I a huge fan of residential solar and photovoltaics. Under the right conditions (summer, adequate battery storage) it's possible to be self-sufficient, just absolutely incredible.
That being said, where is the disconnect between people claiming industrial-scale solar and wind is cheaper than burning fossil fuels, and the reality (in Europe, others?) that electricity prices have risen steadily with an increase in renewable energy production (even before COVID and Ukraine)?
Is it the largely unaddressed battery storage problems? Other effects?
The EU has a pricing system where all the electricity is sold at the price of the most expensive source. For example, if at a given moment you need 100 MW of solar at €10, 100 MW of wind at €12, and 1 MW of gas at €150, consumers will be billed €150 for each and every MW they consume.
I get the intended logic behind the system, which is to incentivize cheap sources (if you run cheap sources, you keep the difference with respect to gas as pure profit), but IMO it's prone to gaming (a lot of incentive to have that single MW of gas up, and electricity companies are an oligopoly...) and doesn't work well even without gaming (if the price of gas is disproportionately high with respect to the rest of sources, things begin to just not make sense).
Spain and Portugal negotiated to (temporarily, I think) get out of this system and change it to something saner (with the same basic principles but some compensations so that gas price doesn't dominate anything). The so-called Iberian exception. And it's working: while our prices are still high with respect to historical standards (due to Ukraine and the general underlying energy crisis), they now tend to be much lower than the rest of the EU most of the time.
> or example, if at a given moment you need 100 MW of solar at €10, 100 MW of wind at €12, and 1 MW of gas at €150, consumers will be billed €150 for each and every MW they consume.
Since the power is exactly the same, people don't buy a MW of solar or wind, they just buy a MW, regardless of the source.
If you were (owning) a generator, why would you sell your electricity for €12/unit when people are willing to buy it at €150/unit? And since it's a free market, otherwise a middleman will come swooping in to rake in the difference.
Market dynamics dictate that when people/businesses are no longer willing to buy a MW for €150, the demand drops, the most expensive generators are not needed anymore and the overall price drops to the new equilibrium price.
Also: my fixed contract price per kWh is about €0.81 always, which is, uh, a lot. A friend of mine recently switched to a dynamic tariff and payed about €0.30-0.40 when I last asked him about it. Pondering...
> Market dynamics dictate that when people/businesses are no longer willing to buy a MW for €150, the demand drops, the most expensive generators are not needed anymore and the overall price drops to the new equilibrium price.
Not an economist, but “inelastic market / supply” answers that, I think.
It might drop, but a little only. Apparently, paying €150 for a MW is acceptable for companies. But the alternative is shutting down, so the cost gets forwarded to consumers of their products eventually.
This is of course dampened by middlemen who sell for a fixed price and take the risk of having buy for a high price. And a few small NL energy companies (or rather middlemen) have gone bankrupt when they didn't have the reserves.
I Also switchede from static to variable billing and saved about 50% on my bill, the static pricing contracts are not worth it currently, they where in August tho, at that point my contract was 50% cheaper than the variable price..
What you explain was also implicitly included when I said "I get the intended logic" (just didn't want to make my post too long).
The thing is that this so-called free market works well for generating companies, but makes no sense for consumers. It doesn't matter how cheap producing the bulk of the electricity is, as long as gas isn't turned off completely the consumer always pays the price of gas. In a country evolving from (say) 100% gas to 90% renewables and 10% gas (I know I'm simplifying, these simple mixes don't really exist) the cost of electricity generation would fall through the floor, but the consumer would pay exactly the same. This is clearly dysfunctional, regardless of how nice it can be in theory.
It's also not inevitable. You can set a cap to the prices, but then compensate
sources that go over the cap (in practice, gas) so they don't operate at a loss. This is what the Iberian exception system is doing, and it works.
What you will accomplish with trying that is that producers will bid what they expect the price to be, instead of their production cost. Thus we still get the marginal cost like all other raw resource markets, but with extra complications.
That is a much less efficient system with larger risks.
It often happened in Spain (pre Iberian exception) that gas isn't even used, but the price of hydro was set to something like (expected price of gas - 5 €) because they knew they could. So we end up paying the price of gas even when we don't use gas!
Honestly, some people talk about the existing system as if it's this perfect free market... but in practice the bar is very low.
The Iberian exception system is already showing in practice that it works better.
Also an option indeed, but eventually the consumers pay for this difference.
The incentive with the 'normal' merit order model is that the most expensive generator is that they make barely a profit if at all. Not too attractive.
Better build generation capacity that has lower operating costs (ie. no fuel, ie. renewables).
At least, that is the theory. I really wonder what happens to this model and the incentives once renewables are the majority and stretch further along the merit-order curve's X axis, pushing out fossil fuels.
There is in fact some discussion, but half-hearted. There doesn't seem to be the political will to actually do it.
Why? The response to that question is inevitably political (because it's a political question). My personal opinion: because the EU has swallowed neoliberal ideological kool-aid hook, line and sinker, and will blindy follow it even if it leads to self-harm (which is funny, because the US, which is the main source of that ideology, has a much more pragmatic approach and will happily ignore it when it's not beneficial: see all the bans going on with China, etc.)
Unpopular opinion here, I guess, but that's my take on it.
This system is a rule of free market economics summarized as "the price of a commodity is its marginal cost".
So changing this system means meddling in the free market. There are times and places where meddling is appropriate and this is likely one such, but there are significant consequences and side effects to doing so, so shouldn't be done lightly.
There are also significant consequences and side effects to having a 'free market', they are called externalities and in the case of fossil fuels they lead to huge unconsidered costs.
I'm putting 'free market' in quotes, because even beyond externalities, the current system with zonal uniform pricing is only 'free' for a very narrow view of what constitutes a commodity or a marginal cost.
Consider two households: (a) in northern Germany close to the Danish border, located in a small town with lots of local wind turbine capacity, (b) in Southern Bavaria with very limited renewable energy production close by. There's also no adequate power transport infrastructure to get the renewable energy from the North (or elsewhere in Europe) to household (b), mostly because local politicians in Bavaria oppose putting up any visible infrastructure, whether power lines or wind turbines).
