I a huge fan of residential solar and photovoltaics. Under the right conditions (summer, adequate battery storage) it's possible to be self-sufficient, just absolutely incredible.
That being said, where is the disconnect between people claiming industrial-scale solar and wind is cheaper than burning fossil fuels, and the reality (in Europe, others?) that electricity prices have risen steadily with an increase in renewable energy production (even before COVID and Ukraine)?
Is it the largely unaddressed battery storage problems? Other effects?
The EU has a pricing system where all the electricity is sold at the price of the most expensive source. For example, if at a given moment you need 100 MW of solar at €10, 100 MW of wind at €12, and 1 MW of gas at €150, consumers will be billed €150 for each and every MW they consume.
I get the intended logic behind the system, which is to incentivize cheap sources (if you run cheap sources, you keep the difference with respect to gas as pure profit), but IMO it's prone to gaming (a lot of incentive to have that single MW of gas up, and electricity companies are an oligopoly...) and doesn't work well even without gaming (if the price of gas is disproportionately high with respect to the rest of sources, things begin to just not make sense).
Spain and Portugal negotiated to (temporarily, I think) get out of this system and change it to something saner (with the same basic principles but some compensations so that gas price doesn't dominate anything). The so-called Iberian exception. And it's working: while our prices are still high with respect to historical standards (due to Ukraine and the general underlying energy crisis), they now tend to be much lower than the rest of the EU most of the time.
> or example, if at a given moment you need 100 MW of solar at €10, 100 MW of wind at €12, and 1 MW of gas at €150, consumers will be billed €150 for each and every MW they consume.
Since the power is exactly the same, people don't buy a MW of solar or wind, they just buy a MW, regardless of the source.
If you were (owning) a generator, why would you sell your electricity for €12/unit when people are willing to buy it at €150/unit? And since it's a free market, otherwise a middleman will come swooping in to rake in the difference.
Market dynamics dictate that when people/businesses are no longer willing to buy a MW for €150, the demand drops, the most expensive generators are not needed anymore and the overall price drops to the new equilibrium price.
Also: my fixed contract price per kWh is about €0.81 always, which is, uh, a lot. A friend of mine recently switched to a dynamic tariff and payed about €0.30-0.40 when I last asked him about it. Pondering...
This system is a rule of free market economics summarized as "the price of a commodity is its marginal cost".
So changing this system means meddling in the free market. There are times and places where meddling is appropriate and this is likely one such, but there are significant consequences and side effects to doing so, so shouldn't be done lightly.
The majority of power generation in Europe is still based on fossil fuels.
And thus those are the price setters according to the Merit order curve [0], since they have the highest cost still.
Depends on when, that's why we need gas and other dispatchables. We've no grid-scale energy storage as of now. So saying they're cheaper isn't comparing apples to apples.
The disconnect is due, in part, to a selection bias. The cost estimates for new solar and wind (for example Lazard's report [1]) is based on existing plants. These plants were built in the best places, for example in the US lots of solar power plants were built in sunny California, and lots of wind turbines in places with plenty of wind (the so-called wind corridor).
If you take solar and install it in Europe, you will not get the same bang for your buck, for the simple reason that Europe is well north of California. As for wind, most of Europe is less windy than the US wind corridor, but offshore areas in the North and Baltic seas appear to be exceptionally good. Still, building offshore wind can't be done at a snap of your fingers.
Going forward, both solar and wind will see huge increases in installed capacity, but only in the places where it makes sense.
> Is it the largely unaddressed battery storage problems?
Afaik those are not solved at scale, as in they're not even "problems" yet, the "battery storage" just doesn't exist at an industrial scale. As in many other past cases a form of pseudo-religiousness has taken over the discourse, hence the disconnect between what certain people believe can be done and reality.
It's really interesting to see that pretty much everybody in the industry agrees that wind and solar are the future after having read https://www.lynalden.com/energy-problems/. That piece seems to argue that wind & solar are some of the least efficient energy generation sources.
If the actual source is extremely powerful, does the efficiency matter? The whole life on earth is solar powered since billions of years and it works very well and organisms did develop efficient energy storage for the times when the sun isn't shining.
