The article says the world relies on fossil fuel for energy because it's cheaper. That's true. It doesn't mention that the world relies on it because it's reliable. It doesn't disappear for 6 months of the year, or stop producing for 3 out of 5 days or during peak demand periods. Make renewables cheaper and more reliable and they will replace fossil fuels in a snap. Cheaper is not enough if it doesn't do the job.
in the past they were cheaper. Now renewables are cheaper.
Right now, intermittent renewables actually drives up the cost of fossil fuels! Renewables do wacky things to the spot price of power - sometimes electricity is free or even has negative value, sometimes it's expensive. Ideally fossil fuel plants would only spin up when they could sell power at a profit, but they can't dispatch so quickly, so they end up selling power at a loss for minutes or hours after the solar panels or wind turbines kick back on.
This is producing market conditions that are favorable to batteries and super-capacitors, because they can dispatch in seconds, or milliseconds. Arbitraging between times of cheap power to times of expensive power can already be competitive with fossil fuels some of the time. And batteries are getting cheaper, too.
There's some question about what the ideal mix of generation vs storage will end up being. While storage is expensive, we'll tend to over-provision wind and solar, and end up throwing power away... unless we can come up for some use for it when we have moments of surplus. There's some talk of using it for things like ocean water desalination, but most of our machinery has such a high investment cost right now that the cost of electricity is not the biggest expense, so we don't actually have many machines that we idle until power gets cheap. Maybe that'll change eventually.
Yes, provided you ignore the cost of balancing an increasingly volatile grid, a volatility that is created by renewables. Also provided you ignore the cost to provide energy when said renewables aren't generating any.
Claims to back up your statment, such as from Lazard, are horribly flawed because they use the metric of LCOE - levelised cost of energy - to claim that renewable energy is cheaper. It is, provided you ignore the slew of costs that are not borne by renewable generators but which ARE borne by consumers.
Yes, batteries are getting cheaper but not at the scale required for the grid. Before you quote the Australian Tesla battery, remember that it can only provide energy for minutes - yes, minutes.
What is needed today for a low-carbon future is nuclear and hydro. Renewables will get there one day but that day is not tomorrow or next year.
That volatility can be dealt with by distributing the renewables geographically. It’ll be sunny or windy somewhere. This requires overbuilding, which is currently cheaper that storage, and the average generation is highly predictable for day-ahead or hour-ahead trading. My rule of thumb is you can supply 70% of demand economically today without long distance transmission.
The negative costs are borne by the owners of generating units that generate excess power when net demand falls. Solar can ramp down in milliseconds, windmills in minutes, CCGT can take hours, and nuclear takes days.
But what if we did add long distance transmission? Look at the US west of the Mississippi. I once estimated the capital cost of powering today’s demand using 100% renewables without storage.
That’s approximately $200bn in generation + $100bn for overcapacity.
The transmission system was mainly built to serve the legacy coal generators, but that’s often not where the best renewable resources are located. I estimated $40-80 billion for transmission.
That sounds like a lot, but 25% of the generation has already been spent. The cost of fuel for the gas generators, which is part of the LCOE, is on par with those numbers.
My biggest criticism of the Lazard study you mention is that it understates the cost of hedging fuel volatility costs.
As a guy who's staffed permitting efforts for major linear corridors, I'm here to tell you that building out that kind of transmission infrastructure is a pipe dream. At least in the western US, the NIMBYs and enviros are too powerful.
> This requires overbuilding, which is currently cheaper that storage, and the average generation is highly predictable for day-ahead or hour-ahead trading.
We should also keep in mind that this isn't unique to renewables, all power sources have to overbuild because systems get taken offline for repair and maintenance regularly. Sometimes it's even weather dependent as well, in a recent heatwave France had to shutdown nuclear power stations because the river for cooling water was becoming too warm.
It's sad to see people downvote correct information.
