PG&E charges much more than 20c. Depending on the tier, it could be over $0.30/kWh. If you have time of day charges, it's even higher during the day, something ridiculously high.
When I lived in Hawaii in the Obama I years, there was a noticeable consumer solar boom. From what I’ve read, they are meeting their renewable goals so far. There were a few windmills coming along, I think. Another big source of power is trash incineration, which is of course located near the people with bad social capital and terribly polluting, but developers wanted to move in that direction so there was talk about cleaning it up. Not sure anything ever happened though.
Historically true but it's being fixed. Wind and solar are basically vastly cheaper than shipping in diesel at this point and Hawai is a great place for both.
Actually the bulk of generation is from oil with 25% or so from renewables [1]. So our power prices is heavily influenced by oil prices.
Each island is also its own isolated electric grid, so reliability is not great and shifting renewables to other islands isn't possible currently. Unfortunately, the ocean is deep between the islands and connecting them would probably cost close to a billion dollars all in. A bit of a stretch for our small state.
Lots of answers about various renewables, no one addressing why diesel, so let me throw that in:
Everything comes to Hawaii by boat or plane, and boats run on diesel. So our power plants burn diesel, instead of coal, because coal, while cheaper per unit energy, would be a whole additional supply chain just for power plants.
And yeah, there's more solar and wind every year, but not nearly enough to provide the overprovisioning and storage necessary to use it for baseline power.
Substantial amounts of solar coming online in Hawaii, causing the utility to carefully manage additional distributed solar installs [1]. Still expensive because there is much diesel
and coal generation (~2GW) left to displace.
"carefully manage" aka try to retain the fossil fuel dependence at all costs. Hawaii is a microcosm of egregious mismanagement despite ideal circumstances.
I was under a similar impression, but an independent audit found that while unnecessary staffing (and associated costs) was occurring, it didn't appear that the utility was attempting to sandbag the grid transformation. There's bloat, but also legitimate progress.
> Contrary to stakeholder criticism, Hawaiian Electric's support of Hawaii's groundbreaking 100% by 2045 renewable portfolio standard (RPS) has been strong, the audit found. "It has exceeded its mandated obligations" and criticisms "appear to be largely unfounded."
> The problem is cost, it said. Meeting the RPS and the challenge of integrating rooftop solar have led to increased workload and costs, the audit recognized. But Hawaiian Electric increased staffing "with little evidence of any business cases supporting these additions."
The progress could be just from the world changing around them (cost competitive renewables). Doing something would mean putting some skin in the climate change fight.
> Additional concerns and opposition to the plant have been raised by Native Hawaiians, who view all forms of volcanic activity as manifestations of the goddess Pele. To the Native Hawaiians who revere Pele, geothermal wells and energy production are a desecration of her body and spirit.
Wind turbines do locally screw with the wind, that's why you can't put them too close to each other. But it's temporary and goes away when the turbine get decommissioned, so maybe that's the difference. Or maybe the wind is traditionally meant to be harnessed (boats) but volcanic energy is not?
It is used on the Big Island, which is the newest island. Unfortunately most people live on the older islands, which aren't above the volcanic hotspot anymore. And the islands are far enough apart that they all have their own independent electrical grids.
Are there any realistic power generation options from tidal/ocean power? Seems like that might be great for Hawaii — if it isn’t still the realm of science fiction?
Most tidal I am familiar with capable of generating anything approaching reasonable amounts causes significant ecosystem impacts- you basically replace entire shorelines with concrete bunkers that act as a crappy gravity battery (you can get significant mass from the water, but not much lift from the tide).
I think most research is focused on utilizing less unique space- rooftops, open plains, open ocean. Shorelines are tiny spaces for how ecologically unique they are, plus they tend to be highly desirable for other human uses as well.
I saw a marketing video for one company that was deploying a prototype to do this a few days ago. I'm unable to remember the name or find a link.
I think it was somewhere in oceania that they were installing the protoype in. The unit looked sort of like (this)[https://imgur.com/a/ymulbWF] but wider and in hd of course.
By wider I mean it looked more like a catamaran style boat and the one in the imgur link is more like a monohull boat. The one in the video which they deployed maybe 15-30 yards off shore from a beach was where they installed it and it had branding from their company on the side and some bright yellow accents.
Much higher than that in higher cost states. My PG&E bill for last summer (summer pricing is higher) shows 62.4c per kWh afternoons & evening to midnight.
90c per kwh in crunch time is still comparably cheap in comparison with much of the world.
I've been in countries where cooking 1 dish on electric oven will cost you $1.
Much of Europe has price hovering in between 30c to 50c during day hours normal usage, and easily more than double of that during extreme peaks like ones you have in Texas now.
Are you sure? Because 30c seems to be the absolute highest in Europe, which is Germany. [0] With the average being 0,21c. This is residential pricing though, so it includes a lot of taxes.
Having lived in UK, France and Spain, I know that there aren't daily variations in consumer electricity prices, as there are in places like California. I don't have data if offices are priced differently.
This are end-user-prices, but the website is about wholesale prices which are normally much smaller e.g. in 2020 the wholesale average had been around $38/MWh (the price companies selling electricity to end-users and companies pay).
Also note that the site contains not just "real-time" prices but also day ahead prices (selected by default) which due to instabilities are quite a bit higher then real-time prices.
I find the average already pretty expensive. You can find here the market price in Europe from the French dispatcher [^1] and it's around 30-40% cheaper depending of the country
This is a very high price. A peak price of over $100 used to be considered high. But peak power prices in CA have been going up, specially in Southern California. In this case the reason is high natural gas prices due to the cold weather and production freezing -- gas is the marginal fuel and tends to set power prices in CA. Anyhow. CA should have been OK, since it has a lot of storage. Unfortunately, regulation has prevented the utilization of a major storage field in Southern California. So gas prices went up, to well over $100/MMbtu (they are usually under $5). In Nor Cal, where storage is allowed to operate, gas prices remained under $10. But the power market is pretty much a single market in CA and So Cal dictated the prices. (I used to be a trader in the market).
The scale on the map appears to have a filter maximum of $150 so I would guess it's 6 times their expected maximum, so very very expensive. Here's another region to compare to: https://www.pjm.com/library/maps/lmp-map.aspx
This is 90c/KWh. Arguably very expensive rate for electricity. Not sure if related to the Texas/ERCOT grid situation, as the DC tie-ins are not that substantial.
Red states in the US don’t follow laissez-Faire economics. They follow race to the bottom and beggar thy neighbor economics.
Essentially, they are willing to burn all sorts of rules and regulations in order to beat a neighboring state to attract businesses and individuals. They then make up for this loss by drawing federal dollars that are usually paid for by people and companies in those same states they drew people and businesses away from.
But they are absolutely willing to regulate where it helps them individually even if it is against purported principles.
And then, of course, there’s the annual hypocrisy where red state senators will decry any funding towards blue states (for example, emergency funding to California for fire disasters) but jump right into demanding as much money as they can get when there are disasters in their states.
Texas’s energy supply bounties hides this there but it’s evident all over the remaining red states.
Probably not. But especially in emergencies it's often better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. (Also, domestic in-state political signaling.)
Anyhow, the legal effect may be irrelevant if the gas producers wouldn't bother trying to export. I would imagine that producers are having trouble just delivering on their long-term, fixed-price contracts in Texas. The short-term prices might be so jacked up precisely because there's little to no surplus to export, period.
Ameren (electric company serving parts of MO and IL) has requested customers cut back on power consumption if at all possible.
