A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage | Hacker News Reader

A near 100% renewables grid is well within reach, and with little storage

reneweconomy.com.au

249 pointsguerby350 comments

"in Australia" is an important qualification here. Australia has a very high ratio of available solar and wind energy to population.

Not that getting Australia fully on renewables wouldn't be exciting. But it is definitely an easier target than say the US.

Quite a lot of people live in Texas and California where renewables are already pretty advanced, plus there's nuclear in the north, and they have hydro and grid connections with Canada who have even more hydro and nuclear so the USA should be easier.

The US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035 and it didn't seem particularly a stretch even before the recent climate bill passed, so I'd guess they're well on target, not even sure a second Trump term as president could derail it now.

I read somewhere that it's the storage/distribution part that's hurting California. Can't go full-throttle without disaster. If the storage/distribution part was worked out, CA would be full renewable tomorrow.

California has a massive battery/solar rollout pipeline, and again that's before the IRA stuff, which lets you get incentives for batteries that aren't part of a solar/wind project, which can be used to fix transmission issues as wel as just being storage, so they'll be fine.

Is California at the point now where more renewables are not just diminishing returns, but potentially negative returns due to inconsistent generation causing thrashing and large levels of curtailment required to stabilize the grid?

They're definitely causing faster natural gas generator breakdown due to them having turning up and down more frequently, causing greater wear and tear.

More batteries and demand response to stabilize the day to day grid and absorb the uncontrollable generation output is going to be increasingly necessary.

No, because there never is such an issue. Renewables can turn themselves off and on so fast that this won't ever be a problem. The current Australian model we're discussing has about 15% 'overgeneration' because that's economically efficient, there's no problems caused by that.

What you have in mind requires someone to do the coordination. that is currently the system operator and they operate at a data rate measured in minutes or 4 s for the fastest changes (e.g. PJM).

Meanwhile, solar output can go from 100% to 10% in three seconds. How is this not a problem?

The problem anonporridge was talking about was the 10% of solar meeting the current demand and then suddenly going to 100% in three seconds, so there's 'too much' power on the grid i.e. overprovision breaking things. Which it doesn't.

While your example is solar at 100% exactly meeting demand, and then dropping to 10% in 3 seconds, and the fix for that is: overprovision (and some other stuff).

They do need to have decent predictions of demand and supply, like this graph that shows the 1-hour ahead and 24-hour ahead predictions:

https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx

To get the whole grid working together, but we already have that, and renewables and batteries help in various ways.

PJM has "Regulation D" signals for sub-second response from energy storage resources (which are mostly batteries in practice):

https://www.pjm.com/~/media/committees-groups/task-forces/rm...

An energy storage regulating resource, such as a battery or flywheel, cannot burn fuels to produce electricity, but instead charge and discharge energy from the bulk electric system itself through a power inverter. Energy storage devices can match a desired output within 200 milliseconds of receiving the regulating signal; therefore these resources do not need to model any dynamics, ramp limitations, or dead-bands.

Australia is also using batteries in a similar way:

"South Australian Battery Responded in Just 140 Milliseconds After A Coal-Fired Power Plant Failed"

https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-s-south-australian-ba...

One thing I've learned recently is that grid management is extremely primitive. People are literally emailing each other word docs and pdfs and calling each other on the phone to make changes to generation output to keep the grid stable.

It's an area that's ripe for some software innovation, if they can actually break through the legacy management club that currently runs the grid.

I, for one, can't wait for the first ever Western Interconnect black start, brought to you by an off-by-one error. During a megadrought.

There are already companies working on that https://www.emsysgrid.com/products/grid_management/futurepow...

Well, you need a 30 minute battery buffer to get gas peakers online. Whether those gas peakers are running natural gas or green hydrogen depends on how much excess solar capacity there is and how much hydrogen plants cost.

Also, medium term storage is a very, very young industry. Things like redox batteries, flow batteries, molten salt, compressed air, and many others are on the horizon. The better these work the more gas peakers are solely used as backup.

Thermal storage, like resistively heated sand, can also act as a backup source, since once the sand is exhausted they could then resort to burning something to get the heat.

Can you build out enough capacity that the lowest wind conditions during nighttime in winter don't cause outages? I worry about distribution as the answer due to the vulnerability of our existing power distribution infrastructure. Do we have answers for that yet? We need them in any case I suppose unless you build out local storage to such an extent that you don't need any grid at all even in the coldest winter or hottest summer.

You can back up the entire grid with combustion turbines burning hydrogen or some other e-fuel. A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant costs $500/kW, 20x cheaper than a nuclear plant ($10,000/kW).

Then don't you have to store the hydrogen somehow? Aren't we still working on that too?

It can be stored underground, just like millions of tonnes of natural gas already is.

It's not a technical issue, but an economic one.

If you have so much wind and solar generation that they spend too much of their lifespans sitting idle and not generating income, they potentially never even pay for their initial build cost and basic maintenance, let alone be a better investment than just buying a treasury note yielding 1%. That's a recipe for long term stagnation and depression.

Well the economic part is solved by solar/wind/batteries being much cheaper than all the other options, that's why this model overprovisions wind and solar.

So yes, lots of solar might make it more cost effective to add some wind and/or batteries and vice versa but that's a good thing and what this model explores.

If whole solar or wind farms find themselves sitting idle someone will drop off some containers nearby to split water into hydrogen or run a data center or something else that drinks power and skip the grid middle-man. Over-idle is not going to be a real issue; someone will always find a way to use of excess power.

Yeah, that's demand response.

Bitcoin miners are the key players innovating in that space right now. It's something that can very easily be packaged up in portable containers. I believe Chinese miners for years had a yearly migration to soak up massive amounts of excess hydro power during the rainy season that would have been otherwise wasted.

There might be a place for more generic computation datacenters, but they would have to find a relatively unique customer that has compute loads that can be turned off and on at a moment's notice, and potentially be down for days, weeks, and even months. There's probably a startup to be founded here, if you can figure out how to severely undercut equivalent AWS services to justify the lack of uptime guarantees.

I don't know enough about hydrogen production to know if it can be quickly spun up/down to suck up variable load. I imagine gas transport infrastructure is going to be the biggest blocker.

Over idle already is a real issue.

Who is going to build a hydrogen generator or data center with a 80% idle time, operating only 12-4 PM?

Another use is thermal batteries. Dump the power into a resistively heated mass and use that for industrial purposes. Thermal storage can be incredibly cheap per stored unit of energy.

I agree that there are solutions, I just think it is silly when people propose these high capital solutions. E.g. run a desalination plant 4 hours a day, ect.

The real solution, like you mention, is more capacity + storage. Pumped storage is my personal favorite, as it is much cheaper than batteries for anything more than 2 hours of power/day. Pumped seawater has a pretty small footprint.

Anyone for whom the ROCE is better than 1% (per the given scenario).

I doubt that data centers will be built, but there are other uses beside hydrogen -> ammonia->urea. Desalination, for instance. Carbon capture, to make money in the carbon credit markets. Even at 4 hours a day, mechanical capture with plausible costs can compete with forests.

I sincerely hope it gets there. My understanding is that carbon capture equipment isn't currently economically viable with 100% uptime

> even before the recent climate bill passed

What is in the bill that is investment in renewables? My understanding is that there aren’t so much subsidies to generators-suppliers, but rather rebates and savings for homeowners and consumers.

Lots of little things, but a big one is that I think you can generate Green Hydrogen with Renewables and get tax credits on both (though I did read some conflicting stuff on that, think it still makes sense if you don't get the credit on the renewables, but if you do then it's another big push).

https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/us-inflation-reduction-...

Fairly big incentives, including, for the first time, battery investments.

This podcast goes in depth on what's in the bill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrfRbr_xbOE

Getting people to use more efficient appliances and insulating their homes should help reach these targets. We don't need to generate today levels of energy if we can drop usage by some percentage and just generate all of that with renewables.

That being said, the bill is also pushing for heat pumps to replace natural gas burning furnaces, so I'm guessing the net impact will be we need today levels of electricity generation, or maybe even a little more once we look at electrifying things that currently don't interact with the grid and consume fossil fuels directly.

And actually as I even type this, I'm remembering that electrifying cars is a big part of this that will definitely drive up electricity need way more than efficiency gains suppress demands for some use. Hopefully we can get to some of the more transformative ideas suggested about improving city planning and density together with investments in public transit so we don't end up producing way too many batteries simply to preserve a car centric transportation system.

I do think even just incentivizing consumers to buy electric everything will have a strong movement to drive more electricity generation, and renewables are the cheapest or very cost competitive options for new power generation installations. I think there are some funds in the new bill for encouraging sunsetting fossil fuel based plants early, but we likely need more of that down the line.

> Getting people to use more efficient appliances and insulating their homes should help reach these targets. We don't need to generate today levels of energy if we can drop usage by some percentage and just generate all of that with renewables.

Sure, but if the bulk of the problem isn’t residential inefficiency (or if these incentives are only going to recoup a small portion of that inefficiency), then perhaps this money and political will might be better spent elsewhere.

In particular, I suspect industry is a big emitter and the big gains are probably to be had in disincentivizing carbon emissions in industry. The low hanging fruit would be a border adjustment tariff on countries that don’t meet our current emission standards (bring more jobs to the US, which improves our supply chain security). From there we could set a low price on carbon and ratchet it up as necessary. I would much rather us squabble over the price of carbon than trying to play whack-a-mole with specific incentives and disincentives. Moreover, carbon pricing isn’t a cost, it’s a revenue source.

Besides carbon pricing, it would also be neat to see the money spent on increasing our renewable energy capacity. It’s not enough to convert our grid to renewables because we have all of these new EVs and electric heaters and electric industrial applications coming online and replacing fossil fuel applications. The grid is going to be much more strained than before, so we need to increase that capacity as quickly as possible.

62% of the power in Oregon comes from renewables, mostly renewables that are available 24/7.

Yeah, but that renewable hydro is unlikely to grow much in the USA, while wind and solar will be growing exponentially. Hydro is cool, and works well with solar/wind/nuclear to help match supply and demand, but ...

If you look at global renewable output, the big chunk of hydro production that's been flat for decades, somewhat obscures the recent sudden rise of solar and wind.

Swapping hydro from 24/7 power to a backup for wind and solar goes a long way to eliminate the need for storage. We don’t need more total kWh per year of hydro we need to be able to more flexibility get those kWh.

I’m not sure that’s true. Electricity generation is pretty regional, so it’s not like we can use a region’s hydro capacity to store energy for other regions. It can store energy for the region that already has hydro, but that region already has hydro so it probably needs less storage in the first place?

New York just approved $5 billion to import Canadian Hydro. This is already done on various smaller scales in the US and across the globe. People in Norway are being riled up by their right wing parties because they are selling hydro electricity (and gas) at a high profit to the rest of Europe via connections because of the Russian situation, and there's nothing the right-wing hates more than market-based price signals that suggest you should maybe use less fossil fuels and be more efficient.

There is no need for that "right-wing" snub there, the same is happening here in Sweden where power prices in the middle and south have been going through the roof even though power generation costs have mostly [1] been unchanged due to the majority of power generation coming from hydroelectric plants (the north) and nuclear plants (the south). Prices have shot up in the south of Sweden because that part of the country is connected to the European grid and exports power generated in the north. Sweden is divided into 4 price regions, the price difference between the top 2 regions and the bottom 2 tends to be enormous. The explanation for the price difference is supposed to be the lack of power generation capacity in the south [see 1, again] while the north and middle have an excess of generating capacity but supposedly lack the network capacity to export this power to the south. That this is not correct is shown by the fact that the power actually is exported through the network [2] and from there finds its way to consumers both in Sweden as well as in neighbouring countries. The majority of the price difference is found between region SE2 and SE3 with power in SE3 often being several times more expensive than in SE2 (currently at €27/MHh in SE2, €525/MWh in SE3 for a factor of 20) with the proceedings of that differential going to the state. Everyone in Sweden paid for the creation of the power infrastructure but those living in the south get to pay dearly due to this artificial price difference.

[1] thanks to the "green party" shutting down half of the nuclear capacity the top load oil-fired power plant in Karlshamn which used to run only during the coldest periods of winter is now running in the heart of summer, consuming between 70 m³ and 140m³ of oil per hour - it has been running for more hours this year than it ran for the last 10 years combined. Oil did get more expensive but Karlshamn still only produces a tiny fraction of power delivered here

[2] https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/

You forgot to explain why price signals were bad and 'artificial'?

I know nothing about Sweden, but:

> https://www.thelocal.se/20220824/explained-whos-telling-the-...

> “I think it’s simply political,” Nilsson says. “The conservative parties are hoping to gain votes by bringing up the nuclear issue. I don’t think they seriously think that we will build new nuclear in Sweden. Everyone knows that it’s terribly expensive and takes a very long time.”

> Söder agrees: “The right-wing parties (Sweden Democrats, Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals) have nuclear power as a common interest where they can show unity. There are also several communities where wind power resistance has become significant, and by stating ‘we think it was stupid to shut down Ringhals’, they can attract voters – even if this will not in any way solve the long-term challenges in Sweden, which is to build a lot of new power production as cheaply as possible.”

> It’s also worth noting that the Energiforsk report estimated that power prices would have been 35–50 percent lower if Sweden had opened an additional large, offshore windfarm off the coast of southern Sweden.

So it appears there was need for my "right-wing" comment after all. I must be psychic.

A "price signal" is artificial when the market is manipulated to set the price artificially as is done in Sweden where electricity prices in the south are tied to the European market while those in the north are not. This leads to extreme differences in price based exclusively on where you happen to live. In some cases people will pay 20-30 times more for the same electricity than their neighbours who happen to just live on the other side of the region. Should I call this type of manipulation "left-wing" to counter your "right-wing" accusations? State-controlled markets are after all a "left-wing" phenomenon. But no, I won´t since I deem this type of polarised discussion counterproductive. On the subject of building nuclear power plants it is clear to everyone and his dog that the reason why building new plants is expensive and takes a long time lies in the policies put in place by the same people who claim that building nuclear power plants is too expensive and takes too much time. The "wind farm" argument is just as hollow since it is not the lack of "wind farms" which has driven up the price of electricity but the fact that those same people closed down 6 fully operational nuclear plants, thereby creating an electricity shortage in the south of the country which has led to an enormous increase in the use of fossil fuel-powered plants - the same plants they accuse of causing "climate change". Top load plants which used to only be needed in extreme circumstances - severe cold snaps in the middle of winter - are now needed on a regular basis to keep the net frequency from sagging below 48.5 Hz.

That's not artificial.

There are literal physical reasons why the prices in different markets are different. The transmission capacity is the limiting factor.

Why do you think those are left-wing and artificial?

Wind has been the cheapest source of energy in Europe for over a decade, yet the Swedish right-wing are against it.

As long as the power plant has decent pollution controls and the carbon is taxed I don't really have an issue with it. That provides a clear price signal to build more cheap renewables, like wind. Unless you are against that, like the Swedish right-wing parties. Which doesn't really give me any confidence that they're doing the smart things to solve this 'problem' they've caused. And the local Swedish energy experts seem to agree with me.

The transmission capacity is only too small because the nuclear power plants were closed. The Swedish distribution network was designed for hydropower in the north, nuclear power in the south. The hydro plants in the north would feed heavy industry, the nuclear plants in the south would feed the needs of most of the population and industry there with the rest being filled in by the overcapacity from those hydro plants in the north.

Then the nuclear power plants were closed while simultaneously allowing the establishment of several data centres by the likes of Google in the south. Those data centres - which easily saturate the local transmission capacity which has already caused other industry to look elsewhere for expansion due to the lack of electricity - do not pay regular electricity rates, they pay far less than either other industries let alone regular consumers.

Who closed those nuclear power plants? Who called for the establishment of those data centres, knowing what problems this would cause? Who did not upgrade the transmission capacity in the full knowledge of its limits?

So, this is not a natural market, it has been manipulated with disastrous results for the majority of the Swedish population - most of whom live in the regions SE3 and SE4 where electricity prices have risen dramatically in the last years.

As to you defence of the use of those fossil fuel power plants due to the (intentional) failure of the policies of the "green" party I can only shake my head in disbelief. What does it take to get those who claim to support "green" policies to admit they were wrong on the issue of nuclear power? More than the environment and the economy can bear it seems.