Now, during peak wind hours, a significant portion of the wind turbines in the north will go offline because the network cannot handle the load, while household (b) still needs to get their power from gas. [This is not a contrived example, but reality in Germany.] Yet (a) and (b) both pay the same price -- that of the gas producer. How is this a 'free' market?
But to your point, the good news is that people are taking electricity market design very seriously, not lightly. (Section 6 of this white paper is a good read that outlines many of the current market inefficiencies (Disclaimer: my former academic advisor and a few former colleagues are coauthors)): https://synergie-projekt.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Elect...
Electricity is not sold on a "free market" anyway - I can not just hook up my nuclear power station without paying a specific tax aimed at just nuclear power generation - here in Sweden it is called "effektskatt" (output-power based tax) and is responsible for making it very hard or impossible to profitably run nuclear power stations [1]. The government went so far as to change the leadership for the state-owned power company Vattenfall because the existing leadership was not deemed to be cooperative in leading the change to "renewable" power sources.
On the other hand I may be able to put a wind turbine on my premises and get subsidised for doing so which has the opposite effect of the mentioned tax on nuclear power in that it makes it easier to generate wind power profitably.
Some users are freed from all sorts of taxes which all others have to pay, here in Sweden this is - or was, the current government seems to want to change this policy - the case for the likes of Facebook, Google and Microsoft who were allowed to establish data centres with the promise of nearly tax-free electricity. These data centres take so much power that the regions where they have been established have found it difficult to allow other energy-intensive industry to establish there for lack of power.
Margin pricing on electricity is counterproductive and should be abolished since it makes it more profitable to underinvest in more efficient power generation technologies since that would have a negative effect on market prices. It is better to keep a few inefficient gas turbines online and make sure these are needed at peak hours since they will drive up the market price for all generated power. As long as margin pricing is in place I do not expect something like grid-scale battery storage for peak demand to take hold since that has the potential to drive down prices.
> Electricity is not sold on a "free market" anyway - I can not just hook up my nuclear power station without paying a specific tax aimed at just nuclear power generation - here in Sweden it is called "effektskatt" (output-power based tax) and is responsible for making it very hard or impossible to profitably run nuclear power stations [1]. The government went so far as to change the leadership for the state-owned power company Vattenfall because the existing leadership was not deemed to be cooperative in leading the change to "renewable" power sources.
The "effektskatt" was removed in 2018.
> On the other hand I may be able to put a wind turbine on my premises and get subsidised for doing so which has the opposite effect of the mentioned tax on nuclear power in that it makes it easier to generate wind power profitably.
The subsidies for wind power in Sweden was phased out in 2021 due to not being necessary anymore.
That these taxes are changed does not change the fact that they, and others, existed (for many decades) and exist and will continue to be imposed. The electricity market is not a "free market", it is a controlled market and as such it would not be "meddling with the free market" to change the control to remove some of the negative effects of such. The marginal pricing mechanism is a prime example of something in need of change.
The marginal pricing mechanism is near impossible to change on a market made up of multiple players. Unless you want to fundamentally alter the market to a more monopolistic market where the state selects or owns the power generation. Like the nice market P&G have in California.
How would you do it? If you keep the current market with multiple independent actors then they would try to predict the most expensive generation required and bid at that price. Or you could tell them that since you are "coal" you get this price. But then that would be unfair to someone who made a different business case based on their availability, or their costs, or whatever.
You essentially end up in a quagmire of 5 year planned production. Marginal pricing solves this, and is what is applied to all raw resource markets due to these issues.
If you do not like marginal pricing you have all the possibility in the world to buy electricity futures, which of course nets you less income as a power generator and costs more for customers, because the risk is still exists.
If 90% of the electricity sold on the exchange - Nordpool [1] - has a price of 0.30€/kWh, 8% 0.60€ kWh and 2% 1.20€/kWh the resulting market price would be 0.342€/kWh. This would be the hourly rate at which electricity is sold to consumers. The market would work just like it does now with producers proposing generating capacity at a certain rate. All producers put in their offers, demand prognoses set the day-ahead rates. If predicted demand at 1 hour before the set time outstrips the prognosis for a certain hour the rate goes up just like it does now - at 00.00 the prognosis showed a rate of 22.39 öre/kWh (SEK) while the actual rate was 48.76 öre/kWh. Suppliers get paid their accepted rates, consumers pay the weighted average of all rates. In this example they'd pay 0.342€/kWh while they would pay 1.20€/kWh using the current marginal pricing mechanism. Just like now suppliers know up front how much they are likely to sell at what price, just like now they will put in offers at a level which makes it likely for their offers to be accepted. The market aims for the lowest price given desired characteristics so suppliers who offer above market rates can only expect to be accepted once the supply of cheaper energy is exhausted. This means peak power plants can still sell their higher-priced power without setting the price for consumers like they do now.
To return to sane prices one extra step may need to be made depending on the transfer capacity from a region or country to one neighbouring it which has markedly higher prices: consumer prices need to be disconnected from export rates if the transfer capacity and export demand is high enough to saturate the national generating capacity or prices will still be pushed up unduly. Just like with many other goods there may need to be an export market running parallel to the domestic market with the domestic market being the first one to run its auctions.
Is this a fully worked-out proposal? No, it is not but the weighed average pricing mechanism proposed has all of the benefits and none of the downsides of the marginal pricing mechanism, at least from a market perspective - producers probably prefer the marginal pricing mechanism which allows the final kWh to be generated by the CEO sat astride a home trainer with a generator attached.
Solar & renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels even without pricing in externalities. There are places where solar energy is priced below $1 / MW, and no place where fossil energy gets anywhere close to that.
Depends on when, that's why we need gas and other dispatchables. We've no grid-scale energy storage as of now. So saying they're cheaper isn't comparing apples to apples.
The storage problem is wildly overstated when we look at data from real world experience. Great thread here explaining how we need far less storage than is often claimed:
The majority of power generation in Europe is still based on fossil fuels.
And thus those are the price setters according to the Merit order curve [0], since they have the highest cost still.
