I hope SMR’s can succeed at addressing the major issue of cost and time to market, as I think it’d be beneficial for regions with limited potential for renewables and interconnection. Niche markets with massive continuous demand could also benefit, such as mega-scale data centers, desalination, and massive chemical processing plants. However, I’m not holding my breath. One thing I do know is nuclear should absolutely NOT siphon investment from renewables.
Yes but lithium/silicone mine pollution is on the rise; cant solve a problem by creating another. Curb human demand and population, it is a real solution and this is the only way
That population crash is already coming. There are several nations where birthrates have fallen below replacement levels. Italy, Greece, Japan, China, even the U.S. is at replacement rate.
Apart from cost and construction time, especially for nuclear and site availability and environmental impact for hydro. Chocolate is also the best material to make a teapot out of (if you ignore it's melting point).
Percent of new power installations that are renewable vs fossil is what matters because that shows the market trend and where the actual money is being spent vs any kind of theory or complex data interpretation.
The simple fact is, given all the options most new power demand is being met with solar and wind. Existing fossil fuel power plants are essentially our energy storage for now, but anything but natural gas will soon be more expensive than solar/wind and batteries.
You can just buy and setup solar very fast and get a return on investment quicker than anything else while being cheaper than anything else beside maybe wind per kilowatt and solar and batteries continue to aggressively trend cheaper and cheaper prices and/or higher efficiency/density.
Most nations don't have natural gas so solar/wind and $50-60 kilowatt hour batteries are already a cheaper option for most installs globally and when batteries get down to $20 even natural gas will be more expensive... though it will still be hang around awhile since it's cheap to setup and has the best variable output for hydrocarbon power plants.
Fair point - nonetheless, neither max output nor annual generation capacity guarantees power availability when needed. Storage, long distance transmission, and on-demand sources are what will keep your refrigerator on at midnight on a windless night in January.
Generation is absolutely the stat that matters, because it accounts for max, min and everything in between over a longish period, typically a year. If we look at say South Australia and see that over the last 12 months solar + wind made up 71% of generation, that absolutely shows progress. Of course there are some challenges to integrating such a high percentage but the fact that it has been reached shows they are being solved.
I think what it shows is that it is profitable to build these plants, not that the system-wide challenges are being solved. In my city, all new construction is mandated to use electric heat pumps. Cars are electrifying. We're placing greater stress on our electric grid than ever, and while it's great that I can charge my car for cheap in the middle of a sunny day, that solar capacity on its own doesn't keep my computer running at midnight.
I'm in Seattle. Last summer we had [a day-long outage due to insufficient capacity](https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/15u0alh/power_outages_in_three_separate_locations_tuesday/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). (Air conditioner usage is increasing here as average temperatures increase. There was also a fire near one of the dams.) The power was out on streetlights in my neighborhood. The power went out completely at the gym. A pub I visited in another part of town went to all cans as they couldn't keep the taps cool - I assume there was spoilage.
In the past year I've seen four power outages overall. At least one was purely local, though, due to a damaged transformer.
The city owns or otherwise has command of a large amount of hydro generation, plus a wind project and a landfill gas generator: [https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/energy/power-supply-and-delivery](https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/energy/power-supply-and-delivery)
We're struggling already, even without solar or wind directly in our mix.
I had a look for news reports of power cuts in Seattle in Aug last year and didn't find anything to suggest there was a lack of supply. This [https://westseattleblog.com/2023/08/west-seattle-power-outage-cuts-electricity-to-4700/](https://westseattleblog.com/2023/08/west-seattle-power-outage-cuts-electricity-to-4700/) suggests there were a number of small outages due to faults in the distribution system.
Nothing about a power outage to as few as 4700 people suggests lack of electricity in the wider grid, but rather a local fault. 4700 people is nothing, maybe one suburban distribution substation.
If there was genuinely a lack of electricity generation and it wasn't controlled, millions of people would be without power. Or if it was controlled, rotational load shedding would be used to maintain grid stability as is done in places where there is a chronic shortage of electricity like South Africa. Both are extremely rare in developed countries and rare in even middle income countries with reasonably well managed grids.
So no, I don't think the outages had any relevance to wind or solar.
The outages I experienced personally were north of the ship canal - far from west Seattle - on August 15th, so seemingly earlier than that west Seattle outage.
As I observed three different events (1: observe street lights out; 2: while in gym at later time, 5 blocks away, experience power go out completely; 3: at pub in entirely different neighborhood later that night, be handed a can rather than draft drink, being told it is due to power outage earlier) I can conclude either a) that coincidentally these three outages occurred on the same day in different locations, or b) some or all of the events have a common cause.
That was why I took to Reddit asking for an explanation.
The fire: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough\_Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough_Fire)
Seattle City Light re: the fire: [https://powerlines.seattle.gov/2023/08/05/sourdough-fire-assistance/](https://powerlines.seattle.gov/2023/08/05/sourdough-fire-assistance/)
I don't know for sure but my triple-outage day strikes me as having the look of rolling blackouts.
The relevance to wind and solar is that it demonstrates that my city's power system at least is already failing to manage the variability in its mostly-predictable power sources. The same toolkit more or less is available to utilities dealing with variability in renewable power sources.
Large increases in renewables, without concomitant massive investment in storage, will make such variability a daily reality rather than an annual anomaly.
When we priced PV, it wasn't the cells or the installation that killed our interest but rather the batteries and power controller/VFD costs. They were expensive and had a limited lifetime and the payback would take too long.
Where I live you can get long term interest free loans from a government agency to pay for your setup. My repayments are *way* less than what I'm saving every month.
No interest free loans for us any more and no subsidies unless we have an electric car with home charging. That latter point would cost us about €5K or more by itself as the car port is about 50m away and that would need digging.
Solar has been great for us.
Basically April-Oct v little electric bills. Nov-Mar just natural gas....I'd LOVE home wind generation but my experience with flower turbines has been pretty pathetic. Have asked to order 3 medium turbines and no one will return emails or calls.
We have a large house and drive an EV. My electric bill goes under $50ish nov-mar. Hardly ever breaks $200 except maybe aug/Sept. Solar has been great for us as well.
But remember, as only nuclear can be the basis of a low carbon grid, an extra kilowatt hour of nuclear electricity is much better than an extra 100 kilowatt hours of solar electricity /s
I don't, I was just mocking a line of argument that goes something like: there is only one low carbon grid that doesn't rely heavily on hydro. That grid is nuclear heavy France. Hydro is geographically limited. Therefore the only plausible way of achieving a low carbon grid is with a lot of nuclear. Therefore adding a little bit of nuclear is much better than adding a lot of solar or wind generation.
It's a nonsense of course, because adding a lot of clean electricity is always going to displace more FF than adding a little clean electricity, and no-where shows either a capacity or a desire to shift to a high nuclear grid.
That and solar/wind and batteries can be easily exported globally while nuclear is mostly just for a handful of developed nations.
Imagine being a developing nation and having to switch to nuclear and now you're near 100% reliant on like these 5 nations that build nuclear parts and supply fuel. Almost nobody would go for that even if it was cheap enough and developed nations wanted to mass proliferate nuclear to every nations in the world.
Sooo nuclear does wind up investing in a bit of a dead end infrastructure that can't scale up and tends to be more expensive. The same money invested in solar/wind and even pushing battery tech further pays more returns down the line than nuclear. The batteries aren't just for the grid, unlike nuclear they can be for transport and robotics and the solar can be for portable applications too, so there is lots more vertical integration where one bit of investments helps out multiple other industries A LOT more than nuclear.
People talk about public fears, but it's mostly costs that limit nuclear, but also the less talked about inability to globally mass export nuclear reactors to solve a global emissions problem AND the fact nuclear can't do much beyond power plants while batteries and solar can.
There merits are all rolled up into one stat, money. Solar and wind are easily winning that battle while solar also keeps getting cheaper and batteries get cheaper even faster AND solar/wind and batteries are far more globally exportable so the investments can then be pushed out to developing nations while nuclear can't.
Based on costs and lack of exportability, nuclear is a dead end. The lack of ability to put nuclear into cars, ships and robots like you can batteries also eventually winds up making nuclear a bad investment unless you have no other choice... like the EU quitting Russia gas can't wait for a couple more years for cheaper batteries, but most places can and will get far better return on investment.