Also... drop it with that senseless "right" moniker already. It is a tired old trope and as far from the truth as can be. Looking at Sweden the supposed "right-wing" party Sverigedemokraterna is a centrist party (their program is strongly reminiscent of that of the social democrats in the '60s) and the "right-wing" Moderaterna is in reality centre-right (they, like all other Swedish 'mainstream' parties support the welfare state to a large extent). Sverigedemokraterna actually has an "energy expert" on an electable position for the coming elections - Elsa Widding - who wrote a report [1] on the subject of the Swedish grid, if you read Swedish (or feed it to a translator) it gives some insight in what they have in mind if they were to gain power. Their short-term focus lies on the preservation of existing hydropower (which "the left" wants to wind down to a significant extent, up to 1.5 TWh is to be closed down), an increased focus on achieving 100% fossil-free power (to avoid the situation I described where the oil-fired top load power plant is running in the heart of summer) to be achieved by e.g. restarting some of the nuclear power plants which "the left" closed down, focusing on combined heat-power (which "the left" is in the process of regulating out of existence) and getting rid of those sweetheart deals I mentioned where Google/Facebook/Microsoft (et al) get power nearly for free due to contracts signed by "the left". Their longer-term focus lies on increasing the amount of nuclear power in the mix, focusing on 100% fossil-free instead of 100% "renewable" and re-focusing on "climate" effects of power generation instead of "nuclear-free" power generation.

[edit] I just noticed a new article being published in Dagens Nyheter on the subject of the establishment of new nuclear power plants in Sweden. The conclusion is that this is fully possible but requires the removal of barriers put in place by "the left". The most important changes are the removal of the decision to close all nuclear power plants by 2040, the restriction that nuclear power plants can only be established there where there already is a nuclear power plant and a change which makes it possible to establish small modular reactors [2].

[1] https://via.tt.se/data/attachments/00738/d68a3b7a-ffe4-4cf1-...

[2] https://www.dn.se/ekonomi/karnkraftsbolaget-nya-reaktorer-mo...

I stand by my claim that the 'right-wing' are (for no obvious logical or politically coherent reason) against wind power. It's a weird global phenomenon.

They're also against solar, and efficiency, and EVs and believing in climate change etc. I personally would suggest they're getting paid by fossil fuel interests, not sure if that's generally considered a wacky out there conspiracy theory or not. At the very least they're taking advantage of conspiracy theories created by the fossil fuel lobby to gain votes for their unpopular ideas.

Meanwhile, the strange phenomenon of the 'left-wing' intentionally letting Google set up datacentres in places where they know that it will artificially drive up prices for consumers and selling them power at below market cost. That's not a stereotype I recognise. Sounds a bit right-wing if anything to be honest.

Combined Heat and Power, using carbon emitting fuels? I hope the 'left' is regulating that out of existance in a country with so much green electricity, heat pumps are almost certainly better, cheaper, cleaner.

And this is their energy expert? Their big focus is on 100% fossil-free power, but they also don't like wind power?

Wikipedia suggests that's not their only diametrically opposed policy goals:

> The party argues that other countries should reduce their emissions instead of Sweden which they believe is already doing enough on that front.[169][170] The party advocates keeping nuclear power plants as a prominent energy source in Sweden,[171] believing it to be an efficient way to combat climate change.

So nuclear is good for climate change, but Sweden shouldn't do more for climate change? That makes sense. Maybe the Swedish energy expert who said they were just lying about being pro nuclear is right.

> Nobody is calling them out on this,” he complains of the way the Swedish media has covered the issue. “If they want nuclear, how are they expecting to get it? What type of subsidy will they give? For Hinkley Point in the UK, there’s a 35-year contract where the government promises to pay £93.5 per megawatt hour — so about 1.1 krona per kilowatt hour for 35 years. That’s a heavy subsidy. So if the Moderates or the Liberals really want this, how are they going to set it up? They should explain that.”

> At the Hinkley Point price, Nilsson adds, it might actually be cheaper to generate hydrogen from wind power when power prices are low, store it, and burn it in gas turbines when prices are high, even though more than half of the electricity produced would be lost in the process.

Given what you state here and what is written in that report on the Swedish grid I assume you agree that the "right-wing" Sverigedemokraterna is not a "rigt-wing" party? They want more efficiency, they want 100% fossil-free power generation, they want to focus on "climate" impact of energy generation.

Realise that the only reason I use these senseless "left-wing" and "right-wing" labels is to show just how nonsensical they are. I do not think in these terms, I just responded to your use of the "right-wing" moniker.

By the way, where would you put the CEO of a company like Vestas or General Electric? Are they "right-wing" because they are greedy capitalists or are they "left-wing" because they want to build more wind turbines?

> Wikipedia suggests...

Wikipedia has become weaponised and is even less of a trustworthy source than it was before the weaponisation.

I am an engineer that works on hydro control systems - It's worth noting that a hydro turbine, depending on it's construction, has a certain turndown ratio - That ratio of it's full scale output to it's minimum output. At the turn of the century designers of these turbines did not particularly care about operating at a lot of different power output levels, they cared about maximizing power output at a particular point, and importantly, maximizing efficiency at that point. These units typically have a turndown ratio very close to one. Consequently many hydro turbines are capable of a relatively narrow operating range, and are not suitable for fast grid support of the type that would be required as the primary source of solar backup. They're on-off type resources in many cases. These turbines can be retrofitted to variable geometry style turbines with much wider operating bands but these upgrades are slow and expensive.

Long story short - hydro is good as a 'base load' but we desperately need storage. Pumped storage, battery storage, compression storage. And we need massive transmission system upgrades (in the US at least). Nothing else will lead to a reliable grid based on renewables in the US.

Can't you get around this by turning on x% of your hydro capacity to 100% rather than turning 100% of your hydro capacity to x%? Also, batteries are really good as a short term storage, so hydro only needs to work on the hours to months time-scale.

I also work in hydro controls.

Apart from equipment limitations, most hydro plants I’ve been to have a river downstream and there are restrictions on how fast output can be changed and requirements for minimum flows. You can’t just stop the whole river to fill up the reservoir and release it later in the day

For the cost of 5kW nameplate of new western nuclear (>$10/W) you can get, right now, at retail, as an individual: 50kW nameplate of solar, and 8kW nameplate of wind, and 75kWh of storage and a 5kW generator (which will almost never need turning on) and a biogas digester.

And it will produce enough excess power to replace itself (with a cheaper version) or just triple the batteries if you can get 2-3c/kWh for the surplus well before the reactor is built

Mentioning nuclear as an option is about as sensible as a generator bicycle.

I wouldn't advocate for new nuclear (for the same reason the creator of this model gives, it just isn't cost effective) but existing nuclear in stable, northern regions that also have hydro is definately a positive if you're aiming to get to carbon-free power faster.

If you don't have the much hydro then it can fight with solar/wind for usage of that dispatchable resource, and if you don't have the nuclear you can build solar/wind for less so there's no reason to start.

Agreed. Keep the current nuclear on as long as it's safe and doesn't cost more than eg. a new green ammonia build.

So you can buffer the wind/solar output for just 78 minutes? Doesn’t sound like a complete solution.

Edit: I guess per the paper it really depends on the specific details of generation/load timing. Could be workable for a certain region but not for another.

The demonstration is 5kW year round with insignificant consumption of fossil fuels everywhere with a climate about as good as Toronto or better, not having somewhere to put all the sunlight. Mid-winter in high latitude you get as little as 2hrs of sunlight/day (or 0 in the arctic, but hardly anyone lives there). If you live in the tropics, 10kW is probably fine.

Also if you feel the need to use it up, electrolyzers are cheap and hydrogen is worth money. You can also store a great deal of energy in a few tonnes of NaOH and avoid using precious winter electricity for heating.

You can also reshuffle the wind, solar and battery for your local climate, or wait a year or three for sodium batteries to halve the price.

The parent is pointing out, that if you are trying to find a solution to generate 5kw of constant power using nuclear, for the same cost you can get an absurd amount of renewable generation and storage plus a backup generator. The batteries can store 15 hours worth of energy at peak demand, you get a 10x overbuild of peak capacity in solar, plus wind, biogas and a backup generator to boot. It is highly unlikely that the system would ever fail. I would guess you could probably cut the system size in half and still have uptime in the high 9's. And the added bonus is you would have a fair bit of redundancy should any part of the system need maintenance, whereas the nuclear solution doesn't even come with a backup generator.

nuclear definitely needs to be in the mix to reach 100% fossil-fuel-free energy generation; not gonna happen on wind/solar/hydro alone

You're literally commenting on a thread about how 100% renewable is possible on a comment demonstrating that an individual can beat the cost effectiveness of new nuclear with 100% renewables.

The utility scale version of the digester is a gas peaker running on green ammonia possibly with a mix of long distance transmission. Everything else scales at least linearly.

Nuclear is dead. The last nail went into the coffin when green hydrogen first hit parity with delivered grey hydrogen in some regions. The case just gets worse from here. Stop shilling.

This has been an article of religious faith, but I'm not sure it has ever been a technologically defensible opinion. Before the recent order of magnitude drops in battery prices, it may have been an economical argument, but to make that economic argument one would have to ignore the technological tech curve of solar and renewables.

And now that nuclear won't be able to compete on the economics, whereas 10 years ago we though we could still build nuclear for historical prices, people have not updated their reasoning.

Most of the models that included nuclear alongside renewables used far far lower prices for nuclear than we can actually build it for. And even then, nuclear was only selected at ~10% of generation for cost reasons, not tech reasons.

The data doesn't include SMRs and MSRs which could be extremely compelling both from a cost and time to build perspective (or they could be a dead end).

Current gen LWRs are problematic for all sorts of reasons but i wouldn't rule nuclear out of the fight just yet. Especially when you take into account china's track record of delivering nuclear plants at a competitive price.

I'm reminded of Admiral Rickover's thoughts on this:

> An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

>On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated.

SMRs and MSRs are in the academic stage at the moment. We don't know what they will look like at the end when they are actual products, but there are technical and practical reasons that they haven't been tried before now, so I think it's only prudent to withhold enthusiasm until we have data on their characteristics and potential.

Back in the 80s, we had PV panels in hand, and knowledge of silicon tech curves that could predict the rosy future we live in today. SMRs are a bit more shaky.

Please note that SMR technology has advanced beyond the academic stage. After years of review, NuScale's design has been approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Multiple sites are planning for their use, both in the United States and elsewhere: https://www.nuscalepower.com/Projects/Current-Projects/Unite...

Unconstructed plans are the very definition of academic.

NRC approval doesn't say anything about constructability or economics. It doesn't even say much about the operating characteristics, except that the NRC is pretty sure it meets the safety guidelines.

This is why there are these characteristics that Rickover lists, which NuScale will encounter when they finally build, but are not revealed by any planning they have done up until now:

> (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems.

I'm not all in on nuclear, but nameplate comparison is meaningless. Solar might hit the name plate for a few hours a day with suitable weather while nuclear can run 24/7 or on demand.

Good thing we weren't comparing nameplate then but instead comparing ability to meet baseload on a cost basis (that thing that's supposed to be most strongly in favour of nuclear) and finding the result insanely in favour of renewables

5kW nameplate nuclear is 3-4.5kW net with 10-40% of the time needing total backup and zero ability to meet higher peak demand.

The system I described needs 2.4 hours of peak sunlight spread throughout a day or 15 hours of wind in a day or 30kg of biofuel (not doable for very many days) or 30kg of imported fuel or any combination with the battery averaging 1-5(ie. you meet ~85% of load with wind/biofuel and draw ~20% of battery) days to meet the 5kW target. It also has a massive peak capacity which dwarfs the nuclear system during half of the year. You might need to tilt the panels two or three times a year in parts of Canada or similar, and maybe import a few days worth of ethanol (or any other stable hydrocarbon you can run your generator on) each year, but this is still less backup than a fission plant needs.

Couple it to an uncorrelated system or trade some solar for an electrolyzer and fuel cells and you can reduce reliance on imported fuel even more. Solar cells and batteries will also better than halve in price well before your plant is finished -- likely making it impossible to even run, let alone recoup your costs. Additionally perovskites work better with partial shade and are quite likely to hit cost parity with solar so the nameplate value can be reduced (or reliability on a still, cloudy, winter, northern morning will increase).

This report provides costs for nuclear power down to about $30/MWH (LCOE) at 3% discount rate (interest rate - inflation rate):

https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12...

Most countries should be able to reach such levels if providing guarantees for the credit, removing overly excessive regulation and allowing the most capable and experienced construction companies to lead construction and initial operations, especially if large enough numbers are built that economies of scale kick in.

Renewables-only systems (apart from hydro, where available), are not able to provide constant power output at anything near such levels yet, without a significant percentage of the power being generated by natural gas.

Massive capital investments in the grid, hydrogen generation, etc, MAY be able to actually provide stable power, but would be very unlikely to match nuclear if nuclear is optimized for price.

This could change in a few years, obviously, especially if storage becomes super cheap. But there is no guarantee of that.

As for the astronomical costs of some recent nuclear plants in western countries, those are a bit like evaluating the price of electric cars based on the Tesla Model S Plaid. We can get perfectly serviceable plants for a fraction of the price, by removing most of the bells and whistles, while still making sure that they are safer than most of the plants in operation today.

There are a couple of problems with that analysis.

Firstly I am very sceptical of their 60 year claim with an additional 20 years for LTO. Every time I look a supposed 60 year reactor in the west up it is having major problems after less than 40 -- I'd be interested in seeing a survey of reactors broken down by location (china is provably much more cost efficient at doing large projects than anyone else albeit at a high human cost) and whether they're funded by geopolitical incentives (russia subsidizing reactors to induce energy dependence). Additionally half of the reactor lifetime is irrelevant to meeting 2050 targets even if we take design lifetime as true.

Even if we take the $30/MWh as an assumption. There are solar projects completing right now on the order of 80c/fixed Watt or $1.2 tilting. These produce 5-6 and 6-8 kWh/day/kW respectively.

Ending the day with half of that production in a battery nets you an LCOE around $50 and that is falling by 15%/year with little indication of slowing down.

Wind is a similar story (although not dropping as precipitously) and moderately anti-correlated.

When 'we promise we can reduce the price by 3x and we'll follow through on that promise for 70 years even though costs have been going up and we've never followed through before' is a pretty hard sell against 'we've been consistently dropping costs for 10 years at a rate that will make even the most optimistic projections of nuclear look expensive before you can build even the first one'. Then with the shorter lived renewables you get your money back after 10-20 years, and cna spend it on a new system that is $3/MWh (or more likely 10 as land and coupling costs will dominate).

And then there's all the geopolitical problems going nuclear entails for the large portion of the world who aren't allowed to make their own fuel. We did that with fossil fuels and it was awful -- and they can be refined by more than 5 countries.

> (china is provably much more cost efficient at doing large projects than anyone else albeit at a high human cost)

Tesla and SpaceX is proving that with the right leadership, western countries can also do large projects. Anyway, I think we should let international corporations compete for such projects, kind of like ship construction or more remotely, the car industry.

> Ending the day with half of that production in a battery nets you an LCOE around $50 and that is falling by 15%/year with little indication of slowing down.

That is great, and I'm a huge believer in solar for many purposes in suitable climates. Where I live, though, we have about 4-6 hours of faint daylight in the middle of winter, when it's really cold.

Also, unlike nuclear, no country has so far been able to demonstrate an electrical grid that is powered exclusively by renewables (and Europe has tried). So far, everyone who tried, ended up with a huge reliance on (mostly Russian) natural gas, while having prices quite a bit above $50/MWH LCOE (for the grid as a hole). Currently, consumer facing prices are above $500/MWH, and may reach $1000/MWH this winter.

If some country wants to invest in a plan to make them independent of natural gas without nuclear, I wish them the best of luck, but in my opinion, nuclear is the proven path. Also, it's not like one cannot do both at the same time.

> Wind is a similar story (although not dropping as precipitously) and moderately anti-correlated.

Wind also has longer variance in supply. To some extent, making a grid the size of Australia may lower the variance, but at the cost of a grid that competes with nuclear in zero day investment costs while bringing its own set of political risks (especially in places where the grid needs to span many countries with different cultures).

> spend it on a new system that is $3/MWh

With all due respect, this is a fantasy number. When you're not including the storage and/or distribution needed to provide stable supply, this number means nothing. (Or rather, it's only relevant as long as only a small fraction of the power comes from such a source.)

Actual costs (LCOE, including enough enough storage to provide stable supply) are much higher. Different estimates exist. Your $50/MWh is probably the lowest I've seen. Typically I see $100-$200/MWH when including moderate storage, and several times that (up to $1000/MWH) when including enough storage to last several days with very little wind.

From my point of view, paying $30-$50/MWH for stable electricity production, with the lowest carbon emissions (construction emissions for concrete, etc, are about the same as the best renewables), low dependence on minerals that are in short supply (rare earths, etc) using proven technology is quite fair.