When there's a sustained negative-degree-weather event for over a week, many people start plugging in extra space heaters or run their electric central heater longer, which places a huge amount of strain on the grid.
Luckily there are many in the midwest who use gas for heating, since it's way more efficient in the long winter months.
There are other factors too, like some plants not being maintained to a level where they can operate at full capacity in freezing weather for weeks at a time (many can, but some are not maintained to that standard—see TX), so those plants can't just pop online like they normally would during the summer.
Ontario Canada reporting. CAD$85/mwh (or ~US$65). We have several gw available on standby, and pretty much even on exports/imports. And we do export to USA as needed to/through Michigan/NY.
Parents got ~10" of snow yesterday night. But it's just business as usual.
Could be a number of factors. Prices are generally composed of generation, loss, and congestion terms. The generation term is driven by the marginal cost of energy (i.e. what's the cheapest generator that still has capacity). The losses term is fairly self explanatory. The congestion term factors in the thermal ratings on equipment based on what can be delivered to a location.
Someone else speculated that this is due to a rise in Natural Gas costs. This would make some sense given that the rise is uniform across the region.
Disclaimer: I work in the energy space. I know nothing about what is happening here and these are personal opinions.
Average in Germany is 30 euro cents per kWh in 2019 apparently; I'm at 31c with this Energiewende Ökostrom which I sure hope is going to help transition to sustainability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende
I don't know where that website is getting its info but it is way off from reality.
The cheapest possible PG&E (Silicon Valley) rate is off-peak (after midnight) winter rate. Looking at my January bill here right in front of me, that rate is $0.16675 for transmission + $0.05525 for generation. So that's 22.2c/kWh. That's the cheapest it ever gets.
The most expensive tier is peak (afternoon to midnight) in the summer, 62c/kWh.
Well, PG&E isn't the only electricity provider in California. Doesn't mean the numbers are correct, but pointing out rates in Silicon Valley doesn't mean the numbers are wrong.
"Northern California is the home of the first successful opposition to the promotion and development of commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S. In the 1950's northern and central California's privately owned utility company, PG&E, was planning to be one of the giants in the new field of nuclear energy."
Nevada or even Mexico could play regulatory arbitrage, build nuclear plants in their jurisdictions, and export the electricity to California.
I suppose Mexico might be cheaper as Nevada lacks water, particularly in remote regions where there'd be the least local resistance. Baja California has the Pacific and the Gulf of California; Sonora has the Gulf of California.
California's unique history of opposition to nuclear is unfortunate, but there are larger dynamics that are also suffocating nuclear in California; dynamics that at most are only marginally stronger in California as compared to elsewhere in the United States. Oregon or Washington could also build more nuclear plants. They already export a significant amount of electricity to California, especially to Southern California. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie) Nuclear is disfavored everywhere, and even where it's allowed and nominally profitable the RoI still sucks, so it doesn't take much friction to shift investment elsewhere. We need change at the national level to make nuclear practical again.
Though, now I'm genuinely curious why Mexico doesn't have more than its current two nuclear plants. PEMEX? (Note: Not that I think that Mexico is some third-world country bereft of regulations and organized opposition. I'm sure many of the reasons are similar as elsewhere. Still, I bet therein lie some interesting and informative stories.)
Nuclear is more expensive than wind or solar with way higher upfront investment and way higher lead time to start generating money. And in the US, thanks to NIMBY politics, there’s no solution for long term waste disposal either.
nuclear does not need to compete with wind or solar. Build as much wind and solar that is possible, and don't let nuclear investment impact solar or wind investments.
Nuclear compete with energy generated from fossil fuel, either locally or bought from neighbours, and future battery technology. The waste problem of nuclear is a problem, but not as big as the waste problem of fossil fuels.
Arizona does this (see Palo Verde Generating Station, the largest power plant in the US by generation) and I benefit with $0.05230 per kWh off peak (off peak is 8 pm - 3 pm on weekdays, all day on weekends and 10 holidays).
That's about the same as the non-summer part of ToU plan in NV -- both peak & off-peak. It's about a cent cheaper off-peak right now.
On the TOU plan in NV, weekdays in June thru Sept, from 1PM to 7PM, it's ~0.45/kWh -- but rest of the time it's under 6c/kWh -- comparable [or less] than your rate.
Hard to believe we haven't figured out efficient, reliable, & redundant long-distance electricity transmission at this point.
I generated almost 100kWh today & have used ~half that; it sure seems like transmission is almost as big of an issue as storage.
The vast majority of nuclear power plants are built next to oceans and large lakes. The one that my sibling commenters mentioned in Arizona is the only exception to that rule in the US.
Large nuclear power plants have unique cooling needs. You must place them near a big body of water or risk shutting them down because of insufficient cooling if you place then near rivers.
Lowest rate is $0.25/kWh and most usage will land at $0.32/kWh. Or so you'd think reading that PDF.
I divided my total electric bill by my total usage and got $0.44/kWh. There was a lot of usage in tier 2 because I don't live in the cold and dark. I use a computer and refrigerator. The various confusing surcharges and credits make knowing what any given kWh will cost very difficult.
No, the federal Energy Information Agency and Bureau of Labor Statistics are not wrong.
> Please take a look at an actual PG&E bill.
Looking at an actual bill will tell you what you pay, not what is typical in the state. And if it's a PG&E bill, it will tell you a significantly higher number than is paid in non-PG&E areas (which make up a majority of the state, and which include significant territories throughout Northern and Central California, including parts of the Bay Area, as well as pretty much all of Southern California.)
As others have stated this seems high. I'm in SoCal with SCE and my rates are around 22 cents/kwh for tier 1, 28 cents/kwh for tier 2, and 35 cents/kwh for tier 3. I have a 2k square foot home and a family of 5 and we never hit tier 3.
To add, Santa Clara city is served by Silicon Valley Power which I believe has substantially lower rates than PG&E.. there may be other such local providers..
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
According to their data the average includes all customers. For residential alone (their table 8) the average was 19.15 cents.
> We paid 33 cents / kWh on the bay area last year. Not sure how the rest of CA is doing.
Forget “the rest of California”, that's extremely high for the Bay Area. Last year, SF Area average retail electricity prices by month ranged between 22.9 ¢/kW and 24.0 ¢/kW.
I live in a state that doesn't exactly prioritize low consumer energy costs to put it mildly and my first thought was "$1/kwh is high but sounds reasonable if there's a massive supply restriction and demand spike at the same time". Goes to show you the power of anchoring.
I wasn't able to find the right data to compare it to but it seems to be roughly over 5 time the price compared to Germany and Germany has some of the highest electricity prices in Europe. I.e. compared to some of the Countries with the cheapest electricity in the EU it's something like 15 times the price.
In 2020 the highest wholesale electricity price spike in the US seem to have been $127/MWh with an average of $38/MWh.
It's a lot, it's 0.9 $/kwh, which depending on where you live is about 10-30x the retail price of electricity under normal circumstances. If it's only for a few days/weeks, it's not going to matter a lot (financially) to most. Of course there are a few people who are going to get squeezed hard by this and I imagine some businesses are also going to have some hefty bills.
It's tempting to single out technologies or particular energy sources here as the problem or solution. But the bottom line is that this is fundamentally a policy failure and not a technical problem. Price incentives and signals are probably part of both the problem and solution here. Although none of that will matter this winter of course.