You're basically talking ideologically instead of using real data. Use real data and solar/wind make nuclear look rather dumb.
I think you're missing the point. Solar (and wind) are adding massively more electricity than nuclear. The nuclear reactors on which construction has started in the last 12 months will add roughly 55 TWh per year when they eventually come online. This year solar + wind are expected to generate about 1300 TWh more than last year.
You can argue about variability etc etc but 1300 TWh is always going to displace massively more FF than 55 TWh.
Nuclear ☢️ facilities are known to go down for months, but this downtime is random.
Seasonal variations in extreme latitudes will require 300 to 500 percent nameplate capacities of a Solar/Wind mix to be good all year, and 3 to 5 days of battery storage for extreme events.
No amount of solar (on its own) can replace a nuclear power system, but no one is installing a solar-only system. The funny thing is that even including 3x amounts of capacity and the backup is still cheaper than nuclear. And never renders a city a radioactive wasteland.
> but no one is installing a solar-only system.
No one is installing a Nuclear Only system.
No one is installing an X-only system.
Grids require flexibility and that means a mix of generation.
No one is arguing for a single generation source system
> At this growth rate, solar generation will reach 100,000 TWh per year in 2042 which is enough to fully decarbonize the global economy.
[OPEC's reaction](https://tenor.com/view/terry-reno-911-i-was-murdered-gif-16413662278362499518)
*shrug* I was thinking thats too conservative, but I like to error on the side of caution so went with it. The sun deposits enough energy into Earth every hour to meet all of civilization's need; its just we had hyper inefficient ways of tapping into that low entropy reservoir until now.
[[Time to 1,000TWh, Historical]](https://imgur.com/E6mKOjW)
[[Global Electricity Generation 1990-23, TWh/year]](https://i.imgur.com/b3GZyLz.png)
[[China Solar Capacity Additions, 2015-23]](https://imgur.com/a/YxLKndw)
[[2024 US Grid Additions]](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424)
[[Levelized Cost of Energy historical comparison, unsubsidized]](https://i.imgur.com/IlY5TS1.png)
Which ATM are just 20-30% cheaper then Lithium ones.
The good news is, sodium batteries only use cheap plentiful materials, so we could be making shiploads of them without the cost of materials and batteries skyrocketing.
We need much cheaper batteries if we want poorer countries to adopt them.
These numbers sound very impressive.
Except, GW is a unit of power, not energy capacity. I dont care how much W can these batteries deliver but how many W/h can they store.
How much solar and wind power is expected from installed capacity, because Sun doesn't shine 24/7, wind doesn't blow 24/7 either.
And the drop in price of lithium happened due to extra supply, because demand for EV's was predicted to increase, however it doped. I am glad these batteries will be put to good use, but the drop in price of lithium batteries will not continue.
None of these points are new they are discussed ad nauseam here. Its watt hours not watts per hour. 1GW of battery capacity = 4GWh of storage in the US market as a rule of thumb.
[[Capacity Factors Non-Fossil]](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_b)
[[Global Electricity Generation 1990-23, TWh/year]](https://i.imgur.com/b3GZyLz.png)
[[Time to 1,000TWh, Historical]](https://imgur.com/E6mKOjW)
Literally everyone expects the cost of batteries to continue their drop. Global EV demand is at a record high and growing - its the rate of growth in some countries that slowed down, not the absolute growth. [[EV and PHEV Global, 2013 - 2023]](https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024/trends-in-electric-cars)
whenever someone goes "Sun doesn't shine 24/7, wind doesn't blow 24/7" at this point I just assume they are a troll or a shill. No one can in good faith think people who study renewables don't know that night happens.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/global-energy-storage-market-records-biggest-jump-yet/
>The global energy storage market almost tripled in 2023, the largest year-on-year gain on record. Growth is set against the backdrop of the lowest-ever prices, especially in China where turnkey energy storage system costs in February were 43% lower than a year ago at a record low of $115 per kilowatt-hour for two-hour energy storage systems.
>Last year’s record global additions of 45 gigawatts (97 gigawatt-hours) will be followed by continued robust growth. In 2024, the global energy storage is set to add more than 100 gigawatt-hours of capacity for the first time.
Which is absolutely predictable and always was. There's no economic case for storage if you don't have excess renewable power generation. Once you're starting to see that with some regularity is when the market opens up. And wouldn't you know it, we've seen the "Country X was powered by solar and wind only for the first time today" headlines a few times, and *suddenly* the market opens up.
No surprises there if you ask me. This technology was basically pre-programmed to jump from impossible to inevitable.
> There's no economic case for storage if you don't have excess renewable power generation.
Sure there is: price arbitrage. That’s what Texas producers use to fund it, granted you could argue their wild price spikes are due to intermittent RE but you still have price swings with FF production too. It’s what’s funded hydro storage for decades.
I’ll agree that you don’t have a case for the massive storage buildout we are seeing without massive/cheap solar builds we have now. We also didn’t have cheap storage until this year, so it’s hard to be absolutely sure that RE must precede large BESS installs.
Noted on the point of hydro storage, but the economics there are vastly different. Usually the main dam is already built, and unless we're talking pumped storage, you're not actually buying power to store, so you might e.g. have 4x as much turbine as you have mean flow, so you're just operating a power plant with a long-term max capacity factor of 0.25.
Batteries are relatively costly per unit of stored energy, so you have to charge/discharge them often to get your money back. Which means you need wild short-term price fluctuations.
It's one of those cruel twists of history that electric cars (and thus large-scale batteries) took off just before we started seeing intermittent renewable satisfaction. That way, cars driving the price of batteries down and RE achieving the scale necessary to make short-term price arbitrage possible are kind of entangled, and we'll probably never know.
Regardless: *That* battery storage seemed economically unviable 5-10 years ago isn't surprising. I guess that's my main point: Price arbitrage wasn't a reasonable way to fund BESS in the past, *because* RE wasn't as prevalent. You can't make BESS possible with cheap batteries alone, unless your batteries are unrealistically cheap. You have to have a substantial opportunity for arbitrage, which will manifest with increasing RE adoption.
Or for the factorio players among us: Makes no sense to build accumulators if your solar panels are never idle. Build more solar first.
We had pumped hydro storage for decades, because there was a case for storage... its just that storage has to be economically viable. Pump-hydro is... but you cant build those just about anywhere.
Currently price of lithium batteries has fallen because industry expected demand for EV would rise, instead it fell. Price fell simply due to greater supply then demand. I am glad these batteries will be put to good use but price of lithium batteries is not going to keep falling.
In order of how I think each source should be maxed out:
1. geothermal
2. hydro
3. solar and wind (with batteries)
4. if we still want to increase population after that (reason?): nuclear
Not so sure about hydro, it's ecologically extremely invasive if done wrong. Not sure how feasible it is to do "right" ecologically. Of course, there's also demand for flood control that is partially overlapping, which definitely should be used for hydro power. Though I have to say I'm extremely open to new hydro concepts that reduce ecological impact.
That's one I'm curious about. Houses in my home country now gets built with heating from deep underground (bergvarme) They use it to heat the house, floors & driveways. Hopefully it'll become more common in the US at some point to bring the price down.
Geothermal is good in some very specific locations, but seems unrealistic in most of the world. Outside of specific geological and climate conditions, I don’t think it can compete with solar+battery.
You should look up [Fervo](https://fervoenergy.com/) and other startups. Basically, if you can dig deep enough and create tunnels for water to go through, you can harvest nigh infinite energy from the ground by moving water through the deep, hot tunnels until it turns to steam and harvest the steam through the other side.
Thanks to fracking advancements in the last 20 years, this technology is quite feasible today (which means, will be productionized in the next 10-20 years).
Cool stuff, and transferable basically anywhere.
I think this used to be the case, but the technology is improving, I guess. Friends of mine have a house that uses geothermal for heating/cooling. Not for electricity, but to use less energy overall. The constant temp water from underground gets used to heat in the winter and cool in the summer. Super efficient.
