- They group nukes in the clean %, so today we're at 37% clean already. not bad. Going to higher clean % with mix of wind/solar expansion + new storage + dispatchable nukes is very possible and the political momentum to throw a lot of money at this is there.
- I think it's unlikely costs can be reduced much in most parts of the US if we still want 100% dispatch capability.
- It's not just about cost. We should consider paying a bit more for carbon considerations, within reason and without forgetting who gets punished by higher prices in the short term, and without compromising the 100% dispatchable standard.
- Wind/solar LCOE is approaching very low numbers, so it should be used as much as possible, but we shouldn't throw a trillion dollars from the government, as the article suggests, to shove wind/solar down the grid's throat. It's likely to break the grid and waste a load of money. Government should just ensure the markets can properly deal with higher renewables without compromising the grid. They can do this via establishing capacity markets, resiliency markets, R&D for storage tech, etc. They might also do a carbon tax to try to set the higher cost we are willing to pay from above.
- There are significant resilience, material, and regulation challenges. It's not just the energy storage for a few hours, but longer term for days and weeks. If we are a responsible society and expect smooth operations and we want to do an extreme renewables expansion, we need to pay the price to keep an idle fleet of fully dispatchable gas/nukes in addition to the renewables fleet or establish multi month storage.
I disagree, if there was a desire to transport molten salt tanks and retrofit coal plants with supercritical steam turbines and build large molten salt storage reservoirs on such sites, we could do it today for under 5 cents/kwh for 24/7 availability.
See comments [0] and [1]
To give a sense of how cheap it's getting consider that there's a proposal to send solar energy from North Australia to Singapore using this tech. That's about 4000km distance total with about 3000km of that under the ocean. 4000km is very close to the distance from Seattle to Miami. If Singapore can afford this then for sure the US can dig around in the couch and come up with enough spare change to build this out.
The opportunities are insurmountable.
"...a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid."
Grid will become massively decentralized. Transmission costs are already greater than production costs in many systems, a trend that will continue.
We'll get resiliency "for free".
Others have already commented on demand shifting. Additionally, producers will innovate, creating new "products" to meet unique customer demands. Like colocation.
"...nukes and nat gas will not be competitive 99%"
Current nukes must be propped up for as long as possible, stopgap until renewables can overtake.
We'll definitely need new nuke options, like small modular reactors (micro reactors) and reprocessing. (My future perfect is traveling wave reactors, but that's a long ways off.)
We need to phase out natural gas asap.
Also, what's wrong with policy wonks?
Perhaps your parent was thinking of EC2 spot instances?
> Lastly, data centers and smelters are expensive capital investments, and typically the economic calculation requires them to be run non-stop to recoup the capital investment.
I suspect this is true for almost all commercial operations.
Residential electric car charging is the only thing I can think of that's
1. A relatively large draw
2. Relatively time insensitive
In general, people aren't going to delay their dinner or wash by a few hours to save a few cents in electricity fees. They might be ok with car charging being delayed as long as it's full when they leave in the morning.
Maybe, but the whole reason cloud providers offer ephemeral instances is precisely because letting the machines sit idle is a waste of capital.
I suspect this is true for almost all commercial operations.
I'm not sure if that's the case. I think it depends on the efficiency of production, ability to stockpile the product and the demand. Not all factories operate around the clock, because round the clock labor is also very expensive.
Residential electric car charging is the only thing I can think of that's (...)
I think a relatively easy development here would be to install large water tanks in people houses, and heat them up/cool them down when energy is cheap, and reuse stored energy when energy is more expensive, to save on heating/AC. But yes, energy these days is so cheap compared to labor and to value added that a complex schemes of idling production when energy prices are high is probably a non-starter in developed countries.
Literally already happening. I have a demand response control box retrofitted onto my electric tanked water heater. It shuts off during high rate times.
But given the total enthusiasm and commitment, I bet it could be made to work. But maybe we have to accept that it's gonna cost more, and that we'll probably lose on other sides. This renewable world just might not be such a nice place. Power would be less taken for granted because it would not always be available. a lot more people would have to work in the industry to keep it going (low EROI for renewables) and they wouldn't be working in other industries. Ironically, that's a plus in the article, which touts immense job creation. lol - not a very good objective. The landscape near populated areas would be dominated with wind turbines and solar plants.
I honestly read that as "it requires people to communicate and co-ordinate in a way that is a net benefit to everyone, seems un-american" and thought yeah that seems about right.
