I recently bought a set of 360 watt panels from LG and not more than a couple months later they came about with 400 watt panels in the same form factor (40” x 66”). Even though that can be frustrating, I am glad the tech is improving at a good clip.
While we wait for sorely needed battery cost reductions, it’s good to look at areas where we can ‘make hay while the sun is shining’. For example, train ML models during sunny days. Other industries might be aluminum, desalination, ice making (i.e. cooling), and other production (ideas welcome).
Ice storage air conditioning is already a thing in some places to take advantage of cheap electricity at night, though it doesn't make as much sense in the context of solar. Maybe it would fit well with wind.
I think it will be very difficult to convince industrial operations that currently run as close to 24/7 as possible that they should just leave all of their expensive equipment idling half the time, unless the electricity price difference is made extremely large.
I once worked for Alstom/GE grid and many regions already have market driven power tied into large energy consumers/producers where they can bid and schedule energy based on the market. So if you have a rock crusher or a freezer (insulation gives flexibility) you might adjust when you power it on based on energy prices.
Trane has a PDF that mentions University of Arizona saving a little under half a million dollars a year using off peak energy prices and ice cooling for storage.
Having worked in a handful of factories, including in very energy intense sectors (aluminum and semiconductors), I'd say that's not the norm. Smelters are a notable exception, as they can be turned down/off relatively quickly as long as the metal in process doesn't solidify - in which case the line will be down for months and will be very expensive to fix and startup again. I could see it being more common on commodity products or when the order book is light.
Energy pricing varies by region, but is sometimes based on consumption during the grids' highest couple consumption days in the last year. In those cases, curtailing production can have a huge impact on total cost for the next year. It's a bit of a guessing game, but there is an industry around energy consulting for factories and forecasting which days will be the highest consumption (typically the hottest days).
Depends how much of your loads you can shift to daytime. If your dishwasher/fridge/freezer/heater/cooler/whatever already ran/pre-cooled/pre-heated during the day, you won't need to run much at night.
I have an off-grid family member running their lighting+IT loads straight off DC just so the inverter can sleep at night. Its efficiency is garbage with small loads.
So does mine, but it is a Tesla, so I cannot use it.
I wish we could get Tesla to allow their cars to be used for energy storage, like the new Ford F150. I'm concerned they are worried about competing with their Powerwall business.
I don't understand why people make this argument. I mean, the number of factories is not some fixed constant of nature. If demand for a product is high enough, more factories get built.
I really want CSP to succeed for no other reason than I find it much more exciting from a childish mechanically fascinating point of view.
However, all indications at the moment are that solar + lithium storage is winning this battle. We are seeing larger farms with more installed storage every year.
Perhaps CSP might flourish in certain niches, particularly those where waste heat and / or industrial high temperature processes are required in addition to electricity production.
> We are seeing larger farms with more installed storage every year.
Same is happening with CSP, just way less so in the US. CSP with MS storage is already cheaper on a LCOE basis than nuclear, esp factoring storage [0]. Lots of PV analysis never includes storage costs (and for obvious reasons).
I think Li tech is probably better served for individual consumer applications (because of all the constraints) than at the grid level.
Li storage is currently only really used for grid stability style installations at the gird-scale level (ie, as an alternative to gas-peaker plants).
Li is convenient for residential installations, but it's possible other batteries are better at industrial and grid scale.
Lazard's latest (2020) levelized energy cost comparison[1] shows the unsubsidised cost comparing like this:
Nuclear: $129-$198 MWh (1st chart)
Solar Wholesale PV + Storage: $188-$329 MWh.
This excludes the (huge) further price reductions in PV noted in the linked article. The wholesale solar does include flow batteries as well as Li storage.
> Li storage is currently only really used for grid stability style installations at the gird-scale level (ie, as an alternative to gas-peaker plants).
Yeah, in the latest Lazard's:
"Lithium-ion chemistries continue to be the dominant storage technology for short-duration applications (i.e., 1 – 4 hours),"
The last one I talked about on hn with someone else last year [1] was from 2018 [2] and the costs in this once for PV and PV + storage seem in line with that (or more expensive in the new report at the high end, but this new report only really covers PV and not anything else like the 2018 one, but at least this one really breaks down the storage).
Their nuclear costs then were $112-$189, and their solar thermal tower + storage were $98-$181 (I'm assuming 2021 costs would be lower here from all the low cost stuff that has came online since, but haven't seen a high level report yet).
Baseload (which i think nuclear really falls and I think what they would consider BTM? but maybe theres a whole sale market for it? hard to really tell with their storage definition capping out at 4 hours) still seems far away:
"The economic proposition of C&I behind-the-meter (“BTM”) projects remains challenged without subsidies", ranging from $214-$292 for C&I (no storage), $392-$507 (PV + storage), and $489-$662 for residential (PV + storage))
> This excludes the (huge) further price reductions in PV noted in the linked article.
Not sure we can consider panel costs (Perovskite, Bi-facial Panels, Doped Polysilicon and Bigger Wafers, Better Cells) speaking for storage costs, and the article really seems to be addressing panel costs. Though improvements in panels are always great.
I think long range UHV transmission plus wind/PV Solar is the real challenge for other baseload technologies.
Projects like the proposed 4500km Australia-SG link[1] mean you get a lot of flexibility to build supply in places different to where the demand is. That solves a lot of the baseload issues.
> I think long range UHV transmission plus wind/PV Solar is the real challenge for other baseload technologies.
Yeah, would like to see more improvements there. Running up to fundamental limits with that though. Perhaps large batteries can be charged and moved elsewhere, but that seems more feasble with molten salt tanks now (but would become more feasble when 4+ hour storage for chemical batteries gets cheaper).
> Australia-SG link
Yeah, really hard to look at prospective projects in terms of lcoe (maybe we'll get more insight with any bids for providing via that link in the future) so we'll really have to see and I don't see anything about MW or MWh costs listed there (just upfront) so i'm assuming only day time baseload.
Flow battery are fantasy right now. No company is actually close.
Liquid Air or Liquid Metal batteries maybe.
However I would argue LFP based Li battery will likely win the cost battle for quite a while. And we are getting to a point in their scale where they are actually quite relevant for large storage.
Li production capacity has come a long way since Tesla battery in Australia.
Maybe not fantasy. But we are far away from series large scale flow battery for grid storage.
Some of the companies who wanted to build large scale flow batteries have had a lot of problems in the last decade and very few to non have managed to do it.
RedFlow seems to have some aspiration for grid scale but it seems to just assemblies of smaller batteries, rather then what most companies hope a flow battery for the grid to look like.
The whole main concept why so many people think flow batteries are so awesome for gird storage is that you can basically have a tank size can scale arbitrary.
The once that actually have some reasonably big pilot are Vanadium redox battery. There are multiple such batteries being developed.
There are also a number of startups who try these flow batteries but try to move away from Vanadium. Li-Ion batteries are collapsing in price so fast, that they have killed of many of these ideas, like the Zebra battery. So newer startups are looking at something cheaper.
But the approach of scaling many smaller ones might still work, it just basically defeats the main benefit of flow batteries in the first place.
Yeah, but you probably have roads, rail, and ports.
It wouldn't be impossible to move vats of molten salt at scale to different locations from collection for usage via HEX and typical Rankine power cycle systems (i.e. steam).
They have no mention of what they are even going to sell the energy at, and no mention storage capacity (if any will be used at all) and not expected to come online for another 6 years.
We'll be able to learn more about it when they actually have an accepted bid from some one.
I have no idea what you are trying to say. Were you talking about shipping molten salt using railroads from texas to singapore "at scale", because I'm not super convinced that would work.
To be clear, you think that shipping molten salt to the other side of the world so that it can make steam to make electricity is viable because oil is shipped in tankers?
> To be clear, you think that shipping molten salt to the other side of the world so that it can make steam to make electricity is viable because oil is shipped in tankers?
Yes, if needed ("to the other side of the world" could very well mean from AU to SG, and not USA to SG [although that happens now in some cases to meet demand]). LNG and CL are shipped across the world so that it can make steam to make electricity now (as well as for heating).
I can imagine it might be hard for some to fathom that doing it this way may work out better at scale than trying to build CSP plants in regions with low irradiance/ limited land availability/etc.
All the person you replied to said was that they live in a region without sun, you are the one that took this into the territory of shipping molten salt for some reason.
There are plenty of places that don't have much sun that are already connected to places that do. They are are connected by copper wires.
There is no universe where trying to ship molten salt and keep it hot so it can turn water into steam is viable. Oil doesn't rely on heat gradients and doesn't lose its energy when put in a tank for a week.
A copper cable carries electricity indefinitely. Also remember that everywhere already has electricity from somewhere. Solar generation is not shipping from one place to another far away, it is offsetting power to somewhere in between.
> All the person you replied to said was that they live in a region without sun, you are the one that took this into the territory of shipping molten salt for some reason.
Because it is an option, just like it is an option for those to place a bunch of PV down and not bother with storage costs for that. Some options will work for some and not for others.
And electricity needs to come from some source, ideally one that can provide more than +4hs and affordably.
> A copper cable carries electricity indefinitely.
All fields fall with distance from the source… shipping a source (like LNG, CL, and perhaps MS in the future) around to local nodes where it can be delivered with copper cables (after burning and combustion) is not beyond current logistics (and nor is factoring evaporation losses with LNG now).
> There are plenty of places that don't have much sun that are already connected to places that do. They are are connected by copper wires.
Right, tell that to every country that still imports hydrocarbons to burn for electricity/heat…
> There is no universe where trying to ship molten salt and keep it hot so it can turn water into steam is viable. Oil doesn't rely on heat gradients and doesn't lose its energy when put in a tank for a week.
I'm pretty sure that it will eventually be possible to have vacuum storage to keep it hot for longer than 17.5 hours with enough delta_k above freezing to provide a predictable amount of energy, so saying "There is no universe" would only apply to those like yourself who deem it beyond the realm of reason (which many things in this world tend to be for those who have walked it, thankfully progress isn't limited by such people in the long run).
Interesting that the notion of a multiverse you appeal to with "There is no universe" seems more realistic than the above…
> Solar generation is not shipping from one place to another far away, it is offsetting power to somewhere in between.
Solar collection is when you need to think about the infrastructure and the surface area needed if you want to do it on a large scale; perhaps beyond realm possibility of what some deem needed for any place in particular…
Battery storage is on a steeper price reduction curve than CSP. So, Batteries + PV is on a steeper cost reduction curve than CSP. The cost of tracking PV + batteries is already cheaper than CSP when fitted to the current demand curve.
What’s kept CSP limping along is you can use natural gas to supplement CSP while calling the project green. But from a pure cost basis it’s extremely expensive.
> The cost of tracking PV + batteries is already cheaper than CSP when fitted to the current demand curve.
Really? Any cost stats for that, I'd love to see that.
From Lazard's 2018 [1] and 2020 [2] reports, PV+storage (and only 1-4 hours of storage) is still more expensive for "In-front-of the meter" on the low end compared to CSP for storage on LCOE basis, and 2.5x-4.4x more expensive on the low end, for "Behind-the-meter" applications.
