Texas solar and wind resources saved consumers nearly $28B over 12 years
utilitydive.com
utilitydive.com
Another way to think about it is if renewables were saving us a lot of money over fossil fuels, shouldn't our fuel billsbe going down? Most utilities are regulated so they are not allowed to keep excess profits. But even before the spike in oil prices related to Ukraine, the places with a higher proportion of renewables have higher energy costs than those without. So where are these so-called savings?
You could make the alternative argument that we need to use renewables despite their greater cost to help the environment, and in the hope that greater use leads us down the learning curve to lower costs in future, but that's clearly not the argument being made by the posted article
I believe the point is that the cost/kW to consumers has remained steady despite the large increase in the price of fossil fuels. See https://www.texaselectricityratings.com/resources/historical... (there has been a sharp increase this year, which counters the argument made, but otherwise steady since 2016).
The cost of the fuel also doesn't account for costs they can externalize (ecosystem, healthcare) and the political issues it causes (Saudi Arabia gets by with more shit than they would otherwise, Russia is a big problem).
For example, for batteries charged directly from a paired solar installation, the cost is estimated to be $85-$158/MWh. [0] The rest of the solar instal costs $28-$37/MWh, unsubsidized. If 3/4 of energy consumption is from the primary solar install, and 1/4 from storage, then you have a firm energy source at a cost of $42-$67/MWh. The national average for generation cost of electricity is something like $50-$60/MWh, (with the rest of the average price of $130/MWh going to transmission and distribution).
So today, solar plus storage offers cost competitive, zero carbon energy in the average US location. And costs are going to drop by 50% over the next decade or two.
We have a really bright energy future, where energy is cheap and plentiful and carbon free. And the faster we build new renewable resources, the faster the technology gets better, and the faster the prices drop.
Slowing down the deployment of renewables is a huge risk that makes us all poorer, and also happens to make our climate challenge worse. We should be doing everything we can to massively expand solar wind and battery production capacity and deployment, as fast as possible.
The tech is ready, it just needs to be deployed.
[0] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Batteries are reasonably priced per unit, but they do not scale reasonably. Batteries will not provide grid scale storage in our lifetime, IMO.
I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times, with as much wind & solar as needed to provide for variable load.
The usual place: factories.
Which are getting built as fast as people can get the investment money and the planning permits.
> It will be decades before we have the manufacturing capacity to make that many batteries,
Even if that was correct (from what I've seen, half of what we need is already being planned and is scheduled for completion before 2030), even then it would be fine, as we only have a critical need of them when renewables become a dominant part of the power grid.
> assuming we have the natural resources to make that possible.
We do, despite the memes.
> I think the concept of grid scale storage is misguided Fission (and hopefully fusion) can provide base load at all times
If the whole world did that with fission, we'd run out of fissile materials pretty fast.
As far as I can determine the typical commenter believes that a lithium-ion battery is just solid lithium. I believe this is a result of a sustained campaign of disinformation driven by fossil fuel interests.
In reality, a standard 18650 cell contains less than a gram of lithium.
The cathode alone contributes to half of the cost of a lithium ion battery. Shortages of lithium are indeed driving up the prices of batteries. If doesn't matter if a small amount of it is necessary, if obtaining even that small amount is expensive.
Ingenuity can't change thermodynamics. There's a minimum amount of lithium necessary to hold a charge. Realistically the only reliable path of grid scale battery storage is a different batter chemistry, but none has proven as effective as lithium ion so far.
This has nothing to do with thermodynamics and everything to do with you parroting anti-renewable propaganda.
Heck, you can zoom out and propose storage mechanisms other than electrochemical. That true, but again most of the talk is focused on lithium ion batteries because that's presently the most effective option.
"Most effective" varies between use cases. LiIon is fantastic for drones and personal electronics, but the reason it's used for cars is that Elon Musk is a very capable salesman and he bet on it — ten years ago, when Tesla was a cute startup but not a manufacturing behemoth, most of the talk I remember was still about hydrogen fuel cells.
I think used car batteries are likely to be a significant part of the global power grid because there will be enough of them, and it's a good reuse option before they need to be fully recycled into new car batteries.
If they're cheap enough to use directly in this way (and they seem to be already in some specific circumstances), great. If not, doesn't matter too much, there are too many alternatives for me to worry about it.
Recycling also doesn't alter the fundamental disparities in scale. Production needs to increase by close to two orders of magnitude to make any significant amount of grid storage. We're struggling to keep pace with just EV demand for batteries, adding just one hour of grid storage for the USA (about 500GWh) would eat up an entire year's worth of batter production.
What alternatives are you talking about? The existing alternatives aren't presently being used because lithium based chemistries beats them in cost. Other storage systems like compressed air are in their infancy and it's unclear if they'll become cost effective enough.
Let me re-use your logic: we don't need solar, or wind, or storage. We'll just use fusion. Fusion is making big strides each year. There's no limit to the number of ways we can squeeze together two hydrogen atoms, so if the tokamak doesn't work out there's too many alternatives for me to think about.
This just isn't the case. There are many large-scale lead-acid energy storage installations.
Irrelevant, it's a cost reduction.
> The recycled batteries would be cheaper to source, but the more frequent replacement drives up labor costs.
Insignificant, and automatable.
> Recycling also doesn't alter the fundamental disparities in scale.
Unimportant, the scaling up is already occurring. Currently planned infrastructure gets us half way all by itself by 2030. There's no need to hypothesise about beyond that, that's a problem for investors and governments.
> Production needs to increase by close to two orders of magnitude to make any significant amount of grid storage.
Yes, and?
> We're struggling to keep pace with just EV demand for batteries,
Which is why Tesla is investing in mining and alternative chemistries.
> adding just one hour of grid storage for the USA (about 500GWh) would eat up an entire year's worth of batter production.
Unimportant, more factories and more mines are being built as fast as people can find investors. Assuming today's output is a constant going forward is only useful for extremely short time horizons; in this context, extremely short is in the order of 6-12 months, given how fast global capacity is changing.
> What alternatives are you talking about? The existing alternatives aren't presently being used because lithium based chemistries beats them in cost.
False: https://insideevs.com/news/575956/tesla-battery-chemistries-...
> Other storage systems like compressed air are in their infancy and it's unclear if they'll become cost effective enough.
Hydroelectric and hydrogen are both large scale, easy to make.
China recently finished a big hydroelectric plant. We have not run out of places we can fill will water, not even places that fill themselves with water.
Hydrogen electrolysis is so easy that it predates alternators and dynamos, and I did it myself when I was single-digit-years-old. There hasn't been much point to it until recently as it's a store rather than a source, but now we have solar cheaper than natural gas, it's trivial and obvious.
> Let me re-use your logic: we don't need solar, or wind, or storage. We'll just use fusion. Fusion is making big strides each year.
Logic without a connection to reality is not useful.
Fusion, to my personal frustration, is not making "big" strides each year, certainly not if you are defining the current growth rate of batteries (let alone renewables) as anything less than "extremely big".
