This is a great example of economics at work. Large-scale electricity storage solutions reduce the need for generating capacity from peak load to average load - reducing the demand by the crest factor of the grid. The majority of this extra generation capacity is currently filled by gas (that is incredibly easy to spool up and down in a matter of seconds). Reducing the demand for natural gas will also increase the cost of other fossil fuels (which are mined in the same place), and it's a virtuous loop...
And given the sodium chemistries slowly showing up in production this seems like it will only continue to escalate going forward. It's a hopeful achievement.
I know someone who worked in a gas plant and although it might take seconds once the plant is running (I don’t know), it takes multiple minutes to start it after being off.
In comparison, scaling from 0% to 100% load on battery storage takes 0,1 seconds, according to Tesla.
Gas plants can't really change how much they are generating in seconds. What they actually do is use the inertia of the spinning machinery, when the grid frequency drops (which is usually one of the first symptoms of load exceeding demand) the big spinning generators don't change speed instantaneously, they instead come under higher load and and convert more of their kinetic energy into electrical energy and help prop up the grid frequency. This starts the generators slowing down which then causes the control software to do whatever it is they do to feed in more gas and generate more power to try to keep them running at the same speed (I don't know exactly, I worked in grid batteries not gas plants).
But yes, the batteries can respond much faster and are way better at this kind of support. It does lead to some situations that felt slightly weird to me where a battery will be selling a "spinning" reserve product. Luckily the weird linguistic artifact did not require us to actually rotate multi-ton batteries ;).
Gas plants can change load in seconds by increasing or decreasing fuel flow. You can consider the generators as operating at the local grid frequency, and power being the product of torque and frequency, so they just change torque to change load, which is done through fuel control. Aeroderivative gas turbines can go from near 0 to full load in less than 30 seconds, which is obviously an eternity compared to battery system inverters with sub 150ms settling times.
You are right that load isn’t independent of frequency, though. For those who are interested, in a simplistic and hand-wavy explanation, the torque imbalance between generation and load causes a change to the frequency. The net torque = torque of generation - torque of load = I*alpha, where alpha is the derivative of omega, or the angular frequency of the grid, and I is analogous to the inertia of the grid. If there is more generation torque than load torque on a generator (and the grid), the frequency increases and vice versa. Keeping the net torque constant, increasing the inertia makes the grid frequency derivative smaller for the same imbalance between generation and load, which is why it was typically desirable to have higher inertia synchronous generators.
What you were describing around changing fuel to maintain speed is typically frequency droop, which is where generators change their power as a function of the frequency, which is a distributed scheme for all generators to independently act to drive the torque imbalance to 0, with some insensitivity proportionality constant. For example, in California, gas turbines are assigned a droop value within the range of 3 to 5%, which means a 3 to 5 % reduction in frequency should result in a 100% increase in power, and vice versa. The total power should be provided in less than 30 sec typically.
For those that are really motivated to understand the interplay between generation, load, and frequency, look up the swing equation in the context of power system stability.
There is another aspect of synchronous generators that enable them to act to stabilize frequency independently, called the inertial response, which also has to do with their rotational energy. A generator at some frequency has KE = 0.5*J*omega^2 where J is rotational inertia and omega is angular frequency. If the frequency changes, it has a change in kinetic energy = 0.5*J*(omega1^2 - omega2^2) which is equal to some power for some period of time (= P*delta_t). This shows that as a generator sees a change in frequency, the shorter the duration, the larger the amount of energy is converted to power. Essentially, generators have an inertial response that act to inject power the faster frequency is falling, and vice versa, which is a self stabilizing function for grid frequency.
This loss of synchronous inertia as generators are replaced by inverter based resources (IBRs) is why managing grid frequency stability becomes more difficult. Various techniques are used to abate the loss of inertia, including emulating the swing equation within inverters to make them behave as synchronous generators and provide that inertial response. This is typically called grid forming with virtual synchronous machine.
Sort of. Thermal generation provides grid services that they get paid for. This revenue is substantial. This means when frequency sags, gas plants were traditionally called on to ramp quickly to maintain grid inertia. Battery storage can do this ("fast frequency response") in milliseconds (vs minutes or tens of minutes for thermal generation, where fuel must be added and momentum of spinning turbines added to), and is eating this valuable revenue distinct from energy arbitrage (charging when power is cheap, free, or negative priced, and discharging when energy prices are higher). This helps kill the economic case for thermal generators, accelerating their phase out.
Glad to see this finally happening. This goal was definitely part of the appeal when I was working on the Autobidder team at Tesla!