> What’s kept CSP limping along is you can use natural gas to supplement CSP while calling the project green.
And we can also cast light on the manufacturing process behind panels and how the materials are gathered for both panels and batteries… either way improvements are being made all around.
I can see that you are a big fan of solar thermal power, but how do you explain that nobody is building them? If utility generators are rational actors they will pick the best solution. Currently there are numerous PV plants under construction and zero thermal plants in construction or even in planning, in California. Globally, solar thermal has almost come to a complete stop. So, how do you rationalize that it's a great technology but nobody wants it?
> If utility generators are rational actors they will pick the best solution.
People make the same textbook argument for "rational" actors in "markets"… as if all actors are "rational" or agree on what is "rational". As if everyone has access to the same information, as if everyone was equally invested in the same things, as if everyone wanted to protect the same things…
> but how do you explain that nobody is building them?
> Globally, solar thermal has almost come to a complete stop. So, how do you rationalize that it's a great technology but nobody wants it?
Not surprisingly, mostly those in the US… and all but one in of those in California (which is not exactly the paragon of innovation as it was in its heyday…)
Luckily, that doesn't limit what other can explore and pursue :D
Look, panels are great. I've used them in the past in certain applications (esp those that wont require any storage, or have 24/7 access to sunlight like in some regions in space, etc), but storage (1-4 hours? lol) costs are a joke compared CSP offering 24/7 and providing electricity 17.5 hours without direct solar radiation[0].
As for why nobody is building them. I would just point out that nobody is really building full solar with storage either.
That is starting but barley happening.
Utilities need to hit install some renewables and setting up some solar is easy. There likely is already a gas peaker somewhere so no need for storage.
I have not studied CSP in any detail so I can't say, but the reality is rational market actor in the current system does not optimize now for what the theoretical best solution is in 2040. They just need to hit their renewable quotas right now.
Solar combined with “4 hours of battery backup” is 16+h of output.
Suppose you want 1GW of solar 24/7. Well 4h is roughly 1/2 the output of an array over a day. So to get 1GW during the day you need a 2GW solar array. Now your 4h batter is 4h x 2GW = 8GWh. Which means your 4h battery can provide 1GW for 8 hours a day combined with your 2GW array providing 1GW for another 8 hours, and less than 1GW for even longer.
Of course the grid doesn’t actually want X GW 24/7, demand is higher in the day and lower at night. On top of this 4h is sized based on maximum output, you need extra solar to cover cloudy days, but extra arrays also come with more grid storage. Thus at scale 4h battery backed solar arrays can roughly meet all of the grids energy needs.
Another factor is panels can be pointed slightly east or west if you want power earlier or later in the day. The tradeoff is less total output over the day, but with expensive storage and cheap PV it can be more profitable that way.
Why would anyone build solar with storage when the same amount of money is a much better investment for pure solar? There is no surplus of power during the day.
Storage to buy cheap energy and sell it back is also a completely separate enterprise. At the moment it looks like lithium iron phosphate batteries will work the best in the near future since they are the cheapest when taking into account the battery life time.
That's my whole point. We are not yet at a level of penetration where that is needed, so the problem solar concentrate plants solve isn't really solved yet in general.
It is actually quite simple to convince industry: An industrial facility will do that if the incentives are aligned that it makes them more money.
The interesting thing is: The really challenging part of electricity storage isn't that much. Usually wind+solar complement each other fine. It depends on the location, but the challenge is usually something like 2-4 weeks in the winter when there's little sun and little wind.
I.e. an industrial facility would only need to shut down in a very limited timeframe to have a huge effect on grid stability.
It is quite funny that in Germany every energy hungry industry is looking since the last decade to produce flexible enough to benefit from negative and cheap electricity prices during certain periods. Examples I know of first hand are graphite kathodes and electrodes (the process can be stopped for hours as long as temperature doesn't drip under a certain threshold) and paper. Continuous chemical manufacturing is having a harder time so, but they are looking into ways to store process heat for later use and generating needed heat for storage. Nothing came from that at on of previous employers so.
Funny is that these same companies, already now making a small fortune from these initiatives, are complaining about electricity prices and base load stability.
One of the best complementary sources to renewables are, besides existing nuclear plants, modern gas turbines.
Of course nuclear is inflexible. It's entire economic case is built on operating at very high capacity factor. That reactors can TECHNICALLY operate at lower capacity factor is irrelevant -- the cost of doing so is prohibitive.
Economically, partnering renewables and nuclear doesn't work well. Nuclear does a very poor job covering for renewables intermittency, and renewables crowd out nuclear during the times they're churning out the power.
That is untrue as well. Inflexibility isn't the problem, the cost profile is. Yes, nobody likes running nuclear at half power, because fuel costs are minute compared to the building cost of the plant (Btw that is exactly analogous to the cost profile of renewables: almost all cost is in the building). So as long as you can regulate some pumped hydro plants that, shed some load, etc, you may save some money. Why don't we do load following with renewables, like e.g. shutting off some wind turbines? Same reason as for nuclear, plus some government regulations.
And in general, renewables do need a flexible supplement. So what would you suggest? More pumped hydro is impossible to build due to environmental regs, NIMBY and geography. Coal and lignite isn't flexible at all, and it is coal. Gas is extremely expensive to run, so expensive that there are gas peaker plants on idle for years in Germany. Also, they are burning gas. Bio gas is not available in sufficient capacity. Battery storage might be an option 30 years from now when enough old EV batteries are available on the cheap. But that will prevent recycling them into new EV batteries and need even more resources like lithium and cobalt. So the alternatives to nuclear like coal and gas are worse, and only still in use because they don't pay fair a price on their carbon emissions.
No, it's not untrue. If you optimize a CO2-free grid for minimum cost, you will find that the solutions don't usually involve both renewables (particularly wind) and nuclear. Either nuclear is so expensive it goes to zero, or its so cheap it dominates. There's little synergy between renewables and nuclear.
This also happens in unplanned grids where market forces are being allowed to operate. Renewables, if they are cheaper per kWh than nuclear, drive down the price sufficiently often that nuclear struggles (and with production subsidies, they can drive prices negative, but never mind that). Today, even existing nuclear plants are struggling to make an operating profit in the US.
> And in general, renewables do need a flexible supplement. So what would you suggest?
For the moment, this would be natural gas. If you object to the CO2 from this, consider that to compete against NG CC for BASELOAD in the US, new nuclear would need a CO2 tax of $300/ton or more (see below for quote and link). For new nuclear to compete against NG to cover renewable intermittency, the CO2 tax would have to be much higher, perhaps $1000/ton or more, depending on the fraction of time the NG generators are needed. This is a ludicrously high CO2 tax, and shows how far out of contention new nuclear plants would be.
In the future, this last resort generation could be replaced with something like hydrogen (either produced from NG by SMR with CO2 capture, or from renewable energy by electrolysis.) And it would still be cheaper than new nuclear.
> Gas is extremely expensive to run,
No. Quote from Physics Today (Crane was the president of Exelon):
“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
(Since then, Exelon has announced they want to spin off all their nuclear generating assets.)
> More pumped hydro is impossible to build due to environmental regs, NIMBY and geography.
More pumped hydro ON EXISTING RIVERS is geographically constrained, but off-river PHES much less so. It has vast potential in most parts of the world, especially when coupled with long distance transmission.
Even with zero regulations, nuclear would still have a cost problem. Just the steam turbine part of a nuclear power plant is more expensive than renewables. Coal is uncompetitive for the same reason.
When I see "less regulation!" talk, I want to ask "so, you're going to do away with the expensive parts, like the containment building?"
If new nuclear is going to ever be plausible, it has to be some fundamentally new (like reactors with molten salts) that don't need massive containment buildings that can safely contain large volumes of steam in accidents. Such reactors will not be commercially viable soon.
The containment isn't the most expensive part, the pressure vessel is. Single forged part of some magic stainless steel alloy able to withstand 300bar at 500K and high neutron flux costing a billion or more. Gen4 reactor designs try to do without that by having the actual core non-pressurized, e.g. in molten-salt reactors or pebble-bed reactors. The other idea is making a loss-of-coolant-accident harmless, thereby getting rid of the necessity to have too many redundant ultra-expensive cooling systems (current EPRs are at quadruple-redundant...). The problem with regulation there is that those novel designs are currently still regulated based upon the aforementioned PWR/BWR reactor designs (so your coolant system has to have X amount of redundancy, the reactor vessel must withstand Y amount of pressure, ...), forcing unnecessary cost that isn't necessary because the possible accidents and conditions are completely different.
> The containment isn't the most expensive part, the pressure vessel is.
I was referring to the expense introduced due to regulations. Or are you saying that one could make a much cheaper pressure vessel without those pesky regulators?
Gen IV reactors have the property that they aren't available now, and won't be available and matured anytime soon. Many also have aggressive operating profiles that will stress materials. No one is going to want to buy a MSR only to discover corrosion limits its lifespan to 20 years. So, getting them to a state that customers would be comfortable with will take a long time.
Gen4 reactors are an active area of research, but it isn't like there are none. Some concepts go back decades, as do prototypes like THTR-300 that actually produced power for a few years.
That stress will limit the lifetime of a reactor is true for any reactor. Any BWR or PWR has a maximum lifetime set by the pressure vessel, because that is the one single component you can neither fix nor exchange. As soon as mechanical stress, neutron embrittlement and temperature gradients have done a certain amount of damage, the plant is finished. But even for currently operating reactors, we are still exploring how long that will take exactly, by regularly checking the materials in the running reactors, because no one ran a prototype for 40 or 60 years. And you cannot compare with other models of reactors, because they are usually very different in operating parameters, materials and design.
We currently do not know what a few decades of operation will do to a MSR vessel, but the point is that trying it out has been hindered for a long time by regulations that are not fit for that type of reactor. So you arrive at a costly chicken and egg problem, where a regulator asks for a proof (ideally a proof by pointing at a working prototype with a few decades of maturity) just to allow you building a prototype.
THTR-300 is an example why there's a large gap between concept and commercially proven reactor design. The THTR-300 was a huge disappointment, with major, showstopping design flaws. The Gen IV concepts being bandied about now will have to go through a long, drawn out process of technical maturation before any large scale deployment can occur.
The companies doing serious work on molten salt right now, are mostly in Canada because of regulatory structure. They had to develop their project with very limited funds and totally uninterested governments (until recently in Canada).
Yes they are not available now but they could be available in this decade and by the 2040 you can build 100s if you really actually put some resources behind it.
These designs are infinity easier to scale then what France did.
Of course that kind of planning is not really how the US does things but at least they could seriously get behind a few prove of concept projects. Currently its not even possible to get a non PWR reactor regulated at all.
I think the potential for cost reduction in nuclear is far bigger.
There is no inherent reason why a small reactor couldn't be mass produced. In a perfect world you would have a factory spitting out finished nuclear reactor every day.
Transport it to a site, drop it into a concrete hole, connect the salt loop and plug in the refiling pipe.
It really shouldn't need much operation other then planning how much to refuel.
