Solar's become dirt cheap - it's replacing coal not because of subsidies or policy, but just because it's cheaper. Bodes well for its continued usage.
The bottleneck for continued electrification is going to become storage shortly. Solar can produce all the electricity we need, but it only does it during daylight hours, while we consume the most energy between 4-10 PM. Natural gas is currently bridging the gap, but utilities can't install more base-load solar than is consumed during peak daylight hours. So the key to letting solar replace more gas is time-shifting consumption from 4-10 PM to 9 AM - 3 PM. Here's my plan of inexpensive solutions for this:
1. Subsidize workplace EV charging, and create a standard that lets workplaces pass along energy costs from it to employees.
2. Invest in smart grid-aware EV & home battery charging technologies. Instead of charging whenever you first plug them in (which is usually ~6 PM), load from EV charging should be distributed to whenever the grid has excess power available, with a random factor so that not all EVs charge at once.
3. Subsidize insulation upgrades for homes. This turns them into thermal batteries where you can heat/cool them during the day and they will retain that temperature at night. Insulation materials are also really cheap for what you get now; it's installation that's the bottleneck in many cases.
4. Subsidize heat pumps, to make all heating/cooling electric.
5. Adopt V2H/V2G charging technology on all EVs, so that energy already stored in the car's battery can power home electronics at night.
6. Meet demand for EV batteries.
There, you're done, at least as far as residential consumers are concerned. Transportation + HVAC are by far the largest energy draws in the consumer sector. Timeshift them so that they happen during peak solar hours, and the problem of creating enough grid-scale energy storage to shift production from 9-3 to 4-10 reduces to the problem of creating enough batteries so that everyone can have an EV. A Ford F-150 Lightning has as much battery capacity as 7 PowerWalls; take HVAC out of the equation and you can easily power a home for weeks off it.
This is a great list, I’m glad to see someone promoting insulation, it’s not a sexy technology, like roof top solar or EVs, but it’s super necessary. I would add three things.
7. Set up virtual power plant policies, give property owners incentives to install storage for grid stabilization, this will enable demand shifting and reduce the need for distribution grid upgrades and enable more distributed energy sources to be installed at the neighborhood level.
8. Inter-regional transmission line upgrades. Build out transmission lines between regions. The sun may not always be shining, and the wind may not always blow. But the sun will always be shining somewhere and the wind will be blowing somewhere. This will let regions support each other.
9. Pass enabling legislation/regulation for community choice aggregation in all states. This will speed up adoption of renewables by leveraging climate action plans at the municipal level to procure more renewables and lead to the early retirement of fossil generation facilities.
To your 7. While I like it personally, it'd be more efficient if power companies put batteries at substations to absorb excess customer production. That'd have all the benefits of a virtual power plant plus the ability for the power company to schedule disconnects that don't impact customers. They also don't have to deal with lost capacity because a customer decides to disconnect before a storm (or whatever reason). It makes capacity planning easier.
>energy already stored in the car's battery can power home electronics at night.
Will those extra charging cycles shorten the lifetime of my EV? It's one thing to have household batteries, which can be replaced on their own and which are still pretty useful at 40% of their original capacity. But I can't economically replace just the battery on my EV (it'll cost more than the car is worth) and diminished range would really reduce the utility I get from the vehicle it powers.
(But thanks for getting me thinking with that list, regardless.)
EV batteries are anywhere from 40->120kWh in capacity. The average home consumed consumes around 20 to 30kWh a day. Assuming you pair your EV with a solar you aren't likely using a significant portion of the battery throughout the night.
This does depend on the chemistry. If your EV is using LFPs, you have about 10k cycles to play with. NMC has about 1000.
So, for an LFP vehicle it's practically a no brainer.
> it's replacing coal not because of subsidies or policy, but just because it's cheaper.
Well, it's also being heavily subsidized, but not by the US. China has been leading the way there, and for a clear geostrategic reason: they have no access to natural gas or oil, and have to trade for it. If you want a "fortress economy" that can endure sanctions like the Russians have done, this is a weakness that must be addressed, and solar isn't a bad option.
Of course, that only works if you can physically defend them (China probably can). Humanitarian groups in Palestine tried solar, and Israel bombed the solar fields. Fossil fuel generators and their fuel stores are much easier to hide.
This post shows a good and economical path towards short term storage, on the order of hours to days. The cost of storage based on a daily charge/discharge cycle is about $100/MWh ($0.10 per kWh), which is fine if power is essentially during day time.
However, seasonal storage is a completely different beast. In the winter there are months without a lot of solar. For my solar panels, total energy generated in December is are about 15% of that in June.
Seasonal storage is a lot more expensive than daily storage, because you can use your battery for only 30 cycles (30 years) rather than 1000-5000, depending on the technology used. That means that storing power generated in June and using it in December costs somewhere around 1$\kWh, simply to expensive. Do you have any ideas on how to solve that problem?