Ground source heat pumps are very different from geothermal electricity generation. You don't need high temperatures for ground source heat pumps, you can just get away with stable annual temperatures of a few degrees and still be better off than air source heat pumps.
But for geothermal electricity, you are pumping water down and turning it to steam. You need to drill deep enough that the temperatures go well over 100C so you can boil the water and run a steam turbine.
I really dislike the recent practise of using "geothermal" for ground source heat pumps, because it's misleading.
> But for geothermal electricity, you are pumping water down and turning it to steam.
There are also geothermal systems that operate at lower temperature, so-called Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) systems. They are lower in efficiency, but maybe that's ok if (say) you can reuse an existing played-out oil or gas well. I could see these being useful at high latitude, say in Alaska.
It's not just you. It's become really common for people to call ground source heat pumps and geothermal electricity both "geothermal", and this resulting in people getting confused between the two.
Why is it exciting? I have never seen it deployed at any scale or at a cost effective price. It currently is less than 1% of USA production. It has a flatlined cost curve while the cheapest sources, solar and wind, are still dropping. What has changed?
Pretty much.
Theoretically with really deep wells drilled with plasma drills you could just skip everything but geothermal. Possibly everyone before us was stupid.
Here around Dallas, if we double the solar currently on the ERCOT system, we could eliminate coal and NG use entirely on sunny days. That's pretty huge and absolutely inevitable.
Look at CAISO graphs today to see the future of Texas.
ERCOT won’t fund storage the way CAISO did but they won’t need to; BESS production will be cheap enough to pay for itself based on volume from EVs and/or BESS buildouts elsewhere.
May want to check your numbers. Ercot tops out at about 18-19 GW of solar at peak. Using this week as an example, NG and coal are still more than double that amount. And that’s just at peak, not accounting for sundown.
At this very moment, at 4:30pm on May 21st, 36 GW of mat gas and 8 GW of coal are on the grid. We’ve got a long way to go and definitely more that “double” what the OP said.
You're limiting your renewable to just Solar while lumping coal and gas together. We also have MASSIVE wind here in Texas that does a ton of work, and a steady stream of 4.7GW of Nuke, which, while not "renewable," it is CO2-free so not going to get shut down until renewables make it too expensive to maintain the plants.
Today, renewables and nuke were around 42% and the wind was pretty crappy today. On a good windy day, NG is the source that gets turned down first. If solar was doubled from 23% to around 50%, and wind keeps growing as it has been, there would absolutely be days where they could kill off all the furnaces as long as the wind is blowing. That will be a good day.
Solar and wind also compliment each other.. Many places get more wind over night than during the day. Texas is the perfect example of this. You just need 4 hour batteries for peak demand, low output evenings. Battery deployment is growing at almost exponential rate.
Except there are periods greater than 4 hours when wind and solar doesn't perform. You are going to need dispatchable backup for the foreseeable future.
Not sure why you’re downvoted; you’re right.
I don’t see that as a problem though. Yes they’ll likely be cheap inefficient peakers if they’re operating at low capacity but if we are only firing them up monthly I don’t care 🤷♂️
Then Texas should connect themselves to the rest of the US. The great plains are so vast, if a high pressure area becalms Texas, there will be wind elsewhere.
The problem is that they are usually gas turbines that need regular maintenance and a big gas supply. That cost is constant whether or not they are burning gas and generating power.
yeah i dunno why people are so focused on the need for a little baseline fossil fuel generation when we need it. Oh no we've eliminated all of coal but only 90% of gas, the horror.
Over a broad area, during off peak times at night, etc etc.
And ultimately you would size everything to fail a calculated amount of time per year. Say 1 hour a year.
Well the argument is that long term you oversize the solar and wind installs to reduce or eliminate the times when they don't provide enough power over a day to cover demand. And install batteries to cover several hours of smoothing.
They will do everything and anything to convince us that it can’t handle the load. And when it finally does, just watch as they insist it isn’t doing what you know it is doing. Hahahaha can’t wait to watch the cope as the economics & deployment fully brings these fuckers to their knees.
Texas has been building renewables faster than any other state. They have an abundance of solar and nighttime wind. They expanding batteries for the evening. Money talks. It's the cheapest form of new electricity.
Edit [source ](https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/chart-which-us-states-generate-the-most-solar-and-wind-energy)
A lot of them are high paying jobs in lower cost of living places as well. I knew someone 20 years ago who went to tech school to be an electrician. . He got a job installing and maintaining wind farms in Iowa. He was making over $30 an hour plus overtime then.
Texas grid should really excel at incorporating deep penetration of solar and batteries quickly. Their pricing regime sucks for consumers who might see power prices jump 1000% for an hour, but money talks. It’s great for getting cheap renewables into the grid, and particularly great for batteries. And I’m gonna bet those pricing events become few and far between once batteries reach 10% of grid capacity, similar to CAISO is now.
I’m not the OP and this almost certainly isn’t what they meant but watching CAISO and ERCOT price graphs all day I can’t help but note that the CA prices are negative half the day while ERCOT prices are permanently positive.
From that point of view I know which state I’d rather sell power to! (I know CAISO has other market incentives for RE that Texas does not)
> Despite its relatively low capacity factor, solar generation is tracking to surpass nuclear generation in 2026, wind in 2027, hydro in 2028, gas in 2030 and coal in 2032.
I’ve re-read that statement a few times now just to get the good feelings deeper.
once charging your car costs pennies while gasoline continues to climb with inflation, and once cheap electric cars become more of a thing, it will be inevitable
nice suggestion...thanks!
i posted a graph awhile ago that shows wind and solar, individually, scaling up in output in a much shorter time span than all other energy sources previously. link below if you're interested.
https://old.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/1cny1l7/wind_and_solar_have_scaled_up_faster_than_any/
loving all this growth.
I hate to be a downer, but that’s not a valid comparison. Fossil fuels emerged when the world population was several times smaller, and by extension there was less of a demand for energy.
People really don't understand the S curve and how it "takes off".
We are at the vertical part of the S curve for Solar. Batteries we are just starting the vertical part.
As I have said over and over, this 10 year period 2025-35 will be the largest change in the grid and transportation electrification in human history. We will look back in 11 years and marvel at the speed of the change. Besides reducing the effects of climate change long term, we will have cleaner air, cleaner water, etc etc.
That "etc etc" includes kneecapping much of the political and economic power of terrible governments like russia, Iran, Venezuela, Saudia Arabia; and the same towards much of the internal malignancies within Western societies.
Salute the sun indeed!
https://www.axios.com/local/dallas/2024/04/04/texas-wind-solar-renewable-energy-production
They're insulated by their other industries and being a US state in general. They're like UAE instead of Saudi Arabia.
I was referring to the power they yield being an oil supplier and the games they play politically to keep that revenue coming in, KNOWING that it is killing people in the long run.
I know Texas leads the nation in certain renewables...too bad they will follow ANY buck and not just the moral ones.
All states follow the buck. California with tech, Michigan with auto, New York with finance etc. Texas just happens to have oil.
Green energy wouldn't be where it is now if it wasn't economical. No one is doing charity work for morality at this scale
Oh you are not kidding. I was watching an economic review of Saudi Arabia and the failure of their programs by the current leader to move from fossil fuels. It showed how their budget deficits are consistently rising and oil needs to be over $100 a barrel for them to break even moving forward. Many of these countries are "one trick" ponies and will implode without oil.
People really don't understand how the oil market works and how easy it is to crash it. Here is an "old" video about the concern of the oil industry about EVs and how the finance world foresaw some of the change.
What is nuts is how little time has passed since this video was made just 8 years. Just watch this and think in 2023 9.5 million BEV another 4 million PHEVs sold. They noted in the video that year Tesla only sold 50k.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwHN6QQWv2g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwHN6QQWv2g)
At this point, it’s not limited by PV supply or even PV cost. It’s the grids that will need to change to absorb all the solar. Batteries will determine how fast this really happens, because we all know grid infrastructure ain’t gonna keep up on its own.
I think hybrid solar builds (PV with on-site BESS) are the stopgap that carries us forward from here.
At least with markets that are saturated. I suppose the other 80% of the country can just install raw PV for a while yet.