Logic is also not useful when you ignore some of the consequences of your assumptions, e.g., the best current estimates for the quantity of superconductors needed to make 2 TW of fusion reactors (ITER magnet is ~1000 tons and the reactor is 500 MW-thermal) is also enough for a lossless global power grid.
> There's no limit to the number of ways we can squeeze together two hydrogen atoms, so if the tokamak doesn't work out there's too many alternatives for me to think about.
You are currently using a lithium ion or lithium polymer battery.
Demonstrate a working fusion reactor that makes more electricity than it consumes. You only get to count the sun if you're willing to use PV.
This is the crux of your mistake: you're treating all futures as equals, when the environmental goals need us to act as quickly as possible.
Fission is too slow to build, and we have working designs; fusion is too slow to build even the experimental reactors whose useful descendants are currently scheduled to arrive after it's too late. The new fusion startups? Well, good luck to them, I wish them the best, but any policy decisions that assume they will be ready to start building their own reactor factories before the already-planned-just-not-yet-built battery factories are finished, is wishful thinking.
Or do you think it's unfair to count "merely" planned battery factories and mines, even though there's nothing fundamentally novel about them?
Nobody has ever commercially deployed hydrogen storage, and most hydrogen is produced via steam reformation. The fact that you performed electrolysis as a child does not somehow mitigate the difficulties of using it as a form of grid storage. If you do have a plan to make it viable, go talk to VCs and you'll be a billionaire. But alas, actually delivering grid storage is harder than making promises.
Because it wasn't previously useful.
Now it is starting to get useful.
Do you understand the concept of "change"? That the future is not always like the present?
> and most hydrogen is produced via steam reformation.
Why do you think that's relevant?
> If you do have a plan to make it viable, go talk to VCs and you'll be a billionaire.
The billionaires are already doing this. Literally. That specific thing is being done on the orders of the richest person on the planet, as part of a plan to get even richer.
He's hardly the only one.
This is why a lot of new infrastructure in this field is getting funding and being built.
This is why the infrastructure that has been planned and whose construction is in progress is so much larger than what currently exists.
This isn't "crossing my fingers and hoping", it's the default outcome unless something else makes it all redundant.
All of the issues you're using to doubt this are "throw money at them and they go away" type of problems, and enough money being thrown at them to be interesting.
Fusion, sadly, is still in the "throw money at the problems and we expect to find new ones" category.
> There's a minimum amount of lithium necessary to hold a charge. Realistically the only reliable path of grid scale battery storage is a different batter chemistry, but none has proven as effective as lithium ion so far.
Given that the cement talks about a minimum amounts of lithium to hold a charge, good faith readers are capable of comprehending that this is talking about lithium based battery chemistries.
Don't waste your energy. The ignorance of the 75th percentile journalist is stunningly broad and deep; it's no wonder that ordinary people haven't a clue.
> We do, despite the memes.
Markets disagree: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
The common discourse around lithium ion batteries doesn't comprehend the idea of input limitations. If they were taken back to 1920, they'd look at how a car cost $100,000 in 1910 and $10,000 in 1920 and conclude that cars will cost $1,000 in 1930, $100 in 1940 and $10 in 1950. They'll just build more iron mines and steel mills. That's not how it works: mining isn't as amenable to order of magnitude increases: A car cannot cost less than it's constituent input materials, and mining and metallurgy can't deliver at that scale.
I'm not sure I agree with that at all. Even Fox News reported on the IEA's "we need more mineral extraction than fossil fuel extraction" report from a few years ago, because my anti-wind-power father got on the phone to tell me as soon as he heard it, as if it would surprise me at all. Everybody knows we need this stuff, and I have never encountered a person that disagrees in the least.
Cost drops for lithium ion batteries are not coming from lower input costs, and in fact input costs are going up.
Batteries are getting cheaper because of process improvements, using less materials, less labor, etc. The same thing happened in solar, cost drops come from improved tech that use less material and manufacturing improvements, not from cheaper inputs.
The story of industrialization is a story of innovating around materials shortages, finding alternatives, and continually outcompeting the older less innovative companies. I don't know why problem suddenly forget this when it comes to renewables.
Again, were going down years ago but aren't going down now. So the entire premise of this comment is on a broken foundation.
As new markets open up and new applications become feasibly, prices will experience temporary spikes due to supply constraints, but it would be foolish to think that these somehow stop the future drop in prices. You see it all over the drop in solar prices; every temporary price increase results in a huge influx of capital, new production capacity, and improvements to manufacturing tech that comes with that.
Solar, similarly, isn't seeing the same order-of-magnitude improvements anymore. It was, back when it was new technology and big improvements could be made. But now the cells themselves are near the thermodynamic maximums: there's fundamentally only so much energy you can store with a gram of lithium. Consequently, the price drops are miniscule compared to what they used to be.
As stationary batteries become a market of their own, some of these requirements can be relaxed; engineers can focus on capital cost and cycle life. (This is already happening with early-stage technologies like carbon polymer, redox flow, and molten salt, which are already competitive with lithium chemistries.)
This allows, and will almost certainly result in, speeding up the rate at which battery costs fall.
1. Similar to the situation for PV cells up to about 2004 - 2005: they were a sideline business for wafer makers focused on logic semiconductors. After crossing over to having their own silicon production (by 2009) the fall in PV cell costs accelerated.
There's about a 16% reduction in cost per doubling of cumulative production.[1]
If announced capacity expansions and renewables commitments come true, we can expect four cumulative doublings of installed PV modules in the next decade, which drops their price by half.
However perovskites could gazump that. If their calendar lifetime can be made acceptable (currently around 10 years), they offer capital PV module costs about a tenth of today's.
Also a version of Amdahl's law applies. Modules are now under 20% of total system cost: cost like the inverters, the connection to the grid, earthworks, structures and wires, installation labor, and so on, add up.
Putting batteries on the PV farm means most of these costs are only incurred once, for much more electricity produced.
1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
What's your source?
This was a surprising claim, so I tried googling, but none of my first 50 or so results were more recent than by 2020.
That said, I don't have the numbers whining battery price increases, but I would expect that when Lazard releases 2022 data in the coming weeks it will show an increase in cost over 2022. There is absolutely massive demand, and supple chain shortages for all sorts of parts on battery installs which is increasing costs.
And all the car manufacturers are about 3-5 years behind where they should be in securing their own production capacity, leading to massive shortages of batteries for cars. And since cars are a higher margin product than utility installs, the car market is going to get served before the utility scale storage market when it comes to allocating limited production capacity. (That said most utility storage is LFP, which is not usually the preferred chemistry for US cars where customers still want massive batteries).
There is a temporary shortage of lithium refining capacity, taking in lithium ore from the mines and producing lithium carbonate /lithium oxide in the purity required for battery manufacturing.
That drove up the price of refined lithium carbonate and therefore finished lithium cells and battery packs.
Note the "temporary". It's fairly quick and easy to expand refining capacity, but it had been in oversupply for a long time, so people were caught napping.
There may soon (2 years?) be a shortage of lithium mining capacity, but miners are jumping on the bonanza, so I don't expect that to happen.
1) we stopped putting much effort into looking when we had more than we could mine — there's not much point looking inside mountains when there are known huge salt lakes where evaporation has conveniently concentrated it on the surface.