The seasonal problem is all about transmission lines and counterseasonal generation sources like (pumped?) hydro. There's no way you can store up a winter's worth of energy needs in batteries. Energy storage is the integral over time of power consumption, so time-shifting demand from January to July is about 750x more expensive than time-shifting it from 6 PM to noon.
Instead, we need to rely on the fact that it's not winter everywhere, at least to the same degree. My house has a similar seasonal profile to yours, but an industrial plant in the Mojave desert does not get shaded by hillsides, does not have atmospheric rivers come in, can move the panels to follow the sun's angle, is at a far more southern latitude, etc. And several generation technologies like hydro and wind actually produce more in the winter than the summer, because rainy and windy days benefit them.
This is probably the biggest argument I've seen for the continued existence of the grid. My home can run indefinitely on self-supplied energy during the summer, but I still need the grid to get through the winter.
- Move as much load out of the low-solar areas as possible. Don't put steel mills and other industrial stuff there. Do that industry in the desert where possible. Society will have to change, at least a little, to switch to renewable energy sources and off of carbon for good.
- Use 100 hour battery tech, which is almost (years not decades) at commercialization. This can bridge pretty big gaps.
- Dam and fill some big valleys in the low-solar areas with water and put generation and pumps on them, to store water all summer for winter use in generation.
- Wind works most of the year. Offshore is great for that.
- HVDC lines streching from sea to shining sea.
- The BIG one: You can save 30% or more on HVAC and other specific loads, if you let software control them better. The problem is retrofitting shitty old buildings with electronics to do it, and getting building managers to repair their HVAC systems instead of letting them languish.
There's a lot to be said for market pricing and letting smart startups find an optimum solution rather than politicians picking things to subsidise which is how you end up with corn subsidies and the like.
In this case for economic efficiency you need really a carbon tax, rather than subsidise this that or the other which may well be out of date by the time the politicians are done arguing.
At least if you actually want to reduce global co2 emissions that's the kind of stuff to do though you need global buy in. At the moment a lot of the actions are more feel good greenwashing and as a result global co2 emissions continue merrily upwards.
> Subsidize workplace EV charging, and create a standard that lets workplaces pass along energy costs from it to employees.
I've never even managed to get my workplaces to provide a parking spot, you can absolutely forget about workplaces paying for EV charging for everyone. It'll never happen even with heavy subsidy.
It only took a few months to get an employer to have them installed. Financial services, a few billion in annual revenue. ChargePoint chargers. Total spend was under $50k and employee time for procurement and integration with HR information system in order to onboard employees (as they’re private and can only be used to charge by employees in a private parking facility). I provided one of my EVs for commissioning and testing.
Can totally be done. Asking is free, and if you don’t ask, the answer is always no.
Of course not -all- businesses will provide EV charging to -all- employees. Tests not a realistic goal.
But lots of businesses do provide parking spaces. If your space is reserved for you, and you drive an EV, it becomes an obvious feature to add though at minimal cost.
Clearly some will do this, its likely many already do, and if you becomes a trend then it will move the needle. Not enough by itself, but a fair bit.
This works, but it requires a lot of complexity, consumer buy-in, the willingness to add extra charge cycles (and degradation) to vehicle batteries, etc.
It’s easier to add a bunch of grid-scale storage, but more expensive.
I think both solutions will scale alongside solar/wind adoption.
My biggest problem with solar and storage is not day/week energy management we can solve that easy, add more batteries, pumped hydro, use car batteries, incentivize customers to use electricity when sun is up... All easy problem compared to seasonal storage.
Where do we get enough renewable electricity on cloudy week in December? Synthetic gas/oil produced in summer? Anything more promising?
There are a few technologies on the horizon.
Using excess energy during the summer to produce a fuel, like you said, is one option. Hydrogen has been considered, but storing it long term is difficult. Another option is ammonia, although it’s toxic and corrosive, and although it produces no CO2 when burned, it still produces NOx, a potent greenhouse gas.
There are technologies on the horizon that could fill the long term storage needs for winter power. Lithium Ion, although great for mobile technologies, is not ideal for grid scale storage. It can’t store power for long. But other chemistries such as vanadium flow batteries and iron air batteries can discharge longer, and they can store power for far longer.
> Subsidize heat pumps, to make all heating/cooling electric.
Are there ways to try to ensure much of these subsidies end up reducing the price (and associated hurdle) of consumers rather than 80+% ending up as increased profits for HVAC companies?
> Invest in smart grid-aware EV & home battery charging technologies. Instead of charging whenever you first plug them in (which is usually ~6 PM), load from EV charging should be distributed to whenever the grid has excess power available, with a random factor so that not all EVs charge at once.
Within a handful of years, major home electricity-consuming appliances will come with built-in batteries used for both backup purposes but also for shifting load to the cleanest/cheapest electricity available. By this time commercial/industrial will have already transitioned to this.
The simple and realistic answer is obviously nuclear + renewables. Nuclear isn’t generally easy to ramp up and down but newer models are more flexible and night time drop off in solar is predictable.