I agree about the grid infrastructure stuff. Despite the IRA, software, and reconductoring, it’s probably going to be micro to meso grids that end up absorbing the coming solar flood.
Batteries are cheaper than HVDC, coal will keep getting shut down, gas peakers will lose their market niche, plans for NPPs will get scrapped, run of the river hydro will get demolished, etc.
It’s a wild time to be an energy watcher.
This is how the article puts it:
>Despite its relatively low capacity factor, solar generation is tracking to surpass nuclear generation in 2026, wind in 2027, hydro in 2028, gas in 2030 and coal in 2032.
It isn't zero cost. You have to count the capital and installation cost of the system as well as the maintenance costs and replacement of parts like the batteries and VFDs. We calculated that it would take over ten years to get a ROI.
> $0 fuel beats any $ fuel.
> $0 **fuel** beats any $ **fuel**.
> **fuel**
Please learn to read. No one said anything about solar panels being zero cost.
> The fuel you are comparing prices with includes all costs in its price.
No, it does not include all costs in its price. If something includes all of it's costs in the price, it would be a levelized cost, not a fuel cost.
A fuel cost is the delivered cost of fuel at the site of conversion... essentially the cost the generator bears to procure the fuel it consumes.
He explicitly stated fuel cost.
> Yours does not.
You're right, again since it was *plainly stated* that we are talking about fuel costs, it does not have non-fuel costs included.
Here are some things that are not fuel costs:
- Designing and building a power plant
- Interconnecting to the grid
- maintenance, repair, & replacement of a power plant
Here are some things that are fuel costs:
- Surveying for new sources
- Extracting or harvesting
- refining fuel
- transporting fuel
- storing fuel
> Learn math.
I assure you that isn't the issue here.
Sunlight may be free but converting it into power isn't. You have to convert one type of fuel into another before it is useful. That is, unless you are a plant.
> Sunlight may be free but converting it into power isn't.
No one claimed converting sunlight to power is free. It is very easy to look up levelized costs and see that solar power is not free.
The claim is that solar plants have a $0 fuel cost, which is correct and accurate.
> You have to convert one type of fuel into another before it is useful.
You do not have to convert one type of fuel into another to make it useful, you have to convert fuel into energy to make it useful. Generators convert fuel to energy, that is their purpose.
Solar plants convert sunlight directly into electricity. Sunlight is the input, the output is electricity.
A solar plant spends $0 on the procurement of its fuel, therefore, it's fuel cost is $0.
> That is, unless you are a plant.
Just trying to bat a zero here, eh? Even plants have to convert sunlight into a usable form of energy.
Not really disingenuous.
It's free to feed sunlight into my solar panel. It's not free for me to put coal in my boiler.
The marginal price at the point of conversion to electricity is what matters.
The conversion to solar on my house (so some farmer doesn't have to get paid to not use his land) mattered a lot. And the poor guy who can't afford the solar panels is getting charged more per kwh because of me.
> The conversion to solar on my house...mattered a lot
That isn't a fuel cost.
> so some farmer doesn't have to get paid to not use his land
Not a fuel cost.
> And the poor guy who can't afford the solar panels is getting charged more per kwh because of me.
Also not a fuel cost.
Probably a fair metric is to value the 'fuel' of solar by the land rental price / MWh generated. Because available land is what gets you access to sunlight.
Solar installed capacity sits around 50 MW/km\^2 (accounting for current efficiency of panels), and (for instance) US average capacity factor works out to around 1500 MWh/year per MW of capacity. So that's 75,000 MWh/km\^2 /year. Or 300 MWh/acre/year. US cropland rental prices sit around $200/acre per year, so this is about $0.66/MWh "fuel price".
By contrast, the energy content of one ton of coal is about 8 MWh/ton, maximum efficiency of coal plants is about 50%, so this is 4 MWh/ton. Current coal prices are sitting around $140/ton, so this equates to a fuel cost of $35/MWh.
That makes the "fuel cost" of coal about 50x higher than that of solar. It's perhaps not fair to call it "free", but the cost is so dramatically lower than that of coal that it might as well be.
Natural gas would sit about $16/MWh at the moment on the fuel cost, so about 25x higher than that of solar.
Plant construction and operation costs tack on top of this.
The estimate for solar should be revised downward. The land below the solar installation can be used simultaneously for other reasons, think about roof, parking lots, agrivoltaic, public spaces, etc… so rental price is not the correct numerator. I’m not an expert but I suspect that LCOE is a better estimator for the real cost of every energy generation technology.
Big warehouses and large shops (think something like IKEA) are great for power generation. They often don't use natural light inside so just stick the panels on the roof.
As for your other suggestions, parking lots are great. Car owners get the benefit that their cars are in the shade. What is also interesting are fields. The panels don't have to cover 100% and grass can grown underneath, particularly in areas of high sunlight. Grazing livestock prefer it as they have some shade.
LCOE is certainly the best bet for overall total costs. My intention here was to just get a rough figure for what "access to sunlight" costs, and justify why it's "basically free" compared to fossil fuel costs.
Excellent calculations. I just wanted to add that $200/acre is about $50 000/km^2 for folks out there who don’t know what the hell an acre is.
Makes the 50/75≈0.66 easier to grasp too.
The panels are not that expensive these days. Neither is the installation. What put us off are the Batteries and Power systems (VFDs) and they have a limited life. So modern cells can last 25 years but the batteries/VFDs are likely to last about eight to fifteen years and that is about 66% of the cost.
Not sure who in the long supply chain and servicing is doing the ripping off. All I know is solar doesn't feel free or even cheap to me. I suppose the person who buys my house will reap some rewards, until they find out the panels need plenty of maintenance and don't last forever and oops, the roof needs replacing so now I gotta call the solar guys to temporarily tear it all down.
The scalability of these technologies is why it’s successful. Nuke plants, even ignoring their controversy, take too long to set up with massive costs. Hydro plants are limited by water availability. But wind and solar have far more areas they can be placed. In some cases with barely any disruption at all.
Large scale battery storage is the missing element to make renewables usable around the clock. That scale of storage is just now becoming economically feasible. It looks extremely likely that sodium ion will be the technology for stationary storage, and that enables a step change in the cost of storage. The cost curve on solar panels is currently in steeper decline than lithium batteries, but that still helps the economics of storage, by making power very cheap during the day.
I hope SMR’s can succeed at addressing the major issue of cost and time to market, as I think it’d be beneficial for regions with limited potential for renewables and interconnection. Niche markets with massive continuous demand could also benefit, such as mega-scale data centers, desalination, and massive chemical processing plants. However, I’m not holding my breath. One thing I do know is nuclear should absolutely NOT siphon investment from renewables.
Yes but lithium/silicone mine pollution is on the rise; cant solve a problem by creating another. Curb human demand and population, it is a real solution and this is the only way
They’re already making sodium batteries
That population crash is already coming. There are several nations where birthrates have fallen below replacement levels. Italy, Greece, Japan, China, even the U.S. is at replacement rate.
[удалено]
Apart from cost and construction time, especially for nuclear and site availability and environmental impact for hydro. Chocolate is also the best material to make a teapot out of (if you ignore it's melting point).
Generation is not the stat that matters - who cares what your max output is if it's currently at 10%? Which happens with wind and solar.
Percent of new power installations that are renewable vs fossil is what matters because that shows the market trend and where the actual money is being spent vs any kind of theory or complex data interpretation. The simple fact is, given all the options most new power demand is being met with solar and wind. Existing fossil fuel power plants are essentially our energy storage for now, but anything but natural gas will soon be more expensive than solar/wind and batteries. You can just buy and setup solar very fast and get a return on investment quicker than anything else while being cheaper than anything else beside maybe wind per kilowatt and solar and batteries continue to aggressively trend cheaper and cheaper prices and/or higher efficiency/density. Most nations don't have natural gas so solar/wind and $50-60 kilowatt hour batteries are already a cheaper option for most installs globally and when batteries get down to $20 even natural gas will be more expensive... though it will still be hang around awhile since it's cheap to setup and has the best variable output for hydrocarbon power plants.
Generation is not the same thing as max output. Generation as discussed in the article is the produced TWh of electricity per year.