The regulations have some work to do catch up to allowing batteries to operate in a straightforward manner. For example, the big battery we launched in Texas had to be registered as both a generator and a controllable load with all sorts of weird issues around switching from discharging (being a generator) to charging (being a load) that a battery wants to do all the time. We found engineering solutions to them, but it's even better that the market operators are working on properly recognizing batteries as their own unique asset with their own advantages and challenges.
The Lazard LCOE cost of unsubsidized solar/wind + storage has recently achieved parity with gas turbine combined cycle.
So the writing is on the wall for fossil fuels.
What's also important is that gas combined cycle kind of represented the end state of maximum power for minimum cost from fossil fuels. Wind and especially solar (perovskites, etc) and storage (sodium chemistries, etc) have lots of runway for further cost drops. So you might squeeze a couple percent out of gas combined cycle for LCOE in the next decade, but solar/wind may still drop by 50%.
So if you have a ten year view (which is what you have fore investment in power projects) fossil fuel projects (and alas nuclear, which is 6x more expensive than wind/solar) simply don't balance the sheet.
Lots of hope. Lots of work to do.
EDIT: response to "why do you think solar/wind have bigger runway to drop in price:" (I hit my post limit)
Wind can simply scale up more, and there are other designs coming online. Wind I don't have the holy-crap-this-is-still-coming thing.
Solar however has made its gains with silicon, but perovskites are simply dirt cheap to manufacture, IF they can eliminate lead and get them to last long enough. I'm spitballing, but perovskites will probably drop the cost by 50% long term in solar.
Solar also really hasn't developed large scale multijunction, and perovskites + silicon may enable that. Multijunction is how you get the higher efficiencies by capturing more wavelengths and the like.
As for gas turbine, they already are exceeding the carnot efficiencies by capturing downstream heat cycles and other tricks. And I think the other thing as an energy financeer I'd worry about is that any fossil fuel power generation has to be worried about an eventual carbon tax imposed.
As the political power of oil companies wanes as their economic strength withers away as EVs and alternative energy undermine their economic value proposition, their ability to keep the environmental lobby from imposing a proper externality tax on carbon emissions with falter.
So any gas generation power plant could overnight have their costs increased by 10-50% or maybe worse. Best case: you have to pay for bullshit offsets, which will probably increase costs 10-20%. Medium case: they have to explicitly pay for the carbon scrubbing/removal, probably 50% increase or more to the generation cost. Worst case: we realize that fossil fuels carbon taxes should include a cost to remove PREVIOUSLY UNTAXED carbon that is sitting in the atmosphere. So then the cost could be exhorbitantly increased.
Likely SOMETHING is coming that will increase the cost of fossil fuel power and fuels due to carbon removal. It will start small and increase as the political strength of oil / gas wanes.
perovskites have the potential if used in tandem with normal cells to get you more efficency per panel since they are sensitive toa different part of the spectrum. You might get relatively cheap 40% panels out of that.
That means you need less panels, less mounting, cableing ect.
sodium batteries have the potential to be dirt cheap and thus might be able to be rolled out for less of what lipos cost at scale especially in non-mobile applications where size and weight aren't that important.
For the price of a gas power plant you can buy some *serious amount* of LiFePo4 batteries, and Sodium Ion batteries are now also slowly hitting the market.
At some point we may still need small gas power plants to charge the batteries but how many days a year would we have to do that?
It may be a touchy subject, but to me Nuclear power is absolutely not the future because for the money you can deploy so much renewables, including batteries, it just doesn't make sense. And they are never on time and on budget.
It would be neat to see an alternate universe where there was zero corporate welfare for petroleum and for solar/wind/tidal/hydro. I imagine that in such a world, renewables would have become the default sometime in the 70s and millions of lives would have been saved due to fewer oil wars and cleaner air.
Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks. What we need is world where we recognize that everyone owning their own personal automobile is probably a bad idea. We need walkable neighborhoods and public transportation but we also need to recognize how powerful fossil fuels are preserve them for heavy duty tasks that would be near impossible w/ human muscle and or renewables.
Trains can often be electrified, as can semi trucks, though it will require substantial investment in heavy duty charging infrastructure. Long haul aviation, and probably long haul shipping, will likely continue to require chemical fuels (though Fleetzero aspires to electrify shipping). But multiple startups have promising routes to replacing fossil fuels with e-fuels for those applications (chemical fuels created using electricity, such as electrolysis and carbon capture, instead of pumping fossil fuel out of the ground).
> Renewables can't power things like trains, planes or semi trucks.
Eh... The only one on your list that is currently a problem is planes. It's expensive powering semi trucks with them, that's why people mostly don't, and it's almost trivial for trains.
There is also no fundamental reason why planes should be impossible. There are several well understood possibilities for them, but very few people have focused on solving this problem.