...which is under constant pressure from "green" parties to be closed down in Sweden. The current government makes different noises and may in fact allow more nuclear power plants to be established but nearly all "progressive" governments in the last decades have worked to reduce reliance on nuclear power. Half of the available nuclear capacity has been closed down for political reasons - "green" politicians claim it was the market which decided to close down these plants but their claims are false [1]. Some of the recently closed down plants could possibly be restarted but this remains to be seen. Given the current "energy crisis" in Europe - which has driven up electricity prices in Sweden 5- to 10-fold for end users and with that is driving many companies into bankruptcy even though the actual cost for ~75% of power producers - hydro and remaining nuclear capacity - in Sweden has not changed. The profits from these price hikes mostly (~65%) flow to the state [2] through increased taxation, the so-called "flaskhalsavgift" (bottle neck surcharge) on electricity produced in the north but used in the south or abroad and the increased VAT income due to the higher prices.
Both Norway and Sweden has had some 5-10X price hikes in 2022 and 2023. I used to pay the equivalent of 15 cents, now that same amount of electricity is 1-4 dollars.
That might be because companies can sell the electricity abroad for a higher price? If electricity in Denmark/Germany/Finland (made up example) is super high then why sell it domestically at the low rate??
Wind turbines are built in the north for both countries, where the vast majority of the population live in the south. This means that power has to be moved for distances that span the equivalent of several countries (Norway and Sweden are very long).
South used to provide some ~30% of base power by nuclear, but due to political and economical[0] pressure they've been neglected and subsequently removed.
[0] Sweden had nuclear specific taxation for several decades, constantly increasing until the point where a lot of power plants were unable to finance themselves. Recently, the tax was dropped. The narrative now is that "the market has spoken" about their lack of profitability, neglecting three decades of economical and political/PR warfare against them.
So charging roughly $1.2 billion over a plant's lifetime, or a small fraction of the underfunded cleanup bill traditionally left behind in other countries.
That's definitely the reason OL3 is a boondogle. Not the other $8 billion of graft.
"Effektskatten" peaked at 7 öre per produced kw/h. That's a ~40-50% tax exclusively for, and on top of existing taxes when prices were a fraction of what they are now.
> Effektskatten" peaked at 7 öre per produced kw/h. That's a ~40-50% tax exclusively for, and on top of existing taxes when prices were a fraction of what they are now.
And if you sum up every cent they ever paid per GW including the capacity charge, you get roughly $1-2bn per reactor or a bit less than the bill that the taxpayer gets left with after decomissioning and waste management is underfunded.
It's also significantly less than insurance would cost without the Vienna convention and Paris convention.
What about the repercussions of closing them down prematurely? We're burning oil 24/7 at peak plants that are normally sleepibg most of the year. The amount of cheap coal power that we've imported to compensate for the closing of Barsebäck (more than a decade now) is terrible.
Given the (political) unfeasability of building wind turbines near people, is it worth closing down functional plants to burn fossil fuels in their place?
Genuinely curious; I'm not comfortable with either solution, but burning coal/oil seems like the worse option.
Forgive me, I'm having some troubles understanding the target of your first two sentences. Are you insinuating that I'm somehow opposed to wind power, or actively pretending that it isn't a viable alternative?
I've paid as high as 700 öre ($0.7 USD) per kw/h, which is insane compared to the historical 15 öre. If building offshore wind parks in southern Sweden solves that problem, then I'm all for it.
AFAIK, we haven't been doing that, and every suggestion that we do is faced with political backlash, NIMBY etc. Instead, the emphasis seems to be new nuclear, which makes no sense, as an alternative to the old "Sverige har för mycket el", which isn't something you hear any more.
> Is it the largely unaddressed battery storage problems?
Afaik those are not solved at scale, as in they're not even "problems" yet, the "battery storage" just doesn't exist at an industrial scale. As in many other past cases a form of pseudo-religiousness has taken over the discourse, hence the disconnect between what certain people believe can be done and reality.
The disconnect is due, in part, to a selection bias. The cost estimates for new solar and wind (for example Lazard's report [1]) is based on existing plants. These plants were built in the best places, for example in the US lots of solar power plants were built in sunny California, and lots of wind turbines in places with plenty of wind (the so-called wind corridor).
If you take solar and install it in Europe, you will not get the same bang for your buck, for the simple reason that Europe is well north of California. As for wind, most of Europe is less windy than the US wind corridor, but offshore areas in the North and Baltic seas appear to be exceptionally good. Still, building offshore wind can't be done at a snap of your fingers.
Going forward, both solar and wind will see huge increases in installed capacity, but only in the places where it makes sense.
Still no answer to how they’re going to solve those moments when there is no wind or sun. Are we just going to accept that businesses and residences have to turn off all their appliances and machines when that happens?
Thanks for saying it. Industrial energy storage hardly strikes the intuition as less tractable than a skyscraper in the desert or a tunnel under the ocean
Some time ago in Germany the last two nuclear power plants produced more than their entire wind and solar systems. Australia is nice, now do that in Northern Europe, in winter some countries barely have sun during the day, couple that with below freezing temperatures and your whole system become extremely in efficient.
I was in my hometown during the holidays, between heavy fog and clouds we didn't see the sun for two weeks straight, not even mentioning almost constant snow
To be clear, you're criticising an integrated system optimally designed to work in South Australian conditions for not being plug 'n play transferable to Germany?
Is that correct?
Have you considered asking an engineer to design a system optimal for German conditions?
BTW - we (Australia) have signed a large contract ($50 billion) with Germany recently to export Australian sunlight to Germany [1] as Ammonia ...
And yet, somehow, Germany produced 46 percent of 2022 German power consumption via renewables.
Could you explain again how this doesn't work in half the world?
Is there no wind in Europe, no ability to lay long power lines (like like gas lines lines, only towards the equator rather than Russia), no path upwards past 46% ?
On the face of it you don't seem to be putting much effort into finding a solution past fossil fuel usage .. is that because you don't accept climate change, you don't care what happens when they get increasingly scarce and more expensive, etc?
People who aren't exposed to battery tech don't think it exists. Because they never see it in the media they consume and it isn't integrated into their lives in any meaningful way. It is difficult for them to imagine what they can't see.
Yeah, that's the point. Kind of "Works on my machine" mindset. Wind and solar are not feasible for Europe without massive energy storage infrastructure, which does not exist.
I'll probably adress that in a future newsletter, but you may want to read the paper linked in the article above that contains a very detailed answer:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
The answer is a mix of demand side management, sector coupling and power-to-x technologies.