2) the rate of discovery (in the "you're not literally tripping over it") category implies there is much more that is still easy to find. The estimated total yet to be located is far more than we need.
And 3), batteries aren't reliant on lithium, lithium is merely convenient and cheap. Sodium-ion batteries are available as an alternative.
But these processes are getting more efficient. And you can also recover other salts from seawater that may also be commercially useful.
This is a planetary scale resource that can be "mined" from just about any coastline anywhere in the world.
What is your basis for the second part, that batteries can not scale? This seems to be an article of faith among many, but there's no data that can back it up, and it doesn't pass a basic sniff test, using common comparisons.
For example, a car that drives 300,000 miles in its lifetime, at say 30mpg, would consume 10,000 gallons of gasoline, weighing approximately 100,000 pounds. This is an order of magnitude more weight than the battery, and the battery can be recycled into new batteries afterwards, it's not even consumed. Why, with this fantastic reduction in the amount of input materials needed, would batteries of all things run out of materials? State your reasoning, please!
We are currently producing ~300GWh lithium ion batteries per year, and will likely 10x our production every five years, according to the industry reference I heard a year or two ago.
The idea that we won't have grid scale batteries within our lifetimes is contradicted by actual reality, today.
Competing batteries to fission is a sever blind spot that seems endemic. We have a shipping off the shelf tech that is scaling at an amazing rate, yet it's compared to science fiction that has been decades away for half a century.
This is exactly the blindness people have about batteries, and it's why all the traditional car manufacturers have been caught completely flat footed in the transition to EVs
All other areas of energy are going to be caught completely flat footed because Pepe for some reason believe fantasies about batteries rather than the real operating truth right in front of their eyes. What I can't figure out is, why?
That's fusion, not fission.
Though certainly it's possible fission has missed the window and, by the time terawatts of it could be designed, approved and built, solar, wind and others will have taken over.
Sea mining and breeders are significantly less real than 46% efficient solar or 1200Wh/kg AlS batteries.
Your "at scale" is a tiny fraction of the scale that would be needed, and at that larger, true scale, current commercially demonstrated nuclear technology would quickly fail. Breeders would be needed to enable use of much more expensive uranium ores (or thorium), and those are not demonstrated at even your smaller scale.
> Your "at scale" is a tiny fraction of the scale that would be needed, and at that larger, true scale,
Which of the tech listed here has this "true scale": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33387011 ?
I don't think the argument that scaling has not been demonstrated is a strong argument, unless there is a good reason to think the scaling won't work. There isn't a good reason to think that for renewables overall. In particular: limits on area are not sufficient, and limitations on particular storage technologies (say, from materials requirements) also fail, since there are many different storage technologies, some of which require no rare materials at all.
See, there's a difference between scaling and scaling.
It is a well-established fact that to provide the same stable production on the same scale as existing nuclear reneables need to be either vastly overprovisioned or have extremely high-capacity storage available. Possibly, the combination of both.
And yet, somehow, when we talk about scaling, it's suddenly "oh no, nuclear cannot scale to support the entire world, it's proof it cannot scale" when renewables can barely sustainably reach the existing scales.
> I don't think the argument that scaling has not been demonstrated is a strong argument, unless there is a good reason to think the scaling won't work.
I will remind you that the original comment I was replying to was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33386636
It was talking about storage solutions which are all but required for renewables. And literally none of those solutions have been proven to work at scale. Moreover, some of those solutions are at best theoretical.
But sure, do tell me how it's not a strong argument?
> limitations on particular storage technologies (say, from materials requirements) also fail, since there are many different storage technologies, some of which require no rare materials at all.
Yes. There are "many storage solutions". Go ahead and show me those that work at scale.
And literally no one was talking about the need or lack thereof of rare materials for that storage. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
The nuclear industry was briefly almost at the current a scale of renewable + storage production. It is now limited by availabity of fuel and cannot grow without new technologies.
Didn't know we are living in 1985.
> Compare to around 500GWh/yr of already existing battery production
1. Are these batteries all used in grid energy storage, or are you taking the full output including things like batteries for remotes?
2. How many of those batteries are actually scalable solutions, deployed, and working. It's kinda funny how my opponents continuously try to steer away the conversation away from this.
3. Compare that to "nuclear power plants generate about a tenth of the world's electricity" which amounts to about 2 653 344 GWh [1]
> The nuclear industry was briefly almost at the current a scale of renewable + storage production.
Storage solutions are not even remotely near nuclear. Without storage renewables have to be significantly overprovisioned to be used reliably.
To repeat again.
It's funny how you pulled the conversation entirely away from discussing tech that often is strictly theoretical, and most of which hasn't been proven to work at scale on the level of even one nuclear plant to... «but what about nuclear».
> Your "at scale" is a tiny fraction of the scale that would be needed, and at that larger, true scale,
Which of the tech listed here has this "true scale": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33387011 ?
----
Edit: don't bother. This discussion isn't in good faith, and being willingly derailed into discussing everything and anything other then the original statements I replied to.
I'm not going to engage in this conversation further.
----
Well we can compare to new capacity added in 2021 if you like? There were 5GW added. There were enough batteries made in 2021 for a 50 hour storage for every nuclear plant that came online with plenty to spare.
The point is that if renewables + batteries are not of sufficient scale, then nothing is. If the bar for pursuing a solution to a problem is that the problem already be solved, then noone will ever solve anything.
Lithium battery production is much closer than the scale of nuclear construction ever was. Having a tantrum when this is pointed out doesn't change it.
Do tell. Then how can it be that globally, in 2021, wind + solar delivered more energy to the grid than nuclear did? 10.31% of total world production vs. 9.94% for nuclear.
Anyone with even a passable knowledge of how grids work, and who isn't stuck arguing in bad faith, would recognize that providing 10% of the grid requires no overprovisioning or storage whatsoever.
It seems that this milestone that you claim is so impossible was already achieved.
The nuclear shills here have given me a lot more hope for a renewable future.
Another fun scaling fact. Loading the 50 or so advanced nuclear reactors required to meet the scale of last year's renewables would require doubling world uranium output.
But really, chemical batteries will be at the TW scale by 2030 and we will have lots of chemistries for lots of varied applications and demands.
The fact that lithium is used but iron flow is less popular is a fairly strong indicator that first and second response (which NPP cannot do) is more important than accounting for daily variability right now.
Similarly sodium ion will hit the market next year and hit similar scale to current Li ion is now in about 2025. Being a smidge heavier is hardly a deal breaker for utility uses, and the reduced fire danger should lower integration costs significantly.
This was the net cost of storage, including construction, power transformers, etc. Batteries are around $150 of that cost. Note that even zero cost batteries won't eliminate more than about a third of the total cost.
What are the production figures for iron flow batteries? Also, can you point me to a market that sells them? I can see places that sell lithium ion and lithium iron phosphate batteries[1], but no such results for iron redox.
And we'll see how far sodium ion batteries go. Scaling from literally zero to 400 GWh in the span of two years is rather optimistic to put it lightly.
