And they can't. Solar and wind are intermittent power sources, meaning that there are times when you aren't generating any energy because the sun ain't shining and the wind ain't blowing. There is also no battery technology that can scale to the level of cities or nations for a period of hours, days or weeks (and we would need around 8 to 16 weeks of storage to bridge seasonal intermittency). Instead what we're seeing are those regions that heavily invest in solar and wind need to make a comparable investment in natural gas to make them viable.
Can you make a little effort here?
Just something that would demonstrate to me that I'm incorrect. I want to be wrong.
Right now it sounds like you feel like I'm wrong but you can't actually explain in what way. So instead you've decided to tell me I'm wrong (but not why). And now you've decided to insult me as well.
Here's what I see:
- We don't have a battery technology that can store enough energy to power an economy for even minutes. In solar/wind deployments we would need batteries to store energy for up to weeks. If there is, please tell me what it is. Lithium Ion doesn't work at that scale and cannot be relied upon to hold weeks of storage. Pumped storage is expensive but more importantly need particular geography to work. There are no examples of this large scale energy storage in practice.
- Because we don't have such a battery technology, solar and wind deployments require burning some fossil-fuel (coal, natural gas garbage, corn etc.). We see this in regions that decide to double-down on solar and wind. A perfect example is Germany. As they increase their solar/wind footprint, they are increasing their natural gas dependency by spending billions on NEW pipelines to Russia to ship their natural gas for decades. What do they know that you don't?
- There are also NO regions that power their economy wholly on renewables that don't involve nuclear, geothermal and hydro. No regions have plans in the immediate future (e.g. within 10 years) to do so either.
- There are a lot of other major issues with solar/wind, such as the huge land area requirements, and the need for large quantities of rare earth materials and lack of recycling. All these issues will be magnified as more and more regions invest in large-scale solar/wind deployments. I shudder at the thought of 100x or 1000x increase in solar cell production and what that would do to the environment, especially as these cells reach the end of their 20-25 year life.
I don't think any of those statements are wrong or controversial.
I'm not happy that this is the case. I would like solar and wind to be viable, but nobody will ever tell me how they could be without arguing that we will invent some new technology (like a better battery) to make it all work. To me it looks like nuclear, hydro and geothermal are the only real answers (with solar/wind having niche applications).
This is a live view of the energy mix of my home province (pop:14m): http://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html - depending on when you look you may see 98% carbon-free energy generation. Don't need to wait until 2060 (the time that Germany is expected to be carbon-free)
To me this looks like the future.
I appreciate the invitation, but I decline.
Cheers.
Existing coal and nuclear plants are shutting down before end-of-life because they're losing customers to cheaper competition.
Intermittency for wind/solar are well understood problems, with a growing body of performance logs, which makes them very predictable (and "wind ain't blowing" is much less of a problem than you probably think). That makes cost modeling for storage predictable as well, and storage technology costs are improving as fast as production costs. This isn't magic. The math is very straightforward. As long as renewable + storage + gas is significantly cheaper than coal/nuclear - and it already is - we're going to see the industry shift rapidly in that direction.
Is this a perfect, carbon-free solution? No. Is it radically better carbon-wise than the old coal plants? Yes. Is it significantly cheaper than the old coal and nuclear plants? Yes. I'll take two wins and a draw over three losses.
Wherever coal is replaced it is replaced with natural gas (occasionally with hydro and nuclear).
>As long as renewable + storage + gas is significantly cheaper than coal/nuclear ...
This is a red-herring. It wouldn't matter if solar and wind were free. We can't use them without fossil-fuel back-up, which today means coal or natural gas.
This is also why natural gas companies are one of the biggest lobby groups for solar deployments.
>(and "wind ain't blowing" is much less of a problem than you probably think)
It's actually a huge problem. If the wind speed is too high, you can't generate electricity (due to risk of damage to the turbine). If the wind speed is too low, you can't generate electricity.
But the elephant in the room is storage. You can always dump more and more money to over-provision your generation capacity (meaning that in certain seasons you would have a ton of generation capacity sitting around doing nothing). The problem is that we don't have storage figured out at all.
>which makes them very predictable
Yes as much as weather can be predictable.
>and storage technology costs are improving as fast as production costs.
To be clear, we don't have storage technology that can store enough energy to power a reasonably sized city (pop:~1m) for a few minutes, much less a modern economy for weeks. There is no such storage technology on the horizon either. You need natural gas as back-up. Maybe in certain geographic region you can build a pumped-storage reservoir (at a great environmental cost).
Take a step back and look at the big picture. No region with a reasonable population is currently being powered by solar and wind even though there is huge amount of pressure to do so - why is that?
Furthermore your estimates for nuclear are contradicted by real world performance. How is it that France's electricity is 20-25% cheaper than the EU average despite 70% of it coming from the purportedly more expensive nuclear power?
edit: Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Feel free to offer rebuttals of the numbers in there, with sources.
I'd be perfectly happy to see new coal plant construction banned from a regulatory perspective, but right now there are ZERO new coal plants being built in the US. The rest of the world will not be far behind.
Not knowing what the next administration is going to change adds cost of uncertainty.
If it weren't due to regulation, that would mean it's due to technology or raw cost. Both of which are ruled out by the fact that the US is the third largest coal exporter in the world, and exports have increased in the last 3 years.
If our coal weren't cheap, it wouldn't be worth exporting. If coal power plants weren't cheap, developing countries would be switching to the cheaper technology.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.... <- Note that in this one, coal is only counted with carbon capture technology, which increases cost
Coal is among the cheapest conventional source. Note that solar (other than solar thermal) and wind do not include cost of energy storage. Gas combined cycle (basically, a jet engine + a steam turbine heated by the jet exhaust) does beat coal in many of these estimates, but this is new technology that has only been deployed widely by first world countries. Generally, only countries with developed aerospace industries have that infrastructure to built thermally efficient gas turbines. Thermally efficient gas turbines need advanced materials and fabrication techniques like monocrystal casting.