There are answrs for those that seek rather than snide.
Shared grids, small industrial estate sized battery farms, heated sand, hydrogen generation and recovery.
In the real world [1]:
> South Australia has been effectively powered by green energy for a week, with one expert predicting it could extend to a month by early next year.
> From December 12 to 19, National Energy Market data showed wind and solar contributed on average 103.5 per cent towards the state's energy demand.
> No coal was used during the period, but gas accounted for 5.9 per cent of electricity when renewable sources were not enough to power the state at points at night.
ie. For an entire Australian state total internal renewable production exceeded total usage for a full seven day period - spot excess was exported to neighbouring states, minimal baseline generation in a shortfall period was boosted by gas.
That's a dramatic change from nearly all coal generated power of some years ago.
South Australia is an interesting example. It is a big state, but 77% of the 1.8mil population live in the capital city. The average population density of the whole state is 1.7 persons per sqkm. It has a temperate climate, and gets quite a lot of sun overall. They’ve done a good job lately with their energy mix but important to bear in mind their specific circumstances when extrapolating to other places with less pleasant weather, less space, more distributed populations and more difficult grid arrangements.
Sure - take it as an example of renewable energy working for a continuous sustained period of time for ~ 2 million people plus Defence Industries [1], Heavy Industry Smelters [2], etc.
It's "small", sure, but it's much bigger than a single house (which was the comment I responded to "sure, a house is easy, but does it scale?)).
It's also relatively isolated (although not a fully isolated independent grid like W.Australia) and so serves as an interesting test case with almost a circle about it.
They won't "have to". But the dynamic pricing will make them "want to" turn of their non-essential appliances when they don't need them.
Would it be a big problem for you if energy was essentially free 12 hours a day and 10 times more expansive than it is right now in the other 12 hours?
This is the only thing that we will need to change - granular, dynamic pricing to reflect the new constraints.
The rest will be solved by consumers adapting to that pricing. It might be by shifting the usage of non-essential devices (does it matter to you to have your laundry done at night?). It will likely include some batteries.
But for me the best option to me seems to be synthetic fuel production. Make hydrocarbons when there's too much solar and wind, and burn them again when there's not enough. The roundtrip efficiency is low (I think about 10% currently), but the capacity of such "battery" is effectively infinite and the investment is very cheap compared to regular batteries. The whole world already is adapted to burning hydrocarbons. So we wouldn't need to change much - just produce hydrocarbons in place instead of drilling for them in dictatorships all over the world.
BTW the implications on world politics are Earth-shattering. The difference in available renewable power per square meter in best vs worst countries is about 3 to 1 - maybe 4 to 1. Imagine if the least fortunate country on Earth had 25% of the oil that OPEC countries have.
> Would it be a big problem for you if energy was essentially free 12 hours a day and 10 times more expansive than it is right now in the other 12 hours?
So why can't I tell these people who want to charge me more to F off and have them build nuclear? And is the threat of global warming enough to warrant making everyones life worse? Is adaptation more costly than stopping the use of fossil fuels?
You seem to think renewables will win because people are ecologically minded. That's not the case. It will win, because it scales better, it has very little paperwork or planning required, and it's very cheap.
Yes - in some cases it's less convenient than traditional powerplants. But early cars couldn't go everywhere horses could. Didn't stopped them from replacing horses for 99% of usecases.
It's not a gotcha. We will still deploy solar and wind in the UK to great effect, and the current plants will remain and fill in the gaps. Best of both worlds, and still better than before.
Indeed. I don't see many downsides to increasing solar and wind. Every turn of the blade is a volume of gas that is not burned for electricity.
Only issue is ownership.
Practically we will always have backup plants I suspect. But we don't need perfect, we just need better, plus redundancies. Gas is a common backup since it had a fast spin up time, couple that with batteries to smooth out frequency and cover spin up time and life is good.
I also want to point out that this is already going on, not just theory crafting. Solar and wind isn't just a good possibility, it is happening and in use right now. Batteries for grid stabilization is also an existing technology that is in practical use.
Electricity storage is not that hard really. Batteries work in small/mid scale.
If we have huge amounts of overproduction, hydrogen is a viable storage medium. But the conversion losses are too big for it to be viable unless the electricity is practically free.
For large scale storage pumped hydro seems to be the best option, albeit it requires compatible geography and isn't cheap to build.
On the other hand even a mid-priced electric car can run an American McMansion for a day, maybe even two. More if you actually pay attention to your energy consumption.
5-20kWh batteries aren't really that expensive and will pay themselves back if you're using market rate electricity instead of a flat rate. You can charge them up during the night with a few cents per kWh and use during the daily peaks - maybe even sell back to the grid if that's possible in your area.
It's really interesting to see that pretty much everybody in the industry agrees that wind and solar are the future after having read https://www.lynalden.com/energy-problems/. That piece seems to argue that wind & solar are some of the least efficient energy generation sources.
Efficient in what sense? Compared to how much energy it costs to get energy out over the lifetime of the mechanical device, or simply turning the fuel into energy?
It's because efficiency is only a small part of the conversation. Someone putting panels on their roof only cares insofar as it helps decide which solar panels to buy. They are buying solar because it goes on their roof, costs less than grid power, and they own the generation (what that means to someone changes)
Likewise a municipality putting in a solar farm is probably doing it because it's cheap and easy to maintain, easier to distribute across your city, and when compared to a big machinery based plant like a fossil fuel plant, both wind and solar take less educated skills from the municipality to install and maintain. Solar is essentially commoditized at this point, it's barrier for entry is for a municipality is just money. Wind is productized too, just more complex and difficult to install and maintain than solar.
That makes sense, and also suggests that governments with more centralized planning might skew more heavily towards nuclear. I'm not sure if that's actually true in practice (because obviously there are many non-efficiency related reasons that people don't like nuclear), but it would be interesting to see if there is a relationship between centralized energy planning and amount of solar/wind/nuclear energy consumed.
If the actual source is extremely powerful, does the efficiency matter? The whole life on earth is solar powered since billions of years and it works very well and organisms did develop efficient energy storage for the times when the sun isn't shining.
IMHO solar is a proven source of energy that just needs more engineering to improve practicality. It kind of feel like we are getting there.
