One nice advantage of wind and solar farms is that they can be added incrementally. Maybe you would need just as many millions of investment in infrustructure to get the same output capacity but you can start with 1/10 of the required capital, set it up and have it online and keep adding as you go.
Yes, but at utility level the difference is invest in million increments to 100 million increments for solar(pv) and wind. While gas is in the same range, modern coal really starts at the top end of that range and nuclear is just an order of magnitude higher.
Wind and solar projects often get cancelled and restarted, mostly because the risk profiles allow for that. Committing to gas is dependant on existing infra, if there is a good gas supply infra then unlikely to cancel if planning permission ok. Once committed to nuclear, you either finish it or go bankrupt...
Coal is getting to be very risky from a regulatory perspective which is why power company execs don't like adding new capacity.
Not just the incremental additions, there basically are no other generation sources below few KWs. Gasoline or diesel generators can be used as a backup only requires a lot of maintenance.
It seems like this observation of Wright's Law in action should lead to more politically palatable policy prescriptions. If cap and trade is out, just shifting some energy incentives to favor renewable or large orders to grow the market could push renewable to the place where it just straight out dominates energy.
IMO, anything other than a strait carbon tax is a horrible idea. Cap and trade works out as billions in free money to existing company's and makes this a long term political football. Subsidies always have the same downsides as communist style planned economies. ex: Ridicules amounts of corn production because of politics not because that's a good use of resources.
I changed my thinking on this after playing the game democracy 3. There are lots of ways to dramatically decrease co2 production, and a lot of ways to keep production minimal.
My favorite strategy was changing spending to subsidize rail over roads, subsidize and market bicycles, and push for electric cars. Not directly applicable necessarily, but the number of things that have lower co2 production as a side effect is pretty large.
Carbon tax isn't sufficient either. It would lower the demand in one country, but the same fossil fuels could be shipped to another country and burned there. Until the demand for fossil fuels decreases below the cost it takes to extract them from the ground. That cost is low, and could get lower with improving technology.
Instead there should be a tax on taking carbon out of the ground or importing it into the country. A tax so high that it becomes economically unviable to do it. Anything else is political games.
> Instead there should be a tax on taking carbon out of the ground or importing it into the country.
Doesn't that have the same problem? Anything energy intensive just shifts outside of the borders of that country where the tax is enforced.
IMO, carbons taxes need to be built into the trade deals. You need to say "we're creating a level playing field between our countries, but we do that on the basis that we are both going to do our bit to solve common problems".
The major reason tackling climate change is difficult is because it is a tragedy of the commons.
In the sense that it's a kind of consumption tax, and consumption taxes are (considered[1]) regressive, then yes.
So? Consumption (of fossil fuels) is the problem. Any policy measure that cuts fossil fuel consumption will thus necessarily be regressive to the extent that it precisely targets the problem. It's not like cap-and-trade or efficiency mandates somehow avoid that.
But whatever anti-fossil-fuel measure you impose can be mitigated with orthogonal welfare policies.
Also, it's not policy options can ever lack downsides.
[1] I saw "considered" because the traditional result only gets that by a confused accounting basis. Yes, a consumption tax hits less of a rich person's income, but it hits the same amount of their later consumption. Don't compare income apples to consumption oranges.
If a carbon tax will hurt the poor imagine what climate change is going to do to them.
Personally I think poor people tend to be in this sort of budgetary Malthusian squeeze. If you raise the price of one thing then something else will have to give. Tax their gasoline more the end result is they'll buy 'less car' and have less money left over for rent. Since rents are likely the only other fungible cost that's where the money will ultimately come from.
Just adjust income tax to compensate. Penalizing carbon production is a simple incentive-compatible way to have society receive compensation for the actual damage of people's actions.
This is something you will have to deal with anyway. Let's take the the US for an example (although this will apply virtually anywhere in the world). I don't have time to gather excellent data, but wikipedia tells me that in 2010 28% of households made less than $25K, 51% made less than $50K, 69% made less than $75K.