Hopefully, renewables, thorium, fusion etc will continue to develop to a point where they become clearly superior to nuclear in terms of price. But if so, I see that as a potential upside. Building more nuclear provides a hedge against the risk that this will take a long time.

> And then there's all the geopolitical problems going nuclear entails for the large portion of the world who aren't allowed to make their own fuel.

It's not for every country, but unlike natural gas, there are enough deposits in stable democratic western countries to power all such countries.

Also, there are alternatives sources for China and Russia to not worry too much about the risk either. India, being somewhat in-between these worlds would probably be able to source fuel from at least one.

And unlike natural gas, transporting nuclear fuel is quite trivial, due to the energy density.

Finally, it's not like we need to have 100% of one source of energy. Some should probably go mostly renewable (Australia, for example), due to climate. Some already have plenty of hydro, and some would benefit from having more (or much more) nuclear.

Some might also need to go for fossil fuels, at least as backup. I'm thinking of smaller islands, for instance (like Hawaii). But it would be good if we could soon start to REDUCE the dependence on fossil fuels, instead of consuming more and more every year, globally.

You appear to agree that solar and wind and batteries are the best options for most of the world even if your optimistic nuclear price point is reached.

So it's not clear what you are arguing against? Isn't that the best way to reduce dependence on fossil fuels which are a global commodity?

Eventually, perhaps, but I see fully renewable as just slightly less sci fi than fusion or thorium.

Instead, I'm seeing countries like Germany restart their dirty, old, lignite fueled power plants (due to lack of natural gas, another, slightly cleaner, fossil fuel), because "environmentalist" organizations have been fighting against nuclear for the last 40 years or more.

Germany has TRIED to build up a lot of renewable capacity, but have hardly built up more than the electricity provided by the nuclear they shut down.

What I want is for us to SHUT DOWN all fossil fuel plants ASAP, stop using natural gas for heating and oil based fuels for most transportation.

This should and could have been started 40 years ago, if it were not for the scaremongers.

I welcome all renewable initiatives that are able to prove they can deliver stable power at a competitive price, and wish them the best of luck. I do NOT welcome the Utopia-chasers that promote renewables as part of their virtue signaling, while either being unrealistic or deceitful about motives, costs, challenges around stability, etc (both before and after investments are made).

And this is especially bad when they spread lies about the safety level of nuclear (either direct lies, or more likely when talking about "radiation" as something dangerous regardless of intensity).

I do realize that such behavior exists in all camps, but I find it especially bad when so called "environmentalists" have promoted policies that have had the net effect of NOT being able to reduce emissions nearly as much as we could have, while still causing prices to increase and ALSO maximize our dependence on Putin and various Arab dictatorial kings and princes.

And btw, while you seem to be charitable about nuclear, only arguing from a cost perspective, there are plenty of organizations out there that still place nuclear in the "dirty" camp alongside fossil fuels when arguing about strategies for the future.

So, while I'm certainly supporting most initiatives that aim to improve renewable power production, I think we (and especially Europe) should invest in a relatively large number of new, reasonably priced nuclear plants, for instance based on recent Korean designs.

NB: You're replying to two different people.

The problems with nuclear as I see them are:

Cost. These projections are very optimistic.

Corruption potential. It's pretty typical for large long term projects to 'go bankrupt' and the cleanup fund is mysteriously empty. There are also a lot of hidden externalities -- publicly funded security, infrastructure, concessions required to keep fuel producers placated. It's too centralized for believable complete accounting.

Geopolitical. Adoption of nuclear outside of UK/France/USA/China/Russia essentially tips the global power balance even further in favour of colonial powers and corps that have caused the problem in the first place and continue to export mass suffering.

Incomplete. Most of the world will never be allowed to have enrichment capabilities, and many countries will never be allowed a nuclear program at all. This means low burnup reactors, and there is not enough uranium for a complete replacement to primary energy at 3% burnup.

Consistent overpromising. Predictions for large projects seem to be consistently wrong when they're 40 years out.

Cost doesn't look great anymore when you include cleanup. Incidents will happen, especially if regulations are relaxed. Even if the rate goes down tenfold we'll still be talking on the order of one a decade, and spending a trillion on cleanup starts making other solutions look pretty great.

> NB: You're replying to two different people.

I saw that, after writing my piece, though.

I think my main objection with your points is that I see nuclear as an alternative to fossil fuels, NOT as an alternative to renewables.

As for each point, I will start with the last: > Cost doesn't look great anymore when you include cleanup.

Actual harm caused by nuclear is miniscule when compared to fossil fuels. Chernobyl caused somewhere between 1000 and 100000 casualties, probably less than air pollution from fossil fuels cause EACH YEAR, only in Europe.

Wind and even hydro also create considerable environmental effects, so the alternative cost should not be seen as zero.

There is no evidence (at least not conclusive evidence) that exposure to radiation doses below 80-100mSv cause any health hazard, and a lot of the "cleanup" and other measures are done to prevent exposure to doses that are often below 10mSv per person, and are probably not needed.

> Corruption potential.

I live in a country with very low levels of classical corruption, luckily. I think corruption affects everything, and should be dealt with as a separate problem.

> Geopolitical. Adoption of nuclear outside of UK/France/USA/China/Russia ..

I suppose India should be added to your list. Anyway, some of the biggest deposits are in countries like Australia. Obviously, I don't want to force anyone to adopt nuclear, but it's a lot easier to find friendly suppliers of nuclear fuel than natural gas.

> Incomplete.

Same thing.

> Consistent overpromising.

40 years ago, reactors were typically built to only last 40 years. (They were also cheaper to build back then). Only newer models are designed for longer lifespans. Anyway, from my perspective, most reactors continue to deliver despite old age, if well maintained, and they don't shut down just because Putin has a temper tantrum.

If you're living in Europe, just imagine what the price of electricity would be if France's electricity depended on natural gas the same way the German does...

> With all due respect, this is a fantasy number. When you're not including the storage and/or distribution needed to provide stable supply, this number means nothing. (Or rather, it's only relevant as long as only a small fraction of the power comes from such a source.)

Distribution will dominate at some point, you are correct. This was more meant to be illustrative of how current battery and solar prices look from the point of view of the market that existed when just finished nuclear projects were approved. $50/MWh with 4 hours storage would look just as crazy from the POV of 2006

Speaking of distribution. 80% of the world's population lives at a lower latitude than washington DC, and about 90% of the remainder is within 2000km. Over this distance HVDC is a viable transport method with costs commensurable to $10-20/MWh. The main issue is security (both political/market and against disaster). For areas without sufficient hydro a reserve of green ammonia or (even physical transport) could be viable.

> Currently, consumer facing prices are above $500/MWH, and may reach $1000/MWH this winter.

Green hydrogen is scalable at about $400/MWh presently and this is decreasing rapidly. This was a wakeup call that doing so is needed. Ammonia is not far behind. Realistic projections for the next 8 years are around $100/MWh.

Combined with short term storage, this makes the $50/MWh with ~unbounded buffer seem pretty achievable by 2030 if sodium batteries and perovskites (or equivalent improvements) are scaled.

> Green hydrogen is scalable at about $400/MWh presently and this is decreasing rapidly. This was a wakeup call that doing so is needed. Ammonia is not far behind. Realistic projections for the next 8 years are around $100/MWh.

The present price is obviously too high. I fully support any investment into this kind of tech, including from the government(s), though in my experience, even when tech is available, it takes time to roll it out.

Maybe by 2050 we will have the ability to provide stable, fully renewable energy at $50/MWh or below, without being limited in how much we can roll out due to some rare mineral or industrial capacity.

But we KNOW we have the tech to produce nuclear at such levels (or below) already.

In my opinion, we should do both, and if, 30-40 years from now, some nuclear plant companies go bankrupt, so be it.

Re. French nuclear saving the day:

https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...

Look at the quarterly tab.

And these claims that the prices can go down are contingent on serial production. 30-40 years is the time window at which significant capacity starts being made, not finishing.

What matters is Joules before 2050 not starting at 2060, and even the most optimistic projections have them costing on the order of $200-500/MWh with nuclear.

> Re. French nuclear saving the day:

When supply cannot meet demand, prices do not represent production costs.

Building a nuclear plant takes about 5 years. In situations with sufficient sense of urgency, construction speeds can be ramped up surprisingly quickly.

From 1940 to 1944 US federal spending went up about ninefold (while GDP almost doubled as a result)

The liberty ships were the most obvious example. Initially it took 230 days to build them (in 1941), in 1943 it took 39 days.

A more modern example is the number of cars built by Tesla each year. From 2013 to 2023, the number of cars built per year will have increased by a factor of about 100x.

Similar economies of scale are available for energy plants, if we choose to. For solar panels and batteries, we're already seeing this.

If the political will was there today to vastly expand the amount of nuclear power, we would be able to produce A LOT within 10-15 years.

The same goes for renewables, of course, as long as raw materials and technologies are available.

The problem is that electrification of fossil fuel applications is going to significantly increase the demand on our grid. So it’s not enough to get to parity in renewables, but we have to go far beyond our current capacity in order to accommodate a world in which almost every car is electric (whether electric hybrid or green hydrogen) and almost every home uses electric rather than natural gas for heating (not to mention all of the industrial applications that will need electrification).

It's going to increase the amount of energy flowing through the grid, but there's plenty of excess grid capacity to accommodate that.

The grid is a technological marvel, but one weakness about it is that it has never included storage except small amount of hydro (which I've heard some claim is because nuclear needed it so that the reactor could stay always on, but I have my doubts on that origin story)

Without storage, every grid component must be sized to maximum expected through put, which can be many many times as large as average throughput. The grid is also the most expensive part of delivering energy, more expensive than generation.

This means that storage, and a lot of electrification means storage, whether that's charging the battery on a car, or heating a hot water tank, or cooling/heating a building which can be used as several degrees of thermal storage, is going to drastically reduce the potential peak load as a ratio to average load.

Electrification has enormous potential to reduce grid cost, and overall energy cost, IMHO.

Even without any other sources of power, storage already makes sense for hydro since ideally you'd like to store excess water that comes during above average rainy seasons so that you have more power to use during a drought, but allowing your nuclear base load to stay running even when the rest of the grid demands less does seem like another useful benefit

That's an interesting point I hadn't considered before. That said, I would think the net effect is still increased demand on the grid. If everyone buys an EV, I can't imagine that constitutes a net reduction in demand on the grid even if everyone charges off-peak (unless utilities can pull storage from those car batteries during peak hours, and I doubt car owners will want that kind of wear on their batteries). Do you know of any publications which try to estimate the effect of electrification on capacity?

In engineering speak, what he means is increased grid efficiency, which can happen simultaneously with increased demand and increased cost.

But all that does is shift the inefficiencies off of the grid. It's redefining the system boundary in a politically/ marketing friendly way, but doesn't eliminate the problem of storage/buffer capacity.

Anyone who thinks the grid can approach steady-state operations near capacity hasn't seriously looked at demand patterns, and that's before complicating things by trying to accommodate the transportation needs of replacing gas/diesel.

It's the equivalent of claiming traffic problems can be solved by staggering when people work instead of doing road improvements.

> Anyone who thinks the grid can approach steady-state operations near capacity hasn't seriously looked at demand patterns

I think that's a bit of a straw man, the key thing is to reduce the peak, rather than get to steady state.

Sure, it's a scale, not an absolute, but maximum efficiency is at steady state.

As you move away from that, the gains drop quickly, especially versus managing the demand variance with on-grid storage.

The most advanced modeling I know of is coming from Christopher Clack, whose latest models show that deploying lots of storage at the grid edge now will pave the way for much cheaper energy in the future. I thought this was more recent but it's 16 months old now:

https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-146-why-local-sol...

Even if there are grid upgrades, getting a higher utilization factor, or more precisely, knocking off the highest peaks of demand, has huge cost savings on the grid size.

So as we shift spending away from fossil fuel, that money will be going to utilities which will allow them to do the grid upgrades.

Unfortunately utilities make the best profits on grid upgrades, so unless there are really good utility commissions, utilities will not be looking to decrease their grid investments or make grid utilization better, the are literally incentivized to make transmission and distribution costs as high as possible.

If you live in California and have PG&E check out how many times more they charge you to deliver a kWh than to generate it, and you'll be fairly shocked and annoyed at CPUC for having done such a terrible job of reigning in PG&E's management.

> Electrification has enormous potential to reduce grid cost, and overall energy cost, IMHO.

This sounds a bit strange. I'm pretty sure that electric cars and replacing natural gas for heating will require quite significant investment in electric distribution infrastructure.

Also, if you want to be able to transfer a significant fraction of power generated from wind and solar across the country, transmission capacity needs to be multiple times greater than today, as far as I can tell.

Some kind of smart adjustment of the end user consumption may slightly shave up the extremes in demand, but that requires a significant investment per household (not only in money, but also awareness and ability to set this up), and a lot of people do not want to compromise on the charge of the car or the temperature in their living room.

And in the end, I really doubt that those efforts will make a big difference, unless paired with significant spare battery capacity.

Electric vehicles are all a way of moving power, and huge spare battery capacity. They are not a problem, they are the solution.

Just throw software at it. I know Musk does not believe that, but essentially it has to work.

> This sounds a bit strange. I'm pretty sure that electric cars and replacing natural gas for heating will require quite significant investment in electric distribution infrastructure.

The total spend on grid infrastructure may increase, but storage will mean we will get more kWh per dollar of grid spending, lowering the energy cost.

Most infrastructures are built to handle maximum load. If the load become nearly flat (by utilizing idle time) thanks to electrification, it makes easy to collect grid cost.

The effect of a lot of renewables can be the opposite, though. When the wind is blowing, all consumers may want to charge their Tesla's at the same time, meaning that the grid wil experience even more spikey load patterns.

Batteries as part of the central grid can help, of course.

It seems that it can be easily adjustable by include grid capacity for pricing calculation.

It can, but that would lead to wasted energy when demand is pushed below supply (when there is no way to store the supply).

That sort of defeats the benefit of elasticity in the demand that was the premise. The idea was that when there is a lot of power being generated on a sunny and windy day, everyone should charge all batteries, heat their water a few extra degrees, run heating or air conditioning a bit harder, etc, as an hour later, the sun could go down, the wind stop blowing and power generation could be scarce.

On the other hand elastic supply sources with a fuel cost (hydro, fossil fuels and to some extent nuclear) are much more suited for cases where consumption elasticity is linked to limitations of the distribution systems.

One interesting approach to this is special tariffs that give you discounts when your local wind turbine is producing.

https://octopus.energy/octopus-fan-club/

More spikes are good, it's the height of the tallest spike that determines the cost, so reducing that specific spike is the key. And one way to do that, is to spike at other times instead.

Think about it like roads and rush hour. The width of the road is set for rush hour, and most of the rest of the time it's empty. Any way of shifting demand away from that peak is good. You'd have to shift an infeasible amount to create a traffic jam in the middle of the night, but every extra car removed from rush hour helps.

When I said "more spikey", I meant generally bigger spikes overall. The frequency of spikes is less relevant and not even very related. It is perfectly possible to have BOTH much higher maximum spikes AND greater numbers of relatively tall spikes. (For instance if you compare energy produced by a set of windmill farm to that produced by a group of nuclear plants.)

If you mean higher annual peaks, then it's probably easier to say that, because that's exactly what has been motivating the early solar deployments and the early battery deployments.

The very high summer peaks correlate well with solar (in many places) and so shaving that peak saves you more than you were spending on solar, even before the price plummeted. Same with batteries replacing expensive gas peaker plants.

Overall demand is predicted to rise a little with electrification, but demand was falling in many places anyway, so between that and the tech above for shaving peaks, it's not really a problem.

Note it's a common thing for "pro-fossil fuel" advocates to show "peaks" without enough context. Usually what looks like a peak on a daily basis is in fact a drop in the bucket compared with the yearly peak.

The famous 'duck curve' is a good example of this, where solar and wind reduced the daily and yearly peak, and then the new lower peak in spring/autumn was pointed at as a "problem".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

> One misconception related to the duck curve is that solar photovoltaic power does not help supply peak demand and therefore cannot replace other power plants. In California, solar output is low at 7 pm when daily demand usually peaks.[20] This fact leads some to believe that solar power cannot reduce the need for other power plants, as they will still be needed at 7 pm when solar power output is low. However, California's annual demand peaks usually occur around 3 pm to 5 pm,[21] when solar power output is still substantial.[20] The reason that California's annual peak tends to be earlier than the daily peak is that California's annual peak usually occurs on hot days with large air conditioning loads, which tend to run more during midday.[22] As a result, solar power does in fact help supply peak demand and therefore can substitute for other sources of power.