The long term effect of this kind of price instability becoming a regular thing combined with frequent blackouts are going to be interesting. IMHO it's a great opportunity for technology that is basically proven to be highly effective both in providing grid resilience and cost reductions; i.e. clean tech. Nothing like 10x spikes in bills becoming a regular thing to cause people to look for solutions.
Do normal households and small businesses keep track of prices ? Are they able to cap their bills in any way ?
In my country, where I live, the per unit prices are fixed and any increases are announced. I doubt whether people anywhere could keep up with 10-30x changes in prices.
Smart meters are extremely popular in places that have flexible pricing. And given that electricity is expensive in lots of places, there are lots of home owners and businesses spending lots of money on solutions that help them reduce their energy cost. Even simple things like off peak tariffs can drive stuff like this.
As far as I know many electric contacts for end users have fixed prices. (Potentially with some auto price correction every year or so based on averages, but this shouldn't matter for now.)
Given that this are wholesale prices it about how much the company selling electricity to end-users pays for it to (simplified).
Note there are three tabs in this graphic: Day-ahead, 15 minute, and real-time.
Day-ahead contracts are high because uncertainty is also high.
15 minute and real-time prices are an order of magnitude lower, despite the sun being down and electric heaters presumably consuming a lot of electricity.
Energy companies need to decide how much of their capacity they want to lock in at the high $900 rate for tomorrow, and how much they want to risk on the shorter interval contracts.
This does not mean that every MWh of electricity costs $900. It does mean power companies are doing a lot of risk management calculations right now, though.
Yes, daily averages vary wildly in industrialised countries with real time electricity pricing.
In much of Europe, residential, and office will pay $0.3-0.5 during normal use in winter, but dramatically less in off-peak hour in countries with "smart meters."
This way you get seemingly sensible $0.1-$0.2 per kWh averages, but drop your jaw when you see your electricity bill.
Just like a car load of hard disks driven 2000 miles has greater bandwidth than transmitting that same data over the internet, I wonder if you could arbitrage Texas electric costs by driving a semi-truck full of Tesla Powerwall batteries from Florida.
Loaded 3 wide, 2 high, 90 deep for space constraints, you'd be well over the gross weight limit.
Loaded to the weight limit, you can ballpark 48K pounds or 174 Powerwall 2s. Those would hold just under 2.5MWh, or just over $2K of electricity at $900/MWh.
If you figure the truck costs you $1.50/mile on the low side, it would cost you at least $1500 to drive Pensacola to Houston and back.
It's much more energy-efficient than building pylons and distribution lines, if you only need it once in a lifetime to deal with a hundred-year weather event, and outside that you have a use for the Powerwalls and the truck.
It's not implausible something like this could be economically worthwhile, though as sokoloff points out it's not close to being there at current prices. Trucks full of portable generators and diesel fuel are also a potential competitor.
People keep saying that this is somehow a "once in a lifetime" event in Texas, even though the last one was in 2011.
Plus, being interconnected gives you the opportunity not just to prevent grid failure, but to sell and buy electricity to arbitrage the price, which will be increasingly important in the future due to renewable energy intermittency.
"if you only need it once in a lifetime to deal with a hundred-year weather event" - I have two problems with that: 1. IIUC global warming means events like this become more likely. So for our parent generations this might be a once a lifetime event, but for us and future generations that thinking could be dangerously wrong.
2. You're seeming to assume the only reason for an interconnected grid might be cold weather (at least that's what you're implying). I believe additional resilience and a more open market are also benefits.
I'm not arguing that Texas having an interconnector to the other US grids would be bad. I don't have the expertise on climate, power distribution or future energy need projections to have a strong opinion on that - though I can see it would have certain benefits.
Just saying that it's fallacious to argue that relying on an emergency solution instead of improved infrastructure to handle extreme cases is per se more expensive, without considering how often the extreme cases are hit.
> 15 minute and real-time prices are an order of magnitude lower, despite the sun being down and electric heaters presumably consuming a lot of electricity.
Not everywhere. I'm seeing prices exceeding $900 when I select real-time. Perhaps I'm reading it wrong but take a look at so cal.
There’s an elegant solution to all this: better energy efficiency for buildings.
It’s funny seeing people in this thread jumping right past the root cause and suggesting elaborate solutions like nuclear power. And before you say it’s not feasible to upgrade hundreds of millions of buildings in the USA, you should be aware that upgrading homes to be more energy efficient actually pays for itself (albeit in the long run, which is why most of us have not bothered doing it).
Great! Now go tear down the entire housing stock so we can rebuild it better. Unfortunately, as a society we're already under-building, so we can't really afford to tear down what we've already got.
In some places (like here in the Bay Area) it's ridiculously difficult and expensive to build anything, so much of the building stock is untouched since the 1950s and simply rots in place.
We'd do well to be as good at home construction as Japan.
> Great! Now go tear down the entire housing stock so we can rebuild it better. Unfortunately, as a society we're already under-building, so we can't really afford to tear down what we've already got.
Well, why not?
Japan effectively rebuilt its entire housing stock few times over since WW2, and so did Britain, Germany, and ex-Union countries.
I believe USA has more money than the broke USSR did
20 year timelines is easily achievable for USA as a wealthy, and still relatively industrialised country.
>I believe USA has more money than the broke USSR did
Note that this doesn't really matter. It especially didn't matter back then in a less globalized economy. The USSR being poor doesn't change anything about their domestic labor pool, which is what is relevant for construction work. The laborers simply charge less.
This is same fallacy that leads people to believe we'd magically have more of everything if money hoarded by rich people was distributed across the populace. At best stuff will be distributed better. But bakers won't start baking more bread, nor will car manufacturers be able to start making more cars. Assuming unemployment stays the same, the economic output of goods won't change.
Money doesn't produce anything, people do. Money is a tool to guide labor in the right direction and distribute goods.
Which means that in order to build more, the USA would either need more construction workers or become more efficient at constructing stuff. The first can be achieved by diverting money and making the job more attractive, the second by creating a competitive environment.
I think money is actually the problem. In a rich country everyone can afford to have opinions about other folks' business, and so we spend years approving projects that take months to complete. Japan has (as far as I can tell as a distant observer) much stronger property rights with regard to what you can build than most of America.
At eye-watering expense and with long lead times. Both of those are largely self-inflicted wounds. As with everything, if it were cheaper and faster to do, we'd probably be doing more of it.
We'd do well to shorten timelines and costs by removing permitting requirements for most types of work and loosening control over building. We also need to reduce costs of living so a broader occupational dynamic range of people can live in any area. That would expand the labor pool for doing work in urban areas.
I don't know anyone who has managed to accomplish nontrivial work on an existing home in Palo Alto in under two years and for less than half a million dollars. One friend has been trying to fix a leaky structure there for ~5 years.
It’s expensive up front, but it should pay for itself if done right. This is not a trivial finance problem, though. It’s very challenging fund projects with decades-long payoffs.
That's probably true in places with sensible construction costs and timelines. But around here it's going to cost me $250k to fix the envelope of my house. If it reduced my energy usage to zero it would take only 70 years to pay for itself. But it won't do that and I won't live that long, so...
Yep, you nailed the biggest problem. No single person can individually make decisions on those time scales. Future energy costs, interest rates, climate trends, technological changes, and urban planning all need to be factored in.
There needs to be a financing system that packages all this together and offers homeowners a simple low-interest construction loan that is cheaper than their energy bills.
A problem is that conserving doesn't in the end produce any cost savings, which is a perverse disincentive to conserve.