IMHO solar is a proven source of energy that just needs more engineering to improve practicality. It kind of feel like we are getting there.
What I would like to see is nuclear power dedicated in producing solar energy hardware. After all, these things are not exotic and it's matter of putting energy into converting some abundant raw materials into solar cells.
I think that efficiency does matter. If a government/utility company/whoever wants to spend 100M on fixing climate change, they have a choice between building a new solar farm or building a new nuclear reactor. One of them will be able to displace more fossil fuel burning than the other.
Efficiency also matters for costs. If we use inefficient methods of generating electricity, the electricity will cost more. This affects us as direct consumers of electricity, but also in consumer prices in general, since everything costs energy to make & transport.
Solar and wind are intermittent sources of energy and Nat Gas, Coal or even Nuclear are needed to back solar/wind when they don't work, which is 70-80% of the time!
You can see here (wind energy generation is the red one) how crazy it would be to think wind could replace gas/nuclear energy. And this is not a single wind tower but for the whole Ontario province.
It's because efficiency is only a small part of the conversation. Someone putting panels on their roof only cares insofar as it helps decide which solar panels to buy. They are buying solar because it goes on their roof, costs less than grid power, and they own the generation (what that means to someone changes)
Likewise a municipality putting in a solar farm is probably doing it because it's cheap and easy to maintain, easier to distribute across your city, and when compared to a big machinery based plant like a fossil fuel plant, both wind and solar take less educated skills from the municipality to install and maintain. Solar is essentially commoditized at this point, it's barrier for entry is for a municipality is just money. Wind is productized too, just more complex and difficult to install and maintain than solar.
That makes sense, and also suggests that governments with more centralized planning might skew more heavily towards nuclear. I'm not sure if that's actually true in practice (because obviously there are many non-efficiency related reasons that people don't like nuclear), but it would be interesting to see if there is a relationship between centralized energy planning and amount of solar/wind/nuclear energy consumed.
Efficient in what sense? Compared to how much energy it costs to get energy out over the lifetime of the mechanical device, or simply turning the fuel into energy?
What? Actually solar is pretty decent, even generates DC - lots of stuff is DC nowadays, incl. all direct drives and induction cooking (incl. the obvious all electronics). Both wind and solar are pretty decent at capturing the only (non-nuclear) energy source the Earth has - the Sun.
The only non-nuclear source would be geothermal, and maybe tidal I believe?
The sun is literally a nuclear fusion reaction. Wind and hydro are an artefact of the sun + the motion of the planets. We could even stretch the argument that fossil fuels are also indirectly solar from photosynthesis.
Historically speaking, this seems true. My understanding is that you're only looking at hydrocarbons (coal/gas), nuclear, and hydro, since everyone else is pretty new. Hydro is obviously the cleanest/safest, and nuclear has killed far fewer people than coal/gas.
Still no answer to how they’re going to solve those moments when there is no wind or sun. Are we just going to accept that businesses and residences have to turn off all their appliances and machines when that happens?
There are answrs for those that seek rather than snide.
Shared grids, small industrial estate sized battery farms, heated sand, hydrogen generation and recovery.
In the real world [1]:
> South Australia has been effectively powered by green energy for a week, with one expert predicting it could extend to a month by early next year.
> From December 12 to 19, National Energy Market data showed wind and solar contributed on average 103.5 per cent towards the state's energy demand.
> No coal was used during the period, but gas accounted for 5.9 per cent of electricity when renewable sources were not enough to power the state at points at night.
ie. For an entire Australian state total internal renewable production exceeded total usage for a full seven day period - spot excess was exported to neighbouring states, minimal baseline generation in a shortfall period was boosted by gas.
That's a dramatic change from nearly all coal generated power of some years ago.
South Australia is an interesting example. It is a big state, but 77% of the 1.8mil population live in the capital city. The average population density of the whole state is 1.7 persons per sqkm. It has a temperate climate, and gets quite a lot of sun overall. They’ve done a good job lately with their energy mix but important to bear in mind their specific circumstances when extrapolating to other places with less pleasant weather, less space, more distributed populations and more difficult grid arrangements.