For context, the US consumes ~12TWh of electricity daily, so 500 GWh per hour. Global lithium ion battery production is around 300 GWh per year. While it's true this is projected to rise exponentially, the amount dedicated to storage is minuscule compared to the scale required to fulfill even one hour of energy storage [1]. This has prompted people to propose more exotic forms of storage like hydrogen, methane produced through the Sabatier process, or thermal storage. But none of those have been deployed at any significant scale, and their feasibility remains unproven.
Nobody generates more than 20% of their electricity from solar. Denmark is the only country that generates over 30% of its power from wind, and Germany is the 3rd highest at 24.7% [2]. By comparison plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from nuclear power: Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Belgium, Hungary, Ukraine, Slovakia, and France. And the last 3 all produce the majority of their electricity from nuclear. [3]
Fossil fuels didn't kick off the industrial revolution, it was the heat engine. The ability to translate thermal energy into mechanical energy. Heating a fluid, turning a turbine, which turns a dynamo is something we cannot easily replace. Replacing the source of heat with a carbon-free source represents a much more modest refactor as compared to trying to migrate modern societies off the the heat engine. Renewables make sense as mitigation: just slap down some solar or wind, don't bother with storage, and shave off daytime carbon emissions when it is producing. But not as the backbone of a carbon-free energy sector.
> Nobody generates more than 20% of their electricity from solar. Denmark is the only country that generates over 30% of its power from wind, and Germany is the 3rd highest at 24.7% [2]. By comparison plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from nuclear power
This is an extremely odd comparison. No one is proposing a completely solar generation strategy - it's renewables vs whatever.
Plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from renewables.
Nuclears not some secret unexplored concept at this point. If it were competitive it would be competing. Its costs are too high, not due to regulations due to the sheer amount of resources involved in mining, refining, and operating. Not to mention initial construction.
It's doing much better in terms of actually being used as a large portion of countries electricity generation, as I demonstrated above. But more importantly, the reality is that nuclear isn't competing against renewables it's competing against a fossil fuel grid that's supplemented by renewables. Germany, the poster child for renewables, still emits 10x the carbon dioxide per watt of electricity as France.
Let me put it more bluntly. Renewables are indeed cheaper on a per-watt hour basis. But that's more than offset by the need to deal with intermittency. Batteries are great for cars, but they exist at nowhere near the scale required to decarbonize with a wind and solar generation base. More exotic proposals like thermal storage, hydrogen, or the Sabatier process remain in prototyping and academic stage. The cost of storage is a non-answer, because there's no real plan to build this storage.
Renewables make in a stopgap mitigation plan but we have no feasible way of building a grid that's powered completely or even mostly by renewables. If our plan is to decarbonize the energy sector, renewables do not offer a solution. Hydroelectricity, and geothermal power do, but those are geographically limited. Nuclear energy is the only source that can feasibly replace fossil fuels as a consistent, geographically independence, and carbon-free energy source.
TL;DR:
* Industrialization happened because we figured out we could heat water and push a piston (and later, spin a turbine). Modern society is built off the ability to produce mechanical and electrical energy from thermal energy.
* It's a lot easier to heat water and spin a turbine with a carbon-free source of heat, than to try and capture energy from sun and wind and store massive amounts of energy to overcome intermittency.
Battery was and is never supposed to take up the entire storage load of a network - nobody is designing or forecasting future networks in that way.
Batteries provide fast response
Pumped hydro is what is being used on a lot of networks and in future network planning. Ironically old open cut mines are often perfect locations for them.
This paper discusses an algorithm used to find pumped hydro sites - there is _a lot_ of capacity out there waiting to be tapped
To add to this, there are numerous very large scale project already underway to use existing hydro capacity as pumped hydro storage.
Eg, Bath County Pump Storage is a 3GW plant[1] although ironically it is often filled using nuclear power because the hydro station can adapt better to rapid changes in demand.
In the US there is 22GW total pump hydro storage already (compared to say 98GW total nuclear power capacity).