We have gotten used to thinking of nuclear reactors as these civil engineering projects with large costume one of designs, but there is no inherent reason why you can't produce them at comparable to speeds other items of that size are built. Really once you have the material qualified a nuclear reactor is in some ways simple then a rocket engine or an airplane.
The problem in days world is that you need to get threw regulation (in the US factually not possible, and requires complex engagement with every countries regulatory scheme) and then you need enough costumers that you can actually invest in the assembly line.
This is not a great way to look at it. Modern nuclear wouldn't use the kind of steam turbines that are currently used. It would either use the same turbines gas plants. Some concepts use even more modern turbines but those are not commercially proven.
However if there was serious commitment to nuclear, these things would be sensible to develop also.
Your overall point is well taken, nuclear is better when running at full capacity, even if I would argue that with a modern reactor with less operational cost this would be less of an issue.
That however is exactly why many nuclear plants in planning today will actually heat up molten salt and use that to drive the turbine. So there is basically a built in flexible heat battery.
The idea of most modern approaches is actually to have more generation power then the reactor actually provides, and have a heat battery containing in between. This makes sense as you have to have a salt loop anyways, so adding a larger tank isn't really a big extra cost.
Additionally it means that the nuclear build of your project is actually a smaller % of the cost with everything outside of the nuclear boundary being pretty standard salt loops and turbines. So you might build a 500MW nuclear plant with 1.5GW turbines plus a big tank full of salt. All the turbines and the salt tank have essentially nothing to do with nuclear or nuclear regulation.
However if we had started to seriously consider this in the 60s/70s/80s, establishing wind and solar would never even have made any sense outside of some niches. You build nuclear plants that can load follow without issue and accept the capacity problem. Clever engineers and business people would have soon realized that the salt loop can double as a heat battery.
The problem is simply that all these issues were not seriously considered in the past. Basically the Navy wanted PWR for submarines, because those got so much development the largest contractors and the government picked it up for civilian power. Once all the large nuclear companies had bought in to that, they no longer want lots of research on other types of reactors, so not even the nuclear industry advocated for such projects. Combine that with the general turning against nuclear and you basically get massive stagnation.
Unfortunately all the Molten Salt based nuclear work was done in Tennessee, a place that was not very relevant politically. There is even a famous call where Nixon basically says, moves all that potential money to projects in California.
The overall goal is to reduce CO2 emissions as much as possible. That alone favors nuclear (existing plants, not new ones) over coal and oil. That gives you stable base load without any CO2 issues. supplement that with as uch renewables as possible and flexible gas plants for ad-hoc peak demand. Phase out nuclea once renewables can provide that power (storage solutions and so on).
Wind and solar were already a lot cheaper than Hickley C a couple of years ago, so that question is not about costs.
I think the comment you are replying to is suggesting go full wind and solar rather than building further nuclear (with gas peakers until we sort out storage as you suggest - but that's the same with both renewable and nuclear). You could say build nuclear in the meantime, but nuclear takes a long time to build, so it will likely to quicker to build the renewable solution. In which case there is no meantime.
I don't think anyone (on this thread) is suggesting that we phase out already built nuclear capacity before it's planned lifetime.
Terrapower is using molten salt instead of water: they can produce 150% output for five hours. Unfortunately they only just started building a demonstration plant.
If you have a high-capacity, constantly running power source, you can subtract that power from the demand curve, up to the minimum power demand.
That means the winter renewable production troughs on dark, windless days become more shallow. Since the requirement on installed wind and solar capacity is driven by how many Watt-hours you need to overproduce so that they can be stored for sunless, windless days, that ends up drastically reducing how many solar panels and wind turbines you need.
You can test this in the model.energy simulator that you linked by simply subtracting a value from "constant electricity demand". I just did that using realistic values for Germany - reducing the constant electricity demand by 20GW from 66 to 46 GW (roughly the peak capacity of nuclear plants in their heyday) leads to a reduction of peak renewable capacity from 537 to 358 GW, basically exactly a factor of 1.5.
You'll still need a flexible source of course to get rid of the oscillations over the minimum demand.
If you look at the solutions at model.energy as you vary cost assumptions, the solutions go from 0% nuclear to 100% nuclear in a step-like manner. It's almost never the case that the two get mixed. There would be some mix in a variable demand scenario if (for example) some of the demand varied along with insolation. But in the baseload case, it's like Highlander.
Not sure if you're referring to a different simulator since model.energy doesn't seem to allow modeling nuclear?
But, qualitatively, it sounds like the step-like behavior you describe simply reflects whether LCOE(nuclear) > LCOE(renewable+storage)?
That wouldn't tell the whole story though, since you might still want to keep the number of nuclear plants low, or you might simply be thinking about whether to keep operating existing plants, rather than building new ones.
this toy model use constant load, ignore grid cost, inertia needs, multi year weather pattern on renewable production other most sophisticated model can disagree with your observations
Are you talking about short term frequency stability on the grid? This was provided by large rotating mass of conventional generators, but today that stability can be provided far better by batteries. The Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia (that thing Elon Musk has built) made a killing off FCAS, which doesn't require more than a fraction of an hour of battery capacity.
The weather is fairly predictable these days. Nuclear is inflexible, but it's human-controlled inflexible, so you can run it at complementary times to reduce the amount of flexibility needed.
2) there are always going to be Capex-dominated industries running full-bore 24/7 that need base power with the same power gen profile. Nuclear is perfect for this.
You exactly want to complement renewables with inflexible. You want 100% of your "DC component" of your load profile handled by base load power plants, and maximizing the utilization of power storage by variables.
You repeat the canard that baseload demand requires baseload supply (from individual power plants with high capacity factor). This is nonsense -- the grid allows baseload supply to be synthesized from intermittent and dispatchable sources. The consumer doesn't care where the energy is coming from.
Even consumers that have their own baseload requirements and are not on the grid don't necessarily want baseload sources. An example is mines in Australia, which are installing batteries to work with solar and combustion turbines (for the latter, they allow the turbines to run at full load for a while, then turn off, which is more efficient than operating at partial load.)
Why do you think so many crypto miner companies are moving to Texas? They want to be paid by ERCOT to not draw power during peak times.
Yes, ERCOT will actually pay them money, if they’re not drawing power.
Chinese crypto miner companies are moving here, and taking over old aluminum smelting operations, kitting them out with tens of thousands of crypto miner computers, and then getting paid for not turning them on.
Yeah, there was even an off-the-shelf unit to do ice storage in residential homes called an Ice Bear. Looks like they went bankrupt a while ago though.
No, or at least not without more steps and automation. WAY back before refrigeration, cooling was done with blocks of ice harvested in winter and stored for the year. Expensive is a word for it.
What's being talked about here is thermal energy storage. Ice is created overnight (ok, like a refrigerator), but then during the daytime used to supplement or replace the refrigeration cycle of the compressor to reduce electric load while still providing cooling. I can't quickly find an article (edit: found a 2016 paper, see comments about Boothbay on page page 3-4: https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2016/data/papers/3_2...), but it's memorable to me that an island in Maine installed these systems instead of spending more on replacing the distribution line to the island the handle the peak daytime cooling load.
I think we're talking about using ice as energy storage: create ice during a time when the supply of electricity exceeds demand, and then use that ice for cooling (AC) at a later time.
I use my seldom used 100A tractor battery for buffer. Instead of reminding myself every couple of months to keep it charged (I use it like three times a year), its now on purpose. I have a guard to prevent the lead-acid battery from a deep decharge.
Hard to build, not a lot of places near cities where this can be done large scale and mainly: you really cant store that much energy there, both getting the water and producing power from it later is not that efficient.
Pumped storage is not a solution except for some specific places in the world.
There are multiple options to store energy from day to night, including pumped storage. The really big challenge is to store energy from summer to winter. When you store energy to use it at night, you only need to store about 12 hours worth of energy consumption, when you store it for winter, you are talking about months of consumption.
It lets you play with combinations of solar, wind, batteries, and hydrogen storage, and optimize for a minimum cost system that can provide "synthetic baseload" for an entire year for a region given high cadence historical climate data.
When I apply that to the US, for example, the storage needed is typically maybe 6 hours of batteries and a week or so of hydrogen. To put that last number in perspective: there is a salt formation in Delta, Utah that could supply enough hydrogen storage capacity to power the entire US for 30 hours.
Storong from summer to winter doesn't sound practical to me. Better just to overprovision generation (and do some strong load shifting away from low-generation periods for non-essential energy use)
It's extremely rare to need to store months of energy at grid scale.
Wind power works really well in winter as well as summer. In many places solar works sufficiently well in winter given the lower consumption levels due to lower air conditioning usage.
Extremely rare != never, though. So it's useful to have a very low capital cost "black swan" backup system. The name of the game here is extremely low capital cost, even at the price of terrible efficiency (which is ok since this system will almost never be running.) Hydrogen stored underground and burned in turbines could do it.
Can you show a single example - anywhere in the world - where this is done at grid scale?
> So it's useful to have a very low capital cost "black swan" backup system. The name of the game here is extremely low capital cost, even at the price of terrible efficiency
I've seen grid scale generators leased as a month-scale solution, so I suppose that counts. That seems more useful than any unproven scheme.
This is true in a lot of places. However, in the places that I am most familiar with, energy consumption is MUCH higher in the winter due to heating . . .
This may be where the international HVDC lines come in (that a sibling comment of yours mentioned), I suppose.
I don't think any country in the north would rely on imported energy for winter survival. I think pretty much every country even in EU counts that critical enough to warrant domestic capacity.
Which is why essentially every country in Europe relies on Russia for gas supplies?
I suspect most of Northern Europe would be happier importing energy from Southern Europe or even North Africa than relying on Russia as they currently do.
There are already some DC lines out there. I remember reading about one run starting in South Africa that runs north and it approached some multiple of the wave length of regular AC which would create too much radition (like an antena does).
It requires a naturally occurring basin to work, so there's not a huge number of suitable locations. The capital cost is huge, it's very disruptive of the land, and up till now very little storage market.
The UK basically has two, Dinorwig and Cruachan, and they're used for managing the demand peaks.
> why pumped storage is actually not going to work, or why we don't have more of it already
(1) Requires a lot of land. (2) It needs a height difference, at the required scale prohibitively expensive to make an artificial one. (3) Requires lots of water.
Something I've heard that's non-obvious is that pumped hydro doesn't work well unless the altitude change happens over a small-ish horizontal distance. It's no good to have a thousand feet of height difference if it happens over a hundred miles. (I'm not sure if this can be mitigated by making the pipes bigger to reduce drag, but I guess there must be a point beyond which it isn't really practical.)
PHES has been underestimated in the past because people looked only at existing waterways. Allowing PHES to be built off rivers radically expands its potential, to be orders of magnitude larger than necessary. There is still some geographical constraint, but transmission helps with that.
Hydrogen could be interesting as energy storage in this configuration. And hydrogen-based kerosene would make airplanes carbon-neutral but is really energy intensive
what is "hydrogen based kerosene?" I understand normal kerosene is almsot 100% hydrogen and carbon. How does hydrogen basing kerosene remove or reduce the carbon while still yielding an energy dense liquid at STP?