For what it's worth national grids with co-operation agreements and a strict regulatory regime absolutely do work when well implemented, the UK has had one for decades.
aluminium production/smelting uses a colossal amount of electricity but they can shut down quickly for a few hours (as long as they don't let things get too cold and freeze which is expensive as it destroys equipment and takes a long time to restart - which is what happened in the ransomware attack against norsk, they had to switch to manual line processes to keep it moving).
For anyone interested the people responsible for monitoring our grid have a good website with a tonne of info.
Our economy works really well because electricity is 100% dispatchable. You flip the switch at any time, things work. If you go below that, the economy will follow the weather, which I guess is just a different way to operate. But it's not so fun. I have some friends in South Africa where power rationing is in place. You basically have a few dead hours every day because the grid isn't run well and they haven't built enough capacity. They hate it. You're cooking a nice pie for grandma and then BAM, powers out. You're on your treadmill, and BAM - you hit the wall. You're playing CoD, and BAM. Sucks to suck.
GP is asking how your analysis would change if we drop the target to "US reaching 80 percent clean electricity by 2035".
The problem is sustaining that 70% for a longer time period. Wind is intermittent, so firming it up with additional solar (also intermittent, but generally at different times) and a lot of storage would have to be the next step if you wanted a sustained > 70%.
I'd guess with very high probability that this region (very geographically large), but not too many large population centers will hit 80% renewable penetration within 3 years based off of current growth. It is still a guess as to how long it will take before you'd see 80% across peak and not in the morning. Still, this has all happened in a few years.
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The flaw with renewables is they are so dam cheap and so dam finicky. Basically, renewables force nukes and nat gas to sell power at a loss or sit idly by for most of the time. This becomes worse and worse as the renewable's market share increases and they eat away at the profitability of the dispatchable sources. The limit is something like 20% at which point nukes and nat gas just can't make any money and so a free market system would just get rid of them. But yet, they need to be there, just in case, because they are dispatchable and you want shit to work at all times. Unfortunately, prices for consumers don't go down because you need the super dispatchable power sources which just sit there for a lot of the time and cost just about the same if you have em on or off, and you also just built a bunch of renewables which are cheap and make money for the guys who built them, but hurt the rest of the grid because you have a bunch of idle equipment (gas/nukes during the day and most of the year, panels at night). Lower cost storage is a way to address that, but has to be really low cost, especially when you increase wind/solar market share. Keep in mind, there's not yet a good solution for long term storage (days or weeks or months).
To go beyond 20% renewables you need a power market that rewards dispatchable sources, essentially preventing solar and wind from taking all the money and bidding everyone into oblivion. If the market is fair, there will be little incentive to push renewables because they just make things more expensive. There's a bunch of ideas on how to do this like capacity payments. Might work, but it's gonna cost more because of all the unused equipment. Everything is possible, you just need to be willing to pay for it.
In an 80% renewables grid, most of the time, renewables will be meeting 100% of demand and producing much more than needed. 20% of the power is delivered by nat gas. But they will mostly be called to do that only on the bad days where they will have to be able to match closer to 100% of the demand. So you've basically got two nearly complete fleets. Who's gonna pay for the idle equipment? The solar power producers should right?
One data point: Germany is 30% renewables and pays 50% higher than EU average. That's old prices in a country not ideal for renewables. It's no Arizona or Washington.
The price of energy in Germany was already high before the switch to renewables, for reasons unrelated to renewables. The renewables surcharge only is 21% of the price per kWh: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1009248/household-power-...
Edit: I feel it's worth mentioning that the price per kWh only tells half the story. High energy prices also incentivize buying efficient appliances and having well-insulated houses: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Annual-household-electri...
As anecdata, our German household of five only pays about 80€/month for electricity (cooking with electricity, heating and warm water with gas).
Every serious plan of conversion of an economy towards renewables has reduced energy consumption through reduction of waste as a core element.
CPS Energy, serving the San Antonio, TX metro is already above 20% renewable[1] and its rates are very low, to the point San Antonio is a preferred data center location.
[1] https://cpsenergy.com/en/about-us/programs-services/energy-g...
The grid isn't one big national national. Our national grid is a bunch of separate grids. Since San Antonio is on the middle of Texas it is on the Texas Interconnection manged by ERCOT [1].
Here's information on the overall grid generation where if you look at the fuel mix report for 2020 YTD you'll see 26% is Wind so overall it is also above 20% [2].