Semis/tractor-trailers are still a problem. Sure, they can make them run off batteries, but you have to forgo a lot of cargo capacity to do so, which makes the economics tough.
No discussion of battery trucks can go very far without reaching the conclusion that more freight must travel by rail. That's a correct conclusion, but for the same reasons it has never carried the day in the US for 75 years, that transition will continue to not happen.
I think you're right, but wouldn't this still necessitate freight to travel by truck from rail centers to population centers? That's how a lot of the system currently operates in the US, no?
There should be no population center without a rail center. I don't deny that last-mile would still be on roads, but that's very different from the present state of affairs.
My lazy googling suggests that 40% of freight movement is via rail in US. I can't find a full breakout, but the same site goes on to claim rail is only 1.7% of GHG, which means most of the rest is traveling by road, since waterborne freight is generally more efficient than rail.
I've always dreamed of trolley-bus like wires strung along interstates paired with robotic self-attaching trolley-poles.
In my head, semi-trucks (and maybe all cars?) only need 50-100 miles or so of range for low-speed (where batteries shine) warehouse/ports/downtown deliveries (or garage-charged commutes?).
Almost every trip I've ever taken beyond ~20 miles included at least some portion on a highway. Electric interstates could allow NY to LA in one shot and pulling off the highway with 100 miles to make the round-trip to wherever a load needed to be dropped off.
If attaching and detaching was automatic, there would be no need to electrify onramps or intersections or underpasses or anything expensive, just find the cheapest, straightest, easiest to electrify 80% of roads and slap up wires there.
When you say trolley, are you suggesting auto-coupling rail? Or was that meant to be paved roads?
If paved roads, then you're forgetting the enormous wear that heavy vehicles put on road surfaces (which would get much worse as labor costs were taken away as a downward pressure on road freight volume.)
If rail, then I think you could see some version of that as a logical upgrade to a high-utilization rail network in a high-trust society with a strong safety culture. I see the US becoming lower-, not higher-, trust.
You're explaining why we don't build useful rail. It seems like there's a really easy first place to look in every major city. Find the biggest interstate, discriminating also by straightness and grade, pick one direction, and start building rail. Divide the other side up into two directions. There are very few places that wouldn't be left with >2 lanes of freeway for each direction, even after halving the right of way. For the few exceptions, they'd have to think a little harder.
In reality, such a series of actions could only exist in a society that got seriously focused on moving away from private auto, and that means density would increasingly be in style. As soon as the NIMBY floodgates came down, property prices would plummet in all but the smallest cores of desirable areas, since it would be readily apparent that you can't build all expensive areas to the level of intensity that justifies insane land values seen in sprawling cities.
Again, we could, but I recognize that we don't. Let's just not say that we can't.
I actually think density would go out of style in that scenario. IF the time and cost of commuting were drastically reduced, many people would prefer a suburban lifestyle.
This reminds me of many high GDP parts of Europe where there are towns of 500-1000 people every few km, connected by rail and busses.
I don't think the time of commuting seems to change much: people just re-equilibrate and reconfigure to use the newly saved time/distance.
But, yes, you would expect to see significant clustering. Nonetheless, the most effective clustering since the advent of indoor plumbing is the cluster of clusters, the city, and I doubt that would change. The connectivity is just so much better than a lineal expansion of small towns along a corridor.
Replace 2T of engine + fuel with 5T of battery. Regulations allow an 82T limit for electric trucks compared with 80T for diesel trucks. So there's only a ~1T difference in cargo capacity, which is at most 2%.
Now do it with volume. Plus, aren't you forgetting that electric vehicles need an motor too? Also, I think you mean 80k lbs, not 80 tons? And it's the range + time that's a killer. Recharging time would likely be a deal breaker even if you could get the same cargo capacity.
FWIW, I agree that electric trucking is the future, just disagree how close we are to that as a reality. My main gripe is how the problem tends to get oversimplified in people's assessment. "All you gotta do is.." is usually a red flag when talking about complicated problems. I'd argue that if it were simple, it would have been done already.
Trucks spend a lot of time loading, unloading and on mandatory driver rest breaks. Charging can and will be done during those times.
The biggest expense in a trucking operation is diesel. Trucking has cut-throat margins. Once electrification starts in the industry, everyone will switch quickly, or go bankrupt. Some routes will be hard to electrify, but the cost savings on the rest will be worth a lot more than a little bit of inconvenience.
It's not easy, but the savings will incentivize overcoming the obstacles.
You are right about the costs and margins. However, a large portion of the cost disparity is because diesel fuel costs incorporate a lot of taxes to fund road maintenance. The electric costs do not, and I suspect that will have to change. Road maintenance funds will have to come from somewhere, and most states are reluctant to take from other tax areas.