They said carbon neutral, so I'm assuming the idea would be to use carbon dioxide and hydrogen to make kerosene to begin with. Then you can burn it and get the carbon dioxide back to start over. It's not carbon from the process entirely, but instead simply not adding additional carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
ok. I see. Due to conservation of energy it takes energy to synthesize fuel hydrocarbons. So you might start with carbon dioxide, run it through some energy consuming process exposed to hydrogen and get hydrocarbons and water as the byproduct from the excess oxygen. I don't know enough chemistry to know what the exact synthesis method would be but I do know it would require substantial energy input. Thus the kerosene serves as a kind of battery. It is not a primary energy source any more. If this is feasible why not make carbon-neutral gasoline too?
Right! The idea is that kerosene is a more convenient form of energy storage than many alternatives, despite the lower efficiency and higher capital costs for recharging it. Compared to, say, Li-ion, kerosene has numerous order-of-magnitude advantages; for example:
- safety: lithium-ion batteries explode if you look at them funny, and are full of poisons, while kerosene can put out a lit match and can be safely imbibed;
- materials availability: carbon is about ten times as abundant in earth's crust as lithium, and there are readily available ways to concentrate carbon from the air such as planting forests, while concentrating lithium from seawater is somewhat trickier;
- specific energy: Li-ion batteries can store 0.5 MJ/kg, and kerosene is 43 MJ/kg, which is a huge advantage for things like trucking and aviation;
- energy density: Li-ion batteries store 1 MJ/liter, kerosene is 35 MJ/liter, which is also important for things like aviation; and
- capital cost of storage facilities: you can store 200 liters of kerosene in a US$10 barrel, while 200 liters of lithium-ion batteries would be about 12,000 18650s, which costs on the order of US$50,000.
Gasoline does indeed share most of these advantages and can also be used in cheaper engines that can rev faster. Other fuels that might be reasonable to synthesize in the same way include hydrogen itself, methane, LP gas (propane/butane), and ammonia (!!).
The best way to compare batteries is energy density per unit mass, energy input and output per unit cost, and cost of production/charging. Long chain hydrocarbons have a much higher density than Li and are easy to pump and store and work in existing vehicles, but a higher cost of production and they are essentially one time use, non rechargeable since the discharge mechanism is combustion.
The ideal solution would be efficient solar bioreactors where bioengineered algea converted solar energy into fats as a bioproduct of a photosynthetic process sequester CO2 that could be esterfied into alkanes or that directly produced alkanes. Long chain alkanes, my understanding is, are not toxic to life. It is the short chain stuff and aromatic ring based stuff like benzene that is hazardous.
That's a valid way to look at it if you think of the battery as analogous to the kerosene, rather than the tank. (BTW, lithium-ion batteries don't contain metallic lithium, so the much higher energy density of Li is not in play here.) I was thinking of the species that are created and destroyed within batteries as it's charged and discharged, like lead and lead dioxide, as being more closely analogous to the kerosene.
Algae have very low capital costs but also fairly low photonic efficiency; it's reasonable to expect non-algae-based designs to be superior. (BTW, you can't esterify things into alkanes; alkanes aren't esters.) You're right about the toxicity profiles, although even things like hexane and octane are relatively low toxicity; hexane's oral LD50 is like tens of grams per kilogram, but they have higher toxicities if you breathe or inject them.
Ok. I was thinking of things like biodiesel. My understanding is that involves an esterfication process but I read about it 10 years ago and never took orgo. I accept esters are not alkanes my ignorance shows...thanks for correcting the record for other readers.
I was using Li as shorthand for Litium Ion batteries which I assume contain salts or oxides or hydrides of lithium. I know it is not elemental lithium. My point was that H-C bonds contain more energy than whatever is in Li batteries in the charged state per mol.
Yes, exactly. There are/have been various small scale projects along those lines. Hydrogen and CO2 to methane, to longer-chain hydrocarbons that can be put into existing engines. As you say, the synthetic fuel is just an energy (and carbon) carrier, you have to put all of that energy into the system somewhere — ideally from solar or wind or nukes or something.
New Zealand synthesized fuel like this in the 80's during an oil crisis, as did Nazi Germany in the 1940's. It's well-understood chemistry, just too expensive right now. Probably will remain that way until it's too late unless we can put a ~$200/t tax on carbon emissions globally.
My understanding is Nazi Germany made synthetic fuels from carbon monoxide, eg from coking coal, which is a more reactive substance than carbon dioxide.
There are proposals to manufacture kerosene* from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The carbon dioxide can be sourced from sequestering existing carbon dioxide emissions or more expensively from atmospheric carbon capture; either way, making and burning the kerosene is carbon-neutral. I think this is not currently economic because petroleum is cheap and energy is expensive, but petroleum is getting more expensive and energy is getting cheaper, so at some point the curves will cross. But I haven't looked into the process in enough detail to know if there are currently other costs that impede mass production.
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* Kerosene is C10-C16, and diesel fuel is C9-C25, so kerosene can be thought of as a particular grade of diesel.
No it is not. Stop the straw man argument.
Hydrogen has been talked about 10 years ago and the technology is still in its beginnings compared to most solar components nowadays.
Hydrogen is also increasingly used by the fissile/carbon industry as a decoy to keep their gas on longer to make hydrogen.
"Hydrogen" is a fundamentally different thing to "solar". There is no "straw man argument" being made because it's comparing apples and pears.
The only purpose of hydrogen is to make energy in one point in space & time and then use it in another point of your choice without CO2 emissions. Solar is to convert sunlight to electrical energy, but you don't get to control when the sun is shining. The technology to generate hydrogen is also completely mature and has been since before I was born, whether we are talking steam methane reforming or electrolysis. It's just not very cheap.
except hydrogen is a horrible option. It is hard to store safely, it is highly explosive, energy expensive to produce vs the energy you get back out, it damages its own holding vessels via hydrogen embitterment, outside of a few niche areas it in generally a bad option.
It's only explosive when mixed with air in confined places, as is gasoline, LPG, CNG, steel, wood and flour. Unlike most others, confinement is a requirement, otherwise it escapes too quickly. See [1] for comparison.
> hard to store safely, damages its own holding vessels
For these reasons I suggest we should produce and store methane, though hydrogen issues aren't a showstopper and hydrogen fuel cells are more efficient.
Hydrogen is highly explosive at almost all concentrations in air, extremely easy to ignite, and leaks through most widely-used materials. It's much worse in all these aspects than common fuels like gasoline, LPG, natural gas, etc.
While the claims are (likely) technically true, if you are trying to insinuate it is less safe, then that is a false conclusion.
As an example, many garages ban LPG cars, but don't care about CNG, AFAICT, because LPG can pool around on the bottom, but methane is light and easily escapes. Hydrogen is even lighter and harder to contain.
If you can acquire hydrogen economically, it can be converted to ammonia cheaply.
For many industrial processes, ammonia is a well-established common feedstock, having none of the issues of hydrogen you mention.
Here in Japan, some Combined Cycle Gas Turbine plants are already running with 10% ammonia blend.
I think you are right about pure hydrogen, but I can see green-hydrogen-into-ammonia as viable for many applications including heavy transportation (train, ship, truck).
We just need much more economic electrolysis, because hydrogen is almost always produced from fossil fuels today.
I learned about this only 10 years ago and then it was to late already, but had they started to convert to Flex-Fuel Vehicle in the 90s it would have meant much cheaper fuel in the 2000s (because natural gas to methanol is cheap and gas was cheap).
Plus you could easily replace it with solar produced methanol overtime.
EV however killed the need for that for the most part.
Today I don't really think synfuels have much of a application. Batteries and storing energy electrically will win. It will not be so long until you can basically do Iron-Silicon battery for a very cheap price. Or if we finally figure Sulfer we could have amazing batteries for super cheap.
It's far easier to store it (underground, as compressed gas; this is a demonstrated technology) than it is to store energy in batteries. The cost/energy capacity can be extremely low, ~ $1/kWh equivalent.
at that point we are no longer looking at a fuel for mobile vehicles and other technologies become better without the lossful need for electrolysis. pumped storage is highly effective for example.
Sure, but the cost per unit of energy storage capacity is also higher for PHES. So PHES (and batteries on one side, and hydrogen on the other) have different storage use cases. In general combining several storage technologies like these can end up being better than using just one.
No idea about energy consumption, so I would assume using dirt cheap solar in remote places with defacto zero variable production costs (over simplified, but this is one reason wind and solar are pricing out other sources on the German spot market which ignores fix costs) might change that.
Long term storage of hydrogen is quite easy so. It can be stored in thermal oil, rendering it inert. In thay form it isn't even considered dangerous goods for transportation anymore.
Source: I consulted a green hydrogen project on logistics a while ago.
> The technology to generate hydrogen is also completely mature
That depends on what metric you are looking at. Efficiency? Perhaps. Cost/kW of the electrolyzer? Not true at all.
Also, the use case for electrolyzers has changed: from converting relatively pricy baseload power to hydrogen to converting cheap intermittent power to hydrogen. For the latter you want to trade efficiency for lower capital cost.
Hydrogen has very low energy density compared to gasoline. Like how diesel has more energy than gasoline.
It also has a terrible efficiency. I think you lose ~70% from electrolysis.
You also have the problem that most hydrogen today is made from petroleum!
The idea is to use hydrogen as easily scalable battery. All of the things that prevent fuel cells from being easily applicable in cars are not such a big factor in closed loop system.
I'm not sure you're familiar with straw man arguments. I know the drawbacks of hydrogen, and for example, I don't think it makes sense for personal vehicles like cars.
OP started a though experiment where we think of a new technology chain where energy is abundant and irregular. In this setup hydrogen might make sense because its energy intensive process is no longer an issue.
I am not sure why any talk about Hydrogen triggers such a visceral reaction from people. There has been major advances in Hydrogen research as well - from production to storage. Both of have gotten much cheaper (consider UNSW's research on using Nickel instead of Platinum electrodes).
Lets suposse you need 10kW to fulfill your needs. You can buy 10000/350=29 panels today at $200 each, or 25 400W panels tomorrow for $200 each. Saving $800 and roof space for the same output.
Maybe for rooftop solar. For utility-scale solar it won't work out like that.
Imagine it's 02031 and you're running a utility-scale solar company and you want to put in a bid on Egypt's latest PPE RFQ for a 100-megawatt solar farm. The market price for PV modules is down to US$0.018 as you predict above, but the labor cost to install them is US$0.18, so your construction costs are US$198k + balance of plant. So, to break even, you need to make at least US$0.198/Wp from the PPE, and so do your competitors who are trying to underbid you.
In this scenario, if you can find some way to automate 10% of the installation labor, you can save US$18,000 and underbid the competition by 5% (more realistically: 2.5%, because of balance-of-plant costs), guaranteeing you win the PPE. That's an environment that produces extremely strong incentives to invest in automation, and extremely favorable circumstances as well: on site at the solar plant, you control the entire environment except for, like, dust storms. And there's plenty of room for even very large machinery.
Think about the scale of the draglines, excavators, and shovels used in open-pit coal mining. Some of these have hundred-meter-long booms; they can reach across an entire city block without walking. (They move by walking because they're too big for wheels or tracks.) Now consider that the available solar energy resource is three orders of magnitude larger than coal ever was, and instead of a mountain-sized coal seam you're mining a country-sized "seam" of sunlight.