So in reality, about 30% are in a fairly serious pinch nearly all the time and 50% are probably doing OK, but still having to watch their budgets pretty closely. Only 30% of the population has the kind of earnings that people on HN generally consider acceptable.
Let's say that energy which doesn't liberate much carbon is 20% more expensive than carbon intensive energy (who knows). Really, only 30% of the population can easily swallow that cost increase. And even then, if we are talking about replacing cars, etc, etc the capital costs are actually outside the reach of a large percentage of those people (imagine being told that you have to replace your car today... could you afford it?)
In reality, if only the people who could afford it switched, it would not actually represent a large reduction in carbon usage. You have to disproportionately affect lower income brackets because that's were the vast majority of people live.
So if you tax carbon to make it attractive to switch, it's really not any more expensive. The main issue is making sure that people are able to deal with the capital expenses. Otherwise they won't switch. So IMHO, you are correct that carbon tax alone won't be enough. But there isn't really a downside to such a tax as long as you find a way to deal with capital expenses. In order to be successful, the poor must switch to the more expensive option.
A carbon tax could be coupled with a reduction in, say, sales tax. The incentive to reduce carbon would still be there, but the regressive effect on the poor would be mitigated.
Better to just rebate a fixed amount to everyone so that you preserve the incentives for cutting back any marginal unit of fossil fuel consumption, while mitigating the overall income effect.
How do you know what to rebate people? The carbon tax will hit more than their electric bill. Also, some people have greener electricity than others. Here's how electricity is generated by state:
So, someone who lives in a state with green electricity, and buys products from "green companies", will get the same as someone from a coal state, like West Virginia?
The question is why are you giving rebates to people who are mostly using green energy?
Because they aren't dumping as much carbon into the atmosphere. Thats the entire point of it all! Those who are dumping carbon into the atmosphere are free loading on the rest of society, expecting others to pay for their externalities.
And it's not "giving rebate" it's returning tax revenues to those that can least afford them.
But there are many other sources of carbon than poorly planned electrical systems. Driving, flying, and industry.
The poor person in West Virginia getting his electricity from dirty coal and driving a 10 year old F150 is getting the same rebate. He's buying stuff from Walmart that's shipped from China.
Are you rewarding people for using less carbon or is the rebate to help offset the cost past through from companies passing on the extra tax onto consumers? Two different claims are being made.
They may be getting the same rebate, but they aren't paying the same tax. If the rebate is the same for all, then those who use less will make a profit, considering the $rebate - $tax amounts, while those using more will pay more tax than they get in rebates. (This is assuming a revenue neutral arrangement).
I havn't looked into it in detail, but I was under the impression that it wasn't so much to affect consumer choices directly, as commercial behavior.
That is, putting a price on carbon will result in businesses either putting up prices, or choosing lower emission production options. All other things being equal, this should result in having lower emission companies having a pricing edge, and then consumers picking those products.
Except that unless batteries and storage solutions get orders of magnitude better, you have to back every megawatt of solar or wind with natural gas, oil, or coal for the calm, cloudy days.
I'm not able to find it now, but a few years ago I read about an idea to have a massive solar plant grid in the SW of America. It would transmit to the rest of the country. Every so often there would be storage plants.
On good days the plants would compress air into man made caves. After the cave reached a certain pressure, the generator would distribute energy as a pass through. If there were bad generation days out SW, the compressed gas would spin turbines at the plant. I believe that each plant was to have 3-5 days worth of common load production. After that, I think there were fallback generators like gas.
The reason I bring this up, is that battery/storage can be more than what we normally think about. In the case of the caves, there are several states that have natural formations. Investment in this idea, or others could reap great returns for the future.
Interesting, looks like this might be a press release describing that (or a similar) project? [1] Proposed wind plant in Wyoming connecting to compressed air energy storage in Utah. Can't find much about where the project went though...
Looks like there are at least 3 operating CAES plants: Huntorf, Germany [2], McIntosh, Alabama [3], and Gaines, Texas [4].