I wonder if we could end up doing something like we do with farming and pay farmers not to grow crops
It seems to be making net-positive amount of money and Tesla built it in record time but sourcing that much lithium to build it for millions of people across the country sounds like a tall order, not to mention the 2-5x costs/time any major public works infrastructure project would add based on recent history of all of them in western countries (for ex: both of Obama's clean coal and solar project went bust, before roll out, after billions spent each and many years, so outright failure of even top-down federal-level projects must also be considered).
I'd be curious to hear an expert speculation on the matter for what a practical battery farm deployment would look like. Which would likely need to exist, assuming we're abandoning backup energy sources like nuclear and natural gas.
Hopefully it is just the first steps towards a clean grid and not an example of a Concorde like moon shot failure.
I think this person has an agenda they want to push and they want to shout down anyone with ad-hominems who doesn't share their world view.
Is this not against hacker news guidelines?
Dang?
Huh? spenrose's most recent comment about nuclear power starts with:
> I am rooting for lots and lots of new nuclear
> Safe micro-nuclear plants are an excellent start on the "economy" side of "political economy." Now y'all need to build a political coalition—and pro-variable-renewable peeps such as myself must be part of your core coalition if you are going to get anywhere. So start treating us as allies.
It's a lot of double speak so I can see how it would be confusing. But definitely take a closer look.
Pointing out the ad hominem's goes further in discrediting the argument, than throwing your own insults and trolling through their history.
All he did was discredit himself in front of the rest of us.
I do think France has it right, but there's some other things to consider. France is phasing out some of its nuclear and does not plan on replacing it. No they aren't going to 0% or even 50%, but they are doing it and this is a good idea. They are replacing old plants with renewables where they can and replacing and building new plants where they can't. This is part of why France has been doing so well in terms of CO2eq production (one of the lowest in Europe, which is especially crazy considering it doesn't have the hydrodynamic opportunities that Sweden does, who also uses a fair amount of nuclear).
Remember that no matter what you do, you want a diversified portfolio for power generation. You don't want to rely on a single resource.
A statement they keep making to placate anti-nuclear advocates but keep postponing and postponing. Because there's no way to reliably generate the majority of electricity using wind and solar, and only small parts of France are suitable for hydroelectricity.
Diversification doesn't matter for energy that comes from heat engines. Just like how many countries successfully grew their economies with > 80% fossil fuels plants, there's nothing wrong with powering a country entirely on nuclear power. Sure it's good build alternatives where it's cheaper. But the main draw of nuclear power is that its output entirely controllable. Diversification is much more important in renewables where you don't control the weather.
This is really confusing. Me, nor France, said that they are going to go to 0% nuclear. In fact, I remember saying
> No they aren't going to 0% or even 50%
Maybe I should be more clear and say "Less than 50%".
So I'm confused because I'm reading your response as disagreeing what IS happening (decommissioning IS happening) and taking it to mean that ALL reactors are being proposed to be decommissioned. Which is definitely not true.
> Diversification doesn't matter for energy that comes from heat engines.
What? We've always had diversification. So does every other country. They also always have. Different energy sources have different advantages. It would be dumb not to use the one that has the most advantage for the specific situation. And of course there's the old saying "don't put all your eggs in one basket." But you seem to be disagreeing with this but also agreeing by saying
> Sure it's good build alternatives where it's cheaper
A big part is that France doesn't produce its own nuclear and so renewables do provide some self resilience. That does have some advantages, but obviously France does want to keep a mostly nuclear system (recycling is self resilience too).
> But the main draw of nuclear power is that its output entirely controllable.
Which this isn't really true. You CAN throttle nuclear but not infinitely and surely not like you can with coal or natural gas. France just sells the excess and this "throttles" a lot for them. It is very efficient.
> there's nothing wrong with powering a country entirely on nuclear power.
The issue is easier for France than other countries, simply because momentum. One thing you have to consider with building reactors is that they take longer to develop and build than other sources. Which I'll agree that we should have started yesterday, but let's be realistic. If you really believe this then you should also be a proponent of renewables because they are a better stop gap to a nuclear based system than coal and natural gas are.
> So I'm confused because I'm reading your response as disagreeing what IS happening (decommissioning IS happening) and taking it to mean that ALL reactors are being proposed to be decommissioned. Which is definitely not true.
They keep delaying their supposed nuclear cutbacks: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/11/20/frances-decision-to-d...
The reality is that wind and solar can't replace nuclear or Fossil fuels without some insanely good energy storage that is currently the stuff of science fiction.