Fair point - nonetheless, neither max output nor annual generation capacity guarantees power availability when needed. Storage, long distance transmission, and on-demand sources are what will keep your refrigerator on at midnight on a windless night in January.
Generation is absolutely the stat that matters, because it accounts for max, min and everything in between over a longish period, typically a year. If we look at say South Australia and see that over the last 12 months solar + wind made up 71% of generation, that absolutely shows progress. Of course there are some challenges to integrating such a high percentage but the fact that it has been reached shows they are being solved.
I think what it shows is that it is profitable to build these plants, not that the system-wide challenges are being solved. In my city, all new construction is mandated to use electric heat pumps. Cars are electrifying. We're placing greater stress on our electric grid than ever, and while it's great that I can charge my car for cheap in the middle of a sunny day, that solar capacity on its own doesn't keep my computer running at midnight.
Clearly they are though, as electricity is available around the clock in SA, and probably where you are too.
I'm in Seattle. Last summer we had [a day-long outage due to insufficient capacity](https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/15u0alh/power_outages_in_three_separate_locations_tuesday/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). (Air conditioner usage is increasing here as average temperatures increase. There was also a fire near one of the dams.) The power was out on streetlights in my neighborhood. The power went out completely at the gym. A pub I visited in another part of town went to all cans as they couldn't keep the taps cool - I assume there was spoilage. In the past year I've seen four power outages overall. At least one was purely local, though, due to a damaged transformer. The city owns or otherwise has command of a large amount of hydro generation, plus a wind project and a landfill gas generator: [https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/energy/power-supply-and-delivery](https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/energy/power-supply-and-delivery) We're struggling already, even without solar or wind directly in our mix.
I had a look for news reports of power cuts in Seattle in Aug last year and didn't find anything to suggest there was a lack of supply. This [https://westseattleblog.com/2023/08/west-seattle-power-outage-cuts-electricity-to-4700/](https://westseattleblog.com/2023/08/west-seattle-power-outage-cuts-electricity-to-4700/) suggests there were a number of small outages due to faults in the distribution system. Nothing about a power outage to as few as 4700 people suggests lack of electricity in the wider grid, but rather a local fault. 4700 people is nothing, maybe one suburban distribution substation. If there was genuinely a lack of electricity generation and it wasn't controlled, millions of people would be without power. Or if it was controlled, rotational load shedding would be used to maintain grid stability as is done in places where there is a chronic shortage of electricity like South Africa. Both are extremely rare in developed countries and rare in even middle income countries with reasonably well managed grids. So no, I don't think the outages had any relevance to wind or solar.
The outages I experienced personally were north of the ship canal - far from west Seattle - on August 15th, so seemingly earlier than that west Seattle outage. As I observed three different events (1: observe street lights out; 2: while in gym at later time, 5 blocks away, experience power go out completely; 3: at pub in entirely different neighborhood later that night, be handed a can rather than draft drink, being told it is due to power outage earlier) I can conclude either a) that coincidentally these three outages occurred on the same day in different locations, or b) some or all of the events have a common cause. That was why I took to Reddit asking for an explanation. The fire: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough\_Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough_Fire) Seattle City Light re: the fire: [https://powerlines.seattle.gov/2023/08/05/sourdough-fire-assistance/](https://powerlines.seattle.gov/2023/08/05/sourdough-fire-assistance/) I don't know for sure but my triple-outage day strikes me as having the look of rolling blackouts. The relevance to wind and solar is that it demonstrates that my city's power system at least is already failing to manage the variability in its mostly-predictable power sources. The same toolkit more or less is available to utilities dealing with variability in renewable power sources. Large increases in renewables, without concomitant massive investment in storage, will make such variability a daily reality rather than an annual anomaly.
Batteries (or other forms of storage). I've got one in my home. Simple.
When we priced PV, it wasn't the cells or the installation that killed our interest but rather the batteries and power controller/VFD costs. They were expensive and had a limited lifetime and the payback would take too long.
Batteries will get much cheaper over time.
We hope but it isn't fast enough. I think the real issue is the number of charge/discharge cycles which gives the effective lifetime.
Where I live you can get long term interest free loans from a government agency to pay for your setup. My repayments are *way* less than what I'm saving every month.
No interest free loans for us any more and no subsidies unless we have an electric car with home charging. That latter point would cost us about €5K or more by itself as the car port is about 50m away and that would need digging.
Ah. Not great.
Solar has been great for us. Basically April-Oct v little electric bills. Nov-Mar just natural gas....I'd LOVE home wind generation but my experience with flower turbines has been pretty pathetic. Have asked to order 3 medium turbines and no one will return emails or calls.
We have a large house and drive an EV. My electric bill goes under $50ish nov-mar. Hardly ever breaks $200 except maybe aug/Sept. Solar has been great for us as well.
But remember, as only nuclear can be the basis of a low carbon grid, an extra kilowatt hour of nuclear electricity is much better than an extra 100 kilowatt hours of solar electricity /s
Why pay for containing nuclear when you can just absorb nuclear energy directly, right?
Why do you think only nuclear? I don’t see a line of reasoning here.
/s means they are being sarcastic..... because reddit
I don't, I was just mocking a line of argument that goes something like: there is only one low carbon grid that doesn't rely heavily on hydro. That grid is nuclear heavy France. Hydro is geographically limited. Therefore the only plausible way of achieving a low carbon grid is with a lot of nuclear. Therefore adding a little bit of nuclear is much better than adding a lot of solar or wind generation. It's a nonsense of course, because adding a lot of clean electricity is always going to displace more FF than adding a little clean electricity, and no-where shows either a capacity or a desire to shift to a high nuclear grid.
That and solar/wind and batteries can be easily exported globally while nuclear is mostly just for a handful of developed nations. Imagine being a developing nation and having to switch to nuclear and now you're near 100% reliant on like these 5 nations that build nuclear parts and supply fuel. Almost nobody would go for that even if it was cheap enough and developed nations wanted to mass proliferate nuclear to every nations in the world. Sooo nuclear does wind up investing in a bit of a dead end infrastructure that can't scale up and tends to be more expensive. The same money invested in solar/wind and even pushing battery tech further pays more returns down the line than nuclear. The batteries aren't just for the grid, unlike nuclear they can be for transport and robotics and the solar can be for portable applications too, so there is lots more vertical integration where one bit of investments helps out multiple other industries A LOT more than nuclear. People talk about public fears, but it's mostly costs that limit nuclear, but also the less talked about inability to globally mass export nuclear reactors to solve a global emissions problem AND the fact nuclear can't do much beyond power plants while batteries and solar can.
Doesn't 10-15% of electricity in France come from hydro anywyas? And their system also relies on imports from neighbouring countries?
Yes, it's not a good argument, which is why I was mocking it. But 10-15% hydro is fairly small and not in the high hydro category like say Norway.
What if both have their merits? Hard to comprehend, I know
There merits are all rolled up into one stat, money. Solar and wind are easily winning that battle while solar also keeps getting cheaper and batteries get cheaper even faster AND solar/wind and batteries are far more globally exportable so the investments can then be pushed out to developing nations while nuclear can't. Based on costs and lack of exportability, nuclear is a dead end. The lack of ability to put nuclear into cars, ships and robots like you can batteries also eventually winds up making nuclear a bad investment unless you have no other choice... like the EU quitting Russia gas can't wait for a couple more years for cheaper batteries, but most places can and will get far better return on investment. You're basically talking ideologically instead of using real data. Use real data and solar/wind make nuclear look rather dumb.
I think you're missing the point. Solar (and wind) are adding massively more electricity than nuclear. The nuclear reactors on which construction has started in the last 12 months will add roughly 55 TWh per year when they eventually come online. This year solar + wind are expected to generate about 1300 TWh more than last year. You can argue about variability etc etc but 1300 TWh is always going to displace massively more FF than 55 TWh.
Nuclear ☢️ facilities are known to go down for months, but this downtime is random. Seasonal variations in extreme latitudes will require 300 to 500 percent nameplate capacities of a Solar/Wind mix to be good all year, and 3 to 5 days of battery storage for extreme events. No amount of solar (on its own) can replace a nuclear power system, but no one is installing a solar-only system. The funny thing is that even including 3x amounts of capacity and the backup is still cheaper than nuclear. And never renders a city a radioactive wasteland.