1. https://www.google.com/aclk?sa=l&ai=DChcSEwioxYW9y4j7AhW9MK0...
And if you put a chemistry that isn't a fire hazard directly onto an MPPT that you have already paid for, how much does it cost?
Or what if you're simply building storage for daily variability rather than a first response peaking station picked as a straw man?
> And we'll see how far sodium ion batteries go. Scaling from literally zero to 400 GWh in the span of two years is rather optimistic to put it lightly.
The manufacturing process is designed to fit existing lithium supply chains. And has had billions spent on the parts that are not drop-in. This is like claiming someone expects Olkiluoto to go from zero nuclear power to gigawatts overnight some time early next year.
Also what's your alternative proposal? Lets examine it on the same basis.
The manufacturing chain for lithium batteries is indeed designed to fit existing lithium supply chains. Which is why we're only producing 400GWh per year. Because the lithium supply can't accommodate more production.
The alternative is to do what France has already done: serial production of the same designs of nuclear plants. American nuclear construction similarly experienced much lower costs when plants were built at scale [1]. Unlike lithium mining, which as never been done at even 2% the scale required for battery grid storage, countries have indeed succeeded in converting a mostly fossil fuel grid to nuclear power in a short amount of time [2]. Again, it's been done before, with even worse technology than we have now. You're willing to assume that batter production will increase by 50-80x when there is no precedence for that scale. Meanwhile the is precedence for nuclear power being deployed more cheaply when the same designs are built repeatedly. We only need to build 3.5 nuclear plants for each one that exists in the US to get to 100% hydro and nuclear. That's a lot more feasible than increasing battery output by 100x.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Mess...
Have a fleet with around 65% capacity factor that has correlated shutdowns right in the middle of an energy crisis? Offshore wind with no storage would be a better choice. At least you'll get _some_ energy during the lulls.
> The manufacturing chain for lithium batteries is indeed designed to fit existing lithium supply chains. Which is why we're only producing 400GWh per year. Because the lithium supply can't accommodate more production.
The supply chain for sodium ion is being built to be compatible existing lithium ion factories. Expansion of those 100s of GWh of production is already being done, and even if it wasn't, building the factory, the supply chain, and then the product takes around the same time as building NPP.
> Unlike lithium mining, which as never been done at even 2% the scale required for battery grid storage, countries have indeed succeeded in converting a mostly fossil fuel grid to nuclear power in a short amount of time
Now do the level of expansion of Uranium mining.
Don't forget you need to overbuild by a factor of 3 from average to provide peaking (otherwise you'll need those exact same 4hr batteries).
You'll need about 400,000 tonnes of enriched fuel or 3 million tonnes of natural Uranium for your first fuel load. This is over 40x the existing annual supply chain. Don't forget to build 10-40x as many centrifuges as exist. You'll probably also need to massively expand sulfuric acid production. Then (assuming you can only burn what you need..which no reactors can do on a scale of minutes) you'll burn the other 75% of known reserves in about two decades. Reprocessing will give you another five years. If you want power anywhere else there's under 6 years total (or rather you just can't because you can't load the reactors even once).
Now do the same for cadmium and silver and indium for control rods. Latest generation copper metallized solar cells use about an eightth of the silver for the same net power as a comparable NPP. Also the Zirconium for fuel rods.
> First of all, can you or can you not tell me where I can order some iron redox batteries? You write that they exist at the same price point as lithium ion, but I'm not even seeing them for sale at all let alone for the same price.
Go talk to ESS, a non-retail technology not being available at retail isn't an indicator of anything. Or Natron for some aqueous sodium ion currently being sold at pilot project prices. Or of you have enough money to jump the queue I'm sure CATL will let you put in an order for a few GWh in 2025. If you ordered a few GWh I'm sure form energy would sign a contract too -- although I'm less certain they can deliver (it seems about as probable as something like Vogtle).
Well, it is. Anyone can produce lithium batteries. Whereas with the magical batteries it's "ESS Inc is the only manufacturer and holder of patents on its flow batteries".[1]
Which is not how you want to quickly ramp up production and solve storage.
The targeted production is 750MWh per year which is nothing, really.
Their biggest planned project is to have 400MWh in Australia by 2026. I'll let you do the math on how laughable that is by yourself: https://www.energy.gov.au/data/renewables
Iron redox batteries as they currently are don't really exist: the production is low, and locked behind the patent lock of a single company.
[1] https://www.energy-storage.news/ess-inc-ramps-iron-flow-batt...
Compare to the state of FNR reactors, where there is a single reactor (yet to close the fuel cycle even experimentally) that doesn't catch fire constantly (if you believe the russian government).
I'll believe it when I see it.
> Compare to the state of FNR reactors
Let's see how many people in this thread were talking about FNR reactors. Oh, look: only you. Compare this to discussions where people argue in good faith.
So what are you proposing if not one of those two options?
You were literally the only one mentioning it in the whole thread. In the response to me talking about storage technologies and batteries. Do not pretend otherwise.
> There are no other nuclear technologies that even come close to the criteria of both existing and being scalable
Thank you for derailing the conversation away from * checks notes * discussion on batteries, but you can do it on your own, I'm not going to engage further.
The only viable option for expanding nuclear is much further from reality than existing battery technology that is in the process of commercialisation.
The peak of historic new nuclear production wasn't even at the scale of existing lithium ion production.
As such there is no better option other than the other main renewable storage technologies of electrolysers and PHES.
Given that most renewables average around 25-40% capacity factor when working well, 65% during a maintenance period is a pretty good thing!
> Now do the level of expansion of Uranium mining
The USA already generates 20% of it's electricity from nuclear power. 10% of global electricity generation is through nuclear power. Recycling alone would reclaim enough fissile material to offset the increase in generation. Where are you getting the figure for 40x increases in uranium production? The reality is 5-10x at most - probably less than that because nuclear electric power isn't the only application of uranium.
> Go talk to ESS, a non-retail technology not being available at retail isn't an indicator of anything.
It means the technology is immature and doesn't have a real cost history. If you can't buy meaningful quantities of it, the price could skyrocket the moment anyone tries to provision a gigawatt hour of storage. These new types of batteries aren't being sold in any significant number, that's the reality.
Not if it's correlated, takes months, and is unplanned. And each reactor takes 5-10x as much money and resources as the same gross power. Noone builds a utility solar plant claiming it will produce nameplate wattage at night. Nuclear is always sold as if it has 90-100% availability.
> The USA already generates 20% of it's electricity from nuclear power. 10% of global electricity generation is through nuclear power. Recycling alone would reclaim enough fissile material to offset the increase in generation. Where are you getting the figure for 40x increases in uranium production? The reality is 5-10x at most - probably less than that because nuclear electric power isn't the only application of uranium.
You need to load your reactors. Bringing them online takes around 6 years of fuel -- an AP 1000 takes 100t of enriched Uranium. Your 800GW-1.2TW (minimum required to meet peak electric loads without storage, but does not touch other energy) of reactors in the US will require a 700, tonnes of natural uranium. A single fuel load for enough PWRs to make all electricity 100% nuclear world wide will require all known reserves. This is including reprocessing (MOX only gives you 15% or so more). Then you still have the other 60% of primary energy to cover.