It seems to me that that depends on which problem you're solving.
(1) No power from renewables overnight? Sure, nuclear works
(2) (Planning for the eventuality where) Entire grid's demand is available from renewables during parts of the day? Either don't use the renewables, and keep the nuclear running, OR battery storage.
A decade ago I think (1) was the primary topic of armchair discussion, but (2) has become increasingly more common. It really doesn't feel like nuclear is demonstrating the ability to keep up (maybe in China though...); it's not getting built fast enough, and I don't recall the more modern designs that are in the permitting process/starting to build (in the US) toting highly variable power generation as a added capability.
I do pay less attention to the nuclear news since I finished my masters a decade ago and never worked nuclear after, so I could be unaware of some things.
One of the key stories for ev adoption though is that you can charge overnight at lower electric rates to save on gas, so we still need a clean baseload power supply for overnight.
With continued solar adoption, "off-peak" will shift from "overnight" to "midday", at least if the utilities are properly passing along their costs. I think it might already have in California - I saw someone in r/electricvehicles saying that they get a cheaper rate for daytime charging. The idea that overnight has the cheapest electricity rates is an artifact of the fossil-fuel-dominated electric grid economics, and (physically speaking) there's no reason for it to hold true with renewables.
How about using excess peak solar time to produce hydrogen?
Whenever I read about hydrogen power, there’s this sort of elephant in the room that producing it burns power, which is usually assumed to mean burning fossil fuels.
If we have excess solar during the daytime, couldn’t that be spent refining water to hydrogen and sticking that in a battery of sorts?
I feel like that would be especially useful for renewable flight and ocean travel, where the weight of actual batteries makes electric unviable.
Electrolysis is about 20% effective. That's why you don't really see hydrogen being seriously considered for grid backup.
Mass produced hydrogen comes from fossil fuels.
That said, I agree hydrogen might have a role in shipping and flight. Just not grid storage. LFPs and sodium chemistry are both cheap with a long life. That's what will more commonly be deployed.
I’m on a TOU plan that makes energy from 5-9 4 times as expensive. Which means I charge my car, heat my water, and even heat/cool my house outside of 5-9. All you need to do is offer incentives and it’ll happen.
Smartgrid has been in the works for decades. I saw it the subject of debate at conferences in 2004. There are fundimental issues, cultural issues. All those batteries in EVs are not an option. People with EVs simply do not want to discharge them back onto the grid. Firstly, they want to have their car fully charged if they need it unexpectedly. Secondly, they will not accept the diminished battery life associated with extra chrage/discharge cycles.
If we need distributed batteries, dont look to the lightweight and highly specialized batteries of EVs. Oldschool lead acid batteries are far cheaper, last longer, and are easily recycled. That is the way to build out a distributed battery grid.
Surely existing methods of energy storage methods e.g. pumping water to higher altitude reservoirs to be used for hydro at peak hours will be more useful than millions of lead acid batteries
We've very probably hit global "peak coal" and looking at future declining world use:
International Energy Agency Global Coal Report December 2023 (released Friday 15th December 2023)
Global coal production is forecast to have risen by 1.8% in 2023, with continued growth in India, China and Indonesia more than offsetting declines in the United States and the European Union.
Thus, 2023 marks another all-time high in global coal production, totalling 8 741 Mt. [...]
For the forecast period, we expect a net reduction in global coal production starting in 2024, which would mean global coal production peaking in 2023 in line with global coal demand.
Ongoing declines in the United States and the European Union are likely to be complemented by reduced production volumes in Indonesia, as Chinese demand for seaborne thermal coal is likely to decrease.
The last bastion of remarkable growth in production is India, serving the growing demand from its power sector.
Our model suggests that declines in other countries will more than offset this growth, resulting in global production of 8 394 Mt in 2026.
But the IEA noted that overall coal use is not expected to drop until 2026, when the major expansion of renewable capacity in the next three years should help lower usage by 2.3 percent compared with 2023 levels, even with the absence of stronger clean energy policies.
>...while energy consumption has been growing enormously over the last 10 years.
Unless I am grossly misreading this chart[0], it looks like US energy consumption has been flat since 2000 at ~100 quadrillion BTUs. Which would align with my expectations: more devices tout energy efficiency, switching to LEDs, and just how much entertainment is driven by portable electronics.
There's still a lot of FUD about the need for change coming from the major fossil fuel players who are knowingly responsible for the current situation:
Best estimates show a total of 1,499 gigatons of global-warming–exacerbating CO2 have been added to the Earth's atmosphere by the actions of us humans since 1751, only 342 gigatons of those were emitted up to 1964 — 23 percent of the total emissions during those 213 years, which was 80 percent per cent of that full time frame.
On the other hand, 1,157 gigatons were emitted between 1965 and 2015 — that’s 77 percent of total emissions emitted during only the remaining 20 percent of the period in question.
Again: 77 percent of total emissions have taken place since fossil fuel companies became aware of what the dangers of burning their products would be.