What I would like to see is nuclear power dedicated in producing solar energy hardware. After all, these things are not exotic and it's matter of putting energy into converting some abundant raw materials into solar cells.
Solar and wind are intermittent sources of energy and Nat Gas, Coal or even Nuclear are needed to back solar/wind when they don't work, which is 70-80% of the time!
You can see here (wind energy generation is the red one) how crazy it would be to think wind could replace gas/nuclear energy. And this is not a single wind tower but for the whole Ontario province.
In other words, they store the energy chemically. Interesting, maybe it is a clue how to make electric systems store energy when the sun isn't shining.
Correct but that means that no, we can't go all renewable right now. It actually means that when you add renewable, you're still about 70-80% dependent on natural gas (or coal) because of the very intermittent nature of solar/wind energy. And hydroelectric energy is (mostly, as some ecologist will protest) great but not scalable.
Not yet, but we're pretty close. We need about 300TWh of energy storage to decarbonize the grid, and about 300TWh to convert all transportation to EV. We currently produce about 1TWh per year of batteries, and that capacity is doubling every 14 months or so.
If only there were some source of dispatchable energy with a total annual limit in ontario and quebec, or some way of averaging the power from different renewable sources in different neighboring place.
I think that efficiency does matter. If a government/utility company/whoever wants to spend 100M on fixing climate change, they have a choice between building a new solar farm or building a new nuclear reactor. One of them will be able to displace more fossil fuel burning than the other.
Efficiency also matters for costs. If we use inefficient methods of generating electricity, the electricity will cost more. This affects us as direct consumers of electricity, but also in consumer prices in general, since everything costs energy to make & transport.
Efficiency matters of course but it's just one of the variables in the equation.
The thing about solar energy is that the source is so powerful and abundant that the dominant factor for its economical viability is our ability to produce devices to capture it.
When nuclear is getting more expensive over the years(as the completely safe reactors prove to be not that safe and more safety is introduced), the devices used to capture the solar energy have been getting cheaper and cheaper. So it doesn't matter if solar is half the efficiency of something else if we can make the devices to capture the solar 10x cheaper.
Solar has already become very cheap, what we still need to do is to figure out the storage. So far the success is limited but because all life on earth is doing it already, I think it's a solvable problem.
For 100M you get huge solar farm ready to go in a couple of years or 1/100th of a nuclear plant which might come online in 15. Investing in Nuclear is in reality prolonging our reliance on fossil fuels.
What? Actually solar is pretty decent, even generates DC - lots of stuff is DC nowadays, incl. all direct drives and induction cooking (incl. the obvious all electronics). Both wind and solar are pretty decent at capturing the only (non-nuclear) energy source the Earth has - the Sun.
The only non-nuclear source would be geothermal, and maybe tidal I believe?
The sun is literally a nuclear fusion reaction. Wind and hydro are an artefact of the sun + the motion of the planets. We could even stretch the argument that fossil fuels are also indirectly solar from photosynthesis.
Not a typo - pretty much all the energy that we get on Earth is the just the Sun - which indeed is nuclear (perhaps i should have said fission). "Geothermal" pumps are solar, too (the earth being heated conserving energy), I suppose the term is used a bit too widely - with the Earth core/spinning being a vastly different source.
Your point stands though. I meant type of energy that's readily available on Earth - either Sun based (fossil, solar, wind, hydro - all directly depend on the Sun), or nuclear fission. We don't have any fusion available, yet - that would be a real change.
Historically speaking, this seems true. My understanding is that you're only looking at hydrocarbons (coal/gas), nuclear, and hydro, since everyone else is pretty new. Hydro is obviously the cleanest/safest, and nuclear has killed far fewer people than coal/gas.
Surprisingly Hydro may actually be the source of power with the most direct deaths [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure]. The deaths from the Banqiao dam failure alone dwarf the entire history of nuclear power.
We see that wind/nuclear/solar are all far "safer" than other sources (wind 0.04 / nuclear 0.03 / solar 0.02 death/TWh).
However, death rate is only one metric for safety. Fukushima may not have made (yet) lot of deaths, but it sure impacted a huge population, and will do so for many years to come.
One has to look at the impact of an incident. Once installed, solar or wind poses very little risk to you or your neighbors, even in case of natural disasters. And even in the case of the worst impact (deaths), this impact is limited in time/space. This is absolutely not the case of nuclear. Moreover, how do you evaluate the risk of nuclear waste?
The current electricity price shock in Europe will (hopefully) force people to think about their energy usage profile a bit more.
Yes it's true that 1:1 replacing the current power generation capacity with solar and wind is going to be really difficult.
BUT if we combine that with small-scale production (local solar/wind) and storage (small batteries in buildings) controlled by a smart grid, with the addition of automatically moving consumption to cheaper hours it's perfectly doable.
You don't NEED to run your dish/clothes washer and dryer the second you come home from work. You can fill them and time them to start so that they run during the night and are ready in the morning, for example. You get cheap electricity and the grid likes it when it gets use on quieter hours too.
> You don't NEED to run your dish/clothes washer and dryer the second you come home from work. You can fill them and time them to start so that they run during the night and are ready in the morning, for example
The problem with this is that the majority of people live in appartement buildings, where a washing machine's sound can traverse walls. Dishwasher too in older buildings with poor sound insulation.
That may be, but if only those who were able to did this I'm sure the impacts could be high. For those in apartments, timers could be set to run during the day when more people are out at work.
"Regular living sounds" are OK over here, by law. And you can buy a damper mat for your washing machine for 10€ that takes away a huge bit of the vibration it causes.
Solar and Wind are not feasible for European winters, because they are backed up by natural gas. Where that natural gas comes from? Well Russia.
You need energy storage first, which does not exists, because it is too expensive to build it. So therefore there is going to be no dominance of solar and wind clearly from practical reasons.
Europe has tons of energy storage in the form of natural gas storage tanks. If they only used gas out of those tanks when there was no sun & wind they could easily keep them topped off via LNG input terminals and they'd be fine.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadThat being said, where is the disconnect between people claiming industrial-scale solar and wind is cheaper than burning fossil fuels, and the reality (in Europe, others?) that electricity prices have risen steadily with an increase in renewable energy production (even before COVID and Ukraine)?