I hope these get cheap enough that every house in the tropics gets them on their rooves. AC is going to become essential as temperatures rise, the grid can't support the load, and we can't afford to power all those ACs with fossil fuel. Solar powered AC seems like the most reliable way to survive a severe heatwave like the one described in the opening chapter of The Ministry of the Future: https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...
You can't rely on the underprovisioned grid in a scenario like that, especially since the heatwave will likely drive the power plants themselves out of their operating range. Solar seems like the only way. Its intermittency is a problem on general, but clouds that would disrupt the power would also stop the heat.
It seems like you've never been in a place that had very humid hot summers. I can tell you that it does not require constant sun to be miserable in summer.
And without sun you can not power that solar and in humid hot weather something like a passive "swamp cooler" won't work either.
It seems you’ve never been in a sunny climate without aircon. People survive. It’s not crazy hard. Growing up in Australia, with temps regularly over 40, and the only aircon in the supermarket frozen section.
I wonder why do people assume that going forward heatwave intensity will stop before reaching the survivability threshold. It doesn't take too much, you just need an event where wet-bulb temperature persists over 35 Celsius to have healthy humans start dropping like flies en masse. If they don't have access to cooled premises, that is.
I have indeed been in a sunny climate without aircon. Sunny and humid in most summers.
That's why we installed the AC. When it's just hot it's fine. You just go outside and in the shade or dip in the pool.
When it's sunny and humid or it starts raining and you hope for a nice cooling downpour and then the rain just stops and it's even muggier than before you crawl inside and turn the AC up.
EDIT: and by turn up I don't mean freezer tenps. I hate that. We use it mainly to get rid of the humidity but that's how ACs cool anyway so temp goes down too.
Dubai was weird. I don't remember humidity being an issue there to be honest. Was only there for 3 days or so though.
I vividly remember freezing on the bus though. Being outside was better.
What I also vividly remember was the beach. Totally different beach experience than anything else I've had before or after. It was really weird when I walked into the ocean and the water wasn't actually feeling colder than air around me. It was just suddenly wet around you but not cold ;)
>It was really weird when I walked into the ocean and the water wasn't actually feeling colder than air around me. It was just suddenly wet around you but not cold ;)
Sounds like we're employing the same strategy. I'm not a big fan of AC overall, but OMG the humidity can be stifling. I have my thermostat set to 79F, sometimes I'll even raise it to 80F or 81F. I'm not looking for cool so much as I'm looking for not muggy. There have been days when the humidity is 68% or more but it's only 77F and it gets uncomfortable. Crank the AC down to 76F and it takes care of that humidity. Do you know if they make thermostats that put a priority on reducing humidity rather than just reducing temperature (for AC)? I mean 84F can feel great if it's not humid.
It only got to 32°C in Japan when I was there but it was 100% humidity and it was the worst, like the air was impossible to breathe, immediate sweating and a feeling of almost claustrophobia. Aircon was essential and luckily ubiquitous.
Japanese people are adapted to their environment and barely sweat, it makes you feel pretty gross as a westerner there with all these Salary Men in black suits and ties looking crisp while you’ve sweated through your shorts and t-shirt…
It happens to you too if you live there long enough. Likewise if you spend a lot of time outside in the cold you too can walk around in shorts and sandals in freezing temperatures with no ill effects (as long as it’s dry with low winds)
I wish more people understood this. No, 35°C is not "too hot", 90% RH is not "too humid" and 10°C is not "too cold", your body is just not adapted to it yet like the locals.
35C or over is not too hot, if it's dry enough that the body can regulate its own body temperature.
Even 100% RH is not a problem if it's cold enough.
10C is definitely not too cold and much much colder temps are totally fine if you are bundled up.
The problem apparently becomes high relative humidity paired with temperatures that are too high for the human body to cool itself. We all know what happens if you get a fever that's too high (i.e. body temp goes way up): you die!
Wet-bulb temperature is a measure of heat and humidity that expresses how human bodies will experience the temperature. It is so named because it is calculated by wrapping the bulb of a thermometer in a wet cloth. In low humidity, water will evaporate from the cloth, carrying away heat and cooling the thermometer in the same way sweat cools the human body. In these conditions, the wet-bulb temperature will be lower than the air temperature. In high humidity — when the air is more saturated with water vapor — the water cannot evaporate as easily so the cloth stays hot. If the wet cloth cannot cool below the air temperature, neither can human skin.
Humans being humans, we invented stuff to help us both be more comfortable because many of these conditions are still uncomfortable, even if they don't kill you and to not die even if the conditions are made for it (easiest example being: it's -40C outside, yes without bundling up a lot you will also be able to die from this.
I.e. in dry climates, have passive evaporative coolers (if you have enough water supply), preferably in houses that have good airflow and are painted white instead of having black tar roofing (think the old white houses built in spain for example).
The modern humans use AC in most places now. Which does come with its own problems.
Traditionally Japanese houses are designed to pass natural winds for cooling in summer. But now winds are no longer helpful so those houses are really bad for both summer and winter.
Yes, I think LKY - basically the father of Singapore - summed it up best:
> Air conditioning. Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the single inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.
> Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency. [1]
Without AC, most of the cities in the tropics would not be anywhere near what they are.
It also brings to mind the importance of AC. It's not a nice-to-have. It can be as essential as heating is in cold climates, and unfortunately it's very clear from the ESG crowd that they don't realize this. They probably won't until we've seen massive death tolls during a heat wave.
Yes the 49C event in Vancouver and surrounding areas was a heat dome and didn't have clouds.
Where I live, just a bit earlier we had complete cloud cover for an entire day w/ "feels like 40C" hot and humid weather. It didn't rain that day, except once a little sprinkle. It made it muggier outside than it was before.
Well, so what do you call a whole week of constant 34℃ during the day, but with clouds in the sky and even a brief (but intense) rain once? That's what we had last week in Poland.
Agreed. It's a heatwave when this kind of weather (hot/dry, hot/normal, hot/humid) persists. Sometimes in combinations of these conditions.
Something that is a heat wave in one place might just be called 'weather' in another place. If New Delhi got our "regular winter weather", it would be called way more than a "cold spell", while 2 weeks of New Delhi weather here is called a heat wave.
Proper insulation is way more efficient than AC. One of the main reasons there is so much AC in the US is because many buildings aren't well-insulated and historically energy has been incredibly cheap.
I don't think "absolutely minimal" is the correct description of the nature of A/C electrical demand.
EIA places the total percentage of A/C electrical expenditures at %12 in 2015[0], energy.gov cites it at 6% of the total usage[1]. This number looks pretty "meh", however note that A/C demand is highly variable, seasonal, and on a daily basis will spike quite a bit.
Contextualized with the annual data this is positioned within, the %6 usage is concentrated regionally, during the day, in the vaguely 4-month summer season in CONUS. Contrasted with heating electrical requirements, which operate more or less all the time in the winter (to prevent freezing pipes, and thermal inertia of a cold-ass house) and the averages of the electrical demand begin to look a lot different.
The relatively low aggregate demand is smoothed out of the highly variable nature of A/C load. Electrical load is immediately produced and consumed for the most part. An electrical grid will struggle to supply this peak-load demand a small but critical percentage of the time.
This A/C demand happily coincides with the times solar power will be most effective. It appears to me that solar is very well suited to augment the baseline load of a national/regional electrical grid to support peak summer demand. There is also some effect of the increased summertime temperatures on electrical grid transmission losses[2], but I'm not sure how all that shakes out.
It's really bizarre that whenever solar is mentioned, someone chimes in with some claim about toxic materials in the panels, yet rarely do you hear these complaints about other ubiquitous products with hazardous materials, like televisions, laptops, fluorescent light bulbs, microwaves, or anything else.
The recovery rate for solar panels in developed countries is already close to 100%. Very few people are going to simply dispose of them in the trash, because they don't fit in the trash, and the contractors they work with are not going to dump them in the woods.
It's fair to say we will have to replace this with something not developed yet. It's honest and if you are scared by it others will come up with that solution.
I' ll offer a guess at a solution.. the next generation of power sources will be organically based and breakdown into non-toxic material and solar will be a part of that.
Solar panels are even better: they don't break down into anything, ever. They are completely inert, pre-vitrified from the factory and guaranteed to hold their shape for millions of years.
And when they're old and lost most of their efficiency, one can still use them in less demanding applications. Example: take old panels from households or industrial buildings and use them on parking lots for services or lighting. To a certain extent, the same applies to batteries too.
> the contractors they work with are not going to dump them in the woods
They will if that's the cheapest option to get rid of them. Westinghouse dumped PCB-laden oil and transformers in the woods and that is still being cleaned up decades later.
30-40+ years ago they would flush it down the drain too. There are unscrupulous contractors out the wazoo, but today you will get your license yanked so fast.
> The recovery rate for solar panels in developed countries is already close to 100%. Very few people are going to simply dispose of them in the trash, because they don't fit in the trash, and the contractors they work with are not going to dump them in the woods.
The garbage will get shipped to corrupt third-world countries, then they can be safely dumped in the woods/water.
Not in Europe. There is also a market for these modules in developing countries. Used up modules are still working good enough for, say, remote areas in Asia or Africa. Why throw a working, for free, module away if you can use it?
It is not bizarre if everyone keeps bring up the same issue.
In your area they will be picked up and shipped to another country with lower environmental standards for disassembling.
These are some of the chemicals of concern:
cadmium telluride, copper indium selenide, cadmium gallium (di)selenide, copper indium gallium (di)selenide, hexafluoroethane, lead, and polyvinyl fluoride. Additionally, silicon tetrachloride, a byproduct of producing crystalline silicon, is highly toxic
Silicon tetrachloride being a “highly toxic” “byproduct of producing crystalline silicon” is a new astroturfing mantra I’ve seen repeated lately. Too bad it’s recycled as part of the process (and is useful on its own for making high purity optical fibers) or solar enemies might have a point!
It is an intermediate product, not a waste product.
There was a highly publicized story in 2008 about Chinese silicon companies dumping it illegally. Ever since it's been repeatedly invoked as anti-solar ammunition. It's like constantly warning about melamine poisoning from milk because an unscrupulous company did that before too.
Additionally, in 2011 China set standards requiring that companies recycle at least 98.5 percent of their silicon tetrachloride waste.
It's fairly easy and cost effective to recycle once you have the infrastructure in place. It seems most of the pollution reports are from before the mandate and also when precursors were way cheaper relative to the final product.
I don't understand the mechanism that hexafluoroethane would be produced by a solar panel.
I guess, that gas might be produced as an impurity during manufacturing, but wouldn't that be at the factory? That seems like something that would be really easy to monitor and regulate because fabs are expensive and rare.
could you explain more about the hexafluoroethane?
I don't know anything about solar panel recycling, but it's worth noting that other means of power generation via solar energy exist [1][2][3], most of which depend on mirror-concentrated heat and don't necessarily involve toxic chemicals or rare earth mineral extraction.