People who aren't exposed to battery tech don't think it exists. Because they never see it in the media they consume and it isn't integrated into their lives in any meaningful way. It is difficult for them to imagine what they can't see.
They won't "have to". But the dynamic pricing will make them "want to" turn of their non-essential appliances when they don't need them.
Would it be a big problem for you if energy was essentially free 12 hours a day and 10 times more expansive than it is right now in the other 12 hours?
This is the only thing that we will need to change - granular, dynamic pricing to reflect the new constraints.
The rest will be solved by consumers adapting to that pricing. It might be by shifting the usage of non-essential devices (does it matter to you to have your laundry done at night?). It will likely include some batteries.
But for me the best option to me seems to be synthetic fuel production. Make hydrocarbons when there's too much solar and wind, and burn them again when there's not enough. The roundtrip efficiency is low (I think about 10% currently), but the capacity of such "battery" is effectively infinite and the investment is very cheap compared to regular batteries. The whole world already is adapted to burning hydrocarbons. So we wouldn't need to change much - just produce hydrocarbons in place instead of drilling for them in dictatorships all over the world.
BTW the implications on world politics are Earth-shattering. The difference in available renewable power per square meter in best vs worst countries is about 3 to 1 - maybe 4 to 1. Imagine if the least fortunate country on Earth had 25% of the oil that OPEC countries have.
So why can't I tell these people who want to charge me more to F off and have them build nuclear? And is the threat of global warming enough to warrant making everyones life worse? Is adaptation more costly than stopping the use of fossil fuels?
> Would it be a big problem for you if energy was essentially free 12 hours a day and 10 times more expansive than it is right now in the other 12 hours?
I'll probably adress that in a future newsletter, but you may want to read the paper linked in the article above that contains a very detailed answer:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
The answer is a mix of demand side management, sector coupling and power-to-x technologies.
Practically we will always have backup plants I suspect. But we don't need perfect, we just need better, plus redundancies. Gas is a common backup since it had a fast spin up time, couple that with batteries to smooth out frequency and cover spin up time and life is good.
I also want to point out that this is already going on, not just theory crafting. Solar and wind isn't just a good possibility, it is happening and in use right now. Batteries for grid stabilization is also an existing technology that is in practical use.
It's not a gotcha. We will still deploy solar and wind in the UK to great effect, and the current plants will remain and fill in the gaps. Best of both worlds, and still better than before.
Electricity storage is not that hard really. Batteries work in small/mid scale.
If we have huge amounts of overproduction, hydrogen is a viable storage medium. But the conversion losses are too big for it to be viable unless the electricity is practically free.
For large scale storage pumped hydro seems to be the best option, albeit it requires compatible geography and isn't cheap to build.
On the other hand even a mid-priced electric car can run an American McMansion for a day, maybe even two. More if you actually pay attention to your energy consumption.
5-20kWh batteries aren't really that expensive and will pay themselves back if you're using market rate electricity instead of a flat rate. You can charge them up during the night with a few cents per kWh and use during the daily peaks - maybe even sell back to the grid if that's possible in your area.
Solar and Wind are not feasible for European winters, because they are backed up by natural gas. Where that natural gas comes from? Well Russia.
You need energy storage first, which does not exists, because it is too expensive to build it. So therefore there is going to be no dominance of solar and wind clearly from practical reasons.
Europe has tons of energy storage in the form of natural gas storage tanks. If they only used gas out of those tanks when there was no sun & wind they could easily keep them topped off via LNG input terminals and they'd be fine.
The current electricity price shock in Europe will (hopefully) force people to think about their energy usage profile a bit more.
Yes it's true that 1:1 replacing the current power generation capacity with solar and wind is going to be really difficult.
BUT if we combine that with small-scale production (local solar/wind) and storage (small batteries in buildings) controlled by a smart grid, with the addition of automatically moving consumption to cheaper hours it's perfectly doable.
You don't NEED to run your dish/clothes washer and dryer the second you come home from work. You can fill them and time them to start so that they run during the night and are ready in the morning, for example. You get cheap electricity and the grid likes it when it gets use on quieter hours too.