"Instead of using that knowledge to change their business practices, or to alert the public or policymakers about what the dangers of burning fossil fuels would be, they’ve doubled down on their business models. They have funded climate obstruction on every level from global to local."
Yes if you consider the fact of how much carbon production did not grow compared to the amount of power being produced and consumed. We need to keep moving in this direction I felt trade protectionism was going to slow this move down a bit but now I think it might accelerate it instead as US and Europe try to block Chinese imports of solar and wind to protect their own manufacturing. I expect China to provide finance to poorer countries to buy it's own solar and wind at least that would be my move solar and wind might be cheaper but upfront cost is higher so it is harder for them to install large scale.
The US electrical grid is changing fast. I built a site to track instantaneous solar generation and other records in real time across different parts of the country.
New solar records are done until next summer but still interesting stuff happening. For example, California hit a new battery charging record a few weeks ago.
There is lots of potential, but as we see in Germany, a glass ceiling for solar and wind power exists where backup is needed - when there is little wind for only one hour at night, you still need another controllable source of energy with an output that does not vary by weather. Few are available with low CO2, such as hydro, nuclear, geothermal
It’s a wide range of sources but basically the different Independent System Operators in the US and the Energy Information Agency (EIA) All of our data scrappers are open source: https://github.com/kmax12/gridstatus
For those in the know:
- Is the adoption of wind and solar accelerating, or is it linear?
- When do you expect 90%+ electricity generation from renewable sources (hydro, wind, solar)?
- Will it be cheaper than nuclear? Will we still need nuclear?
I’m not “in the know” but here is a fun chart showing 2023 solar PV adoption compared to past IEA predictions. You can decide which function class you want to assign it to. (I did not make this, see subsequent post in that thread for credit and sources.) https://ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green/111505497033606507
Fun fact: we’re deploying, on average, ~1.13GW of solar every day globally and that rate is accelerating. China installed more wind power this year than total UK generation capacity, and more solar than total US solar generation. If you’re not paying attention, this transition will rocket past you.
It's all down to politics. The German government practically killed (predominantely East-) Germany's solar industry by messing around with the Stromeinspeisungsgesetz and didn't protect the local producers against the the Chinese ones who still produce under questionable conditions...
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph240/rojas1/
Will the current restart of the german solar panel producers last? No one knows for sure.
Panel production doesn’t need to be tied to panel installation does it? The goal of increasing solar usage doesn’t care if they come from China or not.
Accelerating and who knows - everyone is extraordinarily terrible at making predictions about power generation. New solar/wind capacity is already significantly cheaper than new nuclear (and new plants of any sort other than natural gas), but more expensive than running existing nuclear plants. Nuclear is a great way to get stable base load capacity - while wind and solar require significant storage to be used as base load (because the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine). We'll ultimately probably land on a mix of power sources.
The best predictions have come from people that know the "least" that make the simplest predictions just extrapolating current trends.
To get bad predictions, you need to be "deeply knowledgeable" about energy and come up with all sort of ways to bias the predictions against renewable energy.
Greenpeace (not known for being very numerate in the first place) and Ramez Naam did much better:
Accelerating. Unclear timelines but not soon. It is already cheaper than nuclear. Energy should be priced using the levelized cost of energy. Currently nuclear is way more expensive than utility solar ( but not rooftop solar).
The need for nuclear is about base load and making use of space and existing assets and what not.
Acceleration; naively extrapolating the current growth rate gets us to 100% in 2034-ish; it's already cheaper than nuclear; we will probably want nuclear, but don't strictly need it, other base-load equivalents and load management options exist.
We still need something which can make sure we have enough energy for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute, but at least looking at all of Europe that seems to be manageable with existing energy storage techniques (individual countries have longer Dunkelflaute, but if e.g. there's one only in Germany we can just import from Italy and vice versa)
Cheaper as in it can fully replace nuclear and fully match for demand for also extended periods of no wind, low temperatures and high cloud cover? Without any use of fossil fuels?
It’s been accelerating exponentially for a long time, but generally seems to have taken over secondary energy sources like biofuel more than displacing fossil fuels. Wind is roughly the same price as nuclear & fossil fuels but solar is still expensive. Costs continue to drop & solar bulls contend that it will be cheaper in the long run although I’m skeptical that nuclear couldn’t compete (e.g. MSR or thorium reactors would be much safer & thus cheaper to build reducing nuclear costs too). Additionally, solar bulls conveniently ignore the costs of batteries which complicate the economics by a lot & even fission built today (where costs have been going up rather than down because we don’t build a lot of it) is much cheaper than solar (even without batteries & blows battery-based solutions out of the water).
The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors which would require a major social shift to make people comfortable with it (& of course there are always risks but for some reason spilling radioactive material into the ocean scares people a lot but then they conveniently ignore how much fossil fuels we spill into the ocean which creates waaaay more ecological devastation).