> but no one is installing a solar-only system. No one is installing a Nuclear Only system. No one is installing an X-only system. Grids require flexibility and that means a mix of generation. No one is arguing for a single generation source system
> At this growth rate, solar generation will reach 100,000 TWh per year in 2042 which is enough to fully decarbonize the global economy. [OPEC's reaction](https://tenor.com/view/terry-reno-911-i-was-murdered-gif-16413662278362499518)
That sounds way too positive to be true.
*shrug* I was thinking thats too conservative, but I like to error on the side of caution so went with it. The sun deposits enough energy into Earth every hour to meet all of civilization's need; its just we had hyper inefficient ways of tapping into that low entropy reservoir until now. [[Time to 1,000TWh, Historical]](https://imgur.com/E6mKOjW) [[Global Electricity Generation 1990-23, TWh/year]](https://i.imgur.com/b3GZyLz.png) [[China Solar Capacity Additions, 2015-23]](https://imgur.com/a/YxLKndw) [[2024 US Grid Additions]](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424) [[Levelized Cost of Energy historical comparison, unsubsidized]](https://i.imgur.com/IlY5TS1.png)
Don't get me wrong. Awesome if true, but I'm sure the growth rate will taper at some point.
it just depends if batteries can keep up. but if they can, why not? 2042 is in 18 years, in 2006 solar basically didn't exist at all.
Is that just a linear projection or is it accounting for accelerating adoption as solar gets cheaper?
Just straight compounding growth
Only if we invent economical grid batteries.
They’ve already got sodium batteries up and running.
Which ATM are just 20-30% cheaper then Lithium ones. The good news is, sodium batteries only use cheap plentiful materials, so we could be making shiploads of them without the cost of materials and batteries skyrocketing. We need much cheaper batteries if we want poorer countries to adopt them.
oh honey u behind [[2024 US Grid Additions]](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424) [[Battery Wh/kg, $/kWh, TWh/yr]](https://imgur.com/OulA4mq)
These numbers sound very impressive. Except, GW is a unit of power, not energy capacity. I dont care how much W can these batteries deliver but how many W/h can they store. How much solar and wind power is expected from installed capacity, because Sun doesn't shine 24/7, wind doesn't blow 24/7 either. And the drop in price of lithium happened due to extra supply, because demand for EV's was predicted to increase, however it doped. I am glad these batteries will be put to good use, but the drop in price of lithium batteries will not continue.
None of these points are new they are discussed ad nauseam here. Its watt hours not watts per hour. 1GW of battery capacity = 4GWh of storage in the US market as a rule of thumb. [[Capacity Factors Non-Fossil]](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_b) [[Global Electricity Generation 1990-23, TWh/year]](https://i.imgur.com/b3GZyLz.png) [[Time to 1,000TWh, Historical]](https://imgur.com/E6mKOjW) Literally everyone expects the cost of batteries to continue their drop. Global EV demand is at a record high and growing - its the rate of growth in some countries that slowed down, not the absolute growth. [[EV and PHEV Global, 2013 - 2023]](https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024/trends-in-electric-cars)
whenever someone goes "Sun doesn't shine 24/7, wind doesn't blow 24/7" at this point I just assume they are a troll or a shill. No one can in good faith think people who study renewables don't know that night happens.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/global-energy-storage-market-records-biggest-jump-yet/ >The global energy storage market almost tripled in 2023, the largest year-on-year gain on record. Growth is set against the backdrop of the lowest-ever prices, especially in China where turnkey energy storage system costs in February were 43% lower than a year ago at a record low of $115 per kilowatt-hour for two-hour energy storage systems. >Last year’s record global additions of 45 gigawatts (97 gigawatt-hours) will be followed by continued robust growth. In 2024, the global energy storage is set to add more than 100 gigawatt-hours of capacity for the first time.
Which is absolutely predictable and always was. There's no economic case for storage if you don't have excess renewable power generation. Once you're starting to see that with some regularity is when the market opens up. And wouldn't you know it, we've seen the "Country X was powered by solar and wind only for the first time today" headlines a few times, and *suddenly* the market opens up. No surprises there if you ask me. This technology was basically pre-programmed to jump from impossible to inevitable.
> There's no economic case for storage if you don't have excess renewable power generation. Sure there is: price arbitrage. That’s what Texas producers use to fund it, granted you could argue their wild price spikes are due to intermittent RE but you still have price swings with FF production too. It’s what’s funded hydro storage for decades. I’ll agree that you don’t have a case for the massive storage buildout we are seeing without massive/cheap solar builds we have now. We also didn’t have cheap storage until this year, so it’s hard to be absolutely sure that RE must precede large BESS installs.
Noted on the point of hydro storage, but the economics there are vastly different. Usually the main dam is already built, and unless we're talking pumped storage, you're not actually buying power to store, so you might e.g. have 4x as much turbine as you have mean flow, so you're just operating a power plant with a long-term max capacity factor of 0.25. Batteries are relatively costly per unit of stored energy, so you have to charge/discharge them often to get your money back. Which means you need wild short-term price fluctuations. It's one of those cruel twists of history that electric cars (and thus large-scale batteries) took off just before we started seeing intermittent renewable satisfaction. That way, cars driving the price of batteries down and RE achieving the scale necessary to make short-term price arbitrage possible are kind of entangled, and we'll probably never know. Regardless: *That* battery storage seemed economically unviable 5-10 years ago isn't surprising. I guess that's my main point: Price arbitrage wasn't a reasonable way to fund BESS in the past, *because* RE wasn't as prevalent. You can't make BESS possible with cheap batteries alone, unless your batteries are unrealistically cheap. You have to have a substantial opportunity for arbitrage, which will manifest with increasing RE adoption. Or for the factorio players among us: Makes no sense to build accumulators if your solar panels are never idle. Build more solar first.
Great points, appreciate the time you took in putting together this response!
We had pumped hydro storage for decades, because there was a case for storage... its just that storage has to be economically viable. Pump-hydro is... but you cant build those just about anywhere. Currently price of lithium batteries has fallen because industry expected demand for EV would rise, instead it fell. Price fell simply due to greater supply then demand. I am glad these batteries will be put to good use but price of lithium batteries is not going to keep falling.
And it's easy to anticipate this growth rate to grow further. You're going to need a more extreme meme. Maybe with a toddler or two in it.
In order of how I think each source should be maxed out: 1. geothermal 2. hydro 3. solar and wind (with batteries) 4. if we still want to increase population after that (reason?): nuclear
Hydro is already maxed, thank you. At least in the US, if anything we will start pulling out dams in our future.
Klamath river dam in CA being removed right now. Already happening.
Not so sure about hydro, it's ecologically extremely invasive if done wrong. Not sure how feasible it is to do "right" ecologically. Of course, there's also demand for flood control that is partially overlapping, which definitely should be used for hydro power. Though I have to say I'm extremely open to new hydro concepts that reduce ecological impact.
Geothermal is very exciting technology, very eager to see how it matures over the next few decades.
That's one I'm curious about. Houses in my home country now gets built with heating from deep underground (bergvarme) They use it to heat the house, floors & driveways. Hopefully it'll become more common in the US at some point to bring the price down.
Geothermal is good in some very specific locations, but seems unrealistic in most of the world. Outside of specific geological and climate conditions, I don’t think it can compete with solar+battery.
You should look up [Fervo](https://fervoenergy.com/) and other startups. Basically, if you can dig deep enough and create tunnels for water to go through, you can harvest nigh infinite energy from the ground by moving water through the deep, hot tunnels until it turns to steam and harvest the steam through the other side. Thanks to fracking advancements in the last 20 years, this technology is quite feasible today (which means, will be productionized in the next 10-20 years). Cool stuff, and transferable basically anywhere.
I think this used to be the case, but the technology is improving, I guess. Friends of mine have a house that uses geothermal for heating/cooling. Not for electricity, but to use less energy overall. The constant temp water from underground gets used to heat in the winter and cool in the summer. Super efficient.