I'm guessing you're just reading federal taxes. There are a barrage of taxes applied to fuel. California shows over $1.24 per gallon in total. Nationally it's over 64 cents/gal. That's tens of billions of dollars nationally, and more than we spend on the energy & environment in total. One of the major problems with infrastructure spending is that these numbers have barely budged in decades. Combine that lack of political will with improvements in fuel mileage and increase in EVs means big budget shortfalls. That money has to be made up from somewhere and I can all but bet it won't come from cutting entitlements. A 'mileage driven' tax seems like a reasonable solution.
By that same notion, we could eliminate the $50B funds to energy and the environment, no big deal. $50B is a lot and it doesn't help to trivialize it because it sounds good. Thats double what was spent on Medicare. More than double what was spent on education and social services, Dept. of Education, NASA, etc. Over 10x what was spent on the Dept. of Transportation.
The point is, it's a lot of money and that money has to come from somewhere. Most economists would say it makes the most sense to get that money from the people who most use the roads. That sounds like a mileage tax, tolls, or some other mechanism. I don't see why EVs would get a (literal) free ride here.
If California Fuel tax is $1.24 per gallon in total (20%), which is about $0.15 per mile revenue. Tesla semi is supposably about 2kwh/mile. PG&E commercial vehicle electric rates for off peak are about $0.20 per Kwh, which translates to $0.40/mile.
If California wanted to collect similar revenue, that 0.15 would be about 35% of the operational fuel cost.
Appreciate the breakdown. The part that I would question is whether it's reasonable to expect all long-haul truckers to charge off-peak. I think electric will (over time) still be considerably cheaper, but I also don't think it will be as good as the back-of-the-envelope calculations people tend to tout.
Using off-peak electricity during on-peak hours means installing a stationary battery at the charger. They'll do it if saves money.
It'll be more likely if a high amperage grid connection is also expensive at the charger location. A battery and a low amperage connection can replace a high amperage connection for an infrequently used charger.
A lot of your arguements seem to hinge on "if". "If a tractor-trailor converts to electric" and "if infrastructure is built to support it" and "if we fund infrastructure from something other than fuel taxes" and "if truckers recharge off-peak" and "if chargers have a stationary battery" and...
The more conditionals that get levied the farther off the solution seems to be and the less of a slam dunk electrification appears. They're solvable, but I think it's reasonable to expect a cost and timeline for each of those before we start touting electrification as a great solution just on the horizon.
The original claim was: out of planes, trains, and automobiles, the only one that's a problem are planes.
Short answer: It's solvable, but a heck of a lot more complicated than that statement lets on.
Are we that convinced that only tractor-trailers work well for overland freight?
Even if you insist that big-box retailers represent the peak of retail capitalism, is it so difficult to imagine that these might be placed along a central corridor with rail running along the back, each store able to pluck the intermodals off the flatbed car, and load empties back onto it? Spaced out so that every business could unload at the same time?
Everyone's always bitching about cars and how they've made things awful. But how much traffic/carbon/misery would we eliminate if freight were taken off the highways?
Some places do that type of design, but we're not starting from a blank slate. Urban sprawl has meant most people are not near a rail corridor, meaning your design would mean most people now have to live far from retail distribution. Freight patterns are symptoms of housing in many cases.
There are examples of all three that are electric, although planes are the hardest to make happen. Train electrification is so common that in English it is used in an expression: "touching the third rail".
As with the debate between cars vs. trains, semis lose out to trains by a lot, even when trains use fossil fuels. Trains rule.
Trains rule until demographics change enough where rails no longer support geographic population centers. This is part of the reason politicians tend to favor buses over trains; besides the smaller upfront costs, buses are easier to change routes that support populations when needs change.
Have you run the numbers on this, or are you just imagining? In the 70s, solar and (to a lesser but still substantial extent) wind were still extremely expensive, impractical for large scale use. As were the batteries that are needed to smooth out periods of low renewable generation.
I'm an absolute supporter of renewables, and I'd love to see support for fossil fuels phased out, but it's been a long climb to reach the point where that's feasible.
The appropriate counterfactual here is if we'd made investments into renewables back in the 70s/80s/90s of a scale similar to those we made in the 00s/10s/20s. It's not really clear what the result would have been. To really answer this you'd need to unpack the past two decades' worth of cost decreases in (e.g.,) PV and see how many of them would have been possible with late-20th century technology.
My uneducated guess is that we could have moved the timelines forward at least a decade, and that matters a lot when you're dealing with exponential cost/deployment curves (not to mention possible climate feedbacks.)
> The appropriate counterfactual here is if we'd made investments into renewables back in the 70s/80s/90s of a scale similar to those we made in the 00s/10s/20s.