Finally, it’s the only tech we have right now that’s energy dense enough that we can divert excess capacity into efforts to sequester excess carbon - we’ve already unlocked runaway processes on Earth and sequestration, while insanely expensive, is likely the only mechanism we have to try to undo the runaway processes.
>The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors
The cost of nuclear power as shown above is *enormous*. The only reason it gets built at all is because it provides economic support to the military for maintaining and building nuclear arms:
Or, in non-nuclear powers (like Sweden or Iran), to provide the skills and industry to quickly ramp up a fully fledged nuclear program while still adhering to the NPT.
It's a shame because the money would be far more efficiently spent on solar and wind capacity and also because nuclear weapons are, well, bad.
Different regions are in different parts of the sigmoid curve. In some places, the growth looks exponential. In other places, the market is already saturated and new renewable capacity is only built to meet increases in transmission/storage capacity and demand for intermittent energy.
That’s all fine and good but I have not found any data supporting this good news for net 0 efforts. We’ve been transitioning away from coal power for a while but while the headline implies solar & wind are the beneficiaries, natural gas has benefited much more. While natural gas emits less CO2 than coal, it emits more methane which if I recall correctly means that they’re roughly comparable (natural gas is better for local air quality).
In 2022, 11.3% of energy was generated by renewables (hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal, bioenergy, wave, and tidal). It's been growing at just under 0.5pp/year since 2007, when it was at 4.4%.
This is primarily driven by wind and solar. Wind power took off around 2000, and in the years since has grown from 5.6TWh to 434.3TWh in 2022. Solar power took off around 2011 and has since grown from 1.82TWh to 205.1TWh. Hydropower remains the #2 renewable in the US, with a noisy-but-nondirectional generation between 200TWh and 350TWh going back to the 60's, but solar appears poised to overtake it by 2024. All other renewables combined are holding steady or slightly dropping at ~75TWh (though anecdotally there may be some large geothermal capacity coming online in the medium-term future that would change this).
Narrowing the focus from all-energy-generation (e.g. including fuel) to specifically electricity, the US is currently generating 22.3% of its electricity from renewables, a number that has been steadily increasing at about 1pp/year since it was 8.4% in 2007.
Naïve extrapolation suggests we're about 75 years out from 100% renewables for electricity, but of course there are reasons to doubt that. For one, we've recently passed the tipping point where renewables are just straightforwardly cheaper than other sources of energy in many circumstances, and improvements in technology and infrastructure will just continue to make this true in more and more cases.
There’s actually every reason to believe we’ll plateau sooner rather than later because solar doesn’t work in the dark and I don’t think there’s a single grid scale battery system installed yet (the famous one in Australia that Tesla made so much news about is an arbitrage play that has nothing to do with solar energy storage). Cost is not the only factor that determines the energy mix.
There’s literally no existence proof yet that solar can supplant fossil fuels so everything is prognostication and articles of faith that to me seem overly optimistic. All existing growth in solar and wind is paired with a growth in fossil fuels too. So the argument is look at other positive data and yet nuclear somehow seems to directly correlate with fossil fuel usage in the grid without having to look at anything. In other words, our energy usage grows faster than solar and wind power plant construction can come online / it’s when solar/wind isn’t available meaning the difference is supplied by fossil fuels.
Most new capacity is renewable (and it's been that way for years). It's just that there was a whole bunch of natural gas capacity built out over the 90s and 2000s that it'll take a while before we see any significant reduction in natural gas generation
But our energy usage grows with time too. There’s no indication yet that solar is capable of replacing fossil fuels usage in the grid vs just keeping up with new energy usage (platueing is not sufficient)
I think the first and second derivative, and causes thereof, are crucial.
There are continuous improvements and price reductions to renewables and storage, brought about by scale and innovation. Those affect demand - the speed at which the flywheel ramps up. Natural gas doesn’t have anything like the same rate of change. It’s a relatively fixed technology with no ability to improve. One graph is a curve pointing upwards, the other is a straight line. The current state is not as important as the delta, and sooner or later the curve beats the straight line.
At some point it becomes economically irrational to adopt anything but the cheapest, easiest to deploy technology. The only question is how long it takes to get there, and if it’s soon enough.
Sama, 2016:
"What's you number one piece of hiring advice?"
"Hire for slope, not Y-intercept. This is actually my number one piece of life advice."
I think this has more to do with replacing coal with gas than about the growth of renewables: coal production has been dropping father than renewables have come online.
Renewables have replaced roughly half of the coal production decrease (and the other half is gas). Gas just had its growth moment before renewables did.
On November 20, 37 Gigawatt hours of excess wind were produced by wind turbines. That surplus occurred at night, when there is room to spare on the transmission lines running from West Texas to the urban centers in the East. If Texas had 3.7 million EVs they would have had their daily needs met with the wind electricity that was curtailed for lack of demand.
Let that sink in. Surplus like that is nuclear power plant levels of electricity. Now, admittedly, November 20 had wind potential that was near record-breaking. Further, many nights of the week, wind is not producing at surplus levels -- and the idea of million EVs charging would unleash dozens of natural gas plans to fill their nightly needs.