Compressed air storage is only as efficient as the insulation on the storage reservoir. Without insulation, the heat generated by the compression process is lost, and much of the stored energy goes along with it. This drives up the cost of building efficient compressed air storage systems, but there are several projects underway that are attempting to find cost-effective solutions to this problem.
Hydro is 6% of US electricity supply and is already used as built in storage.
Pumped storage is vastly better than batteries. Also the variance between median days and calm days for wind is far less extreme than generally assumed. PV solar also provides power in cloudy weather.
Anyway the US can get to ~99.99% from ~30% oversupply and ~6 hours of grid storage which is vastly less than many people assume.
PS: Cloudy calm days over large areas are fairly rare. Heavy clouds are generally associated with weather and increased wind. EX: Hurricane incoming, solar down wind UP.
California uses more pumped storage than is generally realized. Some of the reservoirs of the California Water Project are uphill from their water source, and thus have large pumps. These can also be run as generators. They pump water uphill at night when power is cheap, and generate power during the daytime peak. This generates some profit for the CWP. The reservoirs and pumps are needed anyway, so there's very little capital cost associated with doing this. Because big Water Project storage reservoirs are involved, the water levels don't change rapidly.
Purpose-built pumped storage plants, such as Helms near Fresno, tend to have much smaller reservoirs, about enough for a daily cycle, and they go from full to empty and back each day. This annoys some people. They're not recreational lakes. Efficiency is 60% - 80% round trip from electricity in to electricity out.
"Also the variance between median days and calm days for wind is far less extreme than generally assumed."
Actually, the variance is worse than assumed by enthusiasts. Here's today's output from wind, hour by hour, for the entire CAISO area, which is about 400 miles across and covers most of California.[1] Today was a bad day; about 10x variation between peak wind and minimum wind. 5:1 is typical; a good day is 2:1.
You can also see similar data for PJM, which covers the Northeastern US.[2] Today's wind variation is about 2:1.
There's a myth that, with enough transmission distance, fluctuations in wind will average out. The two largest power grids in the US aren't seeing that. Maybe for the whole planet, but not for any area one can reasonably interconnect.
At grid scale Peaks are unimportant, it's median and minimum numbers that matter. The grid needs to meet demand anything past that point is useless. Remember wind and solar don't use fuel they just need infrastructure. Hydro does use 'fuel' but can act as defacto storage by ramping up when there is a gap between supply and demand.
Also of note you can smooth out or shift solar by shifting power east-west without involving storage.
And the actual numbers are considerably less optimistic than you report, and that paper was rather optimistic to begin with.
But I agree with the gist of it: storage worries are quite a bit overrated,and oversupply and transmission capacities are underrated. We can fix those easily enough, though
No, one of the major assumptions was existing hydro got converted to peaking power plants. A reasonable assumption that takes little land or capital and would payback if there where significant day to day demand and a regular oversupply of power. The other major assumption is significantly increased energy transmission which circles back into demand as transmission losses add up.
Raising or lowering two existing lakes by a few feet can provide lot's of pumped storage with minimal issues.
Or in the extreme case, consider Lake Erie is next to Lake Ontario. Pumping extra water back up for a few hours a day would have minimal issues as boat bilge water has already cross contaminated them.
Almost 700,000 gallons of water go untapped over Niagara Falls every second. There's no point in pumping water back up until you've harnessed that first.
They also do hydro so Niagara Falls is effectively just a large and expensive fountain with controlled discharge. As long as pumping up does not increase the rate of Niagra Falls the area works just fine as pumped storage.
> As long as pumping up does not increase the rate of Niagra Falls
But isn't that what it does? Unless you start to limit (more than before) the waterflow to the falls themselves, which probably would meet resistance from conservationists.
(I understand the Lewiston power plant already does have capability to pump water up.)
And, many places don't have such reservoir capacity at hand. Over here any new reservoir project meets fierece resistance, and it's rather the other way round: nature conservationists want to shut down existing hydroelectric capacity.