Water during the CA droughts a few years ago is a perfect example. Water agencies asked people to conserve water. So people did. A lot. Water agencies promptly freaked out because their revenue decreased. Of course it did, people were conserving water.
So they increased the base rates (the amount they'll bill you even if consumption is zero) to compensate (and then some). In my town, base rate went from a few dollars to almost $80.
So even though my consumption went down about 20% from my efforts to conserve, my monthly bill went up from around $40 to near $100.
If they increase the unit cost rather than the base rate, then there's still an incentive to conserve. It just means that the people who didn't conserve water initially are now paying more. To get back to the same price they need to conserve water.
That's exactly the behaviour we (society) want - overall, water is conserved.
Increasing the base rate (making water a fixed cost regardless of usage) has the opposite effect. That was clearly a mistake on the part of the water company.
Yes, we need to align incentives with conservation/consumption and minimize externalities.
Unfortunately, because our buildings are not built by the parties that have to pay for consumption, that's not enough to incentivize energy efficient / green building construction.
There's probably some costs that need to be shared including leaky pipes and fire departments that increase in times of heat, but that seems unlikely to account for a tripling. Your water department probably charged that way because there are water hogs that create jobs/food/etc. who wouldn't be able to foot the actual bill of their water use, so while they wanted to incentivize conservation they also wanted everyone to share the bill. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; we're in this together and need money and food.
Sure, that's a good goal. I spent a lot of effort, time and money to optimize and reduce water consumption as much as possible. Low-flow everything, upgraded appliances, redid the yard and all sprinkler plumbing, all for the idea of conserving water.
It is quite a gut punch to then have the water bill increase more than 100% because the water agency is solely focused on how much profit they are making, instead of caring about conservation.
>It’s funny seeing people in this thread jumping right past the root cause and suggesting elaborate solutions like nuclear power.
The root cause is extreme weather events which will will get more of. Non-renewables are not affected by the wind and sun. Since we don't want to go extinct by pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere we are left with nuclear.
I don't understand how people can want to return to feudalism where land is the only way to extract energy from the sun. But given how NYC and SF treat workers perhaps I do.
The evidence is stacked against centralized power production. Centralized power production is highly unreliable. Nuclear power stops working during freezing weather and very hot weather where flow rates in rivers drop. Gas stops working when pipelines freeze. Coal plants are the primary cause of death via power generation because their pollution is worse than just CO2.
Meanwhile people spend a lot of effort on predicting Solar and Wind and yet their expectations were more pessimistic compared to the actual energy production capacity that is online.
If you are going to deploy an expensive method of power generation you better want to use that expensive power as efficiently as possible. The fact that you don't consider practical reality makes it sound like this is just a Santa wishlist of yours.
This is what the WOZX token plans to do. If you read what website and whitepaper, you will absolutely not get what they are trying to achieve. What i think they are doing is a marketplace for people to chip in to do renovations to improve energy efficiency and then dividends of the savings be vested back into those investors. It sounds like a good place, but ultimately seems too convoluted.
Likely corresponds to the nationwide spike in natural gas prices.
Even in California, natural gas prices are an order of magnitude higher than usual. Prices appear to have hit ~$90 per quadrillion BTU, versus a typical price of ~$2 per 10^15 BTU
I think this misreads the abbreviation MM BTU (where M in this case is the Roman numeral thousand or "mille" rather than the metric million or "mega"). 1 MM BTU = 10^6 BTU, not 10^15.
A therm is 10^5 BTU. Last month I paid $77 for 117 therms, or about 66 cents/therm. This would be $6.6 per MM BTU.
By the way that was 126 ccf (ccf = 100 cubic feet) or 12600 cubic feet (357 cubic meters).
As you say, $90 wholesale for something I'm used to paying less than $10 for, is a big increase.
I'm a big fan of renewables, solar/wind/hydro. But we still need that baseline generating capacity for these dark icy winter days. It's clear now that coal/oil isn't it (pollution) and we should reserve natural gas supply for home heating (because it's efficient and "relatively" clean) and spot-demand generators.
So that leaves Nuclear. But we just need to get it right this time -- i.e. don't build them near earthquake/tsunami zones, don't play games with the control rods and these days we've gotten pretty good at control systems. I think it's about time to look at it again.
Renewables are very reliable if you winter-proof them, the same as other sources.
The problem at the moment is that none of the sources for Texas was prepared for a cold winter, renewable or otherwise.
Quebec is 99% renewable[0] (95% hydro, 4% wind) and runs through the coldest of winter just fine!
> With over 40 853 MW of installed capacity, hydroelectric stations generate about 95% of Quebec’s electricity.
> Wind is the 2nd largest source of electricity generation in Quebec. In 2018, wind capacity reached 4 096 MW and accounted for 4% of the province’s generating capacity
> Quebec is 99% renewable[0] (95% hydro, 4% wind) and runs through the coldest of winter just fine!
Hydro has huge impacts on the environment and can only be built if you have mountains and large amounts of water.
Oh, and it’s one of the dealiest sources of energy. The Banqiao dam disaster in 1975 killed as much as 250.000 people while there are less than 50 deaths attributed to Chernobyl according to UNSCEAR/WHO.
But where are the billions suffering from nuclear power? As you point out, even with a generous accounting, Chernobyl was orders of magnitude less than that.
1. Chernobyl was an old, unsafe design, and the disaster was human error. There are better safer designs.
2. The true toll of Chernobyl is the hundreds of thousands of people killed due to pollution from coal plants (52000 per year in US alone). Lives that could be saved if countries had shifted to Nuclear more aggressively.
I don't know why you think billions are suffering from Nuclear plants. About 20% of total power generation in US is from Nuclear. Can you tell me how many millions are suffering from it?
I completely agree you can build hardy solar/wind generation (i.e. runs in winter), however, the sun still sets each day, and wind is intermittent and unpredictable. until there is a revolution in battery technology, relying on those two sources (without others types of generation) will result in large electricity price spikes.
Also fair to note that fossil fuel plants also froze and were unable to operate. It's not even a renewable or not question. It's just whether your grid has been properly hardened against the elements.
Nuclear works under nearly all environmental conditions. Heck, we have nuclear powered energy sources in space.
Russia built a floating nuclear power plant in the remote city of Pevek in the polar circle where hardly any wind turbine or solar panel will be able to generate sufficient amounts of electricity.
Gas-based electrical generation is what are failing right now! They are failing left and right! If 100% was gas there would be more problems, not less.
Wind and Solar is pulling above planned generation right now.
If you believe your logic, time to go all-in on wind + solar.
Wind and solar are above planned generation right now, which was 0. In ERCOT wind has been making less than 6 GW out of 33 GW installed for over 7 days straight [1]. Natural gas is pulling almost all the weight right now, as you can see. So no, not time to go all in on wind + solar.
Your first statement is partially true. The ERCOT "planners" expected their gas capacity to basically always be there, and the fact that 30 GW of thermal capacity is offline for various weather-related reasons is the primary reason the power is out.
But the remaining gas is pulling almost all the weight keeping people alive so we shouldn't neglect that.
Isn't gas also at like 50% production as well? It's also heavily knocked out?
Like it's pulling a lot of weight because it's 80% of the capacity if nothing's going wrong! If it was 100% then maybe 40 GW of thermal capacity would _also_ be offline.
