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Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

fortune.com

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Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#71

Post by lyschoening »

Qwertious wrote: post #57
Retric wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fossil fuels get on the order of 100+ billion per year in direct and indirect subsidies in the US as a conservative estimate . By far the largest subsides for 'Green Energy' go to corn ethanol which is mostly political football. After that there really more rounding errors than anything else. PS: Nuclear seems to be popular on a lot of tech sites, but it needs massive subsides to come close to break even.

I'm not saying you're wrong (and I think you're right), but do you have a source for the "fossil fuels get $100billion+ in subsidies" and "Nuclear needs massive subsidies to come close to break even"?

A couple of sources in here, below the first few paragraphs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies#Allocation_of...

This article on 'de-facto' subsidies computed by the IMF that includes externalities such as pollution and global warming is also worth reading:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fu...

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#72

Post by afarrell »

DannoHung wrote: post #64
jessaustin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural gas will stick around until utility scale batteries ramp up... Batteries have improved over time, but I'm not convinced that they'll see the vast improvements necessary in order for them to replace natural gas for a long time. If natural gas really must be replaced the most logical alternative might be ammonia. Ammonia has hydrogen's good properties: not a greenhouse gas, doesn't cause smog, numerous producti…

Are physical potential energy storage systems completely impractical? Flywheels, compressed air, gravity storage?

Of those, I believe only gravity storage (at facilities like Blenheim-Gilboa) are currently in use.

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#73

Post by trhway »

osmala wrote: post #38
trhway wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Translated into plain English: >As more governments raise the price of fossil fuels through increased taxation, solar and wind may cost less than fossil fuels. well, as it stands currently the whole society pays the tax for the fossil fuels use - that tax is the expenses and damages caused by the environment damage and climate change, oil wars, backward countries and people having huge political power due to being r…

For society you need reliability, you just don't stop freezers just because sun goes down, or there is period of storms or night. You would need atleast 14 times the hour capacity just to smooth the daily curve. [In winter there is less sunlight hours and maximum sun light is mid-day.] The cost is more than 0.1$ per watt hour of capacity, just for battery, and not for any power electronics going with it. https://en.w…

it isn't a car, so the range of technological options is much wider, ie. there is no need for high capacity small batteries. One can hydrolyze the water during low loads and store the resulting hydrogen (hydrolysis equipment and stationary storage is relatively simple and cheap). A generator with gas turbine to burn the hydrogen would cost on the scale like $400/kw - a small addition to the $2K/kw capital cost for solar panels install. The week of reserve storage - 200kwh to be generated - with even low 40% efficiency of turbine generation - would require storing 250m3 of hydrogen to provide a week reserve per 1kw of basic capacity. Lets say that storage is generous $1/m3.

As result, under $3K/kw we'd have a week of reserve and the ability to short-term double power during peaks using the gas turbines. And using the same loan calculations it is $0.075/kwh.

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#74

Post by trhway »

cpprototypes wrote: post #44
schwabacher wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit of creating oil like this is that it is energy dense, the downside is that it is hugely inefficient at every step compared to battery storage and burning it still produces air pollution.

If cars and all the oil infrastructure didn't exist, EV and batteries are superior. They have far better efficiency and are a much more elegant solution. But all the oil infrastructure does exist and is a huge advantage for oil producing solutions. Consider asking a random person, would you rather keep your current car and use oil that has a side benefit of being carbon neutral or throw away the car, buy a brand new…

>But the Prius combines both technologies and gets 40% thermal efficiency

well, you can get an even better ICE with relatively simple improvements. In some sense there is just no business case for it as metal-air batteries would probably beat all the other options for passenger cars in near future.

>Many think that hybrids and plug-in hybrids are a bridge technology to a pure EV future. But the future may end up being a lot more similar to the present than expected. Maybe the typical car purchase in the future will be a 100 mpg hybrid with 60 mile plug-in battery range as an option.

kind of. Small personal cars will go EV (typical secondary and metal-air batteries). Starting with pickup trucks and into the big ones - will be hybrids with various plugin (probably with metal-air or similar) options.

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#75

Post by terryf »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

1. This is excellent. It means we're well on our way to sustainable energy generation. Wind and solar are only going to get cheaper. Even without subsidies, there is no reason to ever build another coal or oil fired generation facility. Natural gas will stick around until utility scale batteries ramp up, to where peaking plants are too expensive compared to utility scale batteries. 2. Nuclear is dead. Very dead. Thor…

You did miss two things - distribution networks and industrial customers. Those are the two problems that nobody seems to be solving yet.