It's complex there are few environmental effects from blocking the falls as they are already one way and tend to kill fish that make the trip. However, there is a treaty that set's minimum flow levels and more water is diverted at night to a holding area which is then used for hydro in the day.
Anyway, the area already has plenty of pumped storage it's only by importing a lot of power that you would need to expand. But, at that point you can scale really far with few environmental costs.
Kudos to you for reevaluating! Not many are willing to do that.
For example, all those people working in the power plant. They're about to be "disrupted" because they have not been willing to evaluate new technology honestly.
They're actually riding this "green energy" wave, since they are technically a renewable resource - wood chips and sawmill wastes (sawdust, bark, etc), even though it's a steam boiler/turbine essentially on the same design as a coal plant.
Last time I talked to someone still working there, they were making enough per-megawatt on green energy credits that they can run full-bore even if the hourly price for electricity production is negative and make a profit. Not to mention that in the past year, there have been a handful of paper mill closings in the area, so the logging contractors have been scrambling to find anybody that will take their pulpwood production, at any price, and the state government has been mulling legislation to add further subsidies to make sure they take all the wood they can, to keep everyone else in the logging, trucking and other subsidiary industries open.
Oh interesting, I haven't heard of green energy credits for energy from wood mass before. On the face of it, it would seem that burning plant matter is definitely better than pulling old plant matter out of the ground and burning it. However the top google hit I found for it is more skeptical:
The mill I'm talking about actually burns straight wood products - mostly whole tree chips. Aside from a small amount of diesel used to get the fire in the boiler going when they startup, and a few additives like urea to tweak the emissions, it's all wood.
Black Liquor is interesting. Just down the road from my old plant, there is an International Paper mill that has been relying on that loophole for years to keep themselves afloat. All the mill's internal machinery is either steam-driven or runs on the electricity produced by their on-site plant. Lately they've been over-producing power and selling it back on the grid due to these credits, to the point that they have kept paper machines running at paper prices that would otherwise be unsustainable, just to keep a steady supply of black liquor for their power plant.
It never gets calm and cloudy all at once over an entire grid balancing area, so no, not every MW of wind and solar needs to be backed by an equivalent amount of operating reserve. Furthermore, conventional generation requires contingency reserve as well, because it can be tripped offline for any number of non-weather related reasons.
That's factually untrue on many levels, even when I accept that you're exaggerating.
Even without any breakthroughs, high voltage DC interconnects between between electrical grids would allow us to use wind, solar, and a small amount of natural gas (certainly not megawatt for megawatt!)
And the end result is a system that pays for itself and has cheaper electricity. If we could ever get the stakes holders aligned...
As a straight-forward example: if the typical electric car is plugged in for 10 hours every evening, and only needs to charge for 3 of those hours, you can see that there's a lot of opportunity to reschedule load if today's wind forecast is for high winds after midnight.
They are great technologies, but since they address the market externalities around carbon and other air pollution, the non-free market created by this situation won't achieve the aims that a theoretical free market would.
It's a bit embarrassing to free market boosters to see total global catastrophe be an unintended consequence of their policies, but they've often decided to dig in and deny obvious facts, which makes government intervention ever more necessary and welcomed by the population. Bit of an own goal really.
OT: I hope that's not a new trend... "Renewables’ share of power generation. Scale is shown in doublings."
It's a logarithmic scale, labeled as "doublings", with the background lines suggesting linear scale, and confusing rounding on the left (0.03% is "double" 0.01%). Also the left chart starts at 0%, where i think they wanted 0.00625% which got rounded.
"The best minds in energy keep underestimating what solar and wind can do."
Of course wind and solar becomes "efficient" when the state arbitrarily funds and supports it. I am certain there is an entire mafia behind this, from the energy companies all the way to the politicians, ensuring that our public funds flow into their hands and that other forms of energy are properly discredited and taxed.
In terms of financial efficiency renewable and nuclear are completely different to fossil fuels.
With a gas power station their is a point at which the fuel is too expensive to compete and the plant is turned off.