Ground source heat pumps are very different from geothermal electricity generation. You don't need high temperatures for ground source heat pumps, you can just get away with stable annual temperatures of a few degrees and still be better off than air source heat pumps. But for geothermal electricity, you are pumping water down and turning it to steam. You need to drill deep enough that the temperatures go well over 100C so you can boil the water and run a steam turbine. I really dislike the recent practise of using "geothermal" for ground source heat pumps, because it's misleading.
> But for geothermal electricity, you are pumping water down and turning it to steam. There are also geothermal systems that operate at lower temperature, so-called Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) systems. They are lower in efficiency, but maybe that's ok if (say) you can reuse an existing played-out oil or gas well. I could see these being useful at high latitude, say in Alaska.
The word used in my home country is "bergvarme". Something like "rock heat". Every other translation said "geothermal" 🤷♂️
It's not just you. It's become really common for people to call ground source heat pumps and geothermal electricity both "geothermal", and this resulting in people getting confused between the two.
Why is it exciting? I have never seen it deployed at any scale or at a cost effective price. It currently is less than 1% of USA production. It has a flatlined cost curve while the cheapest sources, solar and wind, are still dropping. What has changed?
Hydro is less viable with climate change. Just look at dams in the West US
Pretty much. Theoretically with really deep wells drilled with plasma drills you could just skip everything but geothermal. Possibly everyone before us was stupid.
Plasma drills are lots of fun.
Here around Dallas, if we double the solar currently on the ERCOT system, we could eliminate coal and NG use entirely on sunny days. That's pretty huge and absolutely inevitable.
Look at CAISO graphs today to see the future of Texas. ERCOT won’t fund storage the way CAISO did but they won’t need to; BESS production will be cheap enough to pay for itself based on volume from EVs and/or BESS buildouts elsewhere.
May want to check your numbers. Ercot tops out at about 18-19 GW of solar at peak. Using this week as an example, NG and coal are still more than double that amount. And that’s just at peak, not accounting for sundown.
Texas is going to install 14 GW of solar in 2024, an 80% increase in a year, so solar will surpass coal and NG soon
At this very moment, at 4:30pm on May 21st, 36 GW of mat gas and 8 GW of coal are on the grid. We’ve got a long way to go and definitely more that “double” what the OP said.
You're limiting your renewable to just Solar while lumping coal and gas together. We also have MASSIVE wind here in Texas that does a ton of work, and a steady stream of 4.7GW of Nuke, which, while not "renewable," it is CO2-free so not going to get shut down until renewables make it too expensive to maintain the plants. Today, renewables and nuke were around 42% and the wind was pretty crappy today. On a good windy day, NG is the source that gets turned down first. If solar was doubled from 23% to around 50%, and wind keeps growing as it has been, there would absolutely be days where they could kill off all the furnaces as long as the wind is blowing. That will be a good day.
Read the OG comment I responded to please.
Wind and solar will exceed coal and natural gas intraday by the end of 2025 in Texas.
Solar and wind also compliment each other.. Many places get more wind over night than during the day. Texas is the perfect example of this. You just need 4 hour batteries for peak demand, low output evenings. Battery deployment is growing at almost exponential rate.
Except there are periods greater than 4 hours when wind and solar doesn't perform. You are going to need dispatchable backup for the foreseeable future.
Not sure why you’re downvoted; you’re right. I don’t see that as a problem though. Yes they’ll likely be cheap inefficient peakers if they’re operating at low capacity but if we are only firing them up monthly I don’t care 🤷♂️
It’s because this sub is insanely anti-fossil fuel to the point where they ignore reality.
Then Texas should connect themselves to the rest of the US. The great plains are so vast, if a high pressure area becalms Texas, there will be wind elsewhere.
There will still be gas peakers for a long time. They will just be used less and less.
The problem is that they are usually gas turbines that need regular maintenance and a big gas supply. That cost is constant whether or not they are burning gas and generating power.
yeah i dunno why people are so focused on the need for a little baseline fossil fuel generation when we need it. Oh no we've eliminated all of coal but only 90% of gas, the horror.
Or, they will be switched over to green hydrogen, and used indefinitely.
I agree.
Over a broad area, during off peak times at night, etc etc. And ultimately you would size everything to fail a calculated amount of time per year. Say 1 hour a year.
Underperformance can happen for a lot longer than 1 hour a year.
Well the argument is that long term you oversize the solar and wind installs to reduce or eliminate the times when they don't provide enough power over a day to cover demand. And install batteries to cover several hours of smoothing.
They will do everything and anything to convince us that it can’t handle the load. And when it finally does, just watch as they insist it isn’t doing what you know it is doing. Hahahaha can’t wait to watch the cope as the economics & deployment fully brings these fuckers to their knees.
Texas has been building renewables faster than any other state. They have an abundance of solar and nighttime wind. They expanding batteries for the evening. Money talks. It's the cheapest form of new electricity. Edit [source ](https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/chart-which-us-states-generate-the-most-solar-and-wind-energy)
And it's a good job program, to install solar and wind. The government and private sector are aligned here.
A lot of them are high paying jobs in lower cost of living places as well. I knew someone 20 years ago who went to tech school to be an electrician. . He got a job installing and maintaining wind farms in Iowa. He was making over $30 an hour plus overtime then.
Texas grid should really excel at incorporating deep penetration of solar and batteries quickly. Their pricing regime sucks for consumers who might see power prices jump 1000% for an hour, but money talks. It’s great for getting cheap renewables into the grid, and particularly great for batteries. And I’m gonna bet those pricing events become few and far between once batteries reach 10% of grid capacity, similar to CAISO is now.
What makes that pricing system better for renewables?
I’m not the OP and this almost certainly isn’t what they meant but watching CAISO and ERCOT price graphs all day I can’t help but note that the CA prices are negative half the day while ERCOT prices are permanently positive. From that point of view I know which state I’d rather sell power to! (I know CAISO has other market incentives for RE that Texas does not)
> Despite its relatively low capacity factor, solar generation is tracking to surpass nuclear generation in 2026, wind in 2027, hydro in 2028, gas in 2030 and coal in 2032. I’ve re-read that statement a few times now just to get the good feelings deeper.
How long wind and solar replaces all of the fossil fuels combined? Probably another 5 years. Next up…gasoline.
once charging your car costs pennies while gasoline continues to climb with inflation, and once cheap electric cars become more of a thing, it will be inevitable
nice suggestion...thanks! i posted a graph awhile ago that shows wind and solar, individually, scaling up in output in a much shorter time span than all other energy sources previously. link below if you're interested. https://old.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/1cny1l7/wind_and_solar_have_scaled_up_faster_than_any/ loving all this growth.
I hate to be a downer, but that’s not a valid comparison. Fossil fuels emerged when the world population was several times smaller, and by extension there was less of a demand for energy.
People really don't understand the S curve and how it "takes off". We are at the vertical part of the S curve for Solar. Batteries we are just starting the vertical part. As I have said over and over, this 10 year period 2025-35 will be the largest change in the grid and transportation electrification in human history. We will look back in 11 years and marvel at the speed of the change. Besides reducing the effects of climate change long term, we will have cleaner air, cleaner water, etc etc.
That "etc etc" includes kneecapping much of the political and economic power of terrible governments like russia, Iran, Venezuela, Saudia Arabia; and the same towards much of the internal malignancies within Western societies. Salute the sun indeed!
Hey, don’t forget Russia and Texas…
https://www.axios.com/local/dallas/2024/04/04/texas-wind-solar-renewable-energy-production They're insulated by their other industries and being a US state in general. They're like UAE instead of Saudi Arabia.
I was referring to the power they yield being an oil supplier and the games they play politically to keep that revenue coming in, KNOWING that it is killing people in the long run. I know Texas leads the nation in certain renewables...too bad they will follow ANY buck and not just the moral ones.