The nuclear industry has never been at the same scale as the current lithium battery and renewable industry. And it cannot be at the same scale because it is limited by critical resource reserves -- not just a temporary limitation on extraction of a critical resource for one possible chemistry. Just matching the scale of the existing industry by installing 50GW/yr (which you've asserted is 2% of what's needed) requires doubling uranium mining.
Should read 700,000 to 1,000,000
Where is the uranium coming from? Commercial fast breeders are as mythical as a 10000Wh/kg AlS battery. All nuclear reactors that aren't fiction are just a small multiplier on the U235 supply including DT fusion.
1) Blue sky innovation - most intermittent renewables. They have toxic downsides too.
2) Gray sky innovation - Oil, gas, nuclear, etc fit perfectly here. Much of it is tried and true technology... And yes, it has downsides too
3) No-sky innovation - With space exploration, energy on the moon, mars, spacecraft, etc may be better served with laminar flow rotors using light/lasers... Just another option with diversification.
It looks like stats on 50% of the plastic on the planet have been created after 2006 seem legit, with the trash heaps in the oceans (not to mention plastic breaking down into water system contaminates). Battery technology recycling just looks like another source of toxic groundwater for future generations, since recycling has been gibberish with pretty words thus far.
The reuseable rocket technologies mean that battery technology, nuclear waste, etc can be jettisoned towards the sun after their useful life and that landfills may be a thing of the past.
Know your innovations and how well diversification copes with the farce of "one size fits all". Four seasons still exist in many places.
Furthermore, the existing global production figures are somewhere around 400GWh per year. The world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. Even just one day's worth of storage would mean dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage for over a century. Actually attempting to providing a significant amount of battery storage would spike the cost of batteries as demand exceeds supply.
The input materials for batteries have seen skyrocketing costs in the last couple years [2], and only 24% of battery cost is manufacturing. The rest is input materials. It is very dubious that batter production can keep up with the massive scale required by grid storage.
Batteries can (and are) being deployed. But not at a scale that makes any difference, and it's unlikely they ever will be.
1. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co...
2. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
3. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...
Can you point why you think this number, for installed battery cost, is somehow a contradiction of the numbers I posted? Additionally, temporary supply shortages due to massive new markers opening up as the cost drops is completely expected. All the temporary higher prices finance massive production capacity expansion that drops prices in the future. This is a well understood dynamic that we see again and again, even in fossil due production!
> Even just one day's worth of storage would mean dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage for over a century.
There are two extreme errors with writing something like this: 1) assuming that battery production stays constant, when it has been growing 10x/5 years, and we are seeing unprecedented demand for new applications. 2) Using primary energy production for comparison to electrified electricity use, when electrified versions of the fossil fuel versions require 3x-4x less electricity. This sort of basic error is as bad as comparing 1GW of solar to 1GW of nuclear without correcting for capacity factor.
With reasonable battery production scaling, we will be producing 20-30TWh/year of batteries in a decade. For comparison, it takes more than a decade for us to build a nuclear reactor in the West, so if we are in course to have a fully scaled battery production supply chain for global use, whereas we can't even scale nuclear construction in the US to match the rate at which we will be retiring our aging fleet over the next 20 years.
It's time to take a serious look at what carbon-free energy tech is on the table right now and start deploying it as fast as possible, right now, today. At the same time, we should continue research into fanciful ideas like small modular nuclear reactors, in case they pan out. But we need to go to war with the army we have right now.
Correct. And with the battery production capacity we have "on the table right now" would take more than a century to produce 24 hours of storage capacity. Assuming that there's going to be massive multiple order-of-magnitude capacity increase is not taking a serious look at the tech we have today, it's a hugely optimistic take on what we might have decades from now.
> With reasonable battery production scaling, we will be producing 20-30TWh/year of batteries in a decade.
Again, you're literally assuming that battery production figures will increase by 50-80 times within a decade. This is the complete opposite of taking "what we have on the table now", it's assuming that we'll have an industry 50-80 times larger than what we presently have. Moore's law rarely applied to produces outside of semiconductors, because most products hit bottlenecks with inputs.
> But we need to go to war with the army we have right now.
And again, "the army we have now" would take a century to produce only 16 hours worth for storage for the world via batteries. Actually, it'd take even more than that because after a century global electricity use will have increased substantially as the global south develops and wants amenities like air conditioning. I'm really puzzled by why you chose to close with this statement given that your proposal is to assume that our metaphorical army will be 50-80 times larger by the end of the decade.
This is theoretical. When I got home solar quotes, the difference before incentives between an install with and without 27 kWh Tesla backup was over $1,300/kWh.
Tiny tiny residential scale battery installations have that 5x markup that you are observing.
If you were to build your own, it's not hard to get to $300/kWh-capacity, all in, these days, even for small installs of a dozen kWh, using Chinese LFP batteries. But you won't get any of the support that your local installer gives you, and you had better know what you are doing really well...
Do you have an example? The actual cost in 2019 in the U.S. was $300 to $500/kWh [1]. The cost for the batteries alone was $190, but that’s akin to counting the cost of nuclear power by the fuel alone.
[1] https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/utility-scale_battery_...
The cost of storing and delivering the energy from the battery over its lifetime, is refered to the level used cost of storage. This includes operations costs, debt service, etc. is measured by the cost of delivering energy to the grid, and grid-scale costs are typically measured in $/MWh (as opposed to residential costs typically quotes in $/kWh).
How would you describe Table 1?
I’m contrasting the caped with the *levelized cost of storage, which though it can be measured in $/MWh or $/kWh, is measuring something completely different than the capex. And the levelized cost of storage is the relevant figure for comparing to electricity sold on the grid.
Of course, there are other important non-economic considerations.
For perspective, it takes about 1 unit of materials to generate 2 units of power from wind and solar. Significant resources are used, often on land that was formerly growing food. Oil and gas are roughly 10:1 in terms of output, with nuclear around 100:1.
~85% of world energy is currently non-renewable, relative to ~87% at the start of the millenia. Even if the world suddenly started building hundreds of nuclear facilities and blanketing the landscape with solar, wind, hydrothermal, and hydro, these investments will take decades to come into effect.
Easiest solution is to tax externalities and let the market efficiently allocate resources. Charge 100, 200, or even 500/ton for carbon emissions, allocated globally. Distribute some of the proceeds to low income countries who are still developing. Every 100/ton in taxes is ~3.5B, which could be distributed to the majority of the world who subside on less than 20 dollars per day.
Furthermore, tax air pollution. There are ~10m deaths annually from air pollution, primarily due to fossil fuels. Not to mention shortened life and health complications for the majority of the planet. Air pollution taxes could generate another couple billion in revenue.
Finally - stop subsidizing both oil and gas and renewables. Current incentives are riddled with loopholes and tax breaks. A mix of carbon and air pollution taxes would efficiently incentivize far more renewables development. Viola - more renewables and a cleaner world for eons
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/co2-emiss...
Significant collaboration would be required to mandate participation from all countries
That's not true. You are almost certainly including added taxes in the costs, and well run states tax pollution and also invest in renewables. Both of these are sensible policy responses to pollution.