Is it the largely unaddressed battery storage problems? Other effects?
I get the intended logic behind the system, which is to incentivize cheap sources (if you run cheap sources, you keep the difference with respect to gas as pure profit), but IMO it's prone to gaming (a lot of incentive to have that single MW of gas up, and electricity companies are an oligopoly...) and doesn't work well even without gaming (if the price of gas is disproportionately high with respect to the rest of sources, things begin to just not make sense).
Spain and Portugal negotiated to (temporarily, I think) get out of this system and change it to something saner (with the same basic principles but some compensations so that gas price doesn't dominate anything). The so-called Iberian exception. And it's working: while our prices are still high with respect to historical standards (due to Ukraine and the general underlying energy crisis), they now tend to be much lower than the rest of the EU most of the time.
Since the power is exactly the same, people don't buy a MW of solar or wind, they just buy a MW, regardless of the source. If you were (owning) a generator, why would you sell your electricity for €12/unit when people are willing to buy it at €150/unit? And since it's a free market, otherwise a middleman will come swooping in to rake in the difference.
Market dynamics dictate that when people/businesses are no longer willing to buy a MW for €150, the demand drops, the most expensive generators are not needed anymore and the overall price drops to the new equilibrium price.
Also: my fixed contract price per kWh is about €0.81 always, which is, uh, a lot. A friend of mine recently switched to a dynamic tariff and payed about €0.30-0.40 when I last asked him about it. Pondering...
Not an economist, but “inelastic market / supply” answers that, I think.
This is of course dampened by middlemen who sell for a fixed price and take the risk of having buy for a high price. And a few small NL energy companies (or rather middlemen) have gone bankrupt when they didn't have the reserves.
The thing is that this so-called free market works well for generating companies, but makes no sense for consumers. It doesn't matter how cheap producing the bulk of the electricity is, as long as gas isn't turned off completely the consumer always pays the price of gas. In a country evolving from (say) 100% gas to 90% renewables and 10% gas (I know I'm simplifying, these simple mixes don't really exist) the cost of electricity generation would fall through the floor, but the consumer would pay exactly the same. This is clearly dysfunctional, regardless of how nice it can be in theory.
It's also not inevitable. You can set a cap to the prices, but then compensate sources that go over the cap (in practice, gas) so they don't operate at a loss. This is what the Iberian exception system is doing, and it works.
That is a much less efficient system with larger risks.
It often happened in Spain (pre Iberian exception) that gas isn't even used, but the price of hydro was set to something like (expected price of gas - 5 €) because they knew they could. So we end up paying the price of gas even when we don't use gas!
Honestly, some people talk about the existing system as if it's this perfect free market... but in practice the bar is very low.
The Iberian exception system is already showing in practice that it works better.
The incentive with the 'normal' merit order model is that the most expensive generator is that they make barely a profit if at all. Not too attractive. Better build generation capacity that has lower operating costs (ie. no fuel, ie. renewables). At least, that is the theory. I really wonder what happens to this model and the incentives once renewables are the majority and stretch further along the merit-order curve's X axis, pushing out fossil fuels.
Why? The response to that question is inevitably political (because it's a political question). My personal opinion: because the EU has swallowed neoliberal ideological kool-aid hook, line and sinker, and will blindy follow it even if it leads to self-harm (which is funny, because the US, which is the main source of that ideology, has a much more pragmatic approach and will happily ignore it when it's not beneficial: see all the bans going on with China, etc.)
Unpopular opinion here, I guess, but that's my take on it.
So changing this system means meddling in the free market. There are times and places where meddling is appropriate and this is likely one such, but there are significant consequences and side effects to doing so, so shouldn't be done lightly.
I'm putting 'free market' in quotes, because even beyond externalities, the current system with zonal uniform pricing is only 'free' for a very narrow view of what constitutes a commodity or a marginal cost.
Consider two households: (a) in northern Germany close to the Danish border, located in a small town with lots of local wind turbine capacity, (b) in Southern Bavaria with very limited renewable energy production close by. There's also no adequate power transport infrastructure to get the renewable energy from the North (or elsewhere in Europe) to household (b), mostly because local politicians in Bavaria oppose putting up any visible infrastructure, whether power lines or wind turbines).
Now, during peak wind hours, a significant portion of the wind turbines in the north will go offline because the network cannot handle the load, while household (b) still needs to get their power from gas. [This is not a contrived example, but reality in Germany.] Yet (a) and (b) both pay the same price -- that of the gas producer. How is this a 'free' market?
But to your point, the good news is that people are taking electricity market design very seriously, not lightly. (Section 6 of this white paper is a good read that outlines many of the current market inefficiencies (Disclaimer: my former academic advisor and a few former colleagues are coauthors)): https://synergie-projekt.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Elect...
On the other hand I may be able to put a wind turbine on my premises and get subsidised for doing so which has the opposite effect of the mentioned tax on nuclear power in that it makes it easier to generate wind power profitably.
Some users are freed from all sorts of taxes which all others have to pay, here in Sweden this is - or was, the current government seems to want to change this policy - the case for the likes of Facebook, Google and Microsoft who were allowed to establish data centres with the promise of nearly tax-free electricity. These data centres take so much power that the regions where they have been established have found it difficult to allow other energy-intensive industry to establish there for lack of power.
Margin pricing on electricity is counterproductive and should be abolished since it makes it more profitable to underinvest in more efficient power generation technologies since that would have a negative effect on market prices. It is better to keep a few inefficient gas turbines online and make sure these are needed at peak hours since they will drive up the market price for all generated power. As long as margin pricing is in place I do not expect something like grid-scale battery storage for peak demand to take hold since that has the potential to drive down prices.
[1] https://naringslivets-medieinstitut.se/det-var-marknaden-som...
The "effektskatt" was removed in 2018.
> On the other hand I may be able to put a wind turbine on my premises and get subsidised for doing so which has the opposite effect of the mentioned tax on nuclear power in that it makes it easier to generate wind power profitably.
The subsidies for wind power in Sweden was phased out in 2021 due to not being necessary anymore.
How would you do it? If you keep the current market with multiple independent actors then they would try to predict the most expensive generation required and bid at that price. Or you could tell them that since you are "coal" you get this price. But then that would be unfair to someone who made a different business case based on their availability, or their costs, or whatever.