> You don't NEED to run your dish/clothes washer and dryer the second you come home from work. You can fill them and time them to start so that they run during the night and are ready in the morning, for example
The problem with this is that the majority of people live in appartement buildings, where a washing machine's sound can traverse walls. Dishwasher too in older buildings with poor sound insulation.
That may be, but if only those who were able to did this I'm sure the impacts could be high. For those in apartments, timers could be set to run during the day when more people are out at work.
"Regular living sounds" are OK over here, by law. And you can buy a damper mat for your washing machine for 10€ that takes away a huge bit of the vibration it causes.
Readit News
That being said, where is the disconnect between people claiming industrial-scale solar and wind is cheaper than burning fossil fuels, and the reality (in Europe, others?) that electricity prices have risen steadily with an increase in renewable energy production (even before COVID and Ukraine)?
Is it the largely unaddressed battery storage problems? Other effects?
I get the intended logic behind the system, which is to incentivize cheap sources (if you run cheap sources, you keep the difference with respect to gas as pure profit), but IMO it's prone to gaming (a lot of incentive to have that single MW of gas up, and electricity companies are an oligopoly...) and doesn't work well even without gaming (if the price of gas is disproportionately high with respect to the rest of sources, things begin to just not make sense).
Spain and Portugal negotiated to (temporarily, I think) get out of this system and change it to something saner (with the same basic principles but some compensations so that gas price doesn't dominate anything). The so-called Iberian exception. And it's working: while our prices are still high with respect to historical standards (due to Ukraine and the general underlying energy crisis), they now tend to be much lower than the rest of the EU most of the time.
Since the power is exactly the same, people don't buy a MW of solar or wind, they just buy a MW, regardless of the source. If you were (owning) a generator, why would you sell your electricity for €12/unit when people are willing to buy it at €150/unit? And since it's a free market, otherwise a middleman will come swooping in to rake in the difference.
Market dynamics dictate that when people/businesses are no longer willing to buy a MW for €150, the demand drops, the most expensive generators are not needed anymore and the overall price drops to the new equilibrium price.
Also: my fixed contract price per kWh is about €0.81 always, which is, uh, a lot. A friend of mine recently switched to a dynamic tariff and payed about €0.30-0.40 when I last asked him about it. Pondering...
So changing this system means meddling in the free market. There are times and places where meddling is appropriate and this is likely one such, but there are significant consequences and side effects to doing so, so shouldn't be done lightly.
[0] https://docs.energytransitionmodel.com/main/merit-order/
It's a lot cheaper if you price in the externalities.
If you take solar and install it in Europe, you will not get the same bang for your buck, for the simple reason that Europe is well north of California. As for wind, most of Europe is less windy than the US wind corridor, but offshore areas in the North and Baltic seas appear to be exceptionally good. Still, building offshore wind can't be done at a snap of your fingers.
Going forward, both solar and wind will see huge increases in installed capacity, but only in the places where it makes sense.
[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
[2] https://earthlymission.com/wind-resource-map-europe/
[3] https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325
Afaik those are not solved at scale, as in they're not even "problems" yet, the "battery storage" just doesn't exist at an industrial scale. As in many other past cases a form of pseudo-religiousness has taken over the discourse, hence the disconnect between what certain people believe can be done and reality.
IMHO solar is a proven source of energy that just needs more engineering to improve practicality. It kind of feel like we are getting there.
What I would like to see is nuclear power dedicated in producing solar energy hardware. After all, these things are not exotic and it's matter of putting energy into converting some abundant raw materials into solar cells.
Efficiency also matters for costs. If we use inefficient methods of generating electricity, the electricity will cost more. This affects us as direct consumers of electricity, but also in consumer prices in general, since everything costs energy to make & transport.
You can see here (wind energy generation is the red one) how crazy it would be to think wind could replace gas/nuclear energy. And this is not a single wind tower but for the whole Ontario province.
https://i.imgur.com/XvOAF17.jpg
Likewise a municipality putting in a solar farm is probably doing it because it's cheap and easy to maintain, easier to distribute across your city, and when compared to a big machinery based plant like a fossil fuel plant, both wind and solar take less educated skills from the municipality to install and maintain. Solar is essentially commoditized at this point, it's barrier for entry is for a municipality is just money. Wind is productized too, just more complex and difficult to install and maintain than solar.