> Note it's a common thing for "pro-fossil fuel" advocates to show "peaks" without enough context. Usually what looks like a peak on a daily basis is in fact a drop in the bucket compared with the yearly peak.

I'm not pro-fossil, rather the opposite. I'm anti-fossil (GHG in general) fuel, and want us to use all production methods available that allow us to gut GHG emissions, including solar, wind AND nuclear. Eventually (a few hundred years from now, maybe, but eventually) it seems like fusion will be the final source.

Also, I'm concerned with replacing ALL sources of fossil fuels, including for heating, most industrial use. And for that to come true, I think we need to have a razor sharp focus on price to make it happen. Lately, even before the current crisis, it seems that prices have been going in the wrong direction while global GHG emissions continue their sharp increase.

It seems to me that part of the reason is that many "renewable" proponents are much more more happy to burn a lot of natural gas than to allow nuclear power, and that they're employing a variety of measures to make nuclear seem unattractive, even compared to natural gas. (I've seen some of these messages sponsored by oil companies, some of which seem to want to build expensive offshore wind parks close to where they already have oil platforms.)

I'm getting the impression that some costs of wind power, in particular, is being covered over. And I'm particularly thinking of wind power. This involves both the unstable demand, unavailability of storage and things like increased transportation costs not clearly linked to the type of source.

So, basically, what I'm looking for is ways to make ALL of solar, wind and nuclear as cheap as possible, with reasonable (and shared) safety and environmental standards.

For that to happen, honesty about real costs, accurate prediction models and willingness to remove factors that increase prices unnecessarily (often due to special interest groups) need to be investigated.

For now, my impression is that the real LCOE, including transportation, of nuclear could be A LOT lower than what is represented by new European and American plants, both based on historical prices and efforts in Korea and China, while the real LCOE of wind tends to increase sharply when wind power gets to about 20-30% of total energy production.

For now, my opinion is that we should continue to invest in solar and wind at the same rate we're currently doing while ALSO work on adjust regulation and the business climate for nuclear to allow the cost to come down at least to Korean levels. Meanwhile, all fossil fuel sources should be taxed at a high enough level to make sure both nuclear and renewable investments have a chance of being profitable (The tax should at least be brought up enough to cover the negative externalities of fossil fuels).

If such taxes were made federal (in the US) and collected by the EU (in the EU market), instead of being collected by individual states, one could at least set up the right incentives.

(I agree with almost all of your comment.)

I don’t agree that fossil fuel should be “taxed at a high enough level to make sure both nuclear and renewable investments have a chance of being profitable”, but do agree that it should be taxed significantly higher. (If the outcome of that is that renewables have a chance to compete, great. But if there was a renewable that needed a $50/gallon tax to be competitive, it doesn’t get my agreement to tax to that level.)

> $50/gallon tax to be competitive

At that level, nuclear would be much, much cheaper. Also, there could be a "net tax" system where renewables AND nuclear would get some of those taxes as price subsidies. Let's say that fossil fuels were to be disadvantaged by $X per unit of pollution (lets say 1 unit would be the pollution from 1 ton of natural gas). To prevent all of that disadvantage, one could lower it by $Y (for ($X-$Y)/unit pollutant, and at the same time subsidize nuclear and renewables by $Y per unit of pollutant it displaced.

That way, the competitive advantage would still be $X, but Y could be set high enough that net taxes would stay the same as today.

I'm philosophically opposed to referencing it to "whatever amount would be required to make renewables competitive" but more aligned to "whatever amount represents the true costs, including externalities" (and making the same levies against renewables as well, for mining externalities, waste disposal, etc). Or true costs plus a small margin to ensure there's a nudge.

I don't mind people being exposed to the true cost of their energy; I want that. I don't want to get into picking winners and losers by referencing them to economics of an unrelated power source.

Well, I agree with you. I suppose my argument was presuming that either nuclear or renewables WOULD be competitive with fossil fuels for almost all use cases, if all externalities of fossil fuels are included.

I've seen figures like $15-20 being what gas would cost if the real cost of externalities of driving were included, but I think the carbon is only like 90 cents of that.

Wind power is cheap. This has been true for over a decade. It's not a conspiracy (unless you count the fossil fuel companies and their pet politicians lying about everything for decades, and literally profiting from misery and death).

You have to really try hard to make renewables and nuclear enemies, but a lot of money has been spent on that as it became more obvious that renewables were a good idea and a threat to fossil fuels. I've noticed a recent trend where people attack roof mounted solar because it's so much worse than utility solar. Utility solar is just replacing nuclear in the argument as people get wise to the scam and they need to update the message to slow down the fossil fuel phase out by pointing out that "this isn't perfect, do something else" in the hope that they won't do the something else.

For me nuclear is in the same boat as tidal, geothermal or CSP. Cool tech, but entirely on cost, wind and solar are going to dominate energy production in the future so at best a bit player.

Luckily nearly every single other policy supports tidal, CSP and nuclear just as much as it supports solar and wind. Electric vehicles? Can run on nuclear electricity. Green Hydrogen? can be made with nuclear electricity (technically called Pink Hydrogen). Heat pumps? Can be run with nuclear electricity. Carbon taxes? Don't apply to nuclear as it's low carbon. Air pollution controls? Don't apply to nuclear as it's low pollution. Insulation? Makes it easier to use heat pumps, powered by nuclear power. Time of use pricing? Traditionally used exactly for nuclear power. Demand response? Keeps nuclear running at it's peak efficiency. Battery storage peakers? Can time shift nuclear generated electricity. Believing in climate change? Great opportunity for nuclear, lots of people in the climate change community supported it as part of solution, before wind and solar plummetted in price.

> At the end of 2008, James Hansen stated five priorities that he felt then President-elect Barack Obama should adopt "for solving the climate and energy problems, while stimulating the economy": efficient energy use, renewable energy, a smart grid, generation IV nuclear reactors and carbon capture and storage. Regarding nuclear, he expressed opposition to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, stating that the $25 Billion (US) surplus held in the Nuclear Waste Fund "should be used to develop fast reactors that consume nuclear waste, and thorium reactors to prevent the creation of new long-lived nuclear waste."[96]

> In 2009, Hansen wrote an open letter to President Obama where he advocated a "Moratorium and phase-out of coal plants that do not capture and store CO2".[93] In his first book Storms of My Grandchildren, similarly, Hansen discusses his Declaration of Stewardship, the first principle of which requires "a moratorium on coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester carbon dioxide

So disagreeing on nuclear vs renewables is very minor in the big scheme of things. He was wrong about carbon capture and storage for the same reason, renewables got cheap enough that it no longer made financial sense to do on a large scale.

If you don't believe the wind and solar costs, then obviously you'd come to other conclusions, but you'd be wrong. Just as if you thought tidal or geothermal was going to be as big as solar and wind. But in places where tidal or geothermal makes sense, all the other policies work to support it so it's all good. We were right to try all these technologies to see which one worked out, they probably all have useful niches still.

> If you don't believe the wind and solar costs, then obviously you'd come to other conclusions, but you'd be wrong.

If I'm wrong and you're right, then I have no problem with that, although from what I've seen, the various green movements in Europe have attacked nuclear almost exclusively for ideological reasons, not economic ones.

I still believe that if we give nuclear an equal playing field to other energy forms when it comes to safety standards, other environmental regulations and allow them to be built efficiently by private companies without unnecessary red tape, prices will come down enough for them to be competitive.

Likewise, it seems to me that efforts to fully cover the grid with wind power (particularly in climates where solar is still expensive) has met with problems that have been partly covered up by proponents, and that this has contributed to increased prices, at least in Europe.

But if honest analysis proves me wrong, then I see no problem with that, just as long as it is really the economical side, not ideological ideas that the true reason for future prioritizations.

I'm real bullish on electrification of everything, but the necessary service upgrades for me to get a level 2 charger on my property would cost on the order of $5-10k.

Edit: typo corrected, I said level 3 previously

I'm honestly curious as to why you would need anything more than a Level 2 charger at home.

Maybe they meant Level 2?

A level 3 charger can easily use more electricity than an entire household (250kw is becoming more common now)

Also, many cars can level 2 charge through the onboard inverter at fairly high levels, 48 amps ~ 11.5kw

Ack, that was a typo

fyi the inflation reduction act will cut a good chunk of that for you (assuming you're in the US)

> The Alternative Fuel Refueling Property Credit expired at the end of 2021, but the Inflation Reduction Act gave it life again by extending its application through 2032. For homeowners, the credit is worth 30% of the costs of "qualified alternative fuel vehicle refueling property" installed in the home, up to $1,000.

forgot to cite it, it's from https://www.kiplinger.com/taxes/605069/inflation-reduction-a...

The IRA kinda ruined the AFRPC because it's now only 30% if you're in an eligible jurisdiction (ie, low-income area). Otherwise, you get 6%.

Yeah, same for me (I live in a condo building and our parking lot is not adjacent to the building). My wife and I bought a Tesla back in November of last year, and charging at superchargers hasn't been terribly inconvenient. If you do it too much, your peak charge rate gets limited by a small amount, but we haven't noticed it and we have 15k miles on it already. That said, it will be really nice to have a level 2 charger at our next place.

I find this surprising. I specced out an L2 charger and it did cost me $2K for the install + charger a few years ago (in an expensive market). The install required a new 100A line pulled to my garage as I had no existing washer/dryer there.

What else would you need to support L2 than an extra breaker entry for a 100A?

We'd need to upgrade our panel, as it's already maxed out. On top of that, we'd also have to pay the power company to upgrade their distribution box and the wiring that's buried in a trench that runs under the garage. And, joy of medium density, we'd need about 10 other households to get in on the action and the price I quoted is per unit.

Basically, the problem that we're experiencing is that everybody in the neighborhood has already maxed out their service. Infrastructure upgrades are painful.

Maybe you should install some PV? Not because it could produce cheaper power (although it might), but to get around the supply constraint.

I’m assuming you live in an old house with 100amp or below service. Doesn’t this apply to adding any high current appliances as well?

I don't know if these exist on the market for consumers, but the way that the big superchargers work around this is to co-locate battery storage, so they can trickle charge from the grid and then fast charge to the car.

If you're going to need to spend 10K it feels like you could possibly better spend that on solar and/or batteries.

Here's a portable charger which claims that it costs the same as a home charger install: https://www.zipcharge.global/

And less geekily, you may just not need a level 2 charger or a full speed level 2 charger:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/12/11/dont-s...

That "Zip" thing would be massively improved if it did not act as a car charger but as a portable car battery. Instead of - like the background video shows - taking the thing out of the car, hooking it up to the car charge socket and waiting 60 minutes it should just plug into the car power circuit through a connector in that same trunk, just leave it there and drive the car using power from the thing. This feels like the EV-approach to a spare petrol can in the trunk which itself was the ICE-approach to the bag of oats in the buggy.

If you can store energy in batteries for days wherever, and store energy for weeks in hydrogen anywhere bigger than a house, and store energy in ammonia for decades and move it wherever there are trained personell, and store energy in NaOH and release it as low grade heat, and store energy in methane and put it through the existing gas network, and all these things cost in the range of $20-100/MWh over and above the energy input...

Do we ever actually need to move our $1-10/MWh peak solar energy through our $100-200/MWh grid?

This isn't a problem, this is the solution.

That was why I mentioned the plan (which I can no longer locate) to target 95% carbon-free electricity and focus on electrification instead of the final 5%. That fossil fuel usage can be shifted from cars or heating or industrial uses and used to provide the 5% of electricity instead at a total cost/carbon/pollution saving.

edit: ah, found it (I think, possibly something else quoted this):

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-futures-study

> In the Decarb+E scenario, an expanded grid electrifies additional end uses (such as motor vehicles and space and water heating in buildings) that had derived energy directly from fossil fuels. In 2035, the grid is 95% decarbonized, but the additional fossil fuel displacement yields total emissions reductions equivalent to a grid that is 105% decarbonized—more cost-effectively than could be achieved by completely eliminating grid emissions in this time frame. These results show the importance of considering flexible, cross-sector approaches to optimizing the speed and cost-effectiveness of overall emissions reductions.

So I was wrong about the specific date, but the same general concept applies regardless of the target date and this was written before the 100% goal was moved to 2035.

>> 95% carbon-free generation

I am still not clearly getting the picture here - what exactly this means.

US has about 30% electricity generated by Coal and I do not see that go away in next 20 years let alone 8. What am I missing here?

As of today, US energy portfolio is around 83% fossil. The best case scenario for 2040 is something like 50%, that includes we get Nuclear fusion, massive battery storage, material science breakthroughs that will put a dent on steel and cement consumption.

All the big developed nations have committed to phase out coal by 2030, the USA skipped it because of politics, but if you read any of the coverage of that they usually say that it would happen with or without a government commitment e.g.

Why the U.S. Didn’t Join 40 Other Countries in Pledge to End Coal

subtitle: Economics is already playing a large role in curtailing American coal power

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-u-s-didnt...

The trouble is, the economics only worked out that way because natural gas was cheap - it's not anymore, and countries have been rolling back their coal shutdowns as a result. There's a good chance it never will be again. The same people who were campaigning for that managed to convince pretty much all developed nations other than the US to end new natural gas investment and extraction, and without the supply there prices won't go down and it won't be feasible to use as a coal replacement. This will probably also cut into the switch to renewables because all of the alternatives to natural gas, like coal, play much less well with them.

High gas prices help renewables, because they are even cheaper by comparison. As shown by this model, which as well as removing the 75% of coal fired electricity, reduces the gas fired electricity from 15% to less than 5% and saves lots of money in the process.

The American move from coal to gas shows that even in places where it's still politically favorable to pretend climate change isn't happening, or that coal is clean, simple economics is a big driver of change.

I don't expect the US to hit that ambitious 2030 target. But you may not realize how fast the American generation mix has been changing recently. In 2015 coal supplied 33% of American electricity generation and renewables supplied 13%:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170328200331/https://www.eia.g...

Coal supplied 21.8% of US electricity generation in 2021 and renewables supplied 20.1%:

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427

Coal is the fastest-shrinking electrical power source in the US:

"Coal will account for 85% of U.S. electric generating capacity retirements in 2022"

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50838

Solar and wind are the fastest-growing sources:

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/

The largest increases in U.S. electricity generation in our forecast come from renewable energy sources, mostly solar and wind. We expect renewable sources will provide 22% of U.S. generation in 2022 and 24% in 2023, up from 20% in 2021.

Us coal production is at 22% down from 39% in 2014. That's a 17% reduction in 9 years with 22% to go.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_Sta...

> US intends to hit this target (i.e. 95% carbon-free generation) in 8 years I think, with 100% and wider electrification of current fossil fuel uses in 2035

This seems ambitious. Source?

Getting to 100% carbon-free generation is a goal of the President's Long Term Strategy [1]:

> DECARBONIZE ELECTRICITY. Electricity delivers > diverse services to all sectors of the American > economy. The transition to a clean electricity > system has been accelerating in recent years— > driven by plummeting costs for solar and wind > technologies, federal and subnational policies, > and consumer demand. Building on this success, > the United States has set a goal of 100% clean > electricity by 2035, a crucial foundation for net-zero > emissions no later than 2050.

Other releases have set a goal of 2030 [2]:

> 100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity (CFE) by 2030, at least half of which will be locally supplied clean energy to meet 24/7 demand;

I don't agree with the rosy outlook of the previous commenter, though. Things are looking up, but I think it would be quite a stretch to hit this goal.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/US-Lon... [2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

I think the latter is talking about procurement of energy by the government, not generation. Which obviously helps and is something the government has more control over, but is a slightly different thing.

The 100% by 2035 is fairly widely communicated, but there's definately a document that talks about aiming for 95% in 2030 and then focusing on electrification of other sectors as the diminishing returns start to hit. Can't find it at the moment, too many other announcents with very similar google search terms.

edit: I can only find sligthly older commitments to 80% clean energy by 2030. Which I guess is close enough, as the targets keep ratcheting as it becomes more obviously a good idea.

> the latter is talking about procurement of energy by the government, not generation

Cute how they don’t link to the order nor mention its number. Here it is [1].

It exempts the GAO and independent agencies as well as anything not “an executive agency as defined in section 105 of title 5, United States Code” (§ 603.b). So no military, which is reasonable.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...

And the big elephant in the room? getting the US military on board is going to be tough. Every year, US armed forces consume more than 100 million barrels of oil to power ships, vehicles, aircraft, and ground operations

The US military spends more on renewables each year than most countries. They were on board long before the wider US Government felt it was politically safe.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-military-green-energy...