Pumped hydroelectricity is geographically dependent - you need a valley or mountain that you can dam up to build pumped hydro. While it may be great for South Australia, the region examined in your linked paper, it's wrong to assume that this availability is uniform.
This paper just ran an algorithm over a heightmap, and pinpointed potential reservoirs. This is a far cry from actually identifying feasible sites. The massive density of hydroelectric storage in the Himalayas, for instance, is far too remote to be developed at anything approaching reasonable cost. Not to mention, it still leaves swathes of places like Central north America, and much of Northern Europe without access to hydroelectric storage.
Batteries are only the most expensive of a wide array of storage choices that today vie for which will end up cheapest, overall. Pumped hydro is mature, but underground and underwater compressed air are being proven; mine-shaft gravitic similarly; low-pressure LH2 is newly practical with aerogel insulation; carbon-captured LCH4, likewise; catalytic ammonia; and even powdered iron. None of these require any theoretical breakthroughs, just workaday engineering. In some cases combining them makes sense, such as mineshaft gravitics and compressed air in the same mineshaft. In other cases the storage medium is itself directly useful, as for example LH2 as aircraft fuel, and ammonia as both fertilizer and fuel.
Some depend on geography, particularly pumped hydro and mineshaft gravitic, and to a lesser degree compressed air. Catalytic improvements will bring rapid cost decline in LH2 and ammonia production. And, finally, battery technology, still the most immediately practical for home systems, is still improving fast. Any breakthroughs not anticipated only improve the picture.
The cost for utility-scale solar is many times less than roof-mounted, battery-backed home systems, but in places where distribution is expensive (rural) or unreliable (3rd world and California) it has strong appeal.
Its a nice appeal to simplicity to say nuclear is just 'heating water and spinning a turbine', I could also say the sun is a very large carbon-free maintenance-free opex-free reactor in the sky and we just need to design a secondary stage of the power plant to transform the energy to electricity.
And instead of pistons OR turbines, we can use a new type of machine specifically built for this purpose aka renewable energy technologies.
The reality is it doesn't matter how you word it or what you think should be simpler. Its what the economy can actually build, and including risk, buying solar panels which have no moving parts and last for decades are currently the more efficient way to add a watt to the grid.
Your "blunt" assertion where you predict the capacity of the grid to accomodate renewables and the quantity of battery storage and the feasibility of every potential upcoming storage technology probably requires a few sources to be taken seriously as well.
Correct, the sun is a great source of energy. But we use most of our energy when the sun is blocked by the earth. The sun is opex and capex free, but the storage necessary to make it feasible requires massive capital expenditure and massive operational expenditure.
The point is, just adding watts to the grid is not a solution. You needed watt when they're needed and where they're needed. And doing that with renewables is a lot harder, hence why we're really just supplementing fossil fuels with wind and solar not really working towards full decarbonization.
My assertions about the capacity of battery production were indeed backed by sources of predicted growth of battery production. In case you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25283498
There is you need a certain amount (200?) of karma to use it. Posts with negative votes have more lightly colored text. The above post no longer has negative votes so it's normal colored now.
> Yes, provided you ignore the cost of balancing an increasingly volatile grid, a volatility that is created by renewables. Also provided you ignore the cost to provide energy when said renewables aren't generating any.
If we're taking into account those kind of costs, shouldn't we also account for the cost emitting CO2?
> "What is needed today for a low-carbon future is nuclear and hydro."
Hydro is great if you have the terrain for it, but much of the world is not geographically suited for extensive hydro. Nuclear is extraordinarily expensive and often takes decades to plan and build.
Renewables can be built far cheaper and far more quickly. On grids that still have gas & coal fired power stations, every GWh of electricity produced from renewables displaces a GWh that would otherwise be produced from fossil fuels.
Or, to put it another way, every dollar spent on renewables will result in a significantly larger and faster reduction of carbon emissions than if that same dollar were spent on nuclear.
>Nuclear is extraordinarily expensive and often takes decades to plan and build.
