A New Surge in Power Use Is Threatening U.S. Climate Goals
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The entire power industry seems to have an aversion to deploying the cheapest options for expansion and more power and new custom. They get the best returns for the cheapest options that also happen to be the greenest and yet they keep building ever more CO2 emitting sources and keeping prices high. Its clearly a manipulated market.
Solar and wind power is also not dispatchable, so one needs to add storage costs to the off-grid solution.
Most people saving money buying solar are taking advantage of net metering legislation which forces the utility to buy their power at retail price (above wholesale cost). They use the grid to store electricity for them for use after the sun goes down, without paying for the cost of their own batteries. That’s not DIY. It’s taking advantage of a grid subsidy.
And he's usually right, although I'm not so sure of the "dramatic" bit. It's why people who own their own houses in a sunny location save money by installing solar.
You don’t believe LCoE, which doesn’t factor in storage costs, is a proper apples-to-apples comparison of renewable energy costs to the consumer. Let’s take the all-in, then, which includes storage/dispatchable sources of energy: have a look at https://www.whatnextnow.com/home/solar/sunmetrix-grid-parity....
Take the $3 per kW solar cost. Now add $6 per kW for two installed Powerwalls to store that energy without relying the grid to bank it with net metering. That’s now $9 per kW, and almost no state is competitive, even with subsidies.
The competitive states are those with a lot of sun (and subsidies) but even that number is illusory, because those panels put out so much power one needs to buy even more super-expensive Powerwalls to store all of it to use later.
As a person who owns a house in a sunny location that has solar, I think I can speak with some authority on the matter.
Firstly, we've never had net metering here. Secondly, the current price paid for the feed-in you can get has dropped below the average wholesale, in fact it's at $0.05/kWh it close to 1/2 [0]. Thirdly, some retailers limit how much feed in they will pay for (but the take it all, which pisses me off no end). The electricity wholesaler has got legalisation passed that allows them to turn off feed in from household solar at will. [1] Finally, batteries are too expensive to make sense (but that is rapidly changing), and so are currently rare. I don't know why you brought them up.
Currently we pay about $0.30 / kWh [0]. We consume about 30 kWh/day. Lets conservatively assume we get 10 kWh self use, and have a system that generates 20 kWh/hr per day. That system will cost around $4,000 here, and will return about $1300 per year power we don't pay for and feed-in. It pays for itself in about 3 years. Those figures are very conservative. In the remainder of its 25 year lifetime, the power it provides is free.
Consequently, solar roof top installations are going gang busters here. [3] I'm not sure where you are getting your information from, but it's wrong.
[0] https://b2c-public-website-prod-assets-bucket-name.s3.ap-sou...
[1] https://www.energex.com.au/our-services/connections/resident...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-21/rooftop-solar-cells-i...
What you're paying for, one way or another, is for "base load" that doesn't fluctuate with weather conditions. The coal/oil power plant might not be needed most of the time, but it still needs to exist because its power is needed occasionally, and it cost billions of dollars to build so they have to get that money back somehow.
The problem with charging "correctly" structured rates (huge annual connection fee, tiny per kWh) is that it doesn't encourage any conservation, which will make consumers use ever-higher amounts of energy for exceedingly stupid stuff and thus drive even more Capex.
Perhaps the "best" way to charge for grid connection is to look at the single highest peak demand for each user over the past year, and use that to prorate against sum of all costs needed to provide the base load for that peak moment. So you pay for the infrastructure you needed at any point that year, and it encourages people to reduce their reliance on high-capex base load.
It’s the minimum breakeven sell price for the owner. except you don’t pay the utilities that price. You are also charge, at a minimum, transmission and distribution fees.
Further, the grid isn’t 100% solar and electricity prices are dictated by a variety of factors, lcoe being an estimate for the floor of each asset.
The time batteries are used are in the edge case where it's more cost effective to have storage rather than build a whole new plant.
Given these numbers its pretty clear that using my own solar power and storing it in a battery to use over night is double the price of using it directly due to the battery but its also still less than half the price of buying it from the grid. In addition through the winter when there isn't enough sunshine power can be bought and stored in the battery and used throughout the day avoiding higher day rates and saves about 40%.
Batteries are economically viable and for me at least they will pay back in half the time the solar panels do. The difference in price to the grid is so vast and nearly 5x what it costs from the panels that the additional battery storage cost makes sense up to a certain point of capacity. Its also greener because it shifts power needs and flattens demand which better utilises the green power available.
I really recommend people take the price of a battery (say $1000 for 5KWH for 6000 cycles average 90% capacity) and bring that price back to something like the unit price because its one of the easier ways to account for this sort of infrastructure and what it really costs and its easily comparable in what is done today. That battery would in its lifetime charge/discharge about 26,460 KWH, which is about 3.7 cents a KWH for storage, if you can get more than that differential for power from panels or difference pricing based on time then you may be able to do some good while also saving money and with an inverter too if you don't have one its more like 8 cents a KWH (but averages less the more battery you can utlise).
With Sodium Ion looming this battery equation will get even more compelling for more people.
Increased electricity use isn't, in itself, a problem. In fact, given the electrify everything movement, it's a fundamental part of the solution.
Those EVs and heat pumps for example, are helping to meet climate goals even if coal powered. But a simple time of use rate and a renewables heavy generation portfolio supercharges their benefits.
The world needs much cheaper energy storage: compressed air, pumped hydro, and hydrogen electrolysis.
As is placing hydrogen in the cheap category.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/2023-hydrogen-levelized-cost-upd... puts cheapest green hydrogen LCoE at $1.50/kg. Hydrogen is scalable to store for long periods in salt caverns and large tanks.
LCoH is what the H2 costs as soon as it leaves the electrolyzer. That analysis looks only at electricity and CAPEX and OPEX for the electrolyzers. What is does NOT include is compression, drying, transmission, distribution, or storage.
Specifically for this discussion it also does not include any of the costs associated with the fuel cell portion of the stack, i.e. the entire other half of a electricity->hydrogen->electricity scheme. So that will increase costs substantially.
The other comment is about the 1.50 $/kg. That is a ridiculously low number. H2 LHV is 33.3 kWh/kg, assuming an optimistic 70% electrolyzer efficiency you need 47.6 kWh/kg of electricty. 1.50 $/kg / 47.6 kWh/kg is ~0.03 $/kWh. And that's if all the cost comes from electricty. Again you still need capex and opex for the electrolyzer.
This is the same electricity price as the Lazards reported I linked. That report assumes you'll have the green electricity available 98% of the time. I have no idea where in the world they're going to get such low prices 24/7 on a market once they add the GW worth of demand. Yes certain regions have negative electricity rates, for a few hours a day, but those caused by the mix of renewables and coal/gas/nuclear, and it's the latter which is why costs are negative. I don't think you can count that as green energy, unless it's the nuclear asset that's running.
[0]: https://www.lazard.com/media/12qcxl1j/lazards-levelized-cost...
The problem is not the cost of design but rather the cost of deploying a proven design.
Would anyone even notice if the documents involved contained a few paragraphs T-Rex erotica hidden in them? Hell, would anyone notice if you crammed the entire text of "A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay" in there?
If you have any doubt about it, observe that Microsoft wants to use an LLM to generate the application documents.