Basically, high-voltage electricity is distributed with networks that are dumb and old. The generation and usage is very carefully balanced with heavy users and large producers, because the network does not have storage capacity. It also has very little tolerance for power imbalance, the frequency cutoffs in the old equipment running most of the network are rather severe (in high-voltage networks, frequency increases with more power being fed into the system).

There are already extremely severe network problems in Germany for example where quite a bit of power comes from solar and wind. (I worked as an embedded sw engineer doing software that controlled solar inverters for a while)

The problem with upgrading distribution network is of course the MASSIVE amounts capex needed to replace it.

The other problem is industrial consumers - an aluminium smelter requires a certain amount of power coming in 24/7 or the ovens will freeze and if they do, restart is basically impossible. There are many other factories with similar problems. Given the trend towards just-in-time production and shipping, the chain of events that leads to massive disruption in the global trade can start from a fairly small shutdown with large snowball effects.

I'm not trying to put down green power generation, just saying that getting the price down to reasonable level is just one part of the puzzle.

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#76

Post by ars »

noselfrighteous wrote: post #31
scythe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7. Compressed air energy storage can't get here fast enough. Batteries are great, but they have to be replaced. Tanks can last for centuries and the materials are way cheaper at scale (CAES makes no sense below the MWh scale).

I was thinking about this the other day, what's the loss factor in compressed air storage?

Quite high. When you compress air it heats up and that energy is lost.

When you expand it it gets very cold and you lose pressure (you can wait a bit for the air to warm it up to regain some of what was lost).

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#77

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #48
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

practically free energy We've heard that before, as far back as 1954: "too cheap to meter". The problem is, even if the incremental generation of electricity is practically free, there are still large costs in building the windmills and solar panels. And there are large distribution costs as well. In addition, the more cheap energy there is, the more inefficiently people will use it. Why bother with things like Energ…

You're free to your pessimism :) I've got another 50 years of life to be hopeful. Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 5 minutes to power the world for a year. That's effectively limitless.

> Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in 5 minutes to power the world for a year.

At current levels, and that's the point of the parent comment.

> That's effectively limitless.

It's 0.0000095 or so. Impressive but not limitless. An earth in which all the infalling sunlight was used for power would be a dark place, which would be bad for people and for agriculture. And oxygen production. So actually lot less than that.

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#78

Post by rodgerd »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

1. This is excellent. It means we're well on our way to sustainable energy generation. Wind and solar are only going to get cheaper. Even without subsidies, there is no reason to ever build another coal or oil fired generation facility. Natural gas will stick around until utility scale batteries ramp up, to where peaking plants are too expensive compared to utility scale batteries. 2. Nuclear is dead. Very dead. Thor…

> First world demand for renewables will continue to drive down costs, allowing third world countries to piggyback off the cost savings. Remember how Africa leapfrogged with cell phones instead of land lines? Imagine battery packs and solar roofs in every home instead of traditional utilities. It's already feasible with current economics.

I think the real advantage in places like China, Tanzania, Kenya, etc, is they don't seem to have half of their political class entrenched in the idea that they need to crush renewables because of an unholy alliance of their business backers (the Kochs, Murdoch, etc) and the portion of the population who are apparently pro pollution because they hate hippies or something.

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#79

Post by downandout »

Wind and solar are still not competitive. The report says that coal costs $75 per megawatt hour, while land-based wind costs $83 and solar comes in at a whopping $122. That's far from "almost competitive". Also note that these are not costs of production, these are what people wind up paying for it. That means that the coal numbers include extensive taxes, while the solar and wind numbers include extensive tax discounts and incentives. This makes the real difference in production costs even bigger than what this report implies.

If we as a society decide we want clean energy, that's fine, but it is important that people make these decisions based upon actual facts. Clean energy in 2015 is still significantly more expensive than energy produced using fossil fuels (and of course this report leaves nuclear out entirely, which is far cheaper than coal).

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#80

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

monochromatic wrote: post #46
schwabacher wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit of creating oil like this is that it is energy dense, the downside is that it is hugely inefficient at every step compared to battery storage and burning it still produces air pollution.

> burning it still produces air pollution Doesn't burning it just turn it back into what it was made from? You're not releasing any more carbon than you put into it.

This is an example of how the pollution debate has became ridiculously carbon-centric...

Yes, CO2 is what causes global warming, but other pollutants can cause acid rain and lung cancer among many other effects.

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