That's not necessarily true as countries like China are building new nuclear reactors in 4-5 years. Remember that nuclear is one of the few industries that designs for the worst case scenario which is part of the high cost. The other component of the high cost is often policy and overzealous bureaucracy.
>On grids that still have gas & coal fired power stations, every GWh of electricity produced from renewables displaces a GWh that would otherwise be produced from fossil fuels.
This is not true. A kWh from a wind turbine is absolutely not equal to a kWh from a coal/gas/nuclear/hydro plant due to the fact that the capacity factor for a typical wind turbine is around 20-30%. A hydro plant often runs at > 80% capacity factor.
> "A kWh from a wind turbine is absolutely not equal to a kWh from a coal/gas/nuclear/hydro plant due to the fact that the capacity factor for a typical wind turbine is around 20-30%."
No, a kWh of energy produced by a wind turbine absolutely is equal to a kWh produced by any other means.
You'd be correct to say that a kW of capacity is not equal. (ie: a 1 GW wind farm may not produce as much energy as a 1 GW nuclear plant, but 1 GWh of energy is 1 GWh of energy, no matter what source produces it).
I think we’ll start using more ways to store the energy. In the scenarios you describe, when the energy price fluctuate so wildly, the processes don’t have to be efficient. There’s not really a problem if 70% is lost in the process if the energy we started with is free. Pumping water to higher elevation or hydrogen production is suddenly reasonable.
Pumped storage is great, but it's simply not viable at a large scale. There are very few places where natural landscape allows it, and making more artificial ones would require flooding vast areas. Considering how difficult it often is to build solar plants on deserts (e.g. consider Ivanpah solar plant, which almost did not get build due to its impact on habitat of desert tortoises, which ended up getting relocated at a cost of $300k each), I don't expect the green interest groups to accept such wholesale destruction of environments.
Your link says that at best we could double our current hydro generation capacity, which supports my point: it's simply too little for our storage needs, and if we electrify more of our economy (i.e. use it to replace heat and transport for which we use a lot of fossils now), it will be even less. It might still be worth doing, but is far from solving the storage problem: it just has significant limits on its potential scale.
> Your link says that at best we could double our current hydro generation capacity
No, it says "that without building a single new dam" [hydro could roughly double its existing capacity in the US].
I'll assume you just misread that, but in any case that's pretty different to building new dams, or utilising tech like mines, or at-sea pumped storage.
> No, it says "that without building a single new dam" [hydro could roughly double its existing capacity in the US].
No, that's not what it says. It says:
> The report estimates that without building a single new dam, these available hydropower resources, if fully developed, could provide an electrical generating capacity of more than 12 gigawatts (GW), equivalent to roughly 15 percent of current U.S. hydropower capacity.
Without constructing any new dams, you only increase it by 15%, not double it. Also, consider that 12 GW is 105 TWh per year. US consumes 4100 TWh of electricity per year. It would sure be nice to increase non-fossil electricity production by 2.5%, but that's clearly not very much. If the plan is to use hydro to cover the shortfall when the renewables are not producing enough, you need much more generating capacity than 12 GW, and more than 65 GW your link suggests could be potentially built. Finally, 2.5% is on the order of our annual growth in electricity consumption, which will in fact accelerate as we move off fossils. Thus, building out all possible hydro will only buy one year of growth in consumption.
> I don't expect the green interest groups to accept such wholesale destruction of environments.
In the grand scheme of things, this is like refusing chemotherapy for cancer because it makes your hair fall out.
Climate change is a huge issue. You have to be willing to sacrifice what would normally be valid environmental concerns to address it. You either believe it is an emergency or not.
There are probably not one general solution that will work everywhere. But for example in Sweden where about half of the electricity already is from hydropower, it will work well to even out seasonal variations, from for example getting very little sun in the winter. But say for California, where there’s enough sun most days of the year, generating hydrogen might work better to even out the electricity generation between night and day.