With renewable energy the cost is in capital expenditure rather than fuel. It makes sense to run the generator as much as possible, regardless of how little money it makes. In a market dominated by fossil fuels the effective price is therefore always slightly less than the cheapest fossil fuel available. It becomes more valuable as oil or coal prices rise and less valuable as they drop.
Of course that is a ridiculous situation to be in. The only real reason to ever promote renewable energy/ or nuclear is because it is a better product with less negative impact. It is perfectly reasonable that this would cost more than fossil fuel. The only way for a private company to pay off the debt is to charge more than market rates for the energy produced.
And just to add - there are a lot of areas where renewables are already way cheaper or conventional generation just is not appropriate- like solar for replacing diesel generators, offshore wind near large coastal cities(try building a large nuclear plant near NY), there are also a lot of remote places where grid is expensive to maintain etc, etc
Also PV is the simplest, least maintenance power generation source if you need <few KW.
You know those pipelines that carry the oil and gas? They got built using eminent domain to get a lot of their rights of way. That and the depletion allowance add up to fairly substantial subsidies for the fossil fuel industries.
This is exactly what is happening to discredit nuclear as a low-carbon wedge between fossil fuels and totally renewable energy, science and demographics be dammed.
I feel like we've been down this road before. If some may recall, the federal government setup a giant loan program for alt energy companies. Many went bust taking a lot of money with them. I worry if the investment dollars are going to Just Another Solar Company, or is it demonstrated, proven technology that has potential?
Tesla was part of that program and without that loan they would not be around today. Also, the loans are expected to profitable [1], although I read somewhere that when accounting for administration costs, the program overall would end up slightly in the red[2]. Regardless, the program created/saved thousands of jobs and provided badly needed financing to companies during one of the worst recessions in decades, which in my book means it was very successful.
[1] http://energy.gov/lpo/portfolio
[2] The bill that created the program required that the loans be given out 'at cost'. Had the DOE been allowed to charge even modestly more, or had they asked for stock options as part of their deals, the program could have been wildly profitable.
>Tesla was part of that program and without that loan they would not be around today.
I like Tesla, but it's still not entirely clear Tesla is a viable ongoing enterprise. If Tesla can't make money with the Model 3 it's unlikely to survive in the long term.
In the mean time they fully paid back their DOE loans, have paid billions in salaries / benefits, spent billions at suppliers, built considerable useful infrastructure, and accelerated the progress of electric vehicles by some amount of time. I'd say it's a net win from the taxpayer perspective.
Couldn't you say this about any company? Anybody is unlikely to survive in the long term if they can't make money with their products. But from everything I've read, Tesla has made money with their vehicles so far, so I don't see why you'd worry about the Model 3.
You would've been a gem in the 1920s shaking an angry fist at how many oil companies were going bust and how fortunes were being squandered digging wells that produced nothing.
That whole oil thing is just a fad! Why can't people be happy with coal?
I think you misread the comment. Oil was proven and investment was pushing it to new heights. Do we really want to spend a lot of money on the same technology, and a new company, or new technology and innovation? I for one don't want another Solyndra. I want a company that is pushing a demonstrated advancement in technology.
Solyndra pushed a demonstrated advance in technology. It just didn't end up being cheaper than the rapidly-falling price of silicon solar cells. Sure, you can play Monday-morning quarterback on that deal, but it was a reasonable bet and the investors (who lost a ton of money) were not fools.
Oh, come on. Open a history book. Oil was far from proven back when coal was king. Many, many companies ate up huge amounts of capital and had nothing to show for it. The process for finding, extracting, processing, transporting and consuming oil and its various byproducts was still in its infancy. There was a lot of mistakes to be made.
You're losing your shit here because some companies didn't work out. And? The road to success is often paved with failure.
Mitt Romney, comparing Tesla to Solyndra, in 2012:
> But don’t forget, you put $90 billion, like 50 years’ worth of breaks, into—into solar and wind, to Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and Ener1. I mean, I had a friend who said you don’t just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers, all right? So this—this is not—this is not the kind of policy you want to have if you want to get America energy secure.