ERCOT assumed 0% from Wind. Instead we're getting 25% They assumed 100% from gas. Instead we're getting 50% (or 70% or whatever). You look at that and tell me gas is what's performing well here, and the segment that should be expanded. (EDIT: Sorry, I think your original thing was "all in nuclear." I think I read nuclear was also having some issues but it's at least not the "more gas is the solution for a situation where gas is failing" narrative)
I get that wind + solar can't cover everything, but right now what we're seeing is massive failures from gas. In a universe where we had more wind + solar, there could likely be more energy going around right now.
on 12/19/2020 -- looks to be a fairly typical Texas winter day
natural gas production was 331660 megawatthours
wind was 191415 megawatthours
for a ratio of 1.73 gas/wind
this appears to be fairly typical numbers on a daily basis over the winter -- actually on a number of days wind surpasses gas
on 2/16/2021
natural gas 692091
wind 90087
for a ratio of 7.68 gas/wind
natural gas 2/16 vs natural gas 12/19 is ratio 2.09
wind 2/16 vs wind 12/19 is ratio 0.47
so as expected during an inclement weather event natural gas ramped up and wind ramped down. natural gas just didn't ramp up enough to pick up all the slack from increased demand and ramped down renewables.
"I get that wind + solar can't cover everything, but right now what we're seeing is massive failures from gas. In a universe where we had more wind + solar, there could likely be more energy going around right now." -- Wind is failing much worse than gas from an objective power generation standpoint. All wind has going for it is the tyranny of low expectations.
And you've got plenty of massive offshore wind resources on both sides of the continent that are blowing right now (Feb 17th 7:49pm PDT) if we had installed capacity.
We need to keep our nuclear fleet (20% of electrical generation) and invest in a TON of transmission.
Transmission lines aren't so easy, for example the Northern Pass project to bring power from Quebec Hydro into New England failed due to local opposition:
I do like the idea (from the linked tweet) of underground transmission lines (underground alongside railroads is probably mitigates the NIMBY objections):
Ask anyone who has planned and installed a long-haul transmission line in the past 40 years and they'll tell you that that's gonna be extremely hard. It's simple technically, as is building a lot of a standardized nuclear plant, but it's not easy and will be hit by massive amounts of NIMBY.
Yes, the regulatory and NIMBY challenges are extreme.
Best way to do it is to go:
1. All underground transmission.
2. Expand the natural gas pipeline permitting process (which is controlled at the Federal level and already overrides state's jurisdiction) to include underground electrical transmission.
Take the North East of the US, there's not enough solar year round, nor is it generally windy enough of the time to generate power for a densely populated region & power hungry growing region.
So my logic is go Nuclear, like France. Keep the natural gas for heating (since it's relatively efficient and cleaner than other fossil fuels). Supplement with solar/wind where & when available.
Except it was natural gas generators that caused the system to fail:
As Princeton engineering professor Jesse Jenkins points out, the real primary culprit was the mass failure of nuclear, coal, and natural gas (or "thermal") power plants. At the peak of the blackout something like 27,000 megawatts of thermal capacity were offline — or nearly 40 percent of Texas's entire thermal capacity.
Baseload + peakers is one concept that allows a grid to meet demand. But it's not the only way - decorrelated intermittent generation + peakers could work too. But what doesn't work well so well is baseload + intermittent generation. If you must have baseload (i.e. nuclear) as the foundation of the grid, intermittent renewables (solar/wind) aren't going to have much of a place because you need dispatchable power generation to fill in the demand peaks.
As long as we need peakers or other dispatchable powers supply, I like solar and wind over nuclear to provide the main quantity of generation vs nuclear. I don't see nuclear catching up to renewables on cost terms at this point.
Saying solar is cheap when the sun shines is like saying coal is cheap at the mine.
You need electricity produced at the right time as well as the right place. I don't understand how people can get that producing electricity in the middle of the Sahara is useless, but producing it at 12pm on June 15th when you need it today isn't.
I feel like what we need to do is dump $50 to $100 billion per year into nuclear fusion reactor research, then get them online around the world as soon as possible.
If the patents are to be believed, then Lockheed-Martin's Skunkworks has developed a portable fusion reactor the size of an intermodal shipping container. I'd like to see those scaled up significantly for usage around the world, for a variety of reasons... extraordinarily cheap power for one, but far more manageable nuclear waste storage for another, and more important, reason.
Even if we already new how to do fusion we couldn't build fusion plants quickly enough to prevent catastrophic warming. Arguably we can't even build fission plants quickly enough for that. The window for fusion has closed, we should've invested forty years ago. Hoping for some breakthrough that allows us to build these fifty times faster than we currently believe we might be able to build them is a very risky maneuver.
There are companies and research groups in a number of countries currently experimenting with next generation fusion devices which have a new class of superconductor in them as compared to ITER (in essence, they run at a higher cryogenic temperature so need less exotic refrigeration to operate). None have as yet proved their work to be commercially viable (to my knowledge) but there is real work being done.
That "but" is demonstrably wrong. There are lots of places that are heading towards relying exclusively on renewables where nuclear, coal, and gas plants are basically shrinking in use as the grid expands to shift to being exclusively powered by renewables.
Most of those places are not affected by blackouts being a regular thing. I can't remember the last one in Germany, which has lots of wind. I can't remember a single power outage lasting more than a few minutes/seconds, ever. I'm 46 and I only experienced only a handful of those. Just not a thing in Northern Europe. We have interconnected grids and coal/nuclear are basically disappearing rapidly. I believe the UK had an interesting cascading failure on its grid last year and that was big news because it is so unusual. That only lasted for a few hours.
If you look at the economics, it's pretty straightforward. Texas was an early adopter of wind because it's a cheap option for generating power and it takes power to produce power. So a lot of that Texan wind power is actually used for oil and gas production and was installed primarily for that purpose and payed for by very much for profit oil companies. Probably with the help of a lot of tax money because big oil basically owns the local politicians.
Ironically, the thing that's currently driving up the prices of gas in the US, is basically oil and gas production being affected by the sudden demand for gas for heating. As demand spiked, gas production capacity started dropping because the electrical grid got disrupted (which is of course about 50% powered by gas plants in Texas). Probably Texas is more reliant on gas now than in the past, which is probably a big reason for the current issues.
Yes, some older wind turbines are not capable of dealing with cold weather. Texas of course has lots of those as it was an early adopter and is not commonly affected by cold weather like this.
But there are lots of regions with extreme weather that have large deployments of wind turbines that reliably produce power through very extreme conditions. E.g. Antarctica has wind power. So does Iceland, Norway, or Alaska. Ice proof wind turbines is a high tech business and a fairly recent development. So, wind is basically part of the solution here and not part of the problem.
What is happening in Texas has very little to do with baseline power generation and more to do with an electricity network not designed to handle cold weather.
In this current Texas disaster those base line thermal generators like coal, gas and nuclear have also fallen victim to these low temperatures.
I'm sorry but it's not that simple, as you can see clearly right now. Between Feb 9 and Feb 17th wind and solar energy delivery has been a very small fraction of capacity, less than 10%. To do baseload over a period of 8 days with that kind of resource would require roughly a 20x capacity overbuild and some kind of ridiculous battery. It's just not practical. Most realistic scenarios these days have lots of wind and solar and some overnight batteries, and rely on large mostly-idled capacity of gas to get through the black-swan events like this. Though obviously this approach has challenges as well.
I think you're overcomplicating the situation. A mix of renewable sources is quite stable, and there are more ways to store energy than just batteries. Here's a paper debunking the baseload myth.