And considering solar power, there’s no shortage of available space. There’s plenty of roofs to cover with panels. Or line the sides of, say, Interstate 5 with a wall of vertical panels that also helps keep wild animals from the road and reduce noise pollution.
> Ideally fossil fuel plants would only spin up when they could sell power at a profit
Another effect is it makes these plants sit idle for periods of time.
It costs a lot of money to build a power plant. Every hour it sits idle is an hour you're not getting any benefit out of the investment you made. So it takes longer to break even on your investment. (Possibly, as a consolation, the plant lasts longer or has lower yearly maintenance costs.)
Peaker plants can get paid fees to be ready to deliver power, even without actually running. I think there are plants that get built, paid for as a pure peaker plant, and never run because the peaker is not required.
>While storage is expensive, we'll tend to over-provision wind and solar, and end up throwing power away... unless we can come up for some use for it when we have moments of surplus
isn't that the game plan for hydrogen powered vehicles? so they can build a plan to absorb all these excess from over provisioning at a lower rate to produce hydrogen for their fleet
This is especially attractive for aircraft, but it will take awhile to happen. We probably need new aircraft.
Hopefully civilization will not collapse first, from refugees driving fascist governments into power, and former democracies self-surveilling themselves into locked-in dictatorships.
On the upside, collapsed civilization will have lower energy demands, and will find carbon extraction and transport harder to organize.
Sure. Find some way to break up CO2 from the atmosphere and bond hydrogen to the carbons. It creates a relatively safe, easy-to-use hydrogen storage medium and it reduces greenhouse gases at the same time. The cars would just need to break the carbon-hydrogen bonds to release the energy once again, and the process is GHG-neutral.
I don't think the term "reliable" is the right term to use there. One should distinguish between reliability and availability. Renewables tend to be extremely reliable - why would a solar cell fail? - but not always available. Fossil or nuclear powerplants are quite available - they can run 24/7 on full power, but not always reliable. Especially nuclear power plants have a not so great reliability. They are often shut down completely and without warning for smaller non dangerous events. Also, in certain weather conditions, cooling of power plants is an issue so they have to be shut down. Also, for all fossil fuel plants, there is existing storage to compensate on a failing supply change (oil crisis) which have to be calculated in the costs.
Of course, the availability of renewables is an issue that has to be dealt with in planning the grid. If they are cheap enough, overprovisioning helps a lot, having larger grid interconnects help - even if there is not always wind in Germany, there should be pretty always be wind in Germany or France as an example. We still can change the way existing plants produce electricity - adding pumps to hydroelectric plants to convert them into storage, store the gas used in biomass plants rather than constantly burning it. And of course we need to build up additional storage. But that is just at the beginning of the learning curve, as most grids currently can just absorb all renewables as they are produced.
Traditional power stations do exactly this - being closed for maintenance or running on low output for days, weeks or months even the interconnector cables between UK and European power suppliers have failed for months at a time. BUT yes, there's no equivalent of unexpected low wind and/or low solar for days or weeks.
The point is, a failing turbine makes not a noticable dent in the electricity production when there are tens of thousands of turbines. At that scale, the number of turbines which are shut down for failures/maintenance becomes a constant. A huge power plant going down in an instant is another problem however.
Batteries and electricity storage follow learning curves too
One of the downsides of renewable sources is their intermittent supply cycle. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Technologies like batteries that store electric power are key to balance the changing supply from renewables with the inflexible demand for electricity.
Fortunately electricity storage technologies are also among the few technologies that are following steeply declining learning curves.
We already have cheap "batteries" in our homes. Run the electric water heater when the power is cheap. Water in the tank stays hot for a couple days.
The only piece missing here is an internet-connected thermostat for the tank that inquires about the spot price for electricity and turns on when it's cheap.
You're exaggerating a bit. Water heater will stay hot for a day or so, but will rapidly cool when you start using it and cold water flows in. House will be uncomfortably cold after a few hours in the wintertime if the heat is not running, and it's not really practical to overheat it when electric rates are low/free because you can only go maybe 10 degrees before it's really too warm for comfort. You'd need a heat tank of some sort which complicates the system and as a practical matter homes don't have that and might not have space for.