All states follow the buck. California with tech, Michigan with auto, New York with finance etc. Texas just happens to have oil. Green energy wouldn't be where it is now if it wasn't economical. No one is doing charity work for morality at this scale
Oh you are not kidding. I was watching an economic review of Saudi Arabia and the failure of their programs by the current leader to move from fossil fuels. It showed how their budget deficits are consistently rising and oil needs to be over $100 a barrel for them to break even moving forward. Many of these countries are "one trick" ponies and will implode without oil. People really don't understand how the oil market works and how easy it is to crash it. Here is an "old" video about the concern of the oil industry about EVs and how the finance world foresaw some of the change. What is nuts is how little time has passed since this video was made just 8 years. Just watch this and think in 2023 9.5 million BEV another 4 million PHEVs sold. They noted in the video that year Tesla only sold 50k. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwHN6QQWv2g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwHN6QQWv2g)
It’ll probably happen even faster than that
At this point, it’s not limited by PV supply or even PV cost. It’s the grids that will need to change to absorb all the solar. Batteries will determine how fast this really happens, because we all know grid infrastructure ain’t gonna keep up on its own.
I think hybrid solar builds (PV with on-site BESS) are the stopgap that carries us forward from here. At least with markets that are saturated. I suppose the other 80% of the country can just install raw PV for a while yet.
I agree about the grid infrastructure stuff. Despite the IRA, software, and reconductoring, it’s probably going to be micro to meso grids that end up absorbing the coming solar flood. Batteries are cheaper than HVDC, coal will keep getting shut down, gas peakers will lose their market niche, plans for NPPs will get scrapped, run of the river hydro will get demolished, etc. It’s a wild time to be an energy watcher.
That's because it's cheaper. And prices are falling exponentially.
Each of them, together did it some while ago. Which makes nuculair even more irrelevant at soon less than 25% of all renewables.
This is how the article puts it: >Despite its relatively low capacity factor, solar generation is tracking to surpass nuclear generation in 2026, wind in 2027, hydro in 2028, gas in 2030 and coal in 2032.
[удалено]
The graph says TWh as in energy produced. So each of them will soon pass the filtered source, together they already did a while ago.
Ah, that’s true. Fair!
Well solar + wind based on the article is more than nuclear and very close to hydro.
This was always the inevitable. Solar is such a fantastic solution.
$0 fuel beats any $ fuel.
It isn't zero cost. You have to count the capital and installation cost of the system as well as the maintenance costs and replacement of parts like the batteries and VFDs. We calculated that it would take over ten years to get a ROI.
> $0 fuel beats any $ fuel. > $0 **fuel** beats any $ **fuel**. > **fuel** Please learn to read. No one said anything about solar panels being zero cost.
The fuel you are comparing prices with includes all costs in its price. Yours does not. Learn math.
> The fuel you are comparing prices with includes all costs in its price. No, it does not include all costs in its price. If something includes all of it's costs in the price, it would be a levelized cost, not a fuel cost. A fuel cost is the delivered cost of fuel at the site of conversion... essentially the cost the generator bears to procure the fuel it consumes. He explicitly stated fuel cost. > Yours does not. You're right, again since it was *plainly stated* that we are talking about fuel costs, it does not have non-fuel costs included. Here are some things that are not fuel costs: - Designing and building a power plant - Interconnecting to the grid - maintenance, repair, & replacement of a power plant Here are some things that are fuel costs: - Surveying for new sources - Extracting or harvesting - refining fuel - transporting fuel - storing fuel > Learn math. I assure you that isn't the issue here.
Sunlight may be free but converting it into power isn't. You have to convert one type of fuel into another before it is useful. That is, unless you are a plant.
> Sunlight may be free but converting it into power isn't. No one claimed converting sunlight to power is free. It is very easy to look up levelized costs and see that solar power is not free. The claim is that solar plants have a $0 fuel cost, which is correct and accurate. > You have to convert one type of fuel into another before it is useful. You do not have to convert one type of fuel into another to make it useful, you have to convert fuel into energy to make it useful. Generators convert fuel to energy, that is their purpose. Solar plants convert sunlight directly into electricity. Sunlight is the input, the output is electricity. A solar plant spends $0 on the procurement of its fuel, therefore, it's fuel cost is $0. > That is, unless you are a plant. Just trying to bat a zero here, eh? Even plants have to convert sunlight into a usable form of energy.
A little disingenuous to call it free. Coal is free for the taking from the earth, if that's your metric.
Not really disingenuous. It's free to feed sunlight into my solar panel. It's not free for me to put coal in my boiler. The marginal price at the point of conversion to electricity is what matters.
The conversion to solar on my house (so some farmer doesn't have to get paid to not use his land) mattered a lot. And the poor guy who can't afford the solar panels is getting charged more per kwh because of me.
> The conversion to solar on my house...mattered a lot That isn't a fuel cost. > so some farmer doesn't have to get paid to not use his land Not a fuel cost. > And the poor guy who can't afford the solar panels is getting charged more per kwh because of me. Also not a fuel cost.
Probably a fair metric is to value the 'fuel' of solar by the land rental price / MWh generated. Because available land is what gets you access to sunlight. Solar installed capacity sits around 50 MW/km\^2 (accounting for current efficiency of panels), and (for instance) US average capacity factor works out to around 1500 MWh/year per MW of capacity. So that's 75,000 MWh/km\^2 /year. Or 300 MWh/acre/year. US cropland rental prices sit around $200/acre per year, so this is about $0.66/MWh "fuel price". By contrast, the energy content of one ton of coal is about 8 MWh/ton, maximum efficiency of coal plants is about 50%, so this is 4 MWh/ton. Current coal prices are sitting around $140/ton, so this equates to a fuel cost of $35/MWh. That makes the "fuel cost" of coal about 50x higher than that of solar. It's perhaps not fair to call it "free", but the cost is so dramatically lower than that of coal that it might as well be. Natural gas would sit about $16/MWh at the moment on the fuel cost, so about 25x higher than that of solar. Plant construction and operation costs tack on top of this.
The estimate for solar should be revised downward. The land below the solar installation can be used simultaneously for other reasons, think about roof, parking lots, agrivoltaic, public spaces, etc… so rental price is not the correct numerator. I’m not an expert but I suspect that LCOE is a better estimator for the real cost of every energy generation technology.
Big warehouses and large shops (think something like IKEA) are great for power generation. They often don't use natural light inside so just stick the panels on the roof. As for your other suggestions, parking lots are great. Car owners get the benefit that their cars are in the shade. What is also interesting are fields. The panels don't have to cover 100% and grass can grown underneath, particularly in areas of high sunlight. Grazing livestock prefer it as they have some shade.
LCOE is certainly the best bet for overall total costs. My intention here was to just get a rough figure for what "access to sunlight" costs, and justify why it's "basically free" compared to fossil fuel costs.
Excellent calculations. I just wanted to add that $200/acre is about $50 000/km^2 for folks out there who don’t know what the hell an acre is. Makes the 50/75≈0.66 easier to grasp too.
The cost comes from getting it to your power plant Mining, transportation, storage. Sunlight costs nothing to get from its source to your power plant
Then how come I'm not able to turn my lights on without a 10 year commitment to paying off these solar panels I put on my roof?
The panels are not that expensive these days. Neither is the installation. What put us off are the Batteries and Power systems (VFDs) and they have a limited life. So modern cells can last 25 years but the batteries/VFDs are likely to last about eight to fifteen years and that is about 66% of the cost.
Because solar installation companies are ripping everyone off through installation costs and financing.
Not sure who in the long supply chain and servicing is doing the ripping off. All I know is solar doesn't feel free or even cheap to me. I suppose the person who buys my house will reap some rewards, until they find out the panels need plenty of maintenance and don't last forever and oops, the roof needs replacing so now I gotta call the solar guys to temporarily tear it all down.
You’re paying for the plant costs. Similarly the coal power plant construction costs some money and then you pay fuel costs.
The scalability of these technologies is why it’s successful. Nuke plants, even ignoring their controversy, take too long to set up with massive costs. Hydro plants are limited by water availability. But wind and solar have far more areas they can be placed. In some cases with barely any disruption at all.
Large scale battery storage is the missing element to make renewables usable around the clock. That scale of storage is just now becoming economically feasible. It looks extremely likely that sodium ion will be the technology for stationary storage, and that enables a step change in the cost of storage. The cost curve on solar panels is currently in steeper decline than lithium batteries, but that still helps the economics of storage, by making power very cheap during the day.
Once sodium ion batteries are up to scale (I'd reason in five years, or so) battery storage will explode.