I'm not really sure it would have gone faster instead of just having been a very large waste of money. A lot of the reason that renewables are cheaper now has to do with 30 years of advancements in electronics and power storage and semiconductors and solid state materials etc etc etc that just _took that long to invent_. It's not like people decided a few years ago that 'oh it's time to invent better batteries'. There's always been motivation to build better batteries and people have been working on that non-stop since electricity was discovered.
That counterfactual is like: What if we had invested more in building neural networks in 1970, where would we be today. Well, the problem is we didn't have cheap powerful GPUs back then, so it probably wouldn't have mattered?
We sort of got cheap renewable energy "for free" from a lot of technologies that we invested in for other reasons.
That is one opinion, and I'm curious if there's a stronger (more expert) case to be made for it anywhere. It's true that many necessary advancements happened recently, but it's also true that some of these developments occurred due to massive research and commercial investments (many of which are still under the radar to people who didn't notice they were occurring.)
The advances of renewables are definitely dependent on strong compute and widespread global (or at least widespread local) networking. Smart grids need all of the different tools from different manufacturers to talk to each other, which an agreed-upon networking protocol like IP on top of an existing internet backbone makes very easy to ipmlement. On-demand energy storage and providing from battery banks - or even hydroelectric storage or (as mentioned in the article) gas-powered backup turbines need the analytics power to study and predict load variations on all of the collected data, which existing data centers for search or even apps makes trivial to acquire.
Now, there could have been technical solutions for these issues found in the 80s or 90s, but more probably than not the engineers back then would not have thought about this beyond the obvious corporate aspects - after all, it's much more "practical" to focus on connecting the big power plants together and just vaguely estimate the required consumption.
It's probable that, if you sat at a design meeting in the 80s and proposed, as "an energy-efficient solution", to have a small computer in every consumer's breaker box that monitors the incoming electricity, sends the info through a combination of radio and country-spanning wires to a central server, and then do analytics on it to predict when the power is needed, you'd have been laughed out of the room. And yet, that's how smart grids work nowadays and it is the correct solution to this problem.
The improvements in energy storage and solar/wind renewables would have started decades earlier, sure, and that would have mattered. But I don't think anybody would have been able to use them the way we can use them today if it was done twenty or thirty years ago, and the technology might have died down instead. It's hard to know for sure, but it's a very plausible outcome.
This seems like a fallacious argument. If investing earlier leads to earlier results, why aren't you complaining that we didn't start investing in renewables research in Roman antiquity?
Premature investment doesn't lead to early results, just wasted money. There is an optimum time for such, and it's almost certainly true that this time wasn't in the 1970s, the technology simply wasn't possible.
The 1970s do not represent a point in time in which investment/research became feasible, they represent a point in time at which it became obvious to everyone that the-then current energy technology was disappointing for a variety of reasons.
The question I’m asking is how much faster we could have pulled forward widespread renewables deployment with an earlier commitment to the project. My (non-expert) guess is that a decade might have been possible. Your view is that -2000 years probably wasn’t possible. I don’t think we’re in any major disagreement on those points, so the interesting question is about values in between.
> The question I’m asking is how much faster we could have pulled forward widespread renewables deployment with an earlier commitment to the project.
I don't think you could have gotten much of a head start. Maybe 1-2 years. I don't see you getting an extra 10 out of it, even in the best possible circumstances. Half of what makes it possible now simply didn't exist. Changes in global logistics, materials science, manufacturing capacity, and a hundred other things.
If time travel were possible, and you could go back with all the knowledge and plans from today, even then 10 years is about all you could hope for. Some things can't be rushed. Sure, you've eliminated all the false paths, the bad decisions and backtracking, but booting up this part or that part of the supply chain is a slow process.
Just imagining. The thing is, there’s so much subsidy involved in oil to keep it cheap that the price of oil without subsidy would have greatly encouraged earlier development of renewables. The price on renewables then would have fallen. The primary issue facing anything competing with oil is precisely the subsidy factor. If prices are not allowed to rise naturally as oil becomes increasingly expensive to extract, any competitor is not only attempting to assail the infrastructure already built for oil, but also the artificial price of oil. Today, many are motivated by doing “the right thing” but many more haven’t the money to do “the right thing”. Telling those people to abandon oil and use something more expensive might actually mean death for those people. This all could have been avoided had the petrodollar and the subsidies that came with it never happened.
You could see some of it in the 20s, before the New Deal sunk a lot of renewables with the rural electrification act. Of course, the shape of the problem being 'solved' was very different then, but the neglect of emerging/improving technologies in favor of the government favorite is the same.
solar panels barely existed in the '70s. Nuclear would have become the default, probably at the cost of a few meltdowns, but the air still wouldn't be clean because battery (and manufacturing) technology wasn't up to par with what it is today.