> The military’s push into alternative energy started under Republican President George W. Bush in 2007, when he signed a law requiring the Pentagon to get 25 percent of the electricity for its buildings from renewable energy by 2025.

Who knows, maybe one day, all of the tensions (wars, etc.) between countries that is rooted in access to oil reserves disappear because of this.

One can dream…

> tensions (wars, etc.) between countries that is rooted in access to oil reserves disappear because of this

Unlikely. Lithium, minerals and advanced manufacturing clusters remain geographically concentrated and adversarially demanded.

Everybody leaves out Iowa when mentioning wind energy! Iowa and Oklahoma are both larger into wind that California.

https://windexchange.energy.gov/files/slideshows/wind-energy...

The US is a lot more than just California and Texas.

Where I live isn't anywhere close to being fully renewable. And home solar is much less economical than it is in California or Texas, largely due to having less sunlight.

Artisanal scale rooftop solar is only economical in Califoria due to feed in tariff subsidies. We could build out utility scale solar of the same capacity for the cost of the subsidy to rooftop solar.

Feed in tariff subsidies are a good policy instrument.

Lots of green tech needed initial subsidies to get started because we currently subsidize fossil fuels and removing those subsidies was politically harder than adding subsidies.

California also very sensibly, introduced net-zero house regulations that mean most new houses will have solar, making it a great deal less artisinal and just another thing you need to build a house.

And rooftop (and generally bulding integrated) solar is in general a good thing. Transmission has a cost and as solar and battery prices plummet, transmission loses the economic battle more and more often when you do the sums. Grids are looking at Non-Wire Alternatives aka Non-Tranmission Alternatives for lots of situations where upgrading or building transmission is the easiest place to minimise costs.

Solar feed in tariffs made a lot of sense initially when they helped bootstrap the market for solar panels but now panels have gotten so cheap the costs of rooftop solar are dominated by installation costs we really should reconsider where we allocate our money to achieve the highest reduction in in emissions.

I have more sympathy for the regulations requiring solar on new buildings since it is far cheaper to install while the roof is being built than to retrofit later.

But as a renter who pays for these subsidies through my electricity bill and cannot benefit from them I want to see the maximum amount of renewable generation built out for the cost added to my bill. Utility scale solar works out 1/3rd the price of residential, or roughly the cost of the residential subsidy alone.

Distribution accounts for only 5% or so of the cost of electricity. It is far more cost effective to build utility scale solar in the desert than on individual roofs.

Deserts aren't good locations for solar, for several reasons:

1. They get hot, and solar PV needs light, not heat to work. Heat actually reduces the effectiveness which is why the difference in output between the best and worst places for solar PV in the USA probably isn't as wide a delta as you would think.

2. They're generally not near people, who mostly live on the coast and so have higher transmission costs. Transmission is enough of a cost factor that building solar and battery (or datacenters) on sites of old coal plants is often done to re-use transmission and save money.

Desert like conditions are required for concentrated solar, which require strong direct sunlight and heat, but PV doesn't have that requirement and can still work in cloudy regions and is generally cheaper than CSP these days even in the desert regions. So solar should be distributed more towards where people live and use electricity.

I think adding the costs to the consumers electricity bills made sense when the grid was mostly polluting, as it incentivises efficiency but as we get closer to a clean grid, it makes less sense. Shifting to time-of-use is probably a good next step to keep the incentive to not burn polluting fuels, shifting the costs to people still burning gas makes sense too.

The whole of society is rigged to give money to homeowners (due to racism and classicsm mostly), so it's not unexpected that solar would lean the same way, it's not inherent to the tech though, just how society works at the moment.

Australian energy prices doubled in the last 6 months.

I'm not sure who would ever use the Australian market as a model, other than "under no circumstances follow suit".

Energy prices everywhere are up. That is what happens when the global economy is bouncing back from a pandemic and one of the biggest energy suppliers in the world decides to embark on the first major land war in Europe in over 70 years.

With the energy industry making record profits [1], my naive self has extreme trouble believing that's the whole story.

https://energycommerce.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/pal...

Why do you think that people who sell a commodity that has increased demand wouldn't make more money?

There's no need for a conspiracy. The people who make money from the gas extracted and exported from Australia will profit at the expense of the average Australian who pays more for the gas extracted from under their own soil. You could vote to have them distribute the windfall profits to the people, if they didn't have such a stranglehold on your politicians.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/australias-east-coas...

This is the same as many historical famines, where people starved to death while the crops grown in the same country were exported and sold overseas because rich, non-starving people can pay more than poor starving farmers. Banning or limiting exports might have helped in a roundabout way, but just not intentionally letting poor people starve to death would have been a simpler policy to implement.

Australia tried that whole voting for the profits to be distributed thing.

The CIA gave them a new government that wouldn't be so silly as to enact public will.

Then murdoch came along to make sure noone would vote based on reality anymore.

So you're saying Russia made sunshine more expensive?

Or did we secretly build nothing but gas power plants because renewable are so intermittent nothing else can be turned on and off fast enough, leading to rising electricity prices world wide even before the latest shock?

Russia is cutting gas supply, there's shortage for electricity generation and storage for winter, when a lot more of gas is used to heat buildings. Russia began cutting gas supply in june 2021 IIRC

Anything else happened the past six months that might, say, affect the LNG prices and thus electricity prices overall?

European prices are up far far higher than 2x

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-23/european-...

The reason for that is because of high natural gas prices. And the reason that increases overall prices is because they are treated as a single purchase so renewable sources (who are obviously well aware of gas prices) push their prices up to match.

This is so obviously a bad idea that even the CEO of a major energy firm has suggested the purchase market be split between renewable and fossil, so there are effectively two markets, and everyone can take advantage of cheap renewable prices.

You should learn about this stuff rather than parroting the nuclear fanbook.

It was the already the highest electricity price in the developed world before the start of the war.

You should learn about this stuff rather than parroting the renewable fanbook.

I do know about this stuff which is why I know reasons for things instead of mindlessly repeating talking points. You explain to me why cheaper sources of energy led to high prices. If you can? May require thinking.

>You explain to me why cheaper sources of energy led to high prices. If you can? May require thinking.

Sure.

Sun doesn't shine at midnight.

The end.

So solar farms don't sell to the grid at midnight. You really don't know how any of this works, do you?

I guess we can just shut off unimportant things like refrigeration and life support at night.

No, you buy expensive electricity at night and cheap solar during the day. You were about to explain to me how buying the expensive electricity all the time worked out cheaper than that. Have you thought it out yet?

Where do you store the electricity? The world's largest battery can run the grid it's attached to for about 10 minutes.

Who said anything about storage?

And battery storage on a grid is not for running the whole grid for any time.

Seriously, you don't understand any of this. Stop assuming you do and try asking some intelligent questions instead.

The US also has plentiful natural resources vs. population size. It seems that Europe would be the least naturally blessed considering high per capita energy use and less solar resources. China has a high population to support, but also owns all that renewables manuring capacity. Other countries do not have such large and energy intense populations.

I feel Europe situation is by far better than here in Japan. Here, land is small, 75% of land is mountains (so hard to bring wind parts), suitable sea (shallower) for cheaper offshore wind is rare than it looks, much area heavily snows, grid is smaller and divided for 50/60Hz, and almost zero natural resources exists. Even if HVDC connection to foreign grid is possible solution, closer bigger lands (China and Russia) are obviously no one want to rely on.

Hydro is a thing thanks to mountains but building new is unpopular to protect naturals. Geothermal is a thing and should be encouraged more, but it seems that it's not enough. Perhaps South Korea is in similar situation but they are still fine to operate nuclear plants.

Floating solar (inland) and floating wind (at sea) are the answer. But Japan actually has a unique advantage in aiming for net-zero in that they have a culture of renewing buildings on short timescales and cenralised property ownership. They can reduce electricity demand and GHG emissions faster in the next decade by building better homes and offices than in rolling out renewables, though they can do both at the same time, and sticking building integrated PV on the new buildings is probably worth doing as well.

PV is one of the easiest renewable to install here so it's now heavily being installed now, but it's one of the most unstable energy source so can't be relied so much for a primary option. I'd like to see floating wind development but it seems that its development is now in progress. There's also typhoon and tsunami. I agree that buildings improvement is also important that is not much advanced.

It's not significantly easier than the US, which also has an embarrassingly large surplus of land for solar and wind.

The US also has their population spread out a bit more (and therefore their load centres closer to potential generation sites) - Australia actually has a higher urban population % than the USA.

It's not even true "in Australia", given the South Australian government, famously pro-Tesla and pro-renewables, has been ramping up the production of NEW gas peaking plants and the refurbishment of old ones.

Australia is doubling down on gas. 100% renewables is the fever pipe dream of a delusional environmentalist who ignores gas in the renewables equation (renewables and gas go together hand-in-hand, because batteries aren't up to the job of smoothing supply across demand).

The South Australian government has changed hands twice since the Tesla big battery.

Electranet, the South Australian transmission operator, commissioned four new synchronous condensors in 2021 in order to reduce the minimum number of gas turbines that must operate.

The averages don’t tell me much. We need to look at percentiles with intermittent sources of energy. 99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year. So it needs to be sufficient to cover an even higher percentile (in fact I don’t even think there is an acceptable number of hours of blackout in a year). I would be curious how they get to that with energies that pretty much go to zero the week there is no wind.

Fossil gas short term, green ammonia long term. With enormous amounts of clean energy and air source carbon capture, you can carbon budget for last resort combustion generation. You might have to burn something to keep the lights on, you’re just on the hook to pay Climeworks or someone else to pull that carbon back out of the atmosphere (which will be done with clean energy) and that cost is built in the per MWh spot price.

https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/low-carbon-e...

That's what is different about this new study. It uses real time supply/demand figures instead of annualized averages. It meets 98.8% of demand with renewables and fills in with fossil power the rest of the time. To quote from the article:

Key results from the 52 weeks of simulations are summarised as follows:

- Renewables met 98.8% of demand over the year, with the remaining 1.2% met by ‘Other’ (fossils)

- ‘Other’ generation peaked at 6.59 GW on the night of July 12. Over the year its average capacity factor was 4.3%.

- Hydro met 6.9% of demand. This was lower than my target of 7.5%, and also less than actual hydro generation of 8%. This means that dam storage levels in my simulation would have ended the year higher than they did in the real world.

- 17% of the wind and solar generation was in excess of requirements and ended up being curtailed.

- 11% of wind and solar generation went into storage. Storage discharge met 10% of demand.

- 82% of demand was directly powered by wind and solar without having to pass through storage or be curtailed.

> 82% of demand was directly powered by wind and solar without having to pass through storage or be curtailed.

This is amazing. As an EE I wonder about transportation losses, but wind and solar should be pretty easy to decentralize, so maybe this is a non-issue. Wind might be a little harder to decentralize, but I don't know how the regional differences are in Australia. I'd suspect the coasts (or even offshore) would be windiest, which is also where most people tend to live.

Solar can be decentralized, wind less so.

I don't know what wind looks like in Australia but in the US it heavily favors places like the Front Range and the Wyoming Divide: https://california-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com/77/87/8...

EDIT: Looking at the same map for Australia I see that wind power potential tends to be strongest coastally, which matches population density (nice!)

I'll still say that overall you can't expect to decentralize wind like you can with solar.

That map doesn't take off shore into an account though. Lots of potential in the oceans & Great Lakes.

Am I the only one that's kinda off put or frankly disgusted by the thought of ruining our nature by peppering it with giant wind turbines? At what point does it stop?

Your not only one, but we (society) have ruined far prettier landscapes for far less tangible economic benefits.

Hardly _any_ prairie ecosystems exist in NA, and we pretty much built a dam on every river with a pulse, ruining countless landscapes.

> Hardly _any_ prairie ecosystems exist in NA

To really understand this, open google maps and zoom in to any random point in the US, where you would expect a prairie. You'll see a farm.

Living in the Midwest… no need for Google maps. Both awe inspiring and sad at same time. Terraforming of the prairie.

What do you think drilling rigs, pipeline leaks, and carbon emissions are doing right now? The impact on nature by renewables is dramatically lower.

But your comment focuses on what's visible so no, I'm not put off by that. Wind turbines look cool.

Didn't you wonder about the stability of such grid considering the timeframe inverters take to adjust their output on load or production changes? Wind can also consume energy, solar can just cut off and our electricity grids all other the world are not DC, for various significant and good reasons.

Transportation is definitely one of the main issues. One of the reasons a place like Australia can manage so well in a simulation like this, is the huge size (combined with a generally very sunny interior). On a given day, a very large percentage of total power demand may have to be transported from one end of the continent to another.

For other, smaller countries (like any European one except Russia), you also face political risk, like we're seeing currently with Russian natural gas. When relying on long distance transport of electricity to keep the grid stable, one or two bad actors may tear down the stability for everyone.

Perhaps a smaller issue, but I would not be surprised if total transportation loss would be 10-20% if not higher, when counting both transmission lines, transformers, storage and similar.

If the price of storage comes down enough, it might be a better source of stability, rather than relying on there being wind "somewhere".

> 99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year.

Presumably the entire grid isn't going down.

Brown outs in small parts of the country is what I'd expect.

This sounds like the current state of California.

https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/texas-power-grid-electr...

I grew up in California, and brown outs have been a problem here for at least the last 30 years.

I don't know if renewables had much of an affect one way or another.

Or, alternatively, a handful of gas plants working at this load like peaking power plants work now. So, for 72 hours or so, where the full need isn't met, we have some very expensive alternatives. According to wikipedia, some peaker plants may work as little as a few hours a year.

Or, we have a set of solar thermal energy power plants that can function as peakers down the road.

This isn't an average it's modelled on real-time demand and supply and the 99% means 3 days worth of power met by non-solar/wind/hydro peaker plants over a year, not instantly plunging into a 3 day long version of Mad Max.

>99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year.

Or using some excess wind capacity to generate some windgas at and keeping it stored using existing natgas infrastructure.

The windgas process is only 50% efficient at converting electricity so it's only cost effective if it's used for say, <1% of electrical needs.

These calculations also dont take into account demand shaping. If you can convince people to stop smelting aluminium so much and charging their cars on the off day that reduces storage needs still further.

> 99% still means 3 full days of blackout every year.

Or 3 days running otherwise-mothballed (and, yes, quite expensive per MW) gas plants or whatever to fill the gaps. There's a real problem in this discourse that wants to interpret things in absolutist ideas, when real solutions always end up looking a little patchwork in those last few percent.

Reducing electrical grid carbon output by a factor of 100 (!!) is more than sufficient to meet anyone's climate goals. At that point, the low-hanging-fruit analysis will have long since moved on to transportation anyway.

Meanwhile in the US, we have states allowing counties to ban solar and wind energy production specifically on privately owned and industrially zoned land. I hope Australia can push through the fossil fuel lobby as they start to fight harder.

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/08/23/nine-ohio-counties...

It's odd that the party that claims to be in favor of a free market is passing laws that actively restrict the free market.

That's just the free market greasing the palms of politicians. A greasier solar lobby needs to come long and out-grease them, obviously.

I don’t think they even claim to be free-marketers anymore. The nat-cons in particular are vocally anti-market.

They're only in favor of a "free" market that they control. Decentralization empowers everyone, not just plutocrats.

As far as I can tell, claims of principle are meaningless with some folks. The only unifying idea is a thirst for power.

IMO the odd thing is people who believe the "Free Market" is or ever was real.

I think it depends on whether or not the definition of a "free market" includes the non-existence of monopolies.

If it does, then a free market isn't possible. It will always devolve into monopolies and conglomerates absorbing everything.

If it doesn't, then a free market is possible, but it would not be good.

If you want to play that game here (France) we can made DIY p.v. systems, pass a consuel (third party organism for electrical safety) check and connect it to the grid BUT with only two mode, one is pure-self consumption you might just have few over-voltage rejects to the grid, the other is gifting the grid of your surplus and in this case you do not only give energy for free, energy consumed by some neighbor who pay it to the grid, full price, but you also have to pay "energy transports fee" to the grid handler. You pay to gift something that get sold at full price. That's is.

You make it sound unfair, but from the point of view of EDF getting the power you generate in the grid is probably never profitable. If you're in excess it's probable other sources of renewable are peaking simultaneously, but the demand does not change. They have to lower the production of the nuclear plants which is not free. Otherwise there would be a surplus.

And transport fees is actually reasonable, it's a lot more expensive to connect lots of small production sources to the grid than a couple of big ones.

