Re:A Solar Power Plant designed to deliver 100% of the elect...
by adrianN on Thursday October 10, 2019 @04:00AM
(#21211998)
Most power plants we use today can't deliver baseload cost effectively if you add in the externalized costs of climate change.
Re:A Solar Power Plant designed to deliver 100% of the elect...
by 666lumberjack on Thursday October 10, 2019 @07:15AM
(#21213118)
True, and I'd like to see this corrected with carbon pricing ASAP. My point is simply that whether or not intermittent renewables can ever cost-effectively deliver baseload power is still an open question.
Re:A Solar Power Plant designed to deliver 100% of the elect...
by perl4ever on Thursday October 10, 2019 @06:45PM
(#21219945)
Why do you think those costs are less than the existing taxes, or greater than what anyone could pay? Talking about externalities means you have a rough idea of a number, which is not "infinity". What do you think it is?
Re:A Solar Power Plant designed to deliver 100% of the elect...
by dsfyu404ed on Thursday October 10, 2019 @07:07AM
(#21213070)
>Most power plants we use today can't deliver baseload cost effectively if you add in the externalized costs of climate change.
Like it or not tacking on the cost of climate change to power generation is so far from current reality that adding that hypothetical constraint is meaningless. The people making these decisions have real tangible costs that matter right now that they will prioritize in their comparison.
What would make it clear whether solar + battery at this proportion is a viable source of baseload power is output volatility figures for a few years of operation (though one year would probably give a reasonable indication).
Tangent: The industry has a metric, availability factor, to describe what proportion of the time a plant can supply energy - but conventionally it only considers maintenance-related downtime and ignores periods where no energy is produced because of lack of 'fuel', giving figures of 99 and 100% availability for wind and solar respectively. That needs to change if we're going to measure whether renewables can provide suitable baseload power. The alternative, capacity factor, doesn't ignore periods of no generation in the same way, but it penalises dispatchable sources for having excess capacity so it's not great either.