These figures are highly dependent on the kind of infrastructure available to a country. What's cheap for a country like the US with extensive gas turbine manufacturing is not going to be cheap for other countries. There's a reason why so many developing countries use coal: it's a much more low tech solution that does not require complex industry. If your claim about the lower cost of gas was limited in scope to the US and similarly developed countries, I'd agree, but I was talking in global terms. Many countries are sticking to coal because it's cheaper:
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/08/02/india-shows-ho...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/08/22/asian-governmen...
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
There are good reasons to move off of coal, regardless. Coal extraction is dirty, and it generates pollutants that are much worse than gas turbines. It'd probably be good policy to facilitate the export of gas turbines to developing countries.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/08/02/india-shows-ho...
https://thediplomat.com/2019/10/can-southeast-asia-ditch-coa...
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/29/716347646/why-is-china-placin...
As well as Africa: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/05/lamu-island-...
South America, fortunately, is more mountainous and countries get by with more hydroelectric power.
Countries with established gas turbine production can build gas combined cycle plants at a cheaper cost, but other countries without established aerospace industries (most countries other than Europe, and North America) would be looking at building up gas turbine production capacity largely from scratch.
Response to the comment below, my work IP is getting rate limited:
The articles definitely have a pro green energy stance, I don't deny that. But these articles' optimism is contradicted by the actions of the countries in question. They're building coal plants. The fact that the articles think this is a bad choice does not change this fact. Their claim that the region will see a decline in coal usage is speculative. Furthermore the fact that countries are continuing to build coal plants despite bank's reluctance to offer capital reinforces the fact that coal is the most accessible energy source for much of the world.
> As for turbines, most poor countries buy their turbines (of whatever type) from rich countries
Which costs more and makes them dependent on foreign countries for energy production. Hence why they choose coal.
> While the region “has been a laggard” on renewable energy he points to game-changing recent developments. “The finances are shifting to green globally. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand will all pivot over the next two years.” Vietnam, for instance, has seen a surge in solar power development in the last year alone.
> “No-one forecast Vietnam can do that. That’s how quickly you can pivot markets,” [sic] said Buckley. Earlier this month an auction for a solar power project in Cambodia saw the lowest power purchase tariff for solar so far in Southeast Asia. The Asian Development Bank, which supports the scheme, described it as “a new era for renewable energy development in Cambodia and the region”.
> In a survey of regional leaders last year, media platform Eco-Business found “the ever-increasing risk of stranded fossil fuel assets” was another factor that would drive Southeast Asia’s transition to a greener economy. A big sign of the shifting financial backing for coal regionally came in April as three top Singapore banks said they would stop financing new coal-fired power plants. And in a June meet of Asian coal leaders in Indonesia, they talked of the difficulties of securing finances for projects. Some experts believe that the majority of proposed coal plants won’t emerge.
...
> It’s a “tipping point” in Southeast Asia, said Justin Guay, director for global climate strategy at The Sunrise Project, an environmental group. “It’s the last major region on earth where we are seeing the transformation” away from coal and “it’s a question of when not if.”
> “In many ways Southeast Asia reminds me of where India was five years ago,” he added. “They built a significant number of coal plants, but now they’ve got stranded assets. It’s a big problem. Southeast Asia has the opportunity to avoid that.”
...this is your evidence for nuclear power being the cheapest source of energy and coal being second? That banks are increasingly refusing to lend money to finance plant construction because already-built plants in India have become stranded assets that can't compete with solar?
The NPR link is equivalently pessimistic about the future of coal plants.
As for turbines, most poor countries buy their turbines (of whatever type) from rich countries.
> Which costs more and makes them dependent on foreign countries for energy production. Hence why they choose coal.
This makes no sense. Perhaps you aren't aware that coal power plants universally generate electricity using steam turbines? Do you think they're using pistons like an old steam locomotive?
> But these articles' optimism is contradicted by the actions of the countries in question. They're building coal plants.
Well, no. I mean, Indonesia is, but India isn't, and China isn't, and the articles claim that Vietnam is rapidly ceasing to. And politicians' choices often have explanations that go beyond maximizing profit.
Steam turbines are subject to much less heat than gas turbines. Are you aware of the difference between how combined gas cycle turbines and steam turbines function? In a coal plant, coal is burned to heat water into steam which turns a steam turbine to rotate a dynamo. In a combined gas cycle plant, gas burns in a gas turbine to rotate a dynamo. Then the gas turbine exhaust is used to boil steam to turn a steam turbine to rotate a dynamo.
Gas turbines are subject to much greater heat than steam turbines. Without advanced metallurgy, the turbine blades would melt. There's a reason why the steam turbines were first used in earnest in the 1890s while gas turbines didn't get used extensively until the 1930s and 40s.
What about this is confusing? Combined cycle plants require gas turbines to build. The term gas turbine exclusively refers to turbines burning gas (or gasoline if "gas turbine" is being used to refer to gasoline turbines) to generate an impulse. Plants that burn natural gas to heat a boiler don't use gas turbines, they exclusively use steam turbines. Gas turbines (both the gasoline and natural gas kind) are complex to fabricate and few countries have the technical ability to manufacture large and efficient turbines needed in combined cycle plants.
We just don't fully appreciate side effects of new technology until it's fully deployed. It took decades to realize that fish hatcheries weren't going to solve the salmon problem for hydro. If anything history should teach us to approach all new miracle tech with skepticism, especially when deploying it on a massive scale.