All I'm saying is we need a mix of generation, including guaranteed baseline generating capacity. A typical nuclear plant puts out 1GW, that's pretty substantial.
They generated 71% of their 582 TWh in 2018 from Nuclear, with the bulk of the remainder coming from Hydro (12%) Natural Gas (5%), Wind (5%) ... (solar was only 2%, same as coal).
They are a net exporter of power and that generates about €3 billion/year of revenue.
I don't see why we need this so called baseline. It is an outdated concept pushed by the nuclear industry. We need (i) to harness the cheap energy coming from the sun and the wind and (ii) another source of energy to make up shortages when solar and wind are unavailable.
The source (ii) should be able to be ramped up and shut down quickly, which is a requirement where nuclear flat out fails.
The baseline concept of a power source that is steady and cannot be quickly shut down or ramped up (i.e., nuclear or coal) really does not make sense in a world where you have access to very cheap but somewhat unpredictable sources of energy.
Ideally, source (ii) would be electricity storage. This is not available now at the necessary scale (but it is getting closer and closer to reality). So the other alternatives are hydro (ideal if available in your environment, but not always available) and gas.
Nuclear doesn't enter into it. Starting up and stopping nuclear reactors is a difficult time consuming process that cannot be done on demand.
And yes Gas is falling on its face right now, but that is not due to any fundamental limitations of gas. It is because a lot of the US nat gas is mined and transported in Texas and the Texans did not winterize their equipment.
I expect renewables will keep increasing in combination with gas, until power storage becomes available.
But at the end of the day, it uses more energy than it generates due to the inefficiencies of pumping water up to the top of the mountain (basically, it's playing arbitrage with spot electricity pricing & demand).
By hydro i did not mean pumped storage hydro but ordinary dam hydro. It does not technically store energy but it is a very effective on demand power producer because you can turn it on or off at will (provided there is enough water in the reservoir).
Also, it is very good for intermittent generation, because when you stop it, you can fill up the water in the reservoir and give yourself potential energy for the next time you start it up. It does in a way store energy, it stores the energy of rivers, not of electricity.
Of course whether you can access it depends on your environment. You have to have convenient rivers to dam up, and you have to have no water shortages. In a case of water shortage the decision to let water out or not is usually made based on water needs, not electricity needs.
Hydro has very specific geographical requirements and in countries like Germany, all almost all potential for hydro power has already been put to use and yet it provides only a fraction of the electricity generation here.
Hydro only plays a large role world-wide in countries with low population densities such as Norway.
> I don't see why we need this so called baseline. It is an outdated concept pushed by the nuclear industry.
That’s a lie spread by the renewables lobby.
Of course, there is always a certain level of electricity generation that is needed as most people like to use their fridges, AC and computers 24/7.
And then you have things like traffic infrastructure, hospitals, gas stations which operate 24/7.
I don’t know about the US, but in Germany only 25% of the electricity is consumed by private households, 75% by industry, traffic and businesses.
The result is that in Germany the demand never goes below 50 GW and normally peaks at around 75-80 GW. The demand function pretty much oscillates like a sine function.
> Of course, there is always a certain level of electricity generation that is needed as most people like to use their fridges, AC and computers 24/7.
This is true but let me summarise my understanding which might be incorrect, and is based off this article and similar ones. I'd like to know where it's wrong?
Basically, there is a minimum amount of power a traditional power plant can generate before needing to turn off, which is slow and costly.
"Base load" is this minimum amount that is generated onto the grid and it is priced accordingly at off-peak times so demand will increase and consume it without power stations losing money by burning fuel to waste power, or having to turn off.
With renewables in the picture, they eat into this base load demand. Now when demand is lower, renewables might still be outputting power at little to no marginal cost, and homes are not pulling from the grid. The traditional plants are burning fuel but they have to sell it at a loss or dump the power (maybe batteries can help them here).
This means that, as we get more and more renewable sources online, traditional plants are actually bad for base load (in the modern use of the term) generation. A lot of the time they can't come online fast enough to fill a slump if renewables drop, which means they are idling and losing money the rest of the time when renewables are flourishing. This means we need rapid response sources, like batteries (seconds) or gas (tens of minutes) rather than the traditional sources (coal) which take hours.
There is one additional factor which is used in practice. Fossil fueled plants like those operation on oil can get paid to operate in backup mode. I know plants here in Sweden does this, and I suspect it is either tax funded directly or by the grid connection cost that get added on top of the metered cost.
This way a traditional fossil fueled power station get paid to maintain capacity regardless of current demand, and the response time is kept low in case of changing weather.
From the perspective of the government, they are simply paying for a reliable power grid. From the perspective of renewable energy plants, they can sell energy at a lower price than fossil fueled power plants with smaller investment. From the perspective of the fossil fueled power plant they get paid twice, once for being backup and then any power they then happen to sell when the price goes up because of the weather. From the perspective of capacity, both renewable and fossil fueled power plants tries to have capacity close to 100% of demand and thus get invested and built accordingly.
From my own perspective I am not sure this is the cleanest, most stable or cheapest way to run a power grid.
It sounds basically like paying someone to be "on call" in case you need them in a hurry. That does seem like more of a bandage over the existing system rather than an optimal design.
It is but there are not many alternatives. Government are investing into more power lines at the border in order to import energy from nearby countries fossil fueled energy plants. If we look at the region as a whole however, the fossil fueled energy capacity still need to match the whole grid and the owners of those plants will need to be paid.
Hydro power is a great alternative, but we are already at peak utilization. We actually need to tear down some in order to save red listed species and restore the environment for animals that need to have unobstructed rivers to reproduce. As the capacity has been increasing, hydro power has been mostly static in term of growth.
There is nuclear and the political situation of that. The government and the green party (who is part of the current government constellation) are promoting the "on call" as a favorable strategy over nuclear. Their main political argument is that everything is good as long we produce more green energy over the whole year than we consume coal energy during the winter. Historically the political right has been pro-fossil fuels, but given the current situation there has been some movement now where some parties is looking to move into opposition.
And last we got battery technology. So far the only installations that I know globally that operate by generating solar energy and putting them into battery is Tesla. I don't know how economical that system has been. There exist to my knowledge no wind park operating through Tesla batteries, and I do not know why that is.
What you are saying is true but irrelevant. Yes there is a baseline of demand. But that does not mean that there is a requirement for a similar supply. The demand you described can be supplied by cheap renewables, complemented by gas or hydro as I discussed above.
In St. Louis, MO (which is also seeing a long cold week and winter storms), our power has averaged 8¢/kWh this month. We have a mix of hydro, nuclear, gas, and I believe one coal plant serving our area.
I live in VA. At least if you purchase your generation through the main electric utility, Dominion Energy, there are fixed rates. What these rates are depend upon how much you use per month and the time of year. For rates the year is broken into 2 periods. October - May and June - September. Rates are in general highest for use over 800kWh in a month between June & September since it is the highest usage period statewide. My last bill the average rate was about .11 c/kWh. I used 915 kWh. Last July I used 672 kWh and my rate was about .12 c/kWh.
Texas electric prices have been capped at $9000/MWHr for the last few days. Average is about $35/MWhr. The Texas electric bill is about $10 billion per day right now.
When this winter storm set in, I switched from grid power to my natural gas generator. I have a 48kW Generac attached to a 1000 gallon natural gas tank. The tank also feeds all my gas appliances and fireplaces in my home. At the current rate of usage, I have another 24 days on which to operate.
Where most people are paying enormous rates, I purchased my whole tank of gas for $940, plus delivery fee.