> "Without providing price detail, which companies say is commercially sensitive, Clarke said Carlton had struggled to finance the planned gas plant in part because of uncertainty over the revenues it would generate and the number of hours it would run."
This is the crucial point. Political uncertainty about the future energy system is jacking up the rate of return investors are demanding of gas plant projects without contracted revenues. This is the main reason why gas projects are falling through. At the same time, there is currently no scalable storage system for time-shifting surplus renewable generation over weeks-to-months, so that it can offset renewable troughs. This means surplus renewable generation is simply being wasted, and for that reason, is so low cost that even hours-to-days battery storage - which is a mature storage system - is economical. It's far less clear this is a long-term proposition for at-scale storage, as the longer you can store energy for the higher the efficiency of matching surplus to deficit. Hydrogen and pumped hydro can store energy for far longer.
Your first point is excellent, that this sends capital market signals to investors to not invest in fossil generation. But to your other point, seasonal storage is not required. All available evidence indicates overbuilding renewables and simply making peace with excess curtailment can solve for that, along with transmission and perhaps pumped hydro where geography allows for that.
The nice thing is as long as these markets stay reasonably competitive, economics can figure out what to do with excess renewables.
When renewables are in excess, the spot (instantaneous) energy price will drop to near zero (or sometimes negative in weird situations). That is good for existing (short term) batteries (they can recharge cheaply), but it will also provide price signals to people considering investing in longer term storage (since their cost of energy could be near zero, they only have to recoup the costs of building and operating the storage).
>since their cost of energy could be near zero, they only have to recoup the costs of building and operating the storage
If cost of storage and operation is lower than battery operators can sell it for, then eventually the cost producers will sell at will increase. It will be interesting to watch
> the spot (instantaneous) energy price will drop to near zero
Yes, and that means generation will become unprofitable.
We seem to be a decade or so away from the point where the investment on generation can't be decided by direct ROI. And nobody is preparing for this. Governments need a long time to regulate that kind of thing... so we can expect some problems on the near future.
For that time period. At the same time, using energy becomes supremely profitable. This isn’t a weird quirk of the power markets; compute time is also instantaneous. It’s just less noticeable because we haven’t unified a market for it. These are amply solvable problems.
For the time period that the most common generators generate the most energy. By itself, that guarantees that there won't be enough investment to create excess renewables. Or at least that markets won't make that investment.
If you want excess renewables (and they are a safety and security necessity), you need to fund it by something that isn't interested on direct ROI.
I think Renewables (especially solar) tend to be fairly easy to cutail (stop generating) and can probably avoid generating much during negative prices. I'd guess the negative prices will probably mostly hit legacy assets that don't have that ability.
That's at a cost of trillions though - perhaps annually (just something to keep in mind). Transmission is crazy expensive and hard to secure right of way for. The investment costs on renewables are also pretty high.
My understanding is that this can be true in some regions but requires fairly aggressive use of, not only overbuilt renewables (which may pose challenges in land use and siting), but also long haul transmission (also difficult to site), demand response, etc. And then there's the scary possibility of an extended weather anomaly (several weeks with no wind and minimal solar).
Having some long term storage in the mix, probably in the form of green hydrogen or another e-fuel, greatly increases our options for building a robust fossil-free grid.
Putting more clean firm sources such as nuclear or advanced geothermal in the mix also helps, but I am not optimistic regarding nuclear, and advanced geothermal is still pretty immature.
Interesting and bold proposition, but I suspect the reason why this has not been treated as a feasible vision by any government is that it is optimised for least-cost in the median scenario, not high energy security in the extreme scenario of wind and sun droughts, and that it does not factor in the limits to wind and PV deployment rates. Also, the first scenario still favours electrolytic hydrogen over li-on batteries anyway.
> Governments plan to double renewable capacity by 2030, and tripling is within sight, according to a newly released report.
> Many countries are already on track to exceed their national targets, and more ambition is achievable to bring a tripling of global renewables within reach, according to an analysis of national targets by energy think tank Ember.
> The report analyzes renewables targets for 57 countries, plus the EU, that collectively represent 90% of global power sector emissions. According to these targets, global renewable capacity will reach an estimated 7.3 terawatts (TW) in 2030, more than doubling from 3.4 TW in 2022. More than 75% of renewable capacity in 2030, where stated, will be from solar and wind.
> However, the current renewables boom is already outpacing governments’ planned growth. The world could achieve a doubling just by continuing the deployment achieved in 2023 throughout the rest of the decade – yet all signs point to a more rapid growth curve.
> If the countries analyzed by Ember continue the growth rate of 17% achieved since 2016 throughout the rest of this decade, it would put the world on track for a tripling of renewables.