It's like claiming states that tax cigarettes are using more expensive cigarette technology.
From their site-
> Our analytical and due diligence capabilities can provide significant value to early-stage inventors and professional investors and legal firms.
The “article” (and Study) also features BS projections like this:
> The drop in emissions has saved Texans between $10.2 billion and $76.4 billion in healthcare and other environmentally related costs, the report states.
These sorts of reports and headlines are aimed at people that want 3rd party validation rather than objective, unbiased analysis.
It’s even noted on IdeaSmiths LLC’s website as a speciality:
> Technical due diligence for investors vetting new ventures and inventors looking for 3rd party validation
My impression is the main hurdle for us is CEQA, which gives every homeowner, misguided Sierra Club member, and union goon a way to stop or delay the projects.
The ability to push any substantial power back into the grid always comes with that.
Consider Hawaii's solar options: https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/products-and-services/custo...
> Customer Grid-Supply Plus (CGS Plus) systems must include grid support technology to manage grid reliability and allow the utility to remotely monitor system performance, technical compliance and, if necessary, control for grid stability.
> Smart Export customers with a renewable system and battery energy storage system have the option to export energy to the grid from 4 p.m. – 9 a.m. Systems must include grid support technology to manage grid reliability and system performance.
> Customer Self-Supply (CSS) is intended only for private rooftop solar installations that are designed to not export any electricity to the grid. Customers are not compensated for any export of energy.
---
Having too much power on the grid can be as damaging as not enough. There are systems that take longer to power up and down and corresponding issues with environmental regulations.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/20/the-high-s...
> But as large as the dams are, their margins are minuscule and operating them takes unerring foresight and subtle management: let too much water fill reservoirs and a rainstorm might flood Portland; keep the reservoirs too empty and you’ll parch farmers. Send too much water over a dam’s spillway and you’ll suffocate fish with dissolved gases; send too much through its turbines and you’ll overload the electrical grid.
> ...
> It’s also brought about tension when the BPA hasn’t been able to change its output. Both wind and hydro generation are subject to nature at the extremes. In May 2011, with near-record snowmelt swelling the Columbia River and spillways at their limits under environmental regulations, the BPA had to keep the Columbia’s hydro turbines spinning. It told regional wind power producers to curtail their output by 6%. The producers howled, and in June the BPA ended up the subject of a complaint before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. At issue is what happens when too much electricity is on offer. The enormous supply of hydroelectricity during spring runoff can push electricity prices to zero—the BPA gives away electricity to local utilities for free when it’s forced to produce more than it wants to. Since wind producers enjoy production subsidies, they can push rates below zero, effectively paying other utilities to switch off their generators. Last winter, the BPA told wind producers under its balancing authority that it wouldn’t pay negative rates to them during high-water events.
Making sure that the water doesn't go over the spillways in a hydro plant during a spring peak to avoid killing fish means turning off power from other sources. In that example, it was primarily wind
That's not unreasonable. They might shut off your PV panels as a safety measure to prevent backfeeding into the local lines when utility crews are working nearby. Or when there is a supply glut - it's faster/cheaper/causes less wear to turn off several thousand[0] residential PV panels than to shut down a major generating plant for a few hours.
[0] Or maybe only a few hundred if that's all that is needed to balance the system.
I don't want them cutting off my solar panels from being able to feed my house or my batteries, unless all my batteries are all full and there's no power draw from my house.
If they don't want my solar power, then it's fine for them to refuse to accept it, but the decision of what to do with that remaining power should be left entirely on my end.
If you have specific examples of places where corruption, unenforced regulations and disrespect for property rights allowed a wind or solar farm to get built, especially in a way that shows more corruption than other locales, speak up with a source, otherwise you're just bullshitting.
It's not that hard to see why Texas is a leader in solar and wind:
1. There is a lot of land in Texas, and there are tons of "in the middle of nowhere" places where wind or solar farms aren't subject to NIMBYism.
2. Texas actually has extreme respect for property rights (many might argue too much). In contrast to many Western states, there is comparatively little federally owned land - most of it is privately owned ranch land.
3. Texas already has lower regulations and business taxes than many other states - Texas doesn't need corruption to get around stringent regulations.
Texas simply makes it easier to put up a wind or solar farm on any of the huge swaths of privately-owned "emptiness" that cover most of our state.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlins...
What does this have to do with wind or solar?
The difference is this: installing in California requires reams of permits. Installing in Texas rarely does.
It's weird, yes. But that's the way things are done in Texas.
Another great resource to explore is Robert Caro’s series of biography about Lyndon Johnson, which extends into the unique role Texas’s entry into the union (as a nominally independent state) drove some of the decisions about military base placement, etc. Also the growth of the oil infrastructure companies like Halliburton into major defense contractors.
T. Boone Pickens is also the leading guy in Texas who is deploying wind farms, and is using the same tactics.
It may be a useful exercise to follow the money and the specific individuals who are known to be involved.
Texas has an illiteracy problem too, with fiction and faith in a cesspool swirl. I had a 3 day visit this year and the meth problem outside of their large cities was noticeable too. The wind turbine arrangements have always impressed me though, driving through the state.
The methane leaks from oil/gas prospecting in both of those states also doesn't bode well for environmental stewardship. They still have to cap their greenhouse gas leaks to be 21st century compliant.
The commisions have already been paid and the services rendered. The cleanup for the 20th century is someone elses problem :p
Morbidly obese losing 5 lbs is not news.
You see it’s quite the opposite of free market forces.
Unfortunately, iirc most of the windfarms are owned by a few people, but people are getting paid for wind instead of fracking. I don't think wind and oil are at competition in Texas though. Most oil drilled in Texas isn't destined for Texas, or the US really.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2013/01/02/oil-ga...
The percentage depletion part of the tax code is specific to oil and gas, so it's not quite the same as saying it's what "ever [sic] business in the country does." I agree it's not a subsidy, but it seems like a very specific carve-out for a very specific industry and a specific commodity. It feels to the layperson that it's an odd fact that the percentage depletion can exceed the cost of the well, which makes non-viable wells suddenly viable again. That seems like favoring a specific industry in legislation. A dairy farmer cannot, for example, depreciate "future reserves" of cows milk to make a non-viable farm suddenly profitable, can they? (Understanding that there are true subsidies for farming, that may not be a good analogy).
Compared to a standard utility, which is a regulated monopoly that does five year planning based off old data and the inertia of a large corp with no competition, the Texas energy market is the Wild West. Nearly anybody can connect their project to the grid and sell at the prices they want to sell at.
And that's why Texas is installing massive amounts of battery storage, wind, and solar, compared to new natural gas. There's no mandate for GW of battery capacity, it's just people thinking they can make a buck on arbitrage of all the wind and solar electricity.
He's the guy who is buying off the politicians so that they create the zones where he can get excessive powers to do whatever he wants.
If solar panels keep getting cheaper and more efficient, I will eventually get a rooftop solar system. If I can buy a good electric car without breaking the bank then I will.
