there maintaning solar offgrid. And then --- geodiversity can only make it worse, never better.

Don't know why you are downvoted. I used to run solar powered sites that would have 5 rainy days in a row in which only about 10% of solar generation was delivered during daylight hours. We started with only enough batteries to last overnight and ended up with 10x that. Then we added 33% more when the first set of batteries had a short life due to getting so deeply discharged.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#54

Post by tomatocracy »

generatorguy wrote: post #46
fulafel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that we keep supply and demand pricing models mismatched. The current "fixed price 24/7" model is not set in stone. AC/heating, EV charging, many industrial processes can shift demand and make good forecasts about how flexible their demand is vs average intra-day variation in electricity prices.

I don't have a lot of hope for people changing their behaviour based on time of day pricing. Sure aluminum smelters etc might have to flag it for a day once every 5 years but they do that currently because there isn't enough power for everyone so please help us out and shutdown for a day instead cause we are going to dump you anyway because we have to decide between giving you power or this other major load such as a…

We've had time of day based pricing in the UK for years - it's called "Economy 7" (and there are variants like Economy 10). Historically this was designed for electric storage heaters which were switched on a separate circuit at night and you had two sets of wiring into the house but nowadays it can be done based on pure time of day by a smart meter.

People who have those tariffs do tend to alter behaviour to suit them - it mainly makes sense for homes with electric space and water heating, where it's more "set and forget" (and people also do change behaviour by eg putting washing machines or tumble dryers on late at night when the cheaper tariffs apply too).

Over time I imagine we might see more dynamic algorithms in use to pick and choose times when electricity is used together with more dynamic per-unit pricing.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#55

Post by labster »

hyperbovine wrote: post #51
twoelfer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And at that point in time, in a cloudy night, the wind will stop blowing. And the lights will go dark.

Improved stargazing and no more blackout curtains? Sign me up. :-)

Nah, GP said a cloudy night. Though I look forward to a future where solar panels produce energy from starlight.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#56

Post by 52-6F-62 »

hyperbovine wrote: post #51
twoelfer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And at that point in time, in a cloudy night, the wind will stop blowing. And the lights will go dark.

Improved stargazing and no more blackout curtains? Sign me up. :-)

Hahaha. Maybe by that time we will take it so for granted that time-out periods so we can see the stars better will be socialized. I still remember the blackout of 2003 rather fondly...

Probably not, though...

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#57

Post by philipkglass »

1) I think it's certainly possible, but 2035 is still some time out. Extrapolating battery costs 16 years from now is not at all straightforward.

2) The headline result can be true even if solar/wind/storage have significant annual gaps in availability. If a gas plant was originally built on the assumption that it could run profitably for 5000 hours per year, but in the future there are only 2000 hours a year it can run profitably (due to more solar/wind), it can be financially "crushed." At least in competitive electricity markets. There could be large writedowns as plant load factors decline. Since gas plants are much less labor intensive to keep running than coal plants, I don't expect to see gas plants mothballed and demolished quite the way American coal plants have been over the past 5 years. They may still be profitable to run in the peak-demand season each year even with much more renewable capacity deployed. But they'll make less revenue and profit, burn less fuel, and emit less CO2.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#58

Post by the8472 »

perfunctory wrote: post #40

Some time, in not so distant future, we will have abundant, almost infinite, almost free, renewable energy. We will forget what an energy bill is, because administration overhead will be higher than the price of the energy itself. It will just be an inconspicuous tiny item on the city taxes. And we won't think it's amazing. We'll take it for granted. It will become new normal. Just like now we don't remember any more…

The fuel (or lack thereof) may be free, but in the foreseeable future generation capacity and transmission infrastructure is not. Someone has to build and maintain it according to demand. If efficiency or consumption limits are not incentivized then you risk demand exceeding capacity.

Civilization grows with available energy. People would start desalinating the oceans to green deserts, speed-boat cargo around the world, grow staple foods indoors or pull carbon out of the air if energy were truly free.

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#59

Post by theklub »

GuB-42 wrote: post #3

Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar and big batteries . Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.

Check this out... https://energyvault.com/energy-vault-closes-series-b-funding...

Re: Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

#60

Post by greenyoda »

hash872 wrote: post #10

Sorry to thread jack, but- important question: how are people reading Bloomberg now that they shut down incognito mode as of this week? Disabling Javascript doesn't seem to work either. I'm using Outline for the time being, but it's slow and annoying, and it won't load any longforms that contain multiple pictures or graphs. Anyone else have a better solution?

Works fine when I use the uMatrix add-on to disable cookies and JavaScript.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjal...

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