> The most striking growth has been in solar power, according to Myllyvirta. Solar installations increased by 210 gigawatts (GW) this year alone, which is twice the total solar capacity of the US and four times what China added in 2020.
> The analysis, which is based on official figures and commercial data, found that China installed 70GW of wind power this year – more than the entire power generation capacity of the UK. It is also expected to add 7GW of hydro power and 3GW of nuclear power capacity this year, said the report.
I can't reply to your comment so posting here: Growth rates can be misleading when starting from a low absolutes. The EU and the UK, the two cases I'm most familiar with, do not look set to meet their renewable targets. The UK climate advisory body, that sets each phase of the national carbon budget, specifically include energy security, weather sensitivity and deployment rates limits into their modelling of the future UK energy mix and the role of hydrogen storage (though of course 'limits' are not fixed but relative to competing priorities and alternatives):
When thinking of load balancing over years, you need to weigh seasonal loads that have low capital costs and high energy costs running for 30~50% of the year vs a battery that only discharges ~once a year. The amortization prospects of such a storage medium are grim.
Why call this political uncertainty as opposed to economic uncertainty? The future is intrinsically uncertain. The only thing that has changed is new entrants to the market. If gas plants can be replaced by something cheaper then they will be. If gas plants make economic sense, they will be built. The fact that gas developers have to model additional players in their markets to prove their economic viability seems fine to me. The fact that they are riskier investments means higher capital costs also seems fine (they are riskier!). Would you rather the politicians say no batteries because that would make financing gas plants harder?
> "If gas plants can be replaced by something cheaper then they will be"
This is a simplification of what is a highly complex, interdependent, path dependent and regulated system, with long lead times, and more priorities than just least-cost. The energy system's development isn't the unfolding of an endogenous economic rationality - it's very messy! For all those reasons, it's usually best understood through the lens of political economy.
Also, I don't know why you think there's an anti-green sentiment implicit in my comment. My own views are precisely the opposite.
>Why call this political uncertainty as opposed to economic uncertainty?
I'm assuming this is because so much of the energy market is directed through political mechanisms like subsidies, research funding etc. It's the political uncertainty that undergirds the economic uncertainty.
It's pretty interesting question actually. I think for an honest accounting you would have to take into account the positive externalities as well.
One way to start thinking about the question is to benchmark society before gasoline.
Mass use of gasoline kicked off around 1900, with the popularization of the automobile.
You can compare life now versus 1900 to get one estimate. The world definitely had problems and Wars before 1900.
What the world would look like today had gasoline never been discovered is a lot more tricky, but my gut feeling is that we would be worse off than today.
I suspect you're right. That's why I think it's important to get a transition right, because it would be a shame to squander the type of bootstrapping that oil afforded us as a society.
>You can compare life now versus 1900 to get one estimate.
I think this is probably too broad because it assumes a causal connection between gasoline and all of those differences. The industrial revolution had been decades underway before cheap oil, and would have continued if oil was never found in Pennslyvania. But cheap oil definitely helped speed it along faster.
>The industrial revolution had been decades underway before cheap oil, and would have continued if oil was never found in Pennslyvania. But cheap oil definitely helped speed it along faster.
That is certainly true. I meant using it a benchmark to extrapolate from. In many ways it seems to me that the industrialization at that time had a pretty negative trajectory, with a heavy basis in coal and brutal industrial towns. It is quite possible that we are living one of the best possible timelines from 1900.
I don't think the fuel type, but rather the labor and regulatory environment, was the driver of those conditions. We can't know for sure, obviously, but had oil been used before coal, I have a feeling those towns would still exist.
I agree that's probably a big part of it. Another interesting thought is that if we never moved off of coal we would probably have a lot more electrification and mass transit because call makes more sense in terms of centralized power generation. Sounds like the makings of a steampunk novella
Sure, but why is that special for gas plants? CTs are expensive to run so if they run less that is generally good for people using electricity. I am not saying political uncertainty doesn’t exist or that the grid systems are apolitical or that building plants is easy. I don’t know much about the UK grid or rules which is why I was asking for specifics on what makes this specific case political.
Just speculation, but I imagine there is much less volatility in terms of fossil fuel policies. Fossil fuels (regretfully) have large and entrenched lobbyists who seem to get continued political support regardless of the office party. Contrast that to policies for/against renewables which have become a signaling mechanism.
What? Gas prices in Europe are extremely volatile [0]. Neither lobbyists nor politicians control prices and even if they did it isn’t obvious the lobbyists would prefer smooth prices.
Volatility in terms of policies, not prices. E.g., the it's fairly certain the subsidies for gas that are in place this year will continue next year. Price volatility has a lot more market dynamics at play.