Renewables seem like a great way to meet the growing demands of an energy hungry society but if they are really good then we shouldn't have to try to scare people away from competing energy sources.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/3ffe84d3-6b56-4781-a218-a598d43e8...
What is now an issue for germany is the move away from domestic or easily replaceable fossil fuels like coal or oil in favour of gas.
I don't think that the bad behavior of one German green group is representative of all renewables proponents. Nearly everybody in the renewables space is trying to stop gas burning as quickly as possible.
https://twitter.com/curious_founder/status/15860841319429324...
One thing I do know is that I worked at First Solar from 2008 to 2016 and a couple of things things happened while I was there that don’t fit what you’re saying. First, when the cost of fossil fuels went up, we made bank because that got us closer to “grid parity”. I don’t remember anyone saying that we were in a commanding lead well over grid parity. Just that we were close enough for people to start buying. A year later when the fossil fuel prices would drop, we were back on the ropes. Second, we had a project in west Texas in the mid teens that everyone talked about as being the first, fully financially sustainable implementation of solar. The reason was because it was located in an area of highly dispersed population and very high temp extremes. So the economies of scale that made conventional plants so valuable were not there.
Anyway, I’m not armed with enough details to make a good argument, but I am suspicious of your claim.
You may be confusing "solar and wind are cheap enough to win for new construction" vs. "solar and wind are cheap enough to displace existing fossil fuel burning power plants". US electric demand has been flat for more than a decade, so there's no growth to be causing new installations.
All that said, renewables in the US have been dominating the construction of new power plants as old power plants slowly age out and need to be replaced (or need major maintenance). At some point, renewables may get cheap enough (or the fuel expensive enough) that it makes sense to install renewables to just reduce fuel usage in existing plants. We may be near that point in some locations.
The statement I was responding to was this: >>You're >10 years out of date solar and wind have been cost competitive for a long time>>
Here, for instance, just two months ago is the CEO of First Solar saying that "solar is going to be investible again [because of the Inflation Reduction Act]". This doesn't strike me as a technology that is exactly flying on its own. And again, to be clear, there is no judgement intended as to whether or not government market manipulation is justified - that's a different question.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-solar-to-invest-1-2-billi...
The Republican Party made it political as part of its efforts to establish itself as the pro-business, pro-oil, anti-regulation party[0].
Also, historically environmentalism has had cultural intersections with leftist and feminist movements, which leads in a thumbtacks-and-string way to a suspicion among the American right of a radical socialist agenda behind environmentalism which still persists, as was demonstrated with Trump's infamous tweet about global warming being a Chinese communist plot.
All of this, along with global warming skepticism and a general disdain for "expertise" and "academia" applies via the transitive property of American politics to renewable energy. There is even a dimension of anti-environmentalism/anti-renewable belief among some conservative Christians who believe God gave humanity the world to use as they saw fit, and that God will literally just fix everything.
[0]https://www.vox.com/2017/4/22/15377964/republicans-environme...
Reality is that no energy source is replacing any other, we're simply growing the overall pie. All that new wind and solar is merely added on top of natural gas electricity production, which itself is growing. For now.
Great to see this in Texas! Didn’t know they were big in this
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/fed-report-says-texas-grid-...
Remember when they had the power outage and people died? Wind turbines in Texas aren’t winterized so usage drops to around 10% in the winter. The natural gas also stopped working because it wasn’t winterized either.
Remember when the governor of Texas blamed frozen wind turbines for the disaster?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/17/texas-abbot...
Remember 45 years ago we were warned not to burn all that coal or we would cause climate change?
We’re still at 40% coal for electricity globally and it’s now too late to prevent a significant amount of warming.
But hey, the batteries are almost ready? We can’t be more than 10-20 years from widespread adoption?
Thermal generation was and is the leading cause of the outage - namely a lack of gas supply which offlined much of the states thermal generation.
My understanding wasn't that our gas supply wasn't winterized, but that with residential heating usage, the pressure in the lines was too low to safely turn on the auxiliary powerplants. Apparently it is bad if instead of leaking tiny bits of gas out of the pipes, you start leaking tiny bits of air in...
Failure of feedwater supply attributed to cold-related failure of sensors.
Once the rolling blackouts started, the rolling blackouts shut off the gas wells as the wells weren't on critical circuits... and even if they were winterized with heaters, they wouldn't be able to heat as there was no power.
The only thing the federal government has done to make it impossible is to fail to escalate subsidies.
Maybe it's closest to competitive in eastern Europe? Except the cheapest nuclear plants from Russia aren't going to be a thing now.
The only place on planet earth right now where nuclear might be financially sustainable is China, where highly skilled construction labor is very cheap, where they are building dozens of nuclear reactors in bulk, and where regulatory hurdles don't exist on account of their... administrative system.
But that is only my speculation. We don't have insight into their cost figures, and any data released by the CCP has probably been massaged.
They're also far lower capacity factor than the US (whether that's a symptom of lower reliability or of lower costs permitting curtailment is a different matter) and we know of at least two instances of cost cutting and forgery on safety critical parts.
29,000,000,000 / 29,145,505 (population) = ~$995 savings per person over 12 years
$995 / 12 years = ~$83 per year
$83 / 12 months = less than $7 per month per person.
Am I missing something?
During that event the solar was effectively zero, and wind was close to that. Plus too many gas plants were in maintenance or froze/broke, which caused outages. If Texas would have still been fully on gas/coal/nuclear, would there have been a blackout? If they would have invested more in nuclear, what would be the financial impact? Would it have operated better in the freeze?
There are trade off with every decision made. I'm trying to sus out of the state would be better off spending money in a different way.
Wikipedia on the 2021 Text Blackout (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis):
State officials including Republican governor Greg Abbott[13] initially blamed[14] the outages on frozen wind turbines and solar panels. However, data showed that failure to winterize power sources, like wind turbines and natural gas infrastructure, had caused the grid failure.[15][16] Texas's power grid has long been separate from the two major national grids to avoid federal oversight, though it is still connected to the other national grids and Mexico's;[17] the limited number of ties made it difficult for the state to import electricity from other states during the crisis.[18] Deregulation of its electricity market beginning in the 1990s resulted in competition in wholesale electricity prices, but also cost cutting for contingency preparation.
A bad outage in a 1:70 year event may be reasonable governance. If you demand people gold-plate the grid to prepare for a few bad days every 70 years, it'll really hurt all the other 69 years and however many days because a lot of money gets spent for a contingency that happens rarely.
It might make more sense to just have warm shelters ready, rather than try and make the grid robust. Give the market a chance.
Plus, practically, a 1:70 tail event is usually outside a regulator's tolerance for preparation too. COVID springs to mind as something on a similar timeframe.
The market has abjectly failed customers in texes - but the utilities made off like bandits charging outrageous amounts each time.
The texes power grid is broken and the market won’t fix it. There is a reason the regulations they don’t want to implement exist.
Texas has cheap power though. If I were moving to the US for some reason, I'd consider Texas for it's cheap power then try to mitigate the risks myself. Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean that changing it makes it better.