Photovoltaics have largely left these technologies in the dust, but if the long tail of solar panel production becomes a significant environmental concern, alternatives do exist.
> Photovoltaics have largely left these technologies in the dust
How so? CSP tech continues to advance on multiple levels and usage continues to grow globally at grid scale with advances with tech in the solar field, concentrator design [1] and molten salt storage [2].
PV is not currently competitive at grid scale on its own (I've seen it being used more recently in tandem with CSP, but more like CSP providing most [gt 70%] of the MW), because storage costs are joke (wrt underlying materials for batteries and recyclability[3][4]) compared to molten salt (I'm totally ignoring environmental concerns).
I really think PV has more of an edge in small consumer market that wants/needs no storage at all.
We're replacing the problem where we dump waste in the atmosphere with no clear path to ever getting it back out with the problem of storing potentially hazardous solids. The latter seems to be a much better problem to have. We already have that problem with most things we produce and we are moderately good at handling it.
But you can recycle them. Even says so in the article… so we just need a good recycling program. Not an option with fossil fuels, or nuclear or your super special unknown future energy source
I'm in the sunny state, looking to install 15-20 kW solar panels. It's anything but dirt cheap. The quotes you see in the news (like 1.04c/kWh) are for huge industrial installations in deserts in some countries with close to no regulations.
My residential solar will be ridiculously expensive, probably close to $20K.
We're at the point where residential solar is expensive not because it's solar, but just because hiring a contractor to do anything in any growing metro area is unreasonably expensive.
You don't need a competent developer for that. You can go to one of the website builders like SquareSpace and do it for free, or hire some student to do that for you.
There's zero reason to write any code by hand for a brochure website.
In a funny twist of fate, so many people die while installing panels that it “kills more than nuclear”. Therefore, although I hate the shenanigans they pull off to overcharge, maybe they really deserve the money to be able to do things safely.
Just for reference, I put 5kW of panels on my roof in 2003. The unsubsidized cost was $40,000. After subsidies it came in at around $20K. So your 4X the power at 1/2 the cost is a lot cheaper.
I am trying to get out of a solar lease for the new house we bought and Tesla is saying the fair market value for 9 year old 4kW solar panels is $15k which is double the price of an 8kW system. I hate Tesla with a passion.
We got a significant discount over comps so even if we pay full price to pay them off we still did well, so I was okay with it. It’s still very annoying though having to deal with Tesla. I can’t believe they are still in business with their business practices. My friend has a solar roof contract that Tesla is trying to double the price on, it’s insane.
Oh yeah, no, I wasn't criticising you. It's just that all these solar guys are notorious for being shitheads about their solar leases. They're as bad as the timeshare guys.
I took no offense to what you said. I think solar leases are a complete scam. The sales person sold the elderly couple an undersized system that left them still paying for electricity from PG&E every month. And a few years from now, I will be paying more per kWh than from PG&E. But the delta won’t be huge so based on the discount it was okay with me. But yeah it’s incredible that Solar city sold these people this lease, it’s practically useless for them and it’s definitely useless for me.
Yes it was :-). And based on operating expenses and billing information it became cash flow positive after 12 years. In spite of PG&E doing everything it could to prevent that (changing rate plans out from under owners).
When it breaks I expect to replace it with a 10kW system tied to Powerwalls which avoids the rate plan shennanigans by not having to deal with ANY rate plan.
Would you please explain how the Powerwalls negate the rate plans?
Do you mean during peak ok hours you’ll operate off battery power?
I’ve read something about PGE charging customers for using solar - arguing that solar customer aren’t paying into the system for keeping up the grid. Are you referring to that scenario and do the batteries help with that in any way?
Currently my system is "grid tied" which, if you're not familiar with the lingo, means that when the house is producing more energy than it uses, it pushes it into the grid, when it needs more energy than it can produce it pulls what it needs from the grid.
In terms of maintenance this is a really simple setup since there are no batteries to maintain. The inverters do not require periodic maintenance and the panels only need to be washed off periodically to keep them operating at their peak. In the time we've been operating like this we lost one inverter and one panel which was damaged from a falling rock. So easy to maintain, and trouble free.
The question then was "how much does the power company pay for power that you produce?" The terms and conditions of what you pay, and what the power company pays, is nominally the "rate plan."
When we started, this was new to PG&E and we were on a plan where we stopped getting monthly bills, instead the mechanical meter would run forward when we were drawing power and backward when we were generating power. Each month we'd have a 'net power' which could be positive (used more than produced) or negative (produced more than used)and every 12 months that was summed up. If the number was negative they would just zero it out and roll over to the next year (free power for them), if it was positive they would charge a stepped rate based on total power used for the year. Once they got "smart" meters installed they got creative with the plans, we ended up on a plan where they pay us a wholesale rate, bill us at a retail rate, and total $ up instead of actual power used. This works out better for them and extended the time it took for the system to pay for itself.
Powerwalls can (and in our case will) completely disconnect you from the electric grid. They don't buy any of your power and you don't buy any of their power, hence no rate plan. If you size the system you can be pretty sure you won't ever be without power (even with a series of cloudy days) and you can add a natural gas fueled electric generator[1] (we would still have gas service) which could charge the powerwalls in a pinch.
I've got all the feeds instrumented so I can tell exactly how much power the house is using and the panels have generated (fed into an influxDB time series database) and using that data have been planning for the retrofit based on our usage over the last 15 years.
The Powerwalls double the initial installation cost but since I'm not paying margin (selling wholesale and buying retail)to PG&E the actual value delivered is higher and so it has a better rate of return. Of course I can only speculate on the lifetime ownership costs of Powerwalls (much like I had to do with the inverters which I had in my spreadsheet being replaced every 10 years since that was the warranty on them).
[1] What I really wanted was some Bloom Energy fuel cells for that but they don't really have a 15 - 20kW rated one, it is too small.
We're on battery-backed solar. We still have a connection to the grid, but also have a PowerWall and enough panels to generate about 10% over annual power consumption (this is the max that PG&E will let you install if you keep a grid connection).
PG&E still plays rate-plan shenanigans. Besides the retail/wholesale stuff, they charge $10/month just for the grid connection. They're currently lobbying CPUC to raise that to $60/month.
Also the "time-of-use optimized" setting in the Tesla app isn't actually that optimized. It's unaware of the retail/wholesale issue, and hence simply tries to maximize the amount you ship back to the grid in peak hours when it'd be better off minimizing total consumption. It also sometimes doesn't discharge the PowerWall as much as it could (leaving solar energy on the table), and it charges it with grid power when it could easily use solar energy. I've found it's better to just use the "Self-powered" setting, where it charges the PowerWall as soon as you have excess energy over the home consumption, starts discharging as soon as there's a shortfall, and continues until the PowerWall reaches the reserve level you set.
Note that solar generation is incredibly seasonal. I'm currently generating about 25 kWh/day. In January, this is more like 4 kWh/day. So depending on your shade levels, you might have to put on 6x as many panels to be entirely grid-independent vs. grid-connected with battery backup. We're sized so that we can power a full normal workload from about Apr - Oct, which at least covers fire season, but would have to conserve significantly (i.e. forego loads of laundry and electric appliances) if we had an extended outage in winter.
CA. It's a perfect storm of factors: we're on the north side of a hill, there's a lot of tall trees to the south of us, we've got a pitched roof. In winter the sun doesn't rise on the house until almost 11 AM, and then the south roof gets dappled sunlight because of the trees until about 2 PM. Because of the shade cover, we split the panels between south and north arrays, but the north one doesn't start producing until the sun clears the rooftop, about 10:30 AM. The north array actually produces more during the winter because it gets direct sunlight and has no tree cover.
In the summer, the sun is higher in the sky, so it clears the hill earlier (by 8 AM or so) and never hits the trees. Both arrays produce the full day, and the days are longer, and the sun is incident at a steeper angle anyway.
My situation is a little weird, but it also applies to many urban or rural settings where you'd have a tall building or series of tall trees that block sunlight when the sun is low on the horizon, but that the sun would clear when directly overhead.
Absolutely true that and fortunately that situation appears to be in the level of risk as tankless water heaters lighting your house on fire. But only time will tell.
On the plus side, you can put them in a subterranean vault if you have space on the property for the set back limits.
Or you can get home batteries LiFePO4 chemistry. Better lifetime/more cycles, requires temps about 100C higher than NMC chemistry to hit thermal runaway, and better temperature ranges. The only problem is that it's not as power dense as NMC batteries but that's not a huge concern for a home battery.
True, and we're watching over vendors in this space (we use LiFePO4 batteries in our camper) the integration with the Powerwalls however is pretty good. Batteries being only one component of the whole off grid experience.
15-20kW? How big is your home/electricity consumption? I paid $7.5K USD ($10K AUD) for 5.9kW panels (5kW inverter) only 2.5 years ago, which I still think is pretty good.
In summer I generate 40kWh a day, winter down to ~23kWh (AU is lucky though in this regard), which nearly always exceeds my home usage. 20kW of panels is huge, at least 60+ panels + I'm guessing multiple large inverters or lots of micro inverters.
$1/watt installed is really cheap IMO at this scale residential.
I am running about 2100kw/month (about 70/day) and we are not cooling all rooms. I wish I was not renting as I would insulate the hell out of an owned home. (I would also install solar but that's a different issue.)
That would be an awesome price even if it's after the federal tax credit. Here's a link to average prices by system size, that's way under even for the smaller size.
For rooftop you’re not paying for the solar, you’re paying for the scaffolding, design and fitting for your particular roof, retrofitted electric work, marketing, permits etc.
I don’t understand. How is paying $10,000 or more cheaper than using the electricity provided by my local electric company? The break even point is probably 5 years if you really can install everything but $10,000.
The opportunity cost of that $10,000 is, let’s say 5% per year on avg, or $2500 over 5 years (without compounding which would skew this even further against panels)
Right, it just depends on the numbers. Taxes and credits have a lot to do with it. For example, a $10k (after credits) system might save at averaged $1200/year accounting for production lost, increasing a bit over time due to utility hikes. After 20 years, assuming the system is now worthless, that will compare similarly to an 8% stock market return plus initial capital after capital gains taxes. The solar system would return in a narrower range of performance than the stock market return.
I installed 4.6 kW of solar in 2017 for $20k. I got bids from 3 different companies and they ranged from $4.40/watt to $5.60/watt. All this talk of $1/watt is blowing my mind.
For 25 years, at 20% capacity factor, that will generate 96kWh a day, for a total of 876MWh. That's 2.3 c/kWh, not accounting for the time value of money. Call it 4c or 5c/kWh, if you take out a loan rather than paying up front. I dont know of any utility thag charges that little for electricity.
Of course, 96kWh/day is pretty high on the curve of household energy consumption, so most US customers wont get your economy of scale.
I think you're confused with the rated wattage (perfect angle, noon, at the equator) with the actual produced wattage. You will never generate 96kWh/day from a 15-20 kW system.
You can DIY + electrician (for hookup) for fairly cheaply.
I just bought 5kW of used solar panels for $1k shipped to my door. You can get new panels for around double that ($0.27/watt). My 3kW inverter + charge controller (can run w/o battery) was $750.