I have strongly recommended to my friends to have generators installed and to buy their own natural gas storage tanks to power them. While my personal setup was about $20,000 fully installed and hooked up, you can easily get a 24kW model that would power most homes 2000-2500 sq. ft. easily, for about $7000-$9000.
Best part is, many whole home generator providers will allow you to finance if the upfront costs are too burdensome.
Yeah that's a good idea. Climb onto your roof, onto a notoriously slippery surface, to "clean" said surface off the roof (how exactly are they to do that...?).
That way you can slip on the snow and fall onto not just the snow, but the compacted snow that's now become ice, and not just ice, but the incredibly hard concrete that is your driveway...
I'm sorry but are you serious? You tie yourself with a rope to secure you. Someone has to clean the rooftops from a too big of a snow buildup from cold places all the time. If cleaning small area of panels on rooftop where men and women all around the world work all the time you don't really deserve the modern cozy life. Time to reflect buddy.
Excuse my ignorance, but am I, as a California residential user, going to pay these prices for the electricity I'm using in my home right now?
Should I shut everything down?
No your rates are fixed and agreed upon ahead of time.
However if you sign up for a service like OhmConnect, you can get paid to lower your energy usage at times when prices are high (which tends to coincide with use of the dirtiest energy). They warn you a day ahead for the time period, usually an hour but sometimes two, and you get credit for being under your typical usage for that time period.
Aren't residential prices controlled by the public utility commission? So probably not immediately. But if CA utilities buy on the wholesale market and can't raise rates then they may go bankrupt.
It depends on your utility contract, but very likely not. Most consumers pay a fixed volumetric rate, and it's the utility that is exposed to real-time fluctuations in the wholesale price of power.
In Texas and other deregulated markets, you can be on either a fixed rate for n months or on a variable rate. If you're on a variable rate, the rate will be much higher than normal for the next few months. If you're on a fixed rate you're fine for now, but keep an eye on when your fixed rate expires. This assumes that your supplier is still in business after the next few months (many suppliers will go bankrupt because of this). For the suppliers, they're going to be hit hard by people who either decide not to pay their supplier next month, or have people who switch to budget billing. They're going to suffer a cash crunch for a bit.
If you are in a regulated market or are using the regulated utilities like ConEd in NYC, you'll see limited rate increases to deal with the increased cost to supply. These rate increases need to be approved by the state's Public Utility Commission.
> If you are in a regulated market or are using the regulated utilities like ConEd in NYC, you'll see limited rate increases to deal with the increased cost to supply. These rate increases need to be approved by the state's Public Utility Commission.
If deregulated suppliers are having to raise prices to cover costs, wouldn't that apply to regulated suppliers as well? Unless they have enough cash on hand to ride it out, then they will have to raise prices or go bankrupt. I would feel like the risk of bankruptcy would be higher if they have limited ability to raise prices.
I'm assuming regulated and deregulated suppliers operate similarly. I don't know if regulated suppliers are required to have some sort of backup for this situation.
For the most part, regulated utilities factor in cost spikes into their rates, so they’ll have some reserve built in to cover. They may not make as much profit this quarter, but they won’t go bankrupt. Additionally, keep in mind that a lot of regulated utility companies own their own generating plants. In that case, the cost of power on the open market is basically irrelevant. Heck, they may even be SELLING power into this market.
Small quibble here. I'm pretty sure that most regulated companies do NOT own their own generating plants, since for a long time they were legally not allowed to be in both the distribution business and the generator business. I _think_ this was from the Public Utility Holding Company Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Holding_Company...) but it was ~ 15 years ago when I toured an Entergy power plant and heard the explanation so I may be wrong. I suspect that this still holds true for regulated utilities since the conflict of interest is pretty high.
What has been a recent trend is generator companies purchasing supplier companies (for example Calpine purchased Champion Energy and Noble Solutions)
Regulated suppliers operate somewhat differently than deregulated suppliers. 1. Regulated suppliers have rules around how much a rate can change, and those rate changes have to be approved by their respective PUC. This limits the sticker shock. 2. Regulated suppliers do this in exchange for a guaranteed profit for their distribution side (they have a government approved local monopoly). They also tend to be the biggest supplier since they are usually the default supplier. Because of this, these companies have both more cash on hand and more ability to borrow in case of a cash crunch caused by issues like this. They also have a tendency to be better about hedging for circumstances like this.
Basically the regulated suppliers will probably see some rate increases but they will be more gradual and certainly won't be as wild as rate increases by deregulated suppliers.
PS deregulated supplier is a bit of a misnomer. They are still regulated by the state Public Utility Commission, but they are less regulated than the utilities that also do distribution.
As mentioned by others, in the regulated markets they're required to factor in these contingencies, amortized over the expected length of time between events of this scale.
Likely not, and that's part of the reason why it's so high in the first place. Price is a function of supply and demand. In this case the supply is limited, but demand stays the same because there's basically zero incentive for consumers to reduce discretionary electricity usage.
it's pretty crazy. even when we are not in the middle of a 'once in a generation' winter storm electricity prices regularly spike as much as 100x as peak gen ramps up, and the whole world (basically) goes on consuming it as if the price is static. like what if gasoline cost gas stations $30/gallon between 4-7pm and they just kept on selling it at $2-3/gallon?
So how does this work out in the end? Will people suffering in the cold due to outages in the end also get a thousand dollar invoice for the 2h of daily electricity they were given?
I believe most people will be on fixed rate tariffs so it shouldn’t affect their bills (aside from lower usage due to the outages). This will hit the suppliers as they need to buy the energy for their customers on the wholesale market.
I don’t know what the smart meter situation is like in Texas but there might be some people on price-linked tariffs who would be exposed.
Anyone use a 'alternative energy supplier' (e.g., not the local power company, who you do pay for the transmission). Are your per-kWh prices fixed or do they float?
Ideally new ones would be designed better to avoid this possibility, but new nuclear plants take a minimum of 5 years if you're really sprinting. It's probably the most difficult, expensive, and time-consuming option compared to weather-hardening existing power plants and building new wind, solar, and storage.
Nuclear plants are the worst possible way to reduce energy costs. They are also incredibly massive single points of failure, so they tend to reduce reliability compared to more distributed smaller generation units. Germany, for example, has seen reliability increase massively as they shift towards more distributed renewables, even though it's not a super high penetration level.
As we shift to more renewables and start to install more and more grid storage, and even home storage, reliability will increase massively. Those people with solar and batteries that can island their homes are completely fine the past few days.
We have a much more modern, cost effective, and scalable set of technologies now than we did in the 1970s. I don't see how nuclear can compete on any level, as it's incredibly inefficient and has proven that it can't scale in the modern world.
> Germany, for example, has seen reliability increase massively as they shift towards more distributed renewables, even though it's not a super high penetration level.
That’s a blatant lie.
According to the Bundesnetzagentur which is the local regulator for the electricity grid, the number of times where they have to intervene on the electricity grid to stabilize it has dramatically increased due to the higher share of renewables:
Did you consider the future impact of CO2 pricing in Germany?
Coal plants will shut down very soon and that will "surprisingly" make Germany look much better.
After all, the strategy that is currently being pursued is very erratic. The emission reductions are not going to follow a smooth curve like the CO2 emissions in 2020 showed. It's very difficult to make sense of what is going to happen. An us vs them comparison might not show the whole picture.