Finally aside from all that I heat my water and my home with natural gas.
I've had power outages for a week more than once, and can vouch for it staying warm enough for a comfortable shower for a couple days.
For HVAC, you can heat/cool it at a minimum to the edge of the comfort range, which will make a big difference. You can take it much further by heating/cooling some thermal mass, and drawing on that mass when the electricity is cheaper.
That mass can simply be a pile of stones in a box with some ductwork added. It's hard to find a cheaper "battery" technology than a box of rocks.
Frankly, I think people are way too focused on batteries and are overlooking the rather obvious.
Water has really good thermal mass already. I think that adding huge water tanks in basements would be pretty beneficial: if the water in those tanks is operated in closed cycle, minerals from water wouldn't accumulate, and if we used rust proof materials, they tanks could last for the lifetime of the house. Then, we could use them to store heat in winter and cold in summer, when electricity is cheap.
There were concept houses in Germany, where they had a water tank of 6 cubic meters which was heated through the summer via thermal solar collectors and stored enough energy for the house heating in the winter (and even in the winter the collectors would collect heat on sunny days).
>a pile of stones in a box with some ductwork added
man, the beauty in our lives disappears. Imagine that heated by electricity (especially if during cheap period) instead of coal/wood, and how great it is to sleep on or right next to such a stove (my grandmother house had one :):
I don't know about you, but I live in a log cabin in the back woods of Canada and have only wood stoves lined with bricks to keep me warm in winter (and we have a real Winter here). The cook stove has a cistern (water tank) for greater thermal mass and the stoves have baffles for high efficiency. The fuel grows all around me do it's carbon neutral (except for the chainsaw gas, but that's a luxury I will not forego).
This is not a used-to-was thing. It's the norm outside of towns in my county.
A lot of these issues "house will be uncomfortable cold" are because the way houses have been built previously (and still are in a lot of places) is horribly inefficient. In my country (it's -5c outside now, so not exactly warm) the building standards dictate new houses must consume no more than 15W/m2/year of heat energy for heating.
To convert that to US units, that means a 3000sqft house somewhere were electricity is $0.15c/kWh would cost $600/year to heat from electric baseboard heaters. If you have a heat pump you could bring that down to $200/year - and that's before you even consider solar.
I live in a 5 year old apartment, and haven't even turned on the heating this season, but it's still a comfortable 20c/68F inside.
It's technically possible to store heat for several months, e.g. in a large water tank, and use that heat over the winter. Only really feasible for very thermally efficient houses, but it can be done:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storag...
The obvious solution is not to let cold water flow into the water heater unless you have the electricity to heat it - and if needed make it a bit larger so there is more buffering capacity.
No need for internet connected anything. But there is a need for a "smart grid".
We, in France, have a very primitive system based peak / off-peak hours used in many houses, and I expect other countries to have the same kind of system since it is so simple.
Basically, you have an extra wire coming out of the meter. If there is voltage, it is peak hours, if there is no voltage, if is off-peak. To that wire, you connect a relay which sits in the breaker panel. That relay can turn a circuit on or off, often the water heater, so that it only runs off-peak. You can force it on if you know you are going to use more hot water than usual.
Such a simple thing, but updated in real time can already go a long way. In a more advanced system, the meter could tell you the price of electricity via PLC and you could have a relay in your breaker box that turns on a circuit depending on price.
Even smarter devices could receive the signal from the meter directly and do more things, for example, many appliances have a "delayed start" function. A "start when electricity is cheap" function would be a great addition.
The problem is that would require standardization. A standard protocol shared by utilities and electric device manufacturers. As for communication, PLC sounds ideal, it doesn't have to be fast, and it could also be the same signal used by the utility to remotely check the meter for billing (something that is being deployed in France, BTW).
Yeah, that is mentioned as "one of the downsides of renewables".