The inverter powers a critical loads panel, which switches to grid when solar isn't available. I setup the panel, I had an electrician move my critical loads and connect my inverter.
That said, this is not the standard grid-tie setup, but it works for me. The advantage for me is price and the ability to add a battery later.
Nice. I wanted to do this but I wasn’t able to do enough of the labor myself, and in my state DIY is looking like it may get deprioritized out of receiving renewable energy credits. In exchange for paying the markup on the panels I’m getting all the paperwork done right and paying a reasonable rate for the electrical and installation work. It’s a bummer, though, similar to when I conclude I have to pay for auto maintenance work instead of saving money.
This is the specific off grid inverter I'm using - SPF 3000TL LVM-ES. You essentially place it between your loads and grid and it will intelligently switch to grid when your solar output is too low and your battery voltage is at a certain threshold.
In the short run sure. But electricity isn't going to get cheaper. Think of it like prepaying your electricity bill for 15 years, and then after that, it's free.
It's interesting thing to consider really. As solar gets cheaper also the cost of electricity generated when solar power is available gets cheaper. So it might even make sense not to install it yourself, but instead buy it when there is inevitable over production. And price at those times might as well be zero.
The problem is that if you ever sell, your home's clearing price won't accurately capture the money you put in, and the value of your solar installation.
But what’s the cost of the externalities of non-renewable energy? Solar isn’t perfect, but at this point I’d say it’s actually cheaper than coal (still nowhere close to nuclear) once we talk about actual costs of using it to make energy.
From society's perspective, isn't it better if the solar panels all end up in large installations where they can benefit from economies of scale as far as maintenance, infrastructure, and installations costs go? As long as there is an empty warehouse rooftop in the sunbelt, there shouldn't be a residential solar install occuring. I say this as someone who had a solar install on his old house, but still, the costs should have been such that it discouraged me and encouraged industrial installs.
There are even higher benefits by reducing the transmission and distribution requirements. T&D is hugely expensive, and local installs of solar reduces costs for the neighbors of whomever get solar installed.
Industrial installs are encouraged by utilities because they increase dependence on expensive, centralized, infrastructure. And for regulated utilities, this sort of infrastructure expense is easy to rate-base and increase profits.
But independent modelers that have been looking at fine-grained grid modeling, like Christopher Clack, have found huge cost savings by deploying massive amounts of storage and solar at residential and C&I locations first in the coming years, before doing larger industrial scar installations.
Will it reduce T&D? You still need some capacity for times when solar is not available. And cost doesn't really come from use, but infra existing. Just like Internet, after you have hardware and lines the use is somewhat marginal.
Ofc, local storage is an option, but will it be cheaper and safer than what we currently have? 20-30+ year old battery installations left to operate and just hang there don't look too promising to me...
T&D must be sized for the peak of usage, meaning that most of the capacity sits idle, except for the extreme situations. If that peak is reduced, T&D upgrades and expansions are delayed as our energy demand grows, and all the equipment is used more efficiently. (And just as transmission has been neglected in the US for a long time, so has distribution, and we are going to need a ton of upgrades as energy demand grows while we electrify our energy usage.)
In nearly every market, energy use peaks at mid-day, just as solar is peaking. So distributed solar is a peak-shaving system, whereas centralized utility solar still requires the same big peak.
Distributed storage reduces both troughs and peaks, and makes T&D even more efficient.
Yep 5% of electricity just wasted on resistance [1]. Also all the dangerous/expensive components of an electrical grid could be reduced, if energy was more decentralized. Don't think we're any close to that though.
PS: it's also a harder system to attack for malicious operators.
So you're suggesting that commercial users use less electricity in during peak illuminance than residential? I don't buy that. If you want to place the solar where the electricity is being consumed between 10am - 2pm you're going to put it on a commercial rooftop.
Commercial rooftop, residential rooftop, doesn't matter much at the geographic scale of grids. Certainly doesn't hurt to put it on commercial roofs though! And since those are often flat, it's probably a lot safer. Check out the map of electrical infrastructure in California:
You'll see that on the scale of substations, industry is right next to residential, and virtually indistinguishable.
Consider 500MW placed on the roofs of homes in San Jose, versus 500MW in a somewhat close green field build. The distant green field build is going to send every single kWh over transmission lines. Where as close to 0 kWh of the residential solar would hit transmission, meaning that all transmission requirements are lessened, as are distribution requirements.
> isn't it better if the solar panels all end up in large installations where they can benefit from economies of scale
The opposite: the closer you place production and consumption the better. Less energy wasted in transportation, less costs for infrastructure maintenance, less risk of widespread outages.
However, decentralizing access to solar energy goes against the interest of energy companies, the gas industry, the nuclear industry and, consequently, the political class.
Not sure about that. In general it's centralization that reduces maintenance costs. Centralizing in terms of location lets you use bigger, more efficient hardware, and gives you economies of scale. Centralizing ownership reduces administrative costs and allows for savings not possible with distributed ownership.
I do see the various benefits of everyone running their own energy production, but costs and reliability aren't them.
Scale and network effects are complex and non-linear and need to be understood beyond simplistic slogans.
The efficiency of solar panels stays the same with the number of panels deployed next to each other.
The infrastructure to transport electricity (pylons, cabling, transformers) becomes more expensive with increasing capacity. Less centralization requires less transport.
I expect you can find installers cheaper than IKEA. I got quotes for a 8kW system at the beginning of this year, and prices were €0.7 - €0.9 per watt, before incentives.
Not sure if these are much good, but the price seems reasonable for a retail-packaged solar panel. 18-ish volts is kind of an odd voltage to deal with perhaps, and it appears to not come with a battery charge controller like Harbor Freight's older more expensive solar panel kit.
It's kind of weird that it's hard to buy solar panels as an individual person, so good for them for making it available. This is the only place I know of where you can just walk in and walk out with a cartload of panels; perhaps there are others?
That is exactly what the solar panels do. They aren't mounted directly on the shingles but offset a couple of inches from the roof. The area under the panels tends to be cooler than the rest of the roof.
Yes, somewhat. Though probably not good for snow or high wind load. But an unconditioned, properly-ventilated attic with radiant barrier probably gets most of the way there with less labor cost or roof deck damage.
Any good experiences with solar chargers, for phones?
I had a great 7W one (ALDI, Bosch panel, before they exited) years ago - full current even on a late afternoon winter's day, provided the sun was normal to the mono-crystaline panel.
Mine was stolen 7 years ago when camping. Panels have supposedly improved since then, but I've not seen it in this form factor.
You could also get a standard 12V/14V or whatever panel and rig a car cigarette light USB adapter to it. They're usually very efficient, cheap and can handle like 8-24V just fine.
Thanks, folding's better for camping, but whatever is available.
That linked one is super thin and light, and much smaller area than my old one. Their claimed "20% conversion" is higher, IIRC, part explains it.
The exact direction makes a disproportionate difference (beyond dot product), and probably cloudiness too.
I hadn't thought of using a car cigarette lighter USB adapter - isn't there an issue with non-smooth voltage regulation, that might harm a smartphone? Actually, I don't know what phones can handle, nor what panels typically put out, nor how the "solar chargers" deal with it.
A better long-term solution might be to replace a phone's Li-on battery with (small 12v motorbike) lead-acid battery, for far longer life-time. But heavier for camping etc.
cigarette lighter adapters are usually pretty good. Especially when they don't need to filter whatever crap is happening on an automotive supply (lots of EMI).
They'll regulate output to 5V and a smartphone won't be harmed by it. Too much current won't be a problem for a smartphone, it won't take more than it can handle.
I wish they mentioned more what companies are at the forefront of this. I am also curious to what extent innovations in solar panel tech are patented or if they are more open source and therefore treated like a commodity product.
I think they're the only on-the-market 22% efficient panel. This bloomberg article talking about 700W panels is inane, they just increased the panel size past the standard commercial 1mx2m.
Paywall article so I’ll just share a random interesting fact.
Solar is so prevalent in Australia that power prices regularly go negative as supply exceeds demand. One interesting thing that is starting to happen is companies like Tesla build huge battery banks and buy cheap or negative price power and then sell it back a few hours later when it is much more expensive.
Why would the price go negative? If you have excess solar capacity why would you need to pay someone to take it from you? Why not just sink it into the ground or something?
Utility scale generation of renewables in Australia creates tradable certificates. These are required by law to be purchased by energy retailers to meet the Renewable Energy Target. If that certificate trades at $50, I can sell my power for -$40 and still make $10 profit.
Putting further downwards pressure on prices, small scale solar generators (eg homes) generally have a fixed price for solar exports. The spot price could be -$1000 but they will still be getting paid $100 under their retail contract. So they have no incentive to stop generating, even when the price is negative. The market regulator is attempting to change this, but consumers are resistant to having to pay to generate power or allow their system to be remotely switched off.
Coal generators won't switch off either as they take a while to ramp up and down, and are sometimes are directed (and paid) to remain running to provide system stability.
With excess solar you usually just detach the inverter. In some areas, like Southern California, this can be forced during peak solar times.
As for the price going negative - this isn’t a super new phenomenon. I remember learning about coal power plants in West Virginia having negative power prices in the late night. This is simply because it’s hard to spin down and scale up these loads. It’s more cost effective to pay people to take the energy for a short time than it is to shut down the plant and potentially destabilize the grid in the future.
As for sinking it into the ground - there’s lots of research there. Tesla is pushing utility scale batteries. Other efforts move large rocks up and down hills, convert water to hydrogen and oxygen, or simply pump water up hill. Each of these has some losses and hardware costs to get going and efficiency isn’t great.
At a home you can get a set of Tesla Powerwalls and essentially do this - but you’ll find they cost about $6k each and eat about $7/mo in electric losses (at the $0.23/kWh price I pay - thanks, Eversource).
Forgive this ignorant question… but what happens if people don’t “burn electricity” during negative pricing? Would the voltage on the grid start to fluctuate? What kinds of effects would we see? What happens to the generators in turbine-halls if they kept on running?
It's a bit unintuitive at first, but the voltage would stay the same, however the frequency would increase.
For home users this isn't such an issue today (everything in my home with a motor, has a three phase motor, so there is an inverter inside to convert that from 2 phase AC -> DC -> 3 phase AC, so the frequency doesn't matter), but for industry it is as a lot of equipment needs 60/50Hz and will be damaged with something outside it's operating range.
At multiple places in the power grid there are systems that will disconnect if the grid frequency falls or rises outside it's operating range. This is what caused the cascading failures and power outage over most of the country in the UK in 2019:
Turbine speed is controlled by a device called a governor. When the power in exceeds the power out and the speed (frequency) increases the governor lays off the throttle to stop then speed from increasing further. Throttle could be water, steam, gas, etc. Then the grid operator will have some units that operate in “AGC” automatic generation control which would reduce their output until the frequency is back at 60Hz.
Units start to trip below 58 and above 62 Hz ish, and turbines should respond to 0.01 Hz change in frequency within 200 ms according to the IEEE 125 guideline, so even a 0.5 Hz deviation is huge.