I can't read your link, so I don't know what you mean by "intervene to stabilize," but that actually sounds like a good thing, since the German grid has the least amount of downtime of any of its neighbors and is far better than the US. Here's an IEEE article:
> Germany’s energy sector causes 350 million tons of CO2 annually, 50 France’s just 50 million tons CO2 annually.
What is the relevance here? Germany has always burned lots of coal. Adding renewables, just like adding nuclear, reduces that.
> The kWh in France costs 17 Euro Cents, while it costs over 31 Euro Cents in Germany.
Again, what is the relevance here? Germany bought a ton of solar when it was super expensive, driving the industry forward and permanently lowering costs for everyone. It also charges residential consumers a lot more in order to subsidize industry.
>I have no idea why some people on HN keep spreading such lies about nuclear and the so-called Energiewende in Germany.
>You should get your facts straight!
I would insist that you do the same. Misrepresentations and cherry picked bad numbers are not helpful or informative.
That's really not justifiable unless you assume nuclear construction costs in the out-of-practice west apply everywhere, always and forever. To think this is to completely disregard the amazing nuclear builds in China (see Hualong One), the UAE (3 APR-1400s build by the Koreans), Russia (lots of VVERs), etc. At the costs they're delivering, current low-carbon 24/7 nuclear is a rock-solid choice.
Solar photovoltaic and wind are much older technologies than nuclear, to be fair on the "modern" quip.
> Solar photovoltaic and wind are much older technologies than nuclear, to be fair on the "modern" quip.
To be completely fair, the development of nuclear power took governments and would have been impossible otherwise. Solar and wind, not so much. The problem with nuclear is only cost, not NIMBY and before it is said so, it certainly is not the regulations jacking the cost of nuclear so high. If nuclear power was economically viable, you could not beat off the investors. The trouble is, the investors don't want to pay the $15B or so it costs to build a single plant, nor the cost of decommissioning, nor for the cost of storing the waste effectively forever, plus the cost of securing that, and certainly not for any accidents, as improbable as they may be. They just want to sell electricity and profit, and leave the government with the responsibility of paying for all the things.
And really to be fair, the cost of R&D for nuclear power has never been paid back. Pay the US and UK taxpayers back for the R&D and you can have all the nuclear power plants you want.
The German government spent like $500B buying expensive solar PV which was instrumental in allowing the manufacturing efficiencies to reduce prices to what we see today in solar.
Similarly, we know that serial construction of standard nuclear is cost effective from the examples cited.
Germany spent closer to $26B on Solar since 2016. Meanwhile, the US alone expects to spend $36B on storing nuclear waste. Half of the first generation of nuclear power plants being constructed were abandoned because of insurmountable costs.
If nuclear power was economically viable, no one could stop it. But investors do not want to pay for plant construction without massive subsidies that are now absent, nor for the decommissioning, nor for the storage of spent fuel; they just want to sell electricity and keep the money without any overhead. Where are the private investors! Bring them on and get it done! They're simply not interested. "Electricity too cheap to meter" never materialized. Renewable energy is a far better return, and today, nuclear power can not compete against renewables. Consider that if a tiny portion of the investment in R&D for nuclear energy had instead been invested in renewables, nuclear energy would have died in the 1960's.
Nuclear is a much more modern, cost effective, and scalable tech today than it was in the 70's as well. France has one of the highest levels of nuclear utilization, and one of the lowest energy costs in europe
The costs are all hidden. Removal and dismantling of nuclear waste and the decommissioning power plants is ridiculously expensive in places like the UK. When you factor that in also, nuclear ain't so cheap at all. Those costs only rise also.
The cost of dismantling and recycling solar panels, wind turbines, etc. is also hidden, using that same logic. And will present a huge problem in 20-30 years. We've already had 50 years experience decommissioning poorly designed reactors. We should know how to do it at least slightly better in the year 2021
The costs also do not rise per unit power. As with anything, the more you install, the cheaper it gets to install them.
It’s actually not expensive at all and fully paid by the energy companies.
The costs are always inflated by the anti-nuclear movement, but when you talk to actual nuclear engineers you will learn that these costs have never been a problem.
I have visited multiple decommissioned nuclear plants in Germany and the guides talked about the decommissioning costs which were 6 billion Euros for the two plants of former East Germany.
And keep in mind that a single nuclear reactor produces electricity worth more than one million Dollars - per day - with the NRC already having licensed plants for an 80-year lifetime such as the Turkey Point station.
And don’t forget that solar and wind will _always_ need a backup solution such as natural gas. You have to include these when comparing costs.
If you implement district heating it could work, mostly because renewables don't produce waste heat. However, I'm skeptical on how much nuclear is really needed. Probably only 20% at most.
Many young people have no memory of Enron. Instead of pointing fingers, it would be better if we presented them with historical facts. Because of fraudulent energy market manipulation, many thousands of people from around the world lost their jobs, homes and savings in the blink of an eye. Hopefully, we are not seeing a repeat of that fiasco, but if we are not vigilant, it could happen again.
You might also be interested to know that former Enron CEO, Jeff Skilling, is no longer in prison and was reported to be starting a digital energy marketplace.
Indeed, it feels a bit weird getting a warning on my original comment when I remember all the BS we had to put up with from people who were reselling our own power back to us. I don't know for sure but I don't think electricity prices ever came back down from that.
Like that comment was dripping with irony and schadenfreude, sure, but is not flamebait!
Enron was real, and they fucked things up for good!
Well, when you play these games with energy prices it is just a matter of time... and with the "new normal" in weather changes, it seems that it won't be the last time either.
And Republicans down there seem to be pushing for even more!!
Rick Perry just said this in response to the White House pushing infrastructure spending after this disaster: “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business”
But it was alright when Trump wanted to launch 'infrastructure week'?
And it's totally ok to send in FEMA and a lot of other government assistance?!?!
BTW tangent why hasn't FEMA sent in the ships that can provide power? I think the nuclear ones can and maybe even the Comfort but i'm not sure on that specifically
If I understand this correctly, this is a picture of the western power market showing "next day" purchases as well as "real-time spot prices" (and one other category - something about 15 minutes.) Anyway, if a utility has generating capacity then the cost their electricity is what it's always been subject to natural gas prices or other "cost of manufacturing" costs. If a utility has to purchase extra power then they turn to this market and purchase only what they need at these prices. So what's causing the run-up of market electricity in the western US? Possibly demand from the colder parts of the country assuming there are transmission lines over which the electricity can flow. My recollection is that most of the lines run north-south rather than east-west.
Some did, but at least in Texas the ERCOT planners basically assume ~0 wind for some week-long periods in winter and just expected to rely on their natural gas generators. But then when 30 GW of thermal plants went offline for weather reasons (pipeline freezes, priority to heating customers, a faulty sensor on a nuclear plant, etc.), that's what really brought things offline.
I only have electric heating, this Texas disaster made me realize that I need to have gas as a backup. 10k to install a gas furnace. Lower bills, but also the damage done by burt pipes during a power failure in winter, could easily exceed that. Also thinking about all the Tesla owners, stuck in their cold houses not even be able to drive to buy groceries right now in Texas.
I'm now a little upset that my family's house converted from propane heat to natural gas years ago. That big propane tank that got filled up a few times a year was such a resilient decentralized system. Now being reliant on the regional just-in-time nature of gas and increasing amounts of just-in-time-as-long-as-windy/sunny wind & solar feels really sketchy. And batteries wouldn't really help in Texas since the wind/sun lull is like 6 days long. At least there's also a wood stove!