This problem of 'extra wind' plagues about 18 states covered by Southwest Power Pool and Midcontinent ISOs. Further, the cost savings in moving EV demand from wind-poor nights to wind-rich nights only saves about 1¢/kWh in wholesale electric costs. Accordingly, there isn't much of a price signal to get people to change their habits.
Readit News
The bottleneck for continued electrification is going to become storage shortly. Solar can produce all the electricity we need, but it only does it during daylight hours, while we consume the most energy between 4-10 PM. Natural gas is currently bridging the gap, but utilities can't install more base-load solar than is consumed during peak daylight hours. So the key to letting solar replace more gas is time-shifting consumption from 4-10 PM to 9 AM - 3 PM. Here's my plan of inexpensive solutions for this:
1. Subsidize workplace EV charging, and create a standard that lets workplaces pass along energy costs from it to employees.
2. Invest in smart grid-aware EV & home battery charging technologies. Instead of charging whenever you first plug them in (which is usually ~6 PM), load from EV charging should be distributed to whenever the grid has excess power available, with a random factor so that not all EVs charge at once.
3. Subsidize insulation upgrades for homes. This turns them into thermal batteries where you can heat/cool them during the day and they will retain that temperature at night. Insulation materials are also really cheap for what you get now; it's installation that's the bottleneck in many cases.
4. Subsidize heat pumps, to make all heating/cooling electric.
5. Adopt V2H/V2G charging technology on all EVs, so that energy already stored in the car's battery can power home electronics at night.
6. Meet demand for EV batteries.
There, you're done, at least as far as residential consumers are concerned. Transportation + HVAC are by far the largest energy draws in the consumer sector. Timeshift them so that they happen during peak solar hours, and the problem of creating enough grid-scale energy storage to shift production from 9-3 to 4-10 reduces to the problem of creating enough batteries so that everyone can have an EV. A Ford F-150 Lightning has as much battery capacity as 7 PowerWalls; take HVAC out of the equation and you can easily power a home for weeks off it.
7. Set up virtual power plant policies, give property owners incentives to install storage for grid stabilization, this will enable demand shifting and reduce the need for distribution grid upgrades and enable more distributed energy sources to be installed at the neighborhood level.
8. Inter-regional transmission line upgrades. Build out transmission lines between regions. The sun may not always be shining, and the wind may not always blow. But the sun will always be shining somewhere and the wind will be blowing somewhere. This will let regions support each other.
9. Pass enabling legislation/regulation for community choice aggregation in all states. This will speed up adoption of renewables by leveraging climate action plans at the municipal level to procure more renewables and lead to the early retirement of fossil generation facilities.
Will those extra charging cycles shorten the lifetime of my EV? It's one thing to have household batteries, which can be replaced on their own and which are still pretty useful at 40% of their original capacity. But I can't economically replace just the battery on my EV (it'll cost more than the car is worth) and diminished range would really reduce the utility I get from the vehicle it powers.
(But thanks for getting me thinking with that list, regardless.)
EV batteries are anywhere from 40->120kWh in capacity. The average home consumed consumes around 20 to 30kWh a day. Assuming you pair your EV with a solar you aren't likely using a significant portion of the battery throughout the night.
This does depend on the chemistry. If your EV is using LFPs, you have about 10k cycles to play with. NMC has about 1000.
So, for an LFP vehicle it's practically a no brainer.
Well, it's also being heavily subsidized, but not by the US. China has been leading the way there, and for a clear geostrategic reason: they have no access to natural gas or oil, and have to trade for it. If you want a "fortress economy" that can endure sanctions like the Russians have done, this is a weakness that must be addressed, and solar isn't a bad option.
However, seasonal storage is a completely different beast. In the winter there are months without a lot of solar. For my solar panels, total energy generated in December is are about 15% of that in June.
Seasonal storage is a lot more expensive than daily storage, because you can use your battery for only 30 cycles (30 years) rather than 1000-5000, depending on the technology used. That means that storing power generated in June and using it in December costs somewhere around 1$\kWh, simply to expensive. Do you have any ideas on how to solve that problem?
Instead, we need to rely on the fact that it's not winter everywhere, at least to the same degree. My house has a similar seasonal profile to yours, but an industrial plant in the Mojave desert does not get shaded by hillsides, does not have atmospheric rivers come in, can move the panels to follow the sun's angle, is at a far more southern latitude, etc. And several generation technologies like hydro and wind actually produce more in the winter than the summer, because rainy and windy days benefit them.
This is probably the biggest argument I've seen for the continued existence of the grid. My home can run indefinitely on self-supplied energy during the summer, but I still need the grid to get through the winter.
- Use 100 hour battery tech, which is almost (years not decades) at commercialization. This can bridge pretty big gaps.
- Dam and fill some big valleys in the low-solar areas with water and put generation and pumps on them, to store water all summer for winter use in generation.