A 1 Hz deviation is a major event that would result from a mismatch on the order of gigawatts
It becomes easier and easier to meet the needs of the grid (because less energy is being taken out), so the turbines speed up. This increases the frequency of the electrical oscillations on the grid. If the deviation is small this is mostly noticeable in clocks running too fast, but as the deviation increases large spinning structures start spinning too fast and break, often violently.
When demand exceeds supply, the grid frequency goes below the 60Hz target. From what I've read, the frequency of the grid is closely monitored at all times, and a lot of effort goes into keeping it at or near the target.
I assume in this situation, the voltage also goes below the target, because people talk about "brown-outs" which I believe means that you get less than 120V from an outlet.
I can speculate that when supply exceeds demand, this creates a similar problem, but in the opposite direction.
> From what I've read, the frequency of the grid is closely monitored at all times, and a lot of effort goes into keeping it at or near the target.
Can confirm, did some work in a power station. The frequency is displayed in very large font front and centre of the control room. It's really a leading indicator of the health of the network, so any fluctuations are monitored very closely and the operators would sometimes jump on the phone with nearby generators if it starts doing something unexpected.
Another interesting fact, in the control room there was also an indicator showing the frequency adjusted clock time. Older clocks (like many of those bedside alarms) used the 50/60Hz as a clock rather than using a built-in crystal, so it was important to make sure that over time the frequency did average out to 50/60Hz to keep clocks in sync.
In Germany solar power has a feed in tariff of 8 cent per kWh. The operator of solar power can therefore feed it in at negative prices and still make money. Germany has an extremely perverse system called EEG. The feed in tariff is paid by a fee called the EEG surcharge. Large industrial users are exempt. Meaning retail consumers pay for the electricity bill of industrial companies. Therefore the cheaper the electricity on the spot market, the more expensive the retail rate.
Hypothetical scenario: We have a persistent -8 cent spot market price. Industrial companies get paid for consuming electricity. However, retail doesn't benefit from the negative pricing. If the spot market is -8 cent and the feed in tariff is 8 cent then the EEG has to subsidize 16 cents. Thus electricity for retail gets 16 cents more expensive to get back to the original 8 cent. However, this isn't the whole story. We still have to pay for industrial consumption. If 33% of energy usage is industry and is exempt then every retail kWh has to pay 0.5 industrial kWH. So we now end up at 24 cents for electricity. If you were to add taxes (yes you pay them on top of the EEG surcharge) and grid maintenance costs, etc you would probably end up with 40 cents per kWH.
This was just an extreme example but it explains around 16% of Germany's extremely high electricity price. Getting rid of the various taxes on electricity would lower the costs by 20% without changing anything about the grid or making it less profitable.
It's some what of a recent thing. They are bringing in new laws to allow the grid to shut off your solar feed back when there is an oversupply but currently it just causes a big problem and negative prices.
> If you have excess solar capacity why would you need to pay someone to take it from you?
You don't. Usually there's some external reason that selling renewables at a slight loss is still profitable. Like tax incentives or production quotas or fixed-rate contracts.
Then coal plants get dragged along because they can't change output quickly.
> Why not just sink it into the ground or something?
That takes equipment, which takes money. They won't install it if sporadic negative prices are cheaper.
That infrastructure might not exist. Also, you probably dont get money, you probably get credit. So having batteries connected benefits the grid rather than wasting electricity.
This is by no means something I know much about, but I understood that disconnecting a panel causes it to heat up from sunlight to the point that it can reduce its useful lifespan.
That is somewhat true of exotic panels that nobody uses for utility-scale power, but it's not a necessary outcome of disconnecting a source from the grid. It doesn't have to be disconnected from everything. When removed from the grid, they can just be shorted.
Lol, dirt cheap? Where? In Sweden, the average price of a solar cell package of 5 kW is approximately 90,000 kr (~ $10,500) including VAT. That's about 3 times the average monthly salary in Sweden
At my home last year I installed 5kw at 1500 USD. In India. In addition to that I get 100 MBPS unlimited Internet at 10 USD per month. Not to mention my income is about ~1000 USD per month.
You can use payback time to back into expected returns that adjusts for the time value of money and you need to consider that you're getting expected (investable) savings as well.
Indeed, anything that can pay itself back in less than 5.5 years should be on par with the market.
The EEG makes cheap electricity expensive for no reason. The fundamental problem is that retail pays industry electric bills instead of the state subsidizing those like it is the case with nuclear. (nuclear is entirely subsidized).
Yes, the problem with expensive electricity in Germany is that renewables are one of the few unsubsidized power sources. Retail customers pay for everything. Of course they are expensive if they don't receive the same subsidies other technologies receive. With nuclear retail customers barely pay any of the costs involved in constructing and decomissioning the power plants.
Residential prices maybe. And only due to a screwed up legislation requiring to consumers to bear the brunt of the state subsidies for renewables. Screwed up because solar and wind are competitive now without subsidies and because industrial consumers are basically paying none of that. To the point these large consumers can make more money from brokering electricity and their consumption than from selling there products in certain periods.
None of that has anything to do with renewables per se.
It's not a subsidy for renewables because it's integrated into the price. The EEG is a subsidy for energy intensive industry that is paid by retail customers. The electricity bill of other people shouldn't be on yours. However, buying electricity at 0€ and then paying 0.08€ in EEG is the same as paying 0.08€ in the first place. The only difference is that renewables get feed in priority.
You are half right in that solar doesn't provide base load (obviously). However, other renewables do. E.g. offshore wind is pretty reliable and geothermal and hydro are pretty decent too. And storage seems a more economical alternative to having gas-peaker plants and is commonly paired with solar. Having all of that seems to be a winning solution for many countries that never had much nuclear to begin with and that are shutting down remaining coal and gas production.
Germany's energy sector is dirtier than France because France has a lot of nuclear power plants left from mid last century. And Germany of course built a lot of coal plants during that time and never had that much nuclear due to the political sensibilities of that era. Germany has invested a lot in early and relatively inefficient solutions over the last few decades. As these are being modernized, their cost will gradually improve. E.g. wind turbines from last century are a very different proposition than a modern 15MW offshore turbine. So yes, Germans paid a price for being early but they now they have a thriving industry that is about helping others switch to renewables.
Many coal plants in Germany are being shut down until 2038 and most of those French nuclear plants are reaching their end of life pretty soon as well. France has actually been decommissioning old nuclear plants for a while and has been gradually shifting to other renewables. E.g. wind and solar are growing relative to nuclear in France (quite a lot actually). Of course the issue is less urgent in France as they have (mostly) clean production already. But proportionally, nuclear is becoming less important for them.
Both France and Germany pay too much for their power. Solar and wind can be cheaper than that. That's actually what is driving these changes and that's the point of this article. It's not just a little bit cheaper but massively cheaper and still getting cheaper. We are talking orders of magnitude here (plural long term). Enough that you can consider some pretty wild solutions to address the base load issue and still end up with an overall cheaper solution.
New nuclear plants to provide base load don't make a lot of sense economically when that is true. This seems to be what you are implying. France is of course still building some new plants and they are deploying wind and solar too. They are doing more of the latter and less of the former however. The net proportion of nuclear is actually decreasing. That's true for most countries that are still building nuclear plants: they are increasingly less dependent on those plants. Like China, the USA, etc.
That's because the base load argument is simply wrong. Neither nuclear, coal, nor gas are long term needed for that. All of those are unattractive from a cost perspective long term.
Because Germany has shut down their nuclear plants, and France didn't. Nuclear energy is greenest energy possible, but some people are too influenced by endless fear-mongering to accept that.
Shutting down nuclear plants is an error. But building more of them is also a mistake. France is slowly stopping their plants to make room for the cheaper wind and PV. And the nuclear plants currently being built are an economical nightmare both for EDF and the gobernment: frenchs are paying a hidden cost in "cheap" nuclear electricity by subsidizing EDF through the backdoor.
The tell with France is when they terminated the ASTRID project, which was taking another stab at a sodium-cooled fast reactor.
What this means is they don't see nuclear growing enough to require breeders on any time scale that would justify retaining fast reactor expertise. Which means they don't see nuclear addressing climate change to any large extent, globally.
The cost of nuclear energy is rising only because unlike wind and solar energy it faces more and more restrictions, regulations and bureaucracy redtape. This is a direct result of above-mentioned fear-mongering. Had it received support and proper funding for R&D, by now we'd been swimming in cheap, abundant, reliable and safe nuclear power.
This can be right in Germany. But France or China are nuclear friendly, and their costs are rising as much as everywhere else.
Lets talk about the Flamanville Unit 3: the new plant was approved long ago, and its construction began on 2007 (planned to end in 2012). No bureaucracy, no extra regulations, no restrictions. Built by EDF which is to say by the France gobernment, as they own 90% of EDF), budgeted 3.3 billions.
- 2012, costs escalated to 8.5 billion. Delayed to 2016.
- 2014, delayed to 2017 due to Areva failure on delivery. Areva is owned by the french gobernment, who lost a lot of taxpayer money on it.
- 2015, the french gobernment detected structural problems in the vessel. Detected multiple failures in cooling systems. Cost increased to 10.5 billion, finishing delayed to 2018.
- Due to delays, loans required more guarantees in 2017. The french gobernment agreed, and deemed the plant "safe to start" even before tests, to appease investors.
- 2018, leaks detected in tests. Costs rose to 11 billion, opening delayed until 2019.
- 2019, more leaks detected, costs of repairment rose to 12.4 billion.
- 2020, a gobernment audit estimated that the costs would rise to 19 billion, and it will be charged via taxes to the french citizens. Plant still not working.
This is the history of a nuclear power plant heavily favoured by the gobernment, with costs multiplying by 7 in fifteen years (and rising). All of it while having to compete with solar and eolic technologies that are naturally falling in costs year after year.
Same happened in USA Vogtle, and taxpayers end up eating the overcosts.
Nuclear plants are, economically, a suicide for any society. They are cheap to run, but they are extremely complex monsters that costs a lot to build, even in the most favourable scenario.
Our pool of cheap, abundant, reliable and safe electricity seems more real with eolic and PV than with nuclear. I have more faith in "each-house-with-a-PV-roof-and-batteries" than in "100%-nuclear".
Notice that I didn't even menction waste, accidents, costs of fuel, fearmongering, etc. in my posts. Just plain economics.
Renewables also keep facing more and more restrictions, regulations and bureaucracy redtape in Germany. I don't see the difference except that nuclear has greater technical challenges that require even more of what you mentioned.
We just need to produce 3-5 times more nuclear reactors than we already have to satisfy all current power demands of human civilization with a significant reserve.
If we didn't stop building plants 3 decades ago, you wouldn't have to worry. Anyway, USSR was building new plants in 3-5 years, I'm pretty sure we could get by for a decade more it would take to make 100% generated energy without burning fossil fuels.
And if NASA had kept its funding after the moon landings we would have a base on Mars now. But we don't. We have to make do with what we can achieve within the society we live in. Not compare our world to some alternative history.
If tou6 want to get out of a deep pit, first thing to do is to stop digging.
Humanity should stop those unbased fear-mongering against nuclear energy and start increasing the number of nuclear plants, encouraging the development of cheap, safe and reliable power generation technologies.
