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.
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.
I think that's a bit of a straw man, the key thing is to reduce the peak, rather than get to steady state.
As you move away from that, the gains drop quickly, especially versus managing the demand variance with on-grid storage.
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.
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.
Just throw software at it. I know Musk does not believe that, but essentially it has to work.
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.
Batteries as part of the central grid can help, of course.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Do we ever actually need to move our $1-10/MWh peak solar energy through our $100-200/MWh grid?
Edit: typo corrected, I said level 3 previously
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
> 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.
What else would you need to support L2 than an extra breaker entry for a 100A?
Basically, the problem that we're experiencing is that everybody in the neighborhood has already maxed out their service. Infrastructure upgrades are painful.
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...