Yes most of the time, but not always: for instance during peak heat in summer most p.v. still produce more than the actual owner consumption while EDF have issues producing enough electricity since almost anyone have A/C full power and many NPP are offline due mostly to the decade old lack of investments/minimal maintenance of them for private profits. The same private profit that now get 10 billion € to sell the last private slice of EDF to the State, who will made the needed investments and probably give EDF back to the private sector once done and that's not enough they want to sue the State for lack of profits due to the maximum price roof (bouclier tarifaire) imposed till this year end...

TURPE fees is not expensive, true, and also EDF have issues keeping the frequency of the national grid with many p.v. systems on-line, true again, BUT the justification that EDF (energy production) and ERDF (energy distribution) are now two different companies and so while you gift the former you have to pay the latter is hard to digest... As a results many prefer zero injection even if means consuming a bit more from the grid.

Beside that consider a thing: the State made anything at start, NPPs, electricity grid, TLCs etc then sold them to the private sector at a very cheap price "to made quick evolution and lower prices", none of witch happen, instead happen the exact opposite. The private sector invest FAR LESS than the public and leave a mess as a result, than when things became really bad the State came back to sort out the mess at Citizens expense. What you call it?

Personally since the State now act with the famous "revolving doors" with the private sector I call it high treason for the public officers part, embezzlement and crimes against the State for the private part. To be a bit back on topic: I have invested in p.v. to guarantee my energy supply in case of blackouts, just for that because so far the investment is not really profitable, it would be without lithium storage but in that case I'll get no backup and the relevant profit is far little to justify the investment. Those who made profits are those who sell p.v. systems and all the energy giants, both "green" and "fossil". Me as a citizen get less wealthy to protect my comfort, less wealthy citizens can't protect themselves and to "compensate" those who can, also get far higher prices to be even more pushed to poverty, because that's the 2030/WEF target [1] is this fair? Is this "free market" since the enormous difference between the giant and the others?

Take just an example: in France few municipalities kept the water public, most go private. Mine is one of those who have remained public: I pay water a bit less than 1€/m³, the nearby municipality is with Veolia, get the water from the very same source of mine but people pay ~12€/m³. They also have leaks and service continuity issues we have not. Does suffice as example? Beside that since EDF is now 100% public it's target must be offering a service, not making profit, so why IF the target of the Green Deal is a Green Deal really for environmental reasons why not actively subsidize p.v.? And even more: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/files/files/directions_services... if the government itself publicly state that France can't now and can't in the foreseeable future going really on renewables what we are talking about? Some, interested or sponsored by interest parties, say that we are just an inch behind the ability to going fully on renewables while public bodies (and personal experiences) state the exact contrary... In the meantime energy prices artificially skyrocket to maximize some westerners speculators, those who have invested in the green deal barely get the investment paid back but are anyway far less wealthy and those who have not suffer from prize rise just more. I see ALL the ingredient of a SCAM and nothing about the technical feasibility of a new deal green in the environmental sense, instead I see one in the dollar main color sense and in the stereotypical chemio-radioactive waste spilling out of rusty barrels...

Try going further:

- new buildings needed to consume less enough to being able to heat and cool on heat-pumps only => private costs for the owners, profits just for those who sell heat pumps and ENR stuff, the break even of such new constructions surpass their operational life anyway;

- BEVs needed, integrated to homes electricity (a thing that's still not there, at least without any proper standard and again seems not that around the corner) who cost around the double of equivalent ICEs vehicles and again profits only for their OEMs;

- massive renewable installations who made the grid unstable to push people further investing in renewable, similarly with artificially skyrocketed energy prices => again profits only for the giants.

Non-giants just get breadcrumbs, in little compensation for their investments and continuity of services, who happen to be evidently artificial. Oh and of course, the pollution issue not resolved at all, just hidden since with the new deal polluting productions happen in exotic places so people do not see it, but globally is not different than pure fossil. Meanwhile just seeing https://app.electricitymap.org/map nuclear seems to be the only really green (to a certain extent) electricity source we have with the bonus of being perfectly stable. Yes I make it sound unfair. Because it is in general. And I was even very polite in using the term "unfair"...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...

> My simulation used the 24GW/120GWh of assumed storage and existing hydro to firm up the wind and solar and match demand.

120 GWh is not what most would describe as "little storage". The largest hydroelectric storage facilities in existence are in the single digit or low double digit GWh. And this is for a country with a relatively small population.

> Both the hydro and storage were assumed highly flexible. Note that I did not use the actual hydro generation data. I completely changed the dispatch of hydro so that it had minimal generation on days when it wasn’t needed, and elevated levels whenever there was a day with significant shortfalls of wind and solar relative to demand.

This is also a big simplification. While dams can just totally shut off the flow of water downstream, this has big ecological impact and also impacts availability of water in population centers that draw from the river. Most dams always release a minimum amount of water to ensure the river never runs dry. Much of his simulation has dams bottling up water for long stretches of time.

The current pipeline of utility battery storage projects in Australia is estimated to be 26GW ( https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/11/03/australias-... ). Storage ratios of announced projects seem to range from 2 to 4, so that would be storage in the range of 52GWh - 104GWh - not quite up to the assumed mix in the model but not too far short either.

This is also a big simplification. While dams can just totally shut off the flow of water downstream, this has big ecological impact and also impacts availability of water in population centers that draw from the river. Most dams always release a minimum amount of water to ensure the river never runs dry. Much of his simulation has dams bottling up water for long stretches of time.

Did you miss the part where he imposed minimums on the hydro generation in order to keep it within historical limits:

  However, to maintain consistency with historical generation, 
  hydro generation was also subject to the following constraints:
  
    * Hydro generation was kept between 200 MW and 6,000 MW
    * Weekly hydro generation was kept above 168 GWh
    * Annual hydro generation was targeted at between 6% and 9%
      of demand, though ideally closer to 15,000 GWh, or about 
      7.5% of demand.

I do however agree the hydro part is a little too oversimplified (going by what is in the article). A lot of Tasmania's hydro is run-of-river; the dam-based hydro systems can be very limited by weather-based issues (both too little rain, which hasn't been concern in the previous year due to a persistent La Nina, and too much, which limits how much can be discharged when downstream pondages are too full).

Only 6.3 GWh of battery storage is actually announced in your link. Plenty of storage facilities are at ratios lower than 2: https://www.energy-storage.news/victorian-big-battery-austra...

And if the batteries haven't actually been provisioned yet, it might be hard to build those without securing additional funding: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

It says this:

Eleven months later, and new CIA research shows the pipeline of proposed storage has grown enormously, to over 26 GW of announced projects.

The individually enumerated projects in that article appear to be only a subset of those.

It's true about the Victorian battery you linked at a ratio of 1.5, so that has the 26GW representing somewhere in the range of 39GWh to 104GWh (ratios close to 2 appear to be the most common, though - presumably representing a current sweet spot of battery versus inverter pricing).

I believe the point still stands, though, which is that the suggested quantity of storage is an incremental advance on what's currently planned rather than some kind of moon shot.

Again, no capacity is actually specified for the vast majority of these proposals - it's the sort of things there if the capacity isn't good you have less incentive to share it, so assuming a ratio of 2-4 is very optimistic . And even if we assume that 100% of these proposals get built (which is unlikely) it's still well short of the 120GWh of capacity assumed by the study.

To put this in perspective, annual battery production is around 300-400 GWh. You're talking about redirecting a third of all battery output in a given year to produce the storage for a country of just 26 million people.

David Osmond (author of the simulation) interview on youtube channel "Engineering with Rosie": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgxOlPu9kiM

Twitter : https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1562318623359713280

Also see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32567994

One thing I would love to see addressed in these kinds of analyses: the efficacy of strategic placement of solar. Electrical demand tends to peak slightly after sundown for much of the year. However, the sun obviously doesn't set at the same time everywhere. Darwin's sunset is currently an hour and a half later than Sydney/Brisbane. Could building more equatorial/western solar installations together with transmission defer some of the need for storage, even with the same amount of solar deployed?

Transmission losses would eat any benefit, unfortunately.

Of course, the author didn't model this at all.

This is the problem with 99% of "actually we could totally rip out our entire infrastructure right now" posts - it's usually justified with crappy modeling that falls apart under slightly more scrutinizing consideration.

Solar-only with low storage overhead might become more viable if we get room-temperature superconductors or something.

Losses wouldn’t be bad with HVDC, with the added benefit of HVDC ties not needing to be frequency synced across the entire grid, so you have some opportunity to increase resiliency.

I don’t think it’s a one-sized fits all solution. There will be places where storage will make sense, and other where longer distance transmission makes sense. I think the reality is it will be a mix of both, along with a nice diverse mix of generation methods.

Australia seems especially well suited for long-distance transmission because development is so heavily weighted to the coasts; there's not a lot of existing built-up interior areas to route around. At 800 kilovolts HVDC line losses are only 5% per 2000 km:

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...

(See page 11)

Yeah, people really underestimate how efficient HVDC has become. Even that doc is outdated - it was published in 2015 so likely based on 2013/2014 figures. Modern projects, e.g. ultra HVDC (1100KV) in China are seeing more like 1.5%/1,000KM losses: http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0622/c90000-9474097.html

Australia is ~4,000km wide, so ~6% - totally manageable if it is needed.

Curious to know the relative costs of HVAC vs battery per megawatt/hour offset from peak solar production.

4000 KMs east to west is about 2.4 hours offset geographically. Would it be cheaper to have 2.4 hours of storage closer to the east coast of Australia, with solar farms close to the consumption? Or would building a 4000km HVAC transmission line from the west coast of Australia to the east coast be cheaper? I'd imagine there would be a tipping point where one option is more economical than the other.

Personally, I'd like to see WA's electricity network connected through to SA, and connect SA's through to NSW, but I also like the idea of many independent microgrids for the resilancy they'd offer.

The controversial conclusion I came to many years ago was all of the above ... I remember when the solar lobby was fighting the wind lobby fighting the hydro lobby to be the one true green energy source. It was and still is entirely pointless.

Distributed independent microgrids with interconnects fed by a range of power generation methods and size the generation at >1.5x power needs. Refurbish and maintain fossil fuel to fill when needed, and ideally make them as modular as possible with turbine halls being convertable between different fuel types.

> Losses wouldn’t be bad with HVDC

Uh-oh. We're going to have to rewrite the history books on the current war between Edison and Tesla, this time with Edison as the victor!

Great, let me know when we have economically viable HVDC grids built up.

Renewables enthusiasts love to talk about counterfactual or hypothetical scenarios, but ignore the fact that we can't spontaneously leap to one of those scenarios.

This is pretty outdated.. HVDC has solved most of the transmission problem. Even the typical "3.5% per 1,000km" assumption that shows up on Wikipedia is pretty out of date. Modern projects are built with much lower losses (since they're running much higher voltage) and central Australia with massive solar potential is no more than 2,000KM from anywhere else in the country so generation transmission losses would be more like 5% total...

Even if losses were something absurd like 15%, I don't see how that would meaningfully change the numbers. Location offsetting sunlight seems like a huge win.

Indeed. Solar is so cheap (and the price keeps falling) needing to build an extra 15% bigger solar farms is a total non-issue. By the time some projects go from planning to ground-breaking that extra 15% might be free due to costs plummeting.

> Transmission losses would eat any benefit, unfortunately.

Big “citation needed” on that assertion.

HVDC is a widely proposed option and it’s an oversimplification to dismiss it with a single sentence.

For example the old DeserTec made a feasibility analysis for HVDC interconnects across EU and into Africa; the problem with that one seemed to be more about geopolitical issues and upfront investment costs, rather than long-term feasibility of transmission losses.

A newer analysis at the top of Google does not say “this doesn’t work because of transmission losses”. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/hvdctransmi....

> Big “citation needed” on that assertion.

My knowledge of power markets.

> HVDC is a widely proposed option

I'm sure it's widely proposed by fictional utopian scenario enthusiasts. I will consider it seriously when there's an actual HVDC grid we can use, or even just a successful HVDC interconnect.

There are tons of HVDC interconnects and transmission lines in place, many of which are already over 1000 km long. Many of these projects have been in place for decades. Breakthroughs in solid state HVDC are making it easier and cheaper all the time, but it's not some fanciful science fiction technology. It's a key element of existing power grids already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

Mea Culpa! I knew about a few of these projects in the US but there are more than I realized. Thanks for correcting me.

I see a lot of cynicism around renewable energy and electric cars and I frankly don't get it. The typical cynical approach is to point out one potential problem, and dismiss the entire solution as if it was worthless, which is obviously false.

As others have pointed out, there are now HVDC lines that can go over thousands of kilometers (transcontinental scale!) with reasonable losses. There's no reason to believe that we've hit the peak of HVDC technology either. The need for this technology to exist will drive further innovation.

Even if the OP's estimate is off. Even if we "only" get to 90% renewables by 2045, that's still pretty damn great compared to what we have now, isn't it? Is your cynical opinion that we should just keep going with the status quo because we can't get 100% ?

Even if we need 15% more wind and 15% more storage to than the OP's estimate reach 99%, that's not impossible either. It will create a lot of jobs. Why not just roll up our sleeves and do the best that we can? Thankfully, the world is not only made up of cynics, and a lot of people already are.

We aren't done innovating on the renewable front either. There's LOTS of research into cheaper, safer, more scaleable grid-scale batteries. The current state of the art is cobalt-free and nickel-free lithium iron phosphate, but people sodium-ion batteries look like they're going to be viable soon.

I also feel pretty confident that we'll eventually manage relatively efficient ways to store energy over the long term. If we could turn electricity into methane or ethanol with even 25% efficiency, that would allow us to store energy from the summer to use in the winter, or to power transatlantic airplanes with renewables. That seems pretty exciting to me.

Did you consider how strategical targets became such networks? How much geopolitics nightmares they represent?

Conversely, did you consider how much critical infrastructure we already have today, and how surprisingly little of it is targeted?

Yes, all are far less fragile than such worldwide grid: takes logistics, anything can go wrong but there are few hotspots and in any case we have buffers here and there, a total disruption it's hard, actual "crisis" clearly show it. We have big airports. If one goes totally out of service planes can choose some else and passengers with issue can continue their journey etc.

On contrary a global-scale electricity grid means a global scale blackouts with global scale cascading effects. Something we have already seen at far smaller scales and already devastating effects.

Anything can fail, but if the fail impact few it's far less big than something who impact all. Also if you have buffers you can have a bit of time, even short, to act, to reduce the impact. If you have nothing because you are actually powered by some farms in Uzbekistan thousand of miles away than you are completely TFU.

Just as a sidenote: I've invested in a new (witch means well insulated) home, with p.v., a little lithium storage to survive a single night etc just to ensure I still have energy in case of disruption. So far it already worked few times, and curiously such times are more and more frequent, partially due to explicit political choices partially due to natural events, partially because we push renewables up and still have nothing to compensate energy (frequency) fluctuation they provoke in the national grid. Now instead of try solving this issue witch is VERY BIG especially if you live a bit at north (winter) or at south (aircon needs) some propose some megaprojects fully know that ALL recent megaprojects fails all over the world, and in general ANY big-enough project fail at a rate proportional of it's size and complexity. What's the outcome? Personally I'm protected, at a high price, others simply get worse and worse services and no backups. Also without any proof that we can reach a stable future and that the actual tech is less pollutant at global scale than even classic fossil (actually p.v. and battery shift pollution in exotic place, but do not reduce it at global scale)...

Oh, just to be clear I'm from the EU, nephew of a WWII Partisan's family, so definitively not something like "proud boys" people.

As opposed to fossil fuels, famously free of geopolitical nightmares.

You can store oil. In significant quantity. You can't store electricity in the same way, easiness and quantity. So in case of a war you still have, any country still have months of oil reserves, very little electricity reserves in the form of pumped hydro, fossils and nuclear powers. Not only: a electricity grid disruption is almost instantaneous, oil&gas issue takes at least days and can be foreseeable in months and years.

At a small scale: you can easily store in your garage 1000l, 2000l of diesel. You only need two cheap plastic reservoirs with a supporting structure (something here in EU south priced 50-200€ per tank) and or a high enough support (gravity fall) or a manual/electric pump (various price but in the range of 200-500€ more maximum) and your car will be autonomous for a certain, not that small, amount of time. Similarly to heat your house you might have perhaps 5-15.000l tank underground in your garden, normally sufficient for an year of heating. You can also easy store hot water, it does not last that long but two day is doable. You might have wood burning backups etc. Electricity? Try just to compare the impact of a 5 day gas station strike vs a 5 day blackouts for yourself.