You're assuming that 100% reliability is the only acceptable outcome. It is possible 99% reliability and alternate mitigation is the best outcome. If people prepare for the power grid going down from time to time that will also prepare for other events and build up resiliency.
People freezing is really bad. Relying on a large and complex system working in extreme events is also bad, however. This is one for Texans to resolve for themselves, but there is a story here where the problem is actually the resiliency to the grid failing rather than the failures themselves. Cheap power + good emergency procedures is probably going to be a really cheap path, plus hit a whole heap of alternative disaster planning scenarios.
I would argue that when your power bill can skyrocket suddenly due to poor governance and mismanagement of the grid and you pay 1000s you do not have “cheap” power.
Other states, provinces, and countries manage to deliver even cheaper power, consistently, without the grid failures and profiteering thanks to regulation.
People shouldnt be dead because power companies want to make more money.
With similar weather patterns? Where are you thinking specifically?
> I would argue that when your power bill can skyrocket suddenly due to poor governance and mismanagement of the grid and you pay 1000s you do not have “cheap” power.
You feel that Texas' regulatory state is making it too difficult to extract natural gas? Because the article seems to me to be saying they need more nat gas. I disagree with subsidising nat gas for unrelated reasons, but I suppose if Texas has regulated to stop gas extraction I agree with you that they should change that.
> People shouldnt be dead because power companies want to make more money.
I'm saying that too, you might have detected.
Outlying parts of Texas that are serviced by the main power grids rather than a Texas only power grid? https://www.khou.com/article/news/investigations/texas-power...
> HOUSTON — Some parts of Texas that were battered by the winter storm of 2021 had relatively few homes lose power.
> They are primarily in areas outside of those supported by ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the electric grid for 90% of the state and operates separately from federal oversight and regulation.
> El Paso County is one place to experience minimal power outages, despite getting battered by the historic winter storm.
> “We had about three thousand people that were out during this period, a thousand of them had outages that were less than five minutes,” said Eddie Gutierrez, vice president of strategic communications for El Paso Electric.
However, those power companies have connections that cross state lines and so are federally regulated and had to do winterization of their systems as mandated by the regulators... whereas ERCOT said "yea, well, maybe we'll do it - but you can't make us."
It’s not a great set of maps but I wasn’t willing to spend more then 60 seconds doing your research for you.
The state with the cheapest electricity is actually Washington where residential customers are paying 8.53¢/kWh. Those dam democrats happen to have a lot of dam cheap green power from all those dams.
What it’s missing is all that rainfall that Washington state is known for.
So, Texas as I mentioned has minimal hydropower because it lacks rainfall, but it also suffers because it lacks large out of state rivers due to that same huge west to east elevation drop. In fact if you look at it’s rivers they each have a relatively tiny watershed. https://texasaquaticscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/C...
The Rio Grand is famous, but was never very big and currently flows through some thirsty areas.
I'd also note, the parts of texas that are not part of ERCOT didnt have wide scale outages and they are winterized.
It was the 3rd such event in 32 years. From the wiki article:
"In 2011, Texas was hit by the Groundhog Day blizzard between February 1 and 5, resulting in rolling blackouts across more than 75% of the state.[26] Many roads around Houston were impassable, and boil-water advisories were issued in several areas.[27] Following this disaster, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation made several recommendations for upgrading Texas's electrical infrastructure to prevent a similar event occurring in the future, but these recommendations were ignored due to the cost of winterizing the systems.[28] At the time the blackouts and failures in the power grid were likened to those that occurred in December 1989, after which similar recommendations were made to the state government and ERCOT, which were similarly ignored."
Second,
> practically, a 1:70 tail event is usually outside a regulator's tolerance
Where are you getting this? I can think of many, many counterexamples.
Maybe you mean to limit this to utility regulators planning for outage resiliency? I'd be curious about where that came from. (Maybe inverting the rule of 72 and... something?)
Anyway, the simple fact remains that Texas has a small, inflexible grid that's been populated with low-margin providers playing financial engineering games rather than providing resiliency, and it needs a ton of work.
Even if you are correct that the minimax they've arrived at made sense in the past, it clearly no longer does.
This is confusing the record for the pattern: the temperature was the lowest in 70 years, but Texas saw very similar storms (and worsening crises, through deregulation) in 1989 and 2011.
One hopes this isn't true for nuclear regulators.
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/03/14/lik...
"Peak heating load in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas-managed grid matched the amount of generation that failed. Electric heating was nearly twice the load ERCOT had to drop. No vast heating peak, no shortage."
"Two-thirds of Texas homes were built before statewide home energy codes began in 2001. Half the state’s homes still leak hot or cold air and have little or no wall insulation, limited attic insulation, and low-efficiency single-pane windows."
Improving insulation would also reduce the summer cooling peak in power demand, and allow shifting of some of that daily load to off peak times by pre-cooling homes.
Wind Turbine gearboxes froze up (oil congealed, not froze) because they were too cold and also not winterized. They could have been but they weren't.
Solar could have powered some people's homes, but most home solar turns off when the grid turns off.
The reason why the 2021 freeze was so intense is that during the day we didn't get sun, we had cloud cover 24 hours a day. It's entirely normal to get freezing nights in most of Texas. But by 10 AM stuff is back up to a temperature that it's 40 F or so because of the sun. When we get days upon days or freezing nights followed by even just overcast weather, that is when it becomes an issue.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-st...
In all cases it was because the infrastructure wasn’t hardened for the weather. This is something that they have now been doing I believe, although how ready they are will only be found out at the next big freeze.
Wind works fine in cold weather if you build it with the weather in mind. Cold states like Michigan have wind turbines and do just fine https://empoweringmichigan.com/how-do-wind-turbines-work-in-...
In places where a deep freeze is unlikely it’s usually better just to shut them down in extremely cold weather.
All generation systems need to be adapted to the weather, Texas energy producers of all kinds decided not to, the blackouts were the result.
Also lithium batteries can’t charge in sub-freezing temperatures without permanent damage.
The issue is how they set up the grid and avoided any federal regulation. Additionally, the market structure that it uses is designed to be running as close to being a blackout as possible without actually blacking out in the name of "an efficient market".
Edit: Let me do some math instead of guessing.
> The Texas grid operator expects crypto miners to increase electricity demand by up to 6 gigawatts by mid-2023
> Texas leads the U.S. in wind installations, with 30.46 GW, and it’s second in solar energy, with 8.6 GW as of August.
Still. Not great. Almost every solar panel in Texas going to mine something with seven transactions per second. There is no excuse for this amount of power wasted since Ethereum moved to proof of stake. https://ultrasound.money/.
There is. After the PoS merge more than 50% blocks on the ethereum chain are OFAC compliant raising censorship concerns. https://cointelegraph.com/news/51-of-ethereum-blocks-are-now...
The end result of the censorship of blocks in Ethereum is that non OFAC compliant transactions are taking I think about 30-60 seconds longer as they get picked up by non-censoring validators and added to blocks. This is very different than being silenced forever and not being allowed to transact.
The source of the issue isn’t validators but centralized mev boost operators. More discussion here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/ye57ep/is_ethereu...
https://cryptobriefing.com/is-ethereum-under-attack-unpackin...