You essentially end up in a quagmire of 5 year planned production. Marginal pricing solves this, and is what is applied to all raw resource markets due to these issues.
If you do not like marginal pricing you have all the possibility in the world to buy electricity futures, which of course nets you less income as a power generator and costs more for customers, because the risk is still exists.
To return to sane prices one extra step may need to be made depending on the transfer capacity from a region or country to one neighbouring it which has markedly higher prices: consumer prices need to be disconnected from export rates if the transfer capacity and export demand is high enough to saturate the national generating capacity or prices will still be pushed up unduly. Just like with many other goods there may need to be an export market running parallel to the domestic market with the domestic market being the first one to run its auctions.
Is this a fully worked-out proposal? No, it is not but the weighed average pricing mechanism proposed has all of the benefits and none of the downsides of the marginal pricing mechanism, at least from a market perspective - producers probably prefer the marginal pricing mechanism which allows the final kWh to be generated by the CEO sat astride a home trainer with a generator attached.
[1] https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/
It's a lot cheaper if you price in the externalities.
https://twitter.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1565923581246091264
[0] https://docs.energytransitionmodel.com/main/merit-order/
[1] https://naringslivets-medieinstitut.se/det-var-marknaden-som...
[2] https://www.dagensps.se/privatekonomi/bostad/analys-staten-s...
Wind turbines are built in the north for both countries, where the vast majority of the population live in the south. This means that power has to be moved for distances that span the equivalent of several countries (Norway and Sweden are very long).
South used to provide some ~30% of base power by nuclear, but due to political and economical[0] pressure they've been neglected and subsequently removed.
[0] Sweden had nuclear specific taxation for several decades, constantly increasing until the point where a lot of power plants were unable to finance themselves. Recently, the tax was dropped. The narrative now is that "the market has spoken" about their lack of profitability, neglecting three decades of economical and political/PR warfare against them.
That's definitely the reason OL3 is a boondogle. Not the other $8 billion of graft.
"Effektskatten" peaked at 7 öre per produced kw/h. That's a ~40-50% tax exclusively for, and on top of existing taxes when prices were a fraction of what they are now.
I don't know about Finland/OL3.
And if you sum up every cent they ever paid per GW including the capacity charge, you get roughly $1-2bn per reactor or a bit less than the bill that the taxpayer gets left with after decomissioning and waste management is underfunded.
It's also significantly less than insurance would cost without the Vienna convention and Paris convention.
What about the repercussions of closing them down prematurely? We're burning oil 24/7 at peak plants that are normally sleepibg most of the year. The amount of cheap coal power that we've imported to compensate for the closing of Barsebäck (more than a decade now) is terrible.
Given the (political) unfeasability of building wind turbines near people, is it worth closing down functional plants to burn fossil fuels in their place?
Genuinely curious; I'm not comfortable with either solution, but burning coal/oil seems like the worse option.
Must be because the even less popular option of a nuclear refurb is the only option.
There couldn't possibly be a much better option
https://swedishwindenergy.com/external-news/plans-for-50-gw-...
I've paid as high as 700 öre ($0.7 USD) per kw/h, which is insane compared to the historical 15 öre. If building offshore wind parks in southern Sweden solves that problem, then I'm all for it.
AFAIK, we haven't been doing that, and every suggestion that we do is faced with political backlash, NIMBY etc. Instead, the emphasis seems to be new nuclear, which makes no sense, as an alternative to the old "Sverige har för mycket el", which isn't something you hear any more.
Afaik those are not solved at scale, as in they're not even "problems" yet, the "battery storage" just doesn't exist at an industrial scale. As in many other past cases a form of pseudo-religiousness has taken over the discourse, hence the disconnect between what certain people believe can be done and reality.
If you take solar and install it in Europe, you will not get the same bang for your buck, for the simple reason that Europe is well north of California. As for wind, most of Europe is less windy than the US wind corridor, but offshore areas in the North and Baltic seas appear to be exceptionally good. Still, building offshore wind can't be done at a snap of your fingers.
Going forward, both solar and wind will see huge increases in installed capacity, but only in the places where it makes sense.
[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
[2] https://earthlymission.com/wind-resource-map-europe/
[3] https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34336253
I was in my hometown during the holidays, between heavy fog and clouds we didn't see the sun for two weeks straight, not even mentioning almost constant snow
Is that correct?
Have you considered asking an engineer to design a system optimal for German conditions?
BTW - we (Australia) have signed a large contract ($50 billion) with Germany recently to export Australian sunlight to Germany [1] as Ammonia ...
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/forrest-strikes-huge-green-hydro...
It's a very localised future, won't work for half of the year in half of the world, the half in which most people are living.
Could you explain again how this doesn't work in half the world?
Is there no wind in Europe, no ability to lay long power lines (like like gas lines lines, only towards the equator rather than Russia), no path upwards past 46% ?
On the face of it you don't seem to be putting much effort into finding a solution past fossil fuel usage .. is that because you don't accept climate change, you don't care what happens when they get increasingly scarce and more expensive, etc?
How many kwh was it when you bought it and how many kwh can it still store today? How old is it? How much did it cost you?
It not only 'works on my machine' - it's cheaper, cleaner and more reliable.
I'm sure we've got it better here, but that doesn't mean renewables can't continue to make up a growing slice of Europe's energy supply.
The answer is a mix of demand side management, sector coupling and power-to-x technologies.
Shared grids, small industrial estate sized battery farms, heated sand, hydrogen generation and recovery.
In the real world [1]:
> South Australia has been effectively powered by green energy for a week, with one expert predicting it could extend to a month by early next year.
> From December 12 to 19, National Energy Market data showed wind and solar contributed on average 103.5 per cent towards the state's energy demand.
> No coal was used during the period, but gas accounted for 5.9 per cent of electricity when renewable sources were not enough to power the state at points at night.
ie. For an entire Australian state total internal renewable production exceeded total usage for a full seven day period - spot excess was exported to neighbouring states, minimal baseline generation in a shortfall period was boosted by gas.
That's a dramatic change from nearly all coal generated power of some years ago.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-19/renewable-energy-prod...