My personal lithium storage suffice for a night at minimum service (just lights, fridges/freezers, home rack etc NO heating/cooling without Sun) and its price was ~4k€ (battery) + 2k€ (battery inverter) for an estimated maximum service life of 10 years. While diesel reservoirs and pumps can potentially last 100+ years. Surely the Sun tend to shine a bit all day, but just to live on it I need at my single-home scale the price of a mid-range car for a similar MTBF. With a very cheap and resilient solution I can survive few months without diesel supply. With relatively cheap freezers I can survive a month or two grocery supply without special attentions. Without water things get complicated, but I still have a bit of autonomy anyway. Without electricity I have a small autonomy thanks to p.v. + lithium but while all the rest it's doable by anyone the p.v. system is too expensive for most and still not suffice to heat the house in winter. In summer I can cool it during the day and lucky here nights are always fresh, but you get the idea.

At a bigger scale I do not have sources is English, this is a study by French Gov. https://www.economie.gouv.fr/files/files/directions_services... on the topic, it's conclusion are: we can't run France on renewable nor now nor in the foreseeable future. And that's a study by public body only, no interested parts for nor fossil nor renewables sectors...

>You can store oil. In significant quantity.

>Did you consider how strategical targets became such networks?

All your numbers and calculations are background noise when you can't keep your fundamental concerns coherent.

Edit: Let me say that I see where you're coming from--I get the concern about large, low inertia systems, the ww2 partisans, the need for self reliance. But that ship has sailed. Russia is currently beating the bricks off Germany with the Nordstream. Saudi Arabia has been 'a murdering and 'a terrorizing for the better part of a century on the basis of their petroleum reserves.

I buy that renewables won't pay for the whole party, but it's also undeniable that renewables, in their various and sundry forms, are much more evenly distributed (globally, if not locally) and are therefore much less prone to the kind of exploitative power structures that have already arrived. All other economic considerations aside.

That's an interesting point: yes, formally renewable are significantly "distributed" geographically, the tech to use them though is not that much and the trade-off between the two (control over localized natural sources vs control over tech needed to exploit distributed sources) could be an interesting scenario.

In that sense I see a far more nightmarish scenario where the progress is not anymore done in public universities but in private companies to a point that civil society can just only get black boxes from them, but that's is a bit OT here.

What's in-topic is that few sources state we are near to 100% renewable option, and some other say absolutely not, with the truth probably lie in the difference between theory and practice + availability of something vs it's adoption on scale. If that it's true IMVHO we will not be able to run on renewable for at least 50+ years AND we will suffer MANY issues trying to go faster...

> I see a lot of cynicism around renewable energy and electric cars and I frankly don't get it

So far, we have never globally replaced fossil fuels with renewable energy, only supplemented their usage (meaning you can't point to a single drop of oil that is designated to never be extracted due to the creation of renewables).

The energy required to build an electric car is massive and results in a lot of CO2 production and takes a fairly long time to balance out.

Here's the really important part: despite lots of progress in electric cars and more importantly tremendous (seriously very impressive) growth in renewables CO2 in the atmosphere is not only not decreasing, it is accelerating.

Ultimately massive renewables infrastructure projects and large scale adoption of electric vehicles are capitalist friendly ways of deluding yourself into thinking you're making change while actively making things much worse.

The only surefire way to slow climate change is degrowth but this is literally a forbidden topic. Most of the comments mentioning this on HN or anywhere else on the web are immediately downvoted into oblivion. Even though we know for a fact that economic contraction leads to decreased fossil fuel consumption and have no evidence that on a system level increased renewables reduces CO2.

And it's not just that capitalists don't like it, but nobody really wants to seriously consider degrowth. But here's the rub: climate change will bring massive degrowth either way, and in a much worse way.

The cynicism is because the optimism around renewables allows people to pretend the problem isn't getting worse, and silences any discussion about hard but real solutions.

It doesn't matter much either way, we've chosen violence and are going to play this out the hard way. If you want to pretend it's otherwise, I've given up on bothering to convince other people awhile ago. Have fun in your fantasy and let me know when the rate of atmospheric CO2 starts to even stop accelerating (forget actually dropping).

How would you get to CO2 neutrality if degrowth is going to be the strategy? If you go back to the world of 50 years ago, you reduce emissions but you don't solve the problem, and you make it impossible to go to an entirely carbon neutral economy since you won't be able to produce the required tech anymore. Unless the plan is to actually go back to a preindustrial lifestyle.

Massive investment in renewables at least is a theoretically possible strategy for going to carbon neutrality without a total destruction of people's quality of life.

You're right about electric cars et al being energy intensive to produce right now, but this gets better and better with increasing electrification and CO2 reduction in power generation.

> The only surefire way to slow climate change is degrowth but this is literally a forbidden topic

It's not a forbidden topic - most people just understand that it's in some sense treasonous to human civilization (at least in the forms generally espoused by its proponents), so don't bother entertaining it.

> climate change will bring massive degrowth either way, and in a much worse way.

This is a fantastically unrealistic economic model.

If there is not wind in Sidney, you may have to transport 10s of GW distances of about 4000km during peak hours. Even using HVDC, there is significant transfer loss and building and operating that kind of infra is not cheap either.

Also, who wants to pay for those interconnects when they expect battery prices to plummet, as you say?

> I see a lot of cynicism around renewable energy and electric cars and I frankly don't get it.

It mostly comes from understanding how power production and distribution works.

> Even if we "only" get to 90% renewables by 2045

90% renewables doesn't mean we get to cut 90% of fossil fuel production capacity, and it's almost impossible that we get to 90% renewables without taking serious quality-of-life hits (unless you're including nuclear).

> We aren't done innovating on the renewable front either.

Yeah, in 50 years it will probably be fine. But we're talking about now.

I'm also interested in the opportunity cost of switching to renewables. Maybe we can have the same quality of life we do now off of solar in 50 years, but almost certainly our quality of life would be significantly better if we weren't on solar.

The Kardashev scale is the best cheap proxy for quality of civilizational development.

> It will create a lot of jobs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

> Thankfully, the world is not only made up of cynics, and a lot of people already are.

Another word for "cynic" in this context is "person with realistic and accurately calibrated economic expectations".

People don't dismiss these things as solutions because of a single problem. They generally evaluate them on a holistic material basis and find them lacking. Then, when posting on the internet, they state their general opinion and cite what they consider the most significant and relevant issue, since comprehensively explaining their reasoning makes little sense in the context.

That's the whole point of what the author did. He didn't model putting solar out in the Western Desert or something - he scaled up the existing wind and solar generation on the NEM, implying more generation in the places where we know transmission works just fine, because we're doing it now. Of course if we put more utility scale solar in New England or Central West we'll need to augment the existing transmission, but that's just increasing the capacity of transmission where we already have it.

Not true. Transmission lines can be made quite efficient especially the really high voltage ones like 345kV look it up. Other alternatives are High Voltage DC which is more expensive but much less lossy. There are solutions, nothing is cheap but these things last for decades and when amortized against losing our planet to global warming have great potential. Sorry but you are wrong.

It's fortunate for solar that most populated cities in AU is located on east.

A new east-west interconnector is in progress: https://www.projectenergyconnect.com.au/

In general though, BESS & overbuild seems to be working out cheaper than very long interconnectors.

Interesting, but the title should mention it's localized to Australia so as to avoid arm waving from either side

California, on most days, is generating slightly less power from solar (~10GW) than all of Australia from coal (per https://electricitymap.org). Texas has over 130GW of renewables in ERCOT’s interconnect queue. There are challenges to solve for, certainly, but broad strokes the decarbonization roadmap is well defined and within reach. Velocity is a function of capital and technology investment.

Edit: @usefulcat https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/rampant-solar...

Yeah. As a consumer, I put solar panels on my house in 2017. They generate about as much electricity as I consume. In theory, I will break even on the cost in another two years. Obviously, they're going to depreciate and break at some point, but the only reason ~every house doesn't have them is the price of installation. If everyone did this, you're talking about a world where we would still need non-renewables for load balancing, night time, cloudy days, etc., but we'd still have a huge reduction in carbon. The only thing stopping us from having near carbon free consumer electricity with current technology is the capital costs. So duh, the government should just loan the money to consumers and get it done. We can figure out load balancing etc. later once we pick all the low hanging fruit.

> the government should just loan the money to consumers and get it done.

I'm not sure everyone wants to borrow money - there are a ton of financing options for solar right now, what makes you think adding yet another one would get everyone over that hump?

They could loan the money interest free. that would make it rather a no-brainer

> Texas has over 130GW of renewables in ERCOT’s interconnect queue

I'm curious to know where you got the 130 GW figure? Texas consumption rarely exceeds 80 GW, even in summer, so 130 seems like a lot.

https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/supplyanddemand

(Note: the Y axis in the above chart is megawatts)

I just found a dashboard for the ERCOT interconnect queue. It looks like the previous person understated the amount in the queue if anything.

https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiYjM0YjNjZWQtM2U3ZS00Z...

Page 4 shows nearly 200 GW just for solar and wind, and a total of 275 GW.

Good find. My figure was from September 2021, this is great to hear. I assume even more projects planned with the Inflation Reduction Act juicing renewables subsidies.

It's the first sentence in the article, you can't really miss it.

It's suggested by the url, but if mods wanted to add [AU]

This survey paper shows the same holds true pretty much everywhere, with lots of different labs using different models arriving at the same finding:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

Great job! Did a similar study for Germany about 7 years ago based on their published 30-minute production and demand data and arrived to very similar conclusions. It's not as good as in Australia because both wind and solar in Germany is less reliable, also good enough.

I believe that this model is built using Excel and VBScript. I would love to see the source code for this.

These sorts of things should be shared before anyone starts basing policy on it. I want to know the inputs, the outputs, etc. I want a lot of people going though this, looking at the data.

As a homeowner (1750 sqft, 100% electric with one EV [no gas appliances or fireplace]) in a dry (9-10 inches of rain per year) climate with a small 8.4kW solar installation with one 13.4kW battery, I can tell you that if we had 5-10kW more battery storage our home would be 100% off grid. As it stands now we're 71% self-powered with a current energy offset of 106%.

Models show this same result for most (all?) regions they have been applied to. Here is a survey paper going over the current state of research globally and what mixes different models arrive at for different regions:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

Great analysis. I’m not so familiar with the AU energy market, so I don’t know how much of an update this result is vs. a reasonable prior.

The bigger simulation mentioned in the OP is the ISP: https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/major-publications/integr.... Anyone know what that plan proposes in terms of energy mix?

> It is interesting to note that the ISP is predicting that approximately 9GW of peaking gas or liquids will need to be retained in the NEM’s generation mix out to 2050. This is more than the 6.6GW required so far in this study.

Though the OP notes that ISP is doing demand modeling too, instead of simulating a new supply mix for the present demand & supply conditions.

This is completely in line with reasonable priors:

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

It's more of a science/engineering communication effort, because there's a lot of unreasonable priors out there.

edit: also the 6.6GW of 'other' the current model uses, is the current actual gas plant size, not an amount that they predict as optimal or desirable. Similar with the Hydro, they used the current capacity, even though some are being built right now.

On my reading of it, "Other" is the gap between the other modelled sources and the actual demand.

I may be mixing up his comment about limiting the Hydro to the current max output rate.

But, I believe they chose the levels on solar and wind to aim for, precisely because they knew 'other' would come in around this level, because it would be a poor demonstration of the viability of renewables otherwise. But they were at the mercy of the unpredictable weather and demand, so couldn't control it exactly, just much better than many people would assume.

A few random thoughts:

1. There are symbiotic relationships between different sources of energy. In order to suck petrol out of the earth we need coal (used in steel manufacturing). In order to mine coal we need petrol (used by diggers and for transport). We still don't know how to manufacture solar panels and wind turbines without fossil fuels. The mining, steel forging and international transport of these products is still based on fossil fuels.

2. Electricity consumption represents only about 30% of total energy consumption. A lot of people seem to underestimate the difference in energy density between petrol and lithium batteries. This difference makes it highly unlikely that we'll move to electric ships and aircraft in the near future.

3. The mining activity associated with manufacturing solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, smartphones and electric cars is highly demanding in energy, is highly polluting, and demands great quantities of fresh water as part of the process of refining the different metals. With the rise of electric cars, the continuing demand for smartphones mining is expected to demand even more energy and fresh water, and pollute even more our rivers and soils. This, in a period of constrained energy sources, droughts, and an already degraded environment.

4. Judging by the comments on here people demand an always-on supply of energy, be it electricity, petrol or gas, which is a privilege only some countries enjoy today, and is relatively recent in human history. I think the idea of intermittent energy supply is worth exploring, and might make it easier to achieve 100% renewable energy production, in conjunction with a lower energy consumption.

And random responses.

1. I don't know if the coal used to make steal can be replaced with synthetic sources but petrol (and diesel and oil) can absolutely be replaced with synthetic fuel powered by renewable energy and carbon capture. The tech is old and boring. What's needed are cheaper renewable sources and more expensive oil, both of which are happening right now.

2. You're absolutely right and there is some debate that battery production can ever scale to level needed. Fortunately some combination of batteries and synthetic fuel almost certainly can get us to 100%.

3. Spot on and highly concerning, particularly as demand for these things at low cost has driven mining operations to places with poor environmental protections.

4. Great point. Demand side management and spot pricing are already things and more wide spread implementations will definitely make renewables more economical. I personally will be super excited to see one of the companies pursuing synthetic fuels figure out how to take advantage of surplus generation to capture carbon and turn it into essentially high energy density storage.

Speaking as an electrical engineer with a grid tied PV system for many years, this claim is just bonkers. It's exactly this sort of magical thinking that we don't need more of. Electric utility is a deadly serious business. The cost of getting a massive transition like this wrong is going to be measured not just economically, but in people's lives.

The Ontario grid has been there for years. 92% zero-carbon. [1]

[1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

Wow, that's a lot of hydro and nuclear power!

Thanks for sharing. I wonder how the New England and upstate NY power grids compare, since they also have a lot of hydro and nuclear?

New England and upstate NY don't generate nearly enough power for their own needs and buy excess power from Ontario and Quebec. Quebec in particular as Hydro Quebec has a terrifying amount of hydro generation and always has tons of excess. A big chunk of the clean energy in the northeast US comes from Canada.

Super cool tool that shows the CO2 intensity of various grids and where power is flowing:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-NE-ISNE

Very cool site, thanks for linking. Does most of Quebec's hydro power come from dams on the St. Lawrence river? (this would make sense to me, considering the St. Lawrence is the outlet for the largest reservoir of fresh water in the entire world) Or is there another source I'm not thinking of?

Tons of their dams are in northern Quebec in the middle of nowhere. People who have never been to the Canadian Shield have a tough time imagining just how many rivers and lakes there are. It’s basically endless.

Do we actually have effective strategies for dealing with significant over-generation? The author glosses over it as being necessary to get to 98% renewables throughout the year ("we'll just run our hydro dams in reverse"), but I'm under the impression that over-generation that is unhandled leads to grid instability/desync.

I think wind and solar can simply be turned off if need be.

Maybe folding@home; desalination for farming; pumping and spraying water to re-glaciate areas in the winter.

Resistively heated thermal storage for any industrial plant that uses process heat.

Stop some of the wind generators. Disconnect some of the solar panels. Both are standard practice today.

PV can be throttled instantly to anything down to 0. Otherwise no offgrid setup would be feasible.

You can mandate smart control signals to PV inverters or don't do anything and let the frequency go up so even inverters installed today will start cutting power as this is a requirement from grid code.

Wind has a bigger lag (seconds) but it has brakes to save them in storms.

So those are easy problems (technologically).

It's better to use price signals to ratchet demand up if you can.

The UK already has a tariff that can warn you about upcoming periods of free power. Electric car users like it. They like it a lot.

I have a contract that uses nordpool spot market prices that are known ahead for each hour for the next day. I have PV on my roof and an EV. The price volatility is just insane between 2 and 4000 EUR/MWh so 2000x in the last week alone. So I finally connected a smallish house battery (about 14kWh) last week and by purely arbitrage I’ve made about 100 euros in the week. Even with an 8kW feed in cap and such a tiny battery.

Is over generation an issue that needs to be solved beyond disconnection from the grid?

Gas and Petrol Plants are commonly run in stand by mode because the ramp down/up times are too great to take them off line.

A relatively simple model that is still a reasonable ballpark. However, throughout the article I was wondering about the effect of transmission efficiencies across Australia. The author addresses transmission at the end by acknowledging that they didn't model it. Not sure how much it matters, but I suspect that lots of wires would be required.