> Which this isn't really true. You CAN throttle nuclear but not infinitely and surely not like you can with coal or natural gas. France just sells the excess and this "throttles" a lot for them. It is very efficient.
Incorrect. Reactors can be modulated in terms of thermal output. You can throttle the electrical output even if the thermal output remains the same by cooling the water more aggressively. Furthermore excess energy is not a hard problem to solve. Desalinate water, or other energy intensive tasks are good energy sinks.
> One thing you have to consider with building reactors is that they take longer to develop and build than other sources. Which I'll agree that we should have started yesterday, but let's be realistic. If you really believe this then you should also be a proponent of renewables because they are a better stop gap to a nuclear based system than coal and natural gas are.
France built up it's nuclear generation from 10% to 80% in the span of 15 years. By comparison, solar and wind are still waiting for an effective energy storage system to come into existence.
Renewables are not capable of generating more than ~40% of a country's electricity due to the fundamental mismatch between the time that energy is generated and the time that energy is consumed. Look at Germany to see the failure of solar and wind to produce a carbon free energy system. The solution exists, and has existed for over half a century now.
And my point, is that France has repeatedly postponed even these much more modest plans for denuclearization.
Regarding the immense capacity required for wind/solar: see Figure 10 of https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424.... They essentially optimize the renewable mix to minimize cost while considering different scenarios for storage costs. The optimization must meet 100% of the demand at 100% of times for the grid in a few different states over the last decade of real data. Plot shows the levelized cost of power or LCOE (the color) in the storage energy vs storage power capacity space. In Arizona, it's no problem, renewables are for sure gonna work out even without a storage miracle. Not so much everywhere else, although I bet most people are so climate woke they wouldn't have a problem paying double for power. I don't want to though.
There are flaws here as well. First, how will they enforce the optimal mix of solar and wind? Will they set quotas of how much of each can be built? As soon as you fall out of the optimum, prices go up. And then there's the material/engineering issue. This kind of storage production is out of this world. Yes, Tesla is going to make 100 $/kWh batteries and they will have dozens of giga factories, but we'd have to produce more than we have ever made. That scares me, and even then, the cost is not lower than natural gas. Gentlemen, natural gas is king - it's so cheap, and easy, and dispatchable.
For resiliency, the key is distributing your power and not depending on others to get things to work. So don't rely on solar plants in another state, or gas pipeline, or whatever. Get it done locally. The paper averages the nationwide demand and production which requires a national grid, and this is not resilient. Grid failures tend to cascade and everyone is affected. Some literature on terrorist or weather based grid vulnerabilities (might not be accessible since this enters sensitive info):
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/assault-on-california-power-sta...
- Lanza, R. Fragility of Energy Networks. in INTERNATIONAL SEMINARS ON PLANETARY EMERGENCIES AND ASSOCIATED MEETINGS- 47thSession (2014). doi:10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004
- Wang, S. et al. An Optimization-Based Adaptation Framework for Coastal Electrical Infrastructure Resilience To Climate Change.
PS. Love the character attack with insinuation of conspiracy theorist. Nicely done. To be clear, I get paid by nuclear lobbyists to troll sites like these.
Also, hydro is a massive part of the energy mix going forward and excluding it gives meaningless results.
Environmentally, rivers need variable flow rates to minimize silt buildup so doing so is actually good for the environment. Comparing the costs of constructing a dam with the cost of extra generating capacity, this flexibility is also extremely cheap. They do maintain a minimum flow at all times it’s generally a low fraction of average let alone maximum capacity.
- Unfortunately, they are averaging the entire US, which is made of several grids, so the bad days are not that bad in their analysis. To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need.
- Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid. If Covid has taught us anything, it is the need for resiliency in the face of rare events. In this case unfavorable weather, broken transmission, etc.
- Cost projection is rosy... The panels, batteries, and storage are already very close to the material cost. Need some pretty fundamental tech transitions to improve further.
- If there is no policy change, nukes and nat gas will not be competitive 99% of the time because solar/wind are nearly free electricity and bid extremely low power prices that nuke/gas can't compete with. So even though they will provide the backbone and dispatchibility needed for on-demand power, they do not currently have the financial incentive to do so. We need resiliency and dispatchibility payments.
Report is Berkeley and GridLab, mostly policy wonks
A much better report from MIT: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424... or http://energy.mit.edu/research/utility-future-study/
Both are harder to read and give worse news, so probably won't be part of the policy discussion...
The report itself: http://www.2035report.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2035-Re...
And the data explorer: https://www.2035report.com/data-explorer/?hsCtaTracking=aefa...