It's "small", sure, but it's much bigger than a single house (which was the comment I responded to "sure, a house is easy, but does it scale?)).
It's also relatively isolated (although not a fully isolated independent grid like W.Australia) and so serves as an interesting test case with almost a circle about it.
[1] https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/media-releases/2021-11-2...
[2] https://www.nyrstar.com/operations/metals-processing/nyrstar...
> The Port Pirie plant is one of the world’s largest multi-metal smelters, producing lead, silver and by-products such as sulphuric acid.
Would it be a big problem for you if energy was essentially free 12 hours a day and 10 times more expansive than it is right now in the other 12 hours?
This is the only thing that we will need to change - granular, dynamic pricing to reflect the new constraints.
The rest will be solved by consumers adapting to that pricing. It might be by shifting the usage of non-essential devices (does it matter to you to have your laundry done at night?). It will likely include some batteries.
But for me the best option to me seems to be synthetic fuel production. Make hydrocarbons when there's too much solar and wind, and burn them again when there's not enough. The roundtrip efficiency is low (I think about 10% currently), but the capacity of such "battery" is effectively infinite and the investment is very cheap compared to regular batteries. The whole world already is adapted to burning hydrocarbons. So we wouldn't need to change much - just produce hydrocarbons in place instead of drilling for them in dictatorships all over the world.
BTW the implications on world politics are Earth-shattering. The difference in available renewable power per square meter in best vs worst countries is about 3 to 1 - maybe 4 to 1. Imagine if the least fortunate country on Earth had 25% of the oil that OPEC countries have.
I would find this extremely annoying, yes.
And if you need to, you pay for it. Otherwise you can use the cheap power.
You seem to think renewables will win because people are ecologically minded. That's not the case. It will win, because it scales better, it has very little paperwork or planning required, and it's very cheap.
Yes - in some cases it's less convenient than traditional powerplants. But early cars couldn't go everywhere horses could. Didn't stopped them from replacing horses for 99% of usecases.
During this time then more electricity is imported, a lot of gas is burned, and coal stations are put on standby.
To my knowledge, then no industry needs to shut down .
I also want to point out that this is already going on, not just theory crafting. Solar and wind isn't just a good possibility, it is happening and in use right now. Batteries for grid stabilization is also an existing technology that is in practical use.
If we have huge amounts of overproduction, hydrogen is a viable storage medium. But the conversion losses are too big for it to be viable unless the electricity is practically free.
For large scale storage pumped hydro seems to be the best option, albeit it requires compatible geography and isn't cheap to build.
On the other hand even a mid-priced electric car can run an American McMansion for a day, maybe even two. More if you actually pay attention to your energy consumption.
5-20kWh batteries aren't really that expensive and will pay themselves back if you're using market rate electricity instead of a flat rate. You can charge them up during the night with a few cents per kWh and use during the daily peaks - maybe even sell back to the grid if that's possible in your area.
Likewise a municipality putting in a solar farm is probably doing it because it's cheap and easy to maintain, easier to distribute across your city, and when compared to a big machinery based plant like a fossil fuel plant, both wind and solar take less educated skills from the municipality to install and maintain. Solar is essentially commoditized at this point, it's barrier for entry is for a municipality is just money. Wind is productized too, just more complex and difficult to install and maintain than solar.
IMHO solar is a proven source of energy that just needs more engineering to improve practicality. It kind of feel like we are getting there.
What I would like to see is nuclear power dedicated in producing solar energy hardware. After all, these things are not exotic and it's matter of putting energy into converting some abundant raw materials into solar cells.
You can see here (wind energy generation is the red one) how crazy it would be to think wind could replace gas/nuclear energy. And this is not a single wind tower but for the whole Ontario province.
https://i.imgur.com/XvOAF17.jpg
There you go.
Efficiency also matters for costs. If we use inefficient methods of generating electricity, the electricity will cost more. This affects us as direct consumers of electricity, but also in consumer prices in general, since everything costs energy to make & transport.
The thing about solar energy is that the source is so powerful and abundant that the dominant factor for its economical viability is our ability to produce devices to capture it.
When nuclear is getting more expensive over the years(as the completely safe reactors prove to be not that safe and more safety is introduced), the devices used to capture the solar energy have been getting cheaper and cheaper. So it doesn't matter if solar is half the efficiency of something else if we can make the devices to capture the solar 10x cheaper.
Solar has already become very cheap, what we still need to do is to figure out the storage. So far the success is limited but because all life on earth is doing it already, I think it's a solvable problem.
The sun is literally a nuclear fusion reaction. Wind and hydro are an artefact of the sun + the motion of the planets. We could even stretch the argument that fossil fuels are also indirectly solar from photosynthesis.
Maybe it was a typo?
Your point stands though. I meant type of energy that's readily available on Earth - either Sun based (fossil, solar, wind, hydro - all directly depend on the Sun), or nuclear fission. We don't have any fusion available, yet - that would be a real change.
"Nuclear power has historically been one of the safest and cleanest energy sources."
Again the same bullshit.
Even hydropower is 43 more fatal than nuclear.
However, death rate is only one metric for safety. Fukushima may not have made (yet) lot of deaths, but it sure impacted a huge population, and will do so for many years to come.
One has to look at the impact of an incident. Once installed, solar or wind poses very little risk to you or your neighbors, even in case of natural disasters. And even in the case of the worst impact (deaths), this impact is limited in time/space. This is absolutely not the case of nuclear. Moreover, how do you evaluate the risk of nuclear waste?
Yes it's true that 1:1 replacing the current power generation capacity with solar and wind is going to be really difficult.
BUT if we combine that with small-scale production (local solar/wind) and storage (small batteries in buildings) controlled by a smart grid, with the addition of automatically moving consumption to cheaper hours it's perfectly doable.
You don't NEED to run your dish/clothes washer and dryer the second you come home from work. You can fill them and time them to start so that they run during the night and are ready in the morning, for example. You get cheap electricity and the grid likes it when it gets use on quieter hours too.
The problem with this is that the majority of people live in appartement buildings, where a washing machine's sound can traverse walls. Dishwasher too in older buildings with poor sound insulation.
You need energy storage first, which does not exists, because it is too expensive to build it. So therefore there is going to be no dominance of solar and wind clearly from practical reasons.