Australia is currently reducing their transmission length (and risk of bushfires) by creating microgrids with solar and batteries for remote communities.

The battery rollout modelled, would also be able to reduce transmission bottlenecks by distributing them geographically, something the Australian grid has been encouraging for a few years now.

Not sure how much it matters, but I suspect that lots of wires would be required.

Sure - the model scales up existing wind and solar generation assets, so you would need transmission infrastructure to those same areas to scale up as well (and likely inter-region interconnectors to scale up as well).

If you lower this to, say, 75%, a good analysis will show that a renewables grid with zero storage is possible around the world.

Storage is only required for the last n% and n is much larger than most people realize. If we accept that the energy economy will shift with supply-and-demand based pricing, what can actually happen is having peak production oversupply which will find users with its lower prices enabling off-peak-production to be high enough to meet peak demand. (this is a kind of thing that maybe needs blog posts with graphs to make the most sense)

We would be in a very much better place if we were near n and it's probably not worth worrying that much yet because n is also quite far away.

That was Germany's plan. Go to at least 80% renewable and fill up the rest with natural gas power plants that can change the load quickly. Oops.

Germany’s problem wasn’t the end goal but the path to it.

That was literally everybody's plan. The alternative was to continue using coal while ramping up renewables.

For all the handwringing about the turned off nuclear plants they were getting old in the tooth and wouldnt have made a substantive difference to the current crisis. New plants would take 3x as long and cost 3x as much.

France is in just as much shit as germany this winter coz their nuke plants are aging out.

The realistic alternatives for germany avoiding a gas crisis were dont turn off coal plants "just in case a war with russia starts" or dont try to rile up russia.

Or build LNG import terminals.

Good luck doing that in the next 3 months.

Sure, but you were talking about options to avoid the crisis before it happened.

Fair point. I still doubt that it'd be enough, though. It just changes the bottleneck from port capacity to shipping capacity.

Japan manages to run on LNG imports. If Germany had the import infrastructure and started waving it's chequebook around, the ships would come.

They could use hydrogen instead of natural gas. Today, green hydrogen in Europe would be cheaper per BTU than natural gas.

Its unclear if we even have the metal mining capacity (or the ores in the ground) to do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc

A very compelling case and the material for 100% renewables is staggering. How this can be ignored is bewildering.

A discussion at:

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/wuc4vg/assoc_prof...

Simon Michaux presents the deck of data showing details of where his calculations are coming from that show even the first generation of renewables to replace fossil fuels is going to outstrip our capacity to source the minerals (lithium, copper, vanadium, manganese, cobalt, etc required for only the first generation of renewable energy) and the amount of energy to be replaced based on efficiencies is exorbitant. Summary: EROI going down, mineral requirements going way up spell issues moving forward.

Right from the introduction he assumes all EVs will be using Li ion which is already being phased out of everything but top performance luxury vehicles, then goes on to double count the storage asking where one could possibly find a few trillion Wh of batteries. Then blindly asserts that recycling will be impractical when recycling facilities already exist and are fighting over access to dead batteries.

He then bemoans the lack of a better solution which, as the people who have been promoting renewables for half a century have been saying the entire time while the infrastructure was torn down, is trains and ebikes (or just bikes in most areas).

Every single statement is fractally wrong and I'm only a paragraph in.

I’m interested in the new phase out and the realistic time frame. It’s not this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/24/22898666/panasonic-4680-t... Currently recycling is very low. I think he’s focused on what’s likely in production for the near future and the real material problem of all infrastructure ( its massive)

I'm hoping we can spend some tax money on real infrastructure rather than handouts for rich people to line elon musk's pockets. A train line, a bike lane and a handful of trolley busses take far less network upgrades than 10,000 luxury cars.

It would also help immensely if we could find our sanity and build some 400kg LEVs and NEVs with a 2kWh battery and a 150cc range extender rather than 2-5t padded ego protectors with 50-100x as much battery.

The bus and bus network of the future is more likely to be built and operated by Elon Musk than any Government agency. Auto-routing, and segregation by socio-economics (based on rider ratings and enforced subscription fees) is the killer feature of a sustainable mass transit system.

So just saying the quiet part out loud now, huh?

Those who made such "simulation" probably do have forgot or never learn a classic engineering practice (at least in Europe engineering) witch is named resilience.

We need resilient systems as more resilient as bigger is the impact of their eventual failure. In other terms stating we can made a big and complex enough smart grid to run "almost" an renewable means spend an incredible amount of resource to build a hyper-fragile unmaintainable monster that can malfunction at best most of the time.

Also the "little storage" they state is not little at all and most importantly it does NOT LAST LONGER. So far we have some long-lasting storage (pumped hydro) witch is very effective where you have enough mountains and basins, witch might be true for let's say Norway and to a little extent Swiss, but certainly not for let's say Germany. Compressed air storage seems to offer an option at a sufficient scale, but so far only some experimental plants exists and they have a significant amount of fragility and risks. Long story short: we haven't enough storage on scale to deploy almost only intermittent sources of power. BEVs can compensate an unstable grid for homes, but not for industry, hospitals, big infrastructures etc. Long story short those who claim such possibility follow this classic: https://www.commitstrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Strip... sorry I do not have one in English but I think anyone can translate quick enough. A video equivalent is https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg

It's not much different than https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... something that MIGHT BE partially true, in pure math, but practically false. Fails to understand the real feasibility of such projects is probably the root cause of all managerial driven projects fails.

Norway has very little pumped hydro, even though they have 50% of all hydro in Europe. The flexibility is gained by just postponing consumption if demand is low or alternative supply is high.

Of course, these days, there is rarely any surplus power being generated, so Norway is just exporting as much as they can spare (and then some).

If you want to play around with a toy model of this problem, there is this website: https://model.energy/

While 120 GWh of electricity storage may be remotely feasible to build now, I would not characterize it as "little" in any way, shape or form.

It’s roughly 2 years worth of EV batteries sold in Australia right now.

So, calling it little storage actually sounds reasonable.

I'm very impressed to learn about Snowy 2.0. Of course, it's not a silver bullet - in a renewable world, storage will have to be fairly distributed across the grid to maintain frequency.

For comparison, it seems Germany uses nearly 2x more electricity than Australia and currently has about 10x less pumped storage (including wip) than what Snowy 2.0 will have alone.

How does this analysis map to an all-electric car future? People generally need their cars during the day and charge them at night.

An all-electric car future involves charging stations at destinations as well at home, so cars can be charging during the day as well.

5 hours of grid-scale storage seems like a lot.

On its own, it does seem like a lot.

Thinking about the nature of renewables where I live, it seems so small as to be not worth mentioning; January will often have a week to several weeks of heavy cloud cover and little wind. A mere 5 hours of capacity is a pittance.

Australia, on the other hand, could easily make more sense, as I imagine the outback to be sunnier year round and maybe windier.

Cloud doesn't mean solar stops working - the decrease is 30-60% depending on thickness, but there's still very meaningful generation.

Especially depending on the season - clouds in the summer also typically correspond with a big drop in AC demand, reducing the amount of electricity required. That's why OPs modeling is so interesting, "real" daily data for an entire year is great for this type of planning.

the solar panel's I've used in off-grid applications put out 10% on cloudy days.

We get about nine and a half hours of sun in January, assuming no clouds. That leaves around 14-15 hours of no production, assuming there isn't sufficient wind (also often the case in January).

Panels operating at 30% capacity for 9 hours cannot be offset by 5 hours worth of storage. It simply isn't enough storage, even if the panels were operating at 100% capacity. Adding more storage really isn't a great solution either; I'm guessing that you would be hard pressed to get 15 hours worth of storage out of 9 hours of sunlight when the hours of darkness start at 4:30 PM, especially if everyone moves to electrical cooking, water heating and clothes drying, which some states are starting to compel.

So, the two obvious solutions remain- import stored energy from out of state, or using non-renewables as a base load a few months out of the year. We'll need to pay for burying tonnes of HVDC lines (stringing them up in tornado prone areas isn't a great call, imho) or the expense of more nuclear plants (unpopular and, currently at least, uneconomical) or pulling CO2 out of the air to offset natural gas (also expensive).

HVDC lines seem the cheapest, though sourcing the energy will take years of production and inter-state agreements to get to the point where the south is producing (and storing!) enough to send the excess north.

You can also over-provision solar and wind to factors well above 100%, and still be more economical than burning fossil fuels.

The US can't even provision 100% capacity because of BANANA, let alone over-provision.

it also creates another problem - solar generation drop off very quickly when the sun is obscured. going from 100% to 10% or 20% in many cases. Where doe the power come from during these swings? What generation source can ramp up and down at that speed?

Synchronous condensers or smart batteries. Australia has deployed a lot of the former to deal with this problem at solar farms.

Australia uses synchronous condensers and batteries for frequency regulation, not energy delivery.

The grid is always managed such that any single plant or transmission line can trip at any time without causing voltage or frequency collapse. Clouds going over your solar farm is like the plant tripping but not as bad.

What percentage of the population lives in climates like yours? If I had to guess, maybe something like 10-20% of the worlds population?

My gut tells me the vast majority of the worlds population lives in locations that are more similar to Australia's climate than in climates like yours. So we start there, and overtime things get cheaper, we find better solutions to long duration storage, and then we start tackling the harder climates/geographies.

Many of the countries with climate similar to Australia do not have the purchasing power of most northern countries, so they're currently building new cold power at a rapid pace.

It also doesn't sound like actually enough. They never have outages longer than 5 hours?

And even with fully renewable sources they would never have periods longer than 5 hours without much generation?

Hence the overgeneration.

Looks like they used Gas peaker plants (labeled "Other") to make up the difference during the times that was necessary.

Not if we figure out vehicle-to-grid.

Developed countries have a couple of weeks worth of natural gas in strategic reserves. I don't see why we couldn't do that with gas made from CO2, water, and electricity. Or ammonia. Or maybe hydrogen.

Is it really though? How many gigawatts of gas peaker plants and all the associated infrastructure sit around waiting for the tens or hundred hours they're needed?

Turns out, it's a lot - and it costs the ratepayers:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/just-how-much-b...

> Wood Mackenzie calculates the average peaker plant capacity factor will sit between 5 and 6 percent over the next two decades. That amounts to a low number of hours for storage to replicate.

In New York City, ratepayers are paying billions of dollars for polluting gas peakers that sit idle.

https://www.cleanegroup.org/ceg-projects/phase-out-peakers/

* An estimated $4.5 billion in ratepayers funds have gone to support the continued operation of the city’s peaker plants – most of which operate no more than a few hundred hours each year.

* Even though the power plants don’t run often, they can be significant contributors to local air pollution – accounting for more than 10 percent of nitrous oxide (NOx) emissions on high ozone days.

Luckily we have the technology to both start replacing gas peakers with storage, and roll out demand response and load shedding to reduce peak demand.

For example, my employer is a big power user. On a couple days in the summer during peak heat, the utility requests curtailment. The plant managers can respond by switching HVAC operation plans, shift some loads to the overnight - the utility saves money on peak generation, and the company saves a ton of demand charges. Win-win.

This is going to come up a lot in future, so we should be careful to seperate two things:

1. Money spent on having generators on standby when they are used only 5% of the time

2. Money spent on fossil fuels for those plants when they actually run.

1 is money well spent, 2 is a problem to be solved but just carbon taxing it is probably enough to consider it solved.

Luckily, the high cost of 1, makes it easier to justify adding batteries or a thousand other things that help to reduce 2. But you know people are going to point to the same peaker plants we've had for years and say "look how expensive renewables are!".

Also, we've already built the gas plants. Which is probably a big chunk of the cost (they'll just be spreading that cost across the hours that they intend to run during their working life).

Based on some back-of-the envelope calculations, a single Powerwall would provide about 5-10 hours of "house run" for the average house, and residential use is about 1/3 of all electrical use.

So a Powerwall on every house gets us a third of the way there. That seems entirely within possibility.

The "Victorian Big Battery" cost about 100 million to build and provides 450MWh, so at those prices the 120GWh they calculate for 5 hours would cost about 25 billion.

Not outrageous in the scale of nation building projects.

They won't use batteries for grid scale storage, that's a bit too expensive. They'll probably use hydro, some sort of heated mass or compressed air. Or gas, it's much better than coal at least.

I think in this model it is actually batteries. They pair pretty economically with solar to smooth output on the daily cycle.

They also include existing Hydro in their model, plus 'other' which is what mostly covers the storage on longer scales.

But there's easy answers for the rest too. It's just not modelled in this very simple model because most of the heavy lifting is always going to be solar and wind and that's probably the point they're trying to make.

I think Australia will use mostly batteries, but we are building more hydro. I think hydro is miscast as being green though, when in reality it causes enormous ecological destruction.

Hydro is also intermittent - it requires the right amount of rainfall, currently hydro in Australia is not able to reach full generation because it will flood downstream as it's been a wet year.

Hydro is not that cheap (depending on the metric you need) - see an example[1] comparing Australian hydro to the aforementioned Victorian Big Battery.

[1] https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/snowy-2-vs-battery-stora...

For 25 billion, you could have two Olkiluoto-like nuclear blocks that actually produce energy and not just store it. For several decades.

(Olkiluoto is considered notoriously over budget.)

That wouldn't solve the problem though, because the NEM is a very long thin grid.

Prices have roughly halved since then, and will likely halve again when a winner of the not-lithium battery competition emerges (which is looking very much like sodium ion as it's entering mass production). Everyone is expecting another halving after that but before 2035 even with no single clear winning outcome. After that prices become dominated by steps that don't typically get cheaper, so prices much below $30 (or a bit over 10% of the Big Battery) are unclear.

Model.energy is a good website for modeling a 100% renewables grid.

The missing piece for me in any renewable puzzle is evidence. At a grid level (either state or national) has anyone actually figured out how much storage we need? Based on say a P90 worst case, what % of power is down, for how long, and how much storage do we need to manage that?

Or any such similar study. Traditional power gen is much easier. Plonk it down and essentially it works (with various stabilisation mechanisms in place). Renewables however take a lot more planning.

If anyone does end up checking this. I'm pro-renewables. I'm genuinely interested in to get info on this. I've searched and can't find squat.

I wonder how would the results vary if for every MW of renewables there was 100kWh of storage (using flywheels, lipo, thermal rock, gravity, etc...). I really believe a future with 100% renewables is very, very close. Will happen in the 2030s.

That’s only 6 minutes of peak load worth of storage (assuming it’s rated on output kWh, perhaps only 5 minutes otherwise). If you have three different types of renewables, all equally sized, and uncorrelated, it’s 18/15 minutes against a single type of renewable being offline.

That doesn’t seem like enough for a 100% renewables grid to be 3 9’s reliable.

Demand can be regulated to meet supply using various ways (eg pricing, quotas, etc).

Pricing is a poor tool as the signal doesn't propagate quickly enough. Quotas just means blackouts, and that isn't ever going to fly politically.

Disagreed on both:

Demonstrably pricing already technically works in many hourly priced markets in face of difficult conditions - the swings are not that fast and the time quantum can technically be made much smaller still, there is no fundamental signal propagation speed bottleneck in sight.

Quotas yield cutoffs only if you exceed your quota, so you would still get power constantly for light loads unless you err by blowing your quota. This is far better than getting blackouts.

Pricing doesnt propogate fast enough only if you assume that we cant predict the weather.

It's already working in the UK - power company sends a message saying between 2am-4am power will be free.

each time somebody claims something is impossible, consider how much he is benefiting from the status quo

When somebody claims something is impossible, maybe the status quo will be maintained, or maybe some alternative plan will be started.

On the other hand, if someone argues for doing something that they know is impossible, it may be an even stronger indication that they may benefit from the status quo. In such a situation, those who advocate for an alternative, proven but less sexy option may be those who really seek progress.

120GWh of storage is needed (5hours). A MegaPack of Tesla has 3 MWh capacity, so we'd need the equivalent of 40000 of them... Ouch!

According to [1], there were about 20 million cars registered in Australia in 2021. If we turn them all electric, with an average battery size of 50KW/h, we'll get about 1TW/h of storage that can be charged during periods of overproduction and feed part of their capacity back to the grid when needed.

Electric car sales are currently low in Australia, with ~2% of new cars sold in 2021. But they are growing exponentially: ~2000 electric vehicles were sold in 2018, ~7000 in 2019/2020 and ~20'000 in 2021. [2][3]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/632547/australia-registe... [2] https://electricvehiclecouncil.com.au/wp-content/uploads/202... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/31/new-elec...

If all cars in Germany would would be EV and could be used for storage, it would be 2 days of power consumption.

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