That is like saying, "one of the downsides of using a cooked noodle as a fork is that it doesn't hold its shape". It's disqualifying until that issue is sorted.
The value of solar right now is that it provides energy at the hottest, most energy use part of the day. But there is a tipping point where marginal solar is not really valuable for a grid anymore. California and Germany are at that point.
Hopefully we get cost-effective day-scale energy storage, it's not going to happen in the next few years unfortunately.
It's certainly not disqualifying until we are at far far far higher levels of renewables on the grid. Getting to 80% generation would take very little storage.
And people overestimate how much storage costs. In Texas, even with super cheap natural gas, there are more GW of storage in the interconnection queue than there are of natural gas plants. That's at today's prices, in a market where everybody competes on their own costs!
And greater than 95% of new solar projects in California include storage, and something like 25% of projects outside of California include storage along with the renewables.
We don't absolutely need to deploy storage right now, but independent agents are still doing it, because they make money by deploying storage at current costs.
It isn't. Your base load stations close and you are left only with the intermittent reweables and natural gas. South Australia is the only energy market in that place right now and the prices paid there would destroy any industrial economy.
"Renewables, natural gas and a couple of nuclear plants" is the UK situation, with normal electricity prices. Almost all the coal is closed permanently.
People will keep saying it won't work long after it's already been done.
Assuming no or minimal congestion or losses, the LMP (locational marginal price) or nodal price is basically the same everywhere. So the question is what is the MEC (marginal energy component) of the nodal price which is shared by everyone. In general, prices in the spot market are pretty low that early in the morning. It depends on the RTO/ISO region, but maybe ~$10/MWh?
Using lithium ion batteries, that solar would cost $81-$140/MWh, which is pretty much the same price as coal (compare the final slide to the first slide):
But batteries get cheaper every year, so check back in 2021 for even cheaper prices. Most observers expect lithium ion storage to be cheaper than natural gas within a decade. And when you amortize the nighttime storage costs with the cheap daytime solar, natural gas is barely holding on in some markets. If we had a carbon tax that came close to internalizing the externalities, I don't think NG would be running for much longer.
With 4500km power transmission lines currently being planned[1], the key question is "1 am where?" That's about 3-4 hours of time difference if the cable was along a line of latitude which obviously reduces the required storage time.
Also, unfortunately for our climate, fossil fuels are easy to store, even for decades (potentially forever, they don't decay) and transport and require no advanced technology to be useful, you simply need a way to set them on fire.
There was a discussion few days ago about fossil fuels bootstrapping the industrial revolution(s), one of the theories is that without them we wouldn't be talking about renewable energy at all (except in very basic ways like running a watermill)
have you guys seen Naomi Klein new documentary. Renewable energy is a joke, just another way to squeeze money out of normal people by using a taxation system.
Take some advice from someone who has been there and done that, and suffered for it: -
Cure yourself of this tendency to jump to extremes. Your relationships and your career will benefit from pausing and moderating what you say.
To the content of your comment: -
There is a sizable menu of options to make wind and solar more reliable. Two technologies with nearly a century of history behind them are pumped hydro and CAES (compressed air energy storage).
Batteries have been technologically feasible for decades, and are on the cusp of economic feasibility (that is: being cheaper than the alternatives), thanks to the manufacturing learning curve that the OP makes so much of.
Better grid interconnections also help a lot and probably have an even more illustrious history than pumped hydro and CAES. Demand management (asking large users, e.g. pulp and paper mills to pause for a while), is also a venerable technique.
It is possible to use surplus power to make fuels to burn when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. This is still in its infancy only because we have never before had periods when electricity had a negative price.
These are just the things that sprang to my mind without thinking about it. There are others.
This reminds me of a comment about Creality's belted 3D printer not being able to violate the laws of physics and then someone added rollers so long prints don't fall of the bed...
You can do three easy things. Create bigger electricity grids with more decentralized generation (the whole earth receives a roughly constant amount of energy from the sun), overproduce energy or build some storage.