- Wind works most of the year. Offshore is great for that.
- HVDC lines streching from sea to shining sea.
- The BIG one: You can save 30% or more on HVAC and other specific loads, if you let software control them better. The problem is retrofitting shitty old buildings with electronics to do it, and getting building managers to repair their HVAC systems instead of letting them languish.
There's a lot to be said for market pricing and letting smart startups find an optimum solution rather than politicians picking things to subsidise which is how you end up with corn subsidies and the like.
In this case for economic efficiency you need really a carbon tax, rather than subsidise this that or the other which may well be out of date by the time the politicians are done arguing.
At least if you actually want to reduce global co2 emissions that's the kind of stuff to do though you need global buy in. At the moment a lot of the actions are more feel good greenwashing and as a result global co2 emissions continue merrily upwards.
I've never even managed to get my workplaces to provide a parking spot, you can absolutely forget about workplaces paying for EV charging for everyone. It'll never happen even with heavy subsidy.
Can totally be done. Asking is free, and if you don’t ask, the answer is always no.
But lots of businesses do provide parking spaces. If your space is reserved for you, and you drive an EV, it becomes an obvious feature to add though at minimal cost.
Clearly some will do this, its likely many already do, and if you becomes a trend then it will move the needle. Not enough by itself, but a fair bit.
It’s easier to add a bunch of grid-scale storage, but more expensive.
I think both solutions will scale alongside solar/wind adoption.
Where do we get enough renewable electricity on cloudy week in December? Synthetic gas/oil produced in summer? Anything more promising?
There are technologies on the horizon that could fill the long term storage needs for winter power. Lithium Ion, although great for mobile technologies, is not ideal for grid scale storage. It can’t store power for long. But other chemistries such as vanadium flow batteries and iron air batteries can discharge longer, and they can store power for far longer.
Are there ways to try to ensure much of these subsidies end up reducing the price (and associated hurdle) of consumers rather than 80+% ending up as increased profits for HVAC companies?
Within a handful of years, major home electricity-consuming appliances will come with built-in batteries used for both backup purposes but also for shifting load to the cleanest/cheapest electricity available. By this time commercial/industrial will have already transitioned to this.
(1) No power from renewables overnight? Sure, nuclear works
(2) (Planning for the eventuality where) Entire grid's demand is available from renewables during parts of the day? Either don't use the renewables, and keep the nuclear running, OR battery storage.
A decade ago I think (1) was the primary topic of armchair discussion, but (2) has become increasingly more common. It really doesn't feel like nuclear is demonstrating the ability to keep up (maybe in China though...); it's not getting built fast enough, and I don't recall the more modern designs that are in the permitting process/starting to build (in the US) toting highly variable power generation as a added capability.
I do pay less attention to the nuclear news since I finished my masters a decade ago and never worked nuclear after, so I could be unaware of some things.
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Whenever I read about hydrogen power, there’s this sort of elephant in the room that producing it burns power, which is usually assumed to mean burning fossil fuels.
If we have excess solar during the daytime, couldn’t that be spent refining water to hydrogen and sticking that in a battery of sorts?
I feel like that would be especially useful for renewable flight and ocean travel, where the weight of actual batteries makes electric unviable.
Mass produced hydrogen comes from fossil fuels.
That said, I agree hydrogen might have a role in shipping and flight. Just not grid storage. LFPs and sodium chemistry are both cheap with a long life. That's what will more commonly be deployed.
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If we need distributed batteries, dont look to the lightweight and highly specialized batteries of EVs. Oldschool lead acid batteries are far cheaper, last longer, and are easily recycled. That is the way to build out a distributed battery grid.
For the correct price, a great many would. Once the batteries are too degraded for mobility use, they’re still often usable for fixed storage.
International Energy Agency Global Coal Report December 2023 (released Friday 15th December 2023)
https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023/supplyGlobal coal use to reach record high in 2023, energy agency says
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/15/global-coal-use-to...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652273Carbon emissions have barely been growing while energy consumption has been growing enormously over the last 10 years.
By 2030, carbon emissions could be substantially power. By 2050 it looks like it'll basically be a Brave New World in terms of energy.
Unless I am grossly misreading this chart[0], it looks like US energy consumption has been flat since 2000 at ~100 quadrillion BTUs. Which would align with my expectations: more devices tout energy efficiency, switching to LEDs, and just how much entertainment is driven by portable electronics.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...
There's still a lot of FUD about the need for change coming from the major fossil fuel players who are knowingly responsible for the current situation:
Again: 77 percent of total emissions have taken place since fossil fuel companies became aware of what the dangers of burning their products would be.https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/16/fossil_fuels_wildfire...New solar records are done until next summer but still interesting stuff happening. For example, California hit a new battery charging record a few weeks ago.
All the records and more real time information about US grid are here: https://www.gridstatus.io/records
Thanks!
Will the current restart of the german solar panel producers last? No one knows for sure.