The sun is literally a nuclear fusion reaction. Wind and hydro are an artefact of the sun + the motion of the planets. We could even stretch the argument that fossil fuels are also indirectly solar from photosynthesis.
Maybe it was a typo?
"Nuclear power has historically been one of the safest and cleanest energy sources."
Again the same bullshit.
Even hydropower is 43 more fatal than nuclear.
Shared grids, small industrial estate sized battery farms, heated sand, hydrogen generation and recovery.
In the real world [1]:
> South Australia has been effectively powered by green energy for a week, with one expert predicting it could extend to a month by early next year.
> From December 12 to 19, National Energy Market data showed wind and solar contributed on average 103.5 per cent towards the state's energy demand.
> No coal was used during the period, but gas accounted for 5.9 per cent of electricity when renewable sources were not enough to power the state at points at night.
ie. For an entire Australian state total internal renewable production exceeded total usage for a full seven day period - spot excess was exported to neighbouring states, minimal baseline generation in a shortfall period was boosted by gas.
That's a dramatic change from nearly all coal generated power of some years ago.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-19/renewable-energy-prod...
How many kwh was it when you bought it and how many kwh can it still store today? How old is it? How much did it cost you?
Would it be a big problem for you if energy was essentially free 12 hours a day and 10 times more expansive than it is right now in the other 12 hours?
This is the only thing that we will need to change - granular, dynamic pricing to reflect the new constraints.
The rest will be solved by consumers adapting to that pricing. It might be by shifting the usage of non-essential devices (does it matter to you to have your laundry done at night?). It will likely include some batteries.
But for me the best option to me seems to be synthetic fuel production. Make hydrocarbons when there's too much solar and wind, and burn them again when there's not enough. The roundtrip efficiency is low (I think about 10% currently), but the capacity of such "battery" is effectively infinite and the investment is very cheap compared to regular batteries. The whole world already is adapted to burning hydrocarbons. So we wouldn't need to change much - just produce hydrocarbons in place instead of drilling for them in dictatorships all over the world.
BTW the implications on world politics are Earth-shattering. The difference in available renewable power per square meter in best vs worst countries is about 3 to 1 - maybe 4 to 1. Imagine if the least fortunate country on Earth had 25% of the oil that OPEC countries have.
I would find this extremely annoying, yes.
The answer is a mix of demand side management, sector coupling and power-to-x technologies.
I also want to point out that this is already going on, not just theory crafting. Solar and wind isn't just a good possibility, it is happening and in use right now. Batteries for grid stabilization is also an existing technology that is in practical use.
During this time then more electricity is imported, a lot of gas is burned, and coal stations are put on standby.
To my knowledge, then no industry needs to shut down .
If we have huge amounts of overproduction, hydrogen is a viable storage medium. But the conversion losses are too big for it to be viable unless the electricity is practically free.
For large scale storage pumped hydro seems to be the best option, albeit it requires compatible geography and isn't cheap to build.
On the other hand even a mid-priced electric car can run an American McMansion for a day, maybe even two. More if you actually pay attention to your energy consumption.
5-20kWh batteries aren't really that expensive and will pay themselves back if you're using market rate electricity instead of a flat rate. You can charge them up during the night with a few cents per kWh and use during the daily peaks - maybe even sell back to the grid if that's possible in your area.
You need energy storage first, which does not exists, because it is too expensive to build it. So therefore there is going to be no dominance of solar and wind clearly from practical reasons.
Yes it's true that 1:1 replacing the current power generation capacity with solar and wind is going to be really difficult.
BUT if we combine that with small-scale production (local solar/wind) and storage (small batteries in buildings) controlled by a smart grid, with the addition of automatically moving consumption to cheaper hours it's perfectly doable.
You don't NEED to run your dish/clothes washer and dryer the second you come home from work. You can fill them and time them to start so that they run during the night and are ready in the morning, for example. You get cheap electricity and the grid likes it when it gets use on quieter hours too.
The problem with this is that the majority of people live in appartement buildings, where a washing machine's sound can traverse walls. Dishwasher too in older buildings with poor sound insulation.
Deleted Comment