To get bad predictions, you need to be "deeply knowledgeable" about energy and come up with all sort of ways to bias the predictions against renewable energy.
Greenpeace (not known for being very numerate in the first place) and Ramez Naam did much better:
https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...
The need for nuclear is about base load and making use of space and existing assets and what not.
(German wiki has more numbers)
The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors which would require a major social shift to make people comfortable with it (& of course there are always risks but for some reason spilling radioactive material into the ocean scares people a lot but then they conveniently ignore how much fossil fuels we spill into the ocean which creates waaaay more ecological devastation).
Finally, it’s the only tech we have right now that’s energy dense enough that we can divert excess capacity into efforts to sequester excess carbon - we’ve already unlocked runaway processes on Earth and sequestration, while insanely expensive, is likely the only mechanism we have to try to undo the runaway processes.
Its LCOE is roughly 5x lower than nuclear power:
https://www.evwind.es/2023/10/05/the-drop-in-the-lcoe-of-sol...
>The numbers just aren’t positive for solar/wind helping us reach net 0 by 2050. Also, grid energy isn’t the only thing we need to fix. For example, you can’t power a commercial shipping vessel off of solar / batteries. You’d need nuclear reactors
The cost of nuclear power as shown above is *enormous*. The only reason it gets built at all is because it provides economic support to the military for maintaining and building nuclear arms:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...
Or, in non-nuclear powers (like Sweden or Iran), to provide the skills and industry to quickly ramp up a fully fledged nuclear program while still adhering to the NPT.
It's a shame because the money would be far more efficiently spent on solar and wind capacity and also because nuclear weapons are, well, bad.
Here’s a direct link to the EIA document:
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/pdf/steo_full.pdf
It says renewables already passed coal. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong page?
Quick stats for the US:
In 2022, 11.3% of energy was generated by renewables (hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal, bioenergy, wave, and tidal). It's been growing at just under 0.5pp/year since 2007, when it was at 4.4%.
This is primarily driven by wind and solar. Wind power took off around 2000, and in the years since has grown from 5.6TWh to 434.3TWh in 2022. Solar power took off around 2011 and has since grown from 1.82TWh to 205.1TWh. Hydropower remains the #2 renewable in the US, with a noisy-but-nondirectional generation between 200TWh and 350TWh going back to the 60's, but solar appears poised to overtake it by 2024. All other renewables combined are holding steady or slightly dropping at ~75TWh (though anecdotally there may be some large geothermal capacity coming online in the medium-term future that would change this).
Narrowing the focus from all-energy-generation (e.g. including fuel) to specifically electricity, the US is currently generating 22.3% of its electricity from renewables, a number that has been steadily increasing at about 1pp/year since it was 8.4% in 2007.
Naïve extrapolation suggests we're about 75 years out from 100% renewables for electricity, but of course there are reasons to doubt that. For one, we've recently passed the tipping point where renewables are just straightforwardly cheaper than other sources of energy in many circumstances, and improvements in technology and infrastructure will just continue to make this true in more and more cases.
There’s literally no existence proof yet that solar can supplant fossil fuels so everything is prognostication and articles of faith that to me seem overly optimistic. All existing growth in solar and wind is paired with a growth in fossil fuels too. So the argument is look at other positive data and yet nuclear somehow seems to directly correlate with fossil fuel usage in the grid without having to look at anything. In other words, our energy usage grows faster than solar and wind power plant construction can come online / it’s when solar/wind isn’t available meaning the difference is supplied by fossil fuels.
Most new capacity is renewable (and it's been that way for years). It's just that there was a whole bunch of natural gas capacity built out over the 90s and 2000s that it'll take a while before we see any significant reduction in natural gas generation
There are continuous improvements and price reductions to renewables and storage, brought about by scale and innovation. Those affect demand - the speed at which the flywheel ramps up. Natural gas doesn’t have anything like the same rate of change. It’s a relatively fixed technology with no ability to improve. One graph is a curve pointing upwards, the other is a straight line. The current state is not as important as the delta, and sooner or later the curve beats the straight line.
At some point it becomes economically irrational to adopt anything but the cheapest, easiest to deploy technology. The only question is how long it takes to get there, and if it’s soon enough.
Sama, 2016:
"What's you number one piece of hiring advice?"
"Hire for slope, not Y-intercept. This is actually my number one piece of life advice."
https://twitter.com/sama/status/792823320441786368?lang=en
Still, good news anyway.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960
Let that sink in. Surplus like that is nuclear power plant levels of electricity. Now, admittedly, November 20 had wind potential that was near record-breaking. Further, many nights of the week, wind is not producing at surplus levels -- and the idea of million EVs charging would unleash dozens of natural gas plans to fill their nightly needs.
This problem of 'extra wind' plagues about 18 states covered by Southwest Power Pool and Midcontinent ISOs. Further, the cost savings in moving EV demand from wind-poor nights to wind-rich nights only saves about 1¢/kWh in wholesale electric costs. Accordingly, there isn't much of a price signal to get people to change their habits.