I have lost the thread. The og parent said that political uncertainties were responsible for gas plant economic issues. You are now saying that gas plant lobbyists create more political certainty. I don’t know if that is true but it is beside the point.
I don’t think it is. If we agree that lobbyists affect political outcomes, and we can agree that some industries have entrenched lobbyists, then we can connect the two to say that lobbyists create more political certainty. That’s not to conflate “more certainty about policy” with “good policy.” It’s only beside the point if you think policy doesn’t impact energy prices, which is fairly easy to disprove.
In other words, if you think it's hard to implement a new energy policy in part because of monied interests, those monied interests are providing certainty in policy. To ground it in more real terms, I may not want to bet on new energy tech if the have an economic advantage based on who's in the White House. By contrast, betting on fossil fuels has more certainty because those interests are protected almost regardless of who's in the White House.
From the parent: “Political uncertainty about the future energy system is jacking up the rate of return investors are demanding of gas plant projects without contracted revenues.”
Your argument about lobbyists creating certainty doesn’t follow. Not all people in an industry have the same interests (gas generators and gas producers both like gas but price impacting regulation will create divergences). Lobbyists may reduce certainty because, for example, a super convincing lobbyist might instigate changes to an staid regime. The cumulative impact of different, less effective lobbyists over time may wash out or it may cause branches.
Ok, I'll try to be more explicit with the caveat that it's possible I'm reading too much between the OP's lines.
"future energy systems" means, in this case, battery and EV tech. Had it said "legacy energy systems" I agree that it does not follow. However, as stated, they are saying "we just don't know what's going to be on the political horizon. Maybe a ultra-conservative will be in the white house and all of these subsidies that help foster future energy systems will go out the window." Again, it's about the volatility of less-entrenched, prospective industries that are more reliant on policies to make them viable.
Entrenched lobbyists, almost by definition, want to keep the status quo. So I don't think we can agree that they are likely to institute massive changes. Put differently, do you think it's more likely that fossil fuel subsidies or that renewable subsidies will be dramatically reduced if the WH changes parties in the next election?
> If gas plants can be replaced by something cheaper then they will be. If gas plants make economic sense, they will be built.
Eventually, the system will land in a semi-stable equilibrium. Getting there may be quite painful, though.
Capitalism is NOT an inherently stable system when the time scales of production and consumption have a mismatch. Look at farming and the feast/famine cycles it goes through. Practically all "developed" countries stabilize their agricultural sector, somehow, precisely for this reason.
Capitalism will happily take plants offline faster than new investment can replace. The grid needs a certain amount of base production or it becomes unreliable--which defeats the whole point of a "grid" in the first place.
Batteries are not enough by themselves. You need a combination of batteries, solar, HVDC links over larger areas (to give you diversity to ride out weather), gas plants, and nuclear plants. Many of these will be unprofitable to build but are necessary.
The reality is much more complex than "batteries replace gas" -
> Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said.
> Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate.
> "It does become more complex," Nigel Scott, head of structured trade and commodity finance at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, said.
> Investors are putting increased scrutiny on the modelling, he added.
- so basically, maintaining a large-scale grid is an optimization problem. And batteries merely shift the answer to "how much of which each type of equipment should we have?" around some. Kinda like someone architecting a DC-scale system has to understand trade-offs between L1 cache / L2 cache / L3 cache / local-to-core RAM / more-distant RAM / SSD / HD / Tape - vs. what equipment is actually available - at what prices, lead times, configuration limitations, ...
Batteries are kind of the RAM/cache in the system:
- Big merchant batteries like Hornsdale are kind of like more distant ram RAM
- Batteries co-located with renewables are kind of the local to core ram
- UPS and similar are cache
- Pumped hydro is probably Tape ;)
It feels like we might still be lacking a good/widely deployed HD/SSD equivalent in this space, hopefully new/emerging technologies (maybe the sodium chemistries others are mentioning) will be able to fill that in.
I think in terms of the energy grid batteries are currently more like your L1 cache or similar. I.e. very expensive to have, and has specific requirements so you have little of it.
It is probably smart to keep around a certain capacity of nonrenewables to provide at least some base load. Long periods of low sunshine and slow winds could deplete batteries to a critical level. Also, the turbines of big powerplants act as grid frequency stabilizer. Do grid-scale batteries use alternators or might they run flywheels?
Well, currently the sellers are the ones directly paying for the grid infrastructure.
It makes much more sense. They are the ones that can choose what part of the grid they plug on, and they are the ones choosing if they provide the service or not.
Typically electric companies pay for the grid infrastructure and operation currently. Electricity producers like solar plants out in the desert is not paying to maintain the poles to your house.
maybe we have a difference in terminology. The interconnects between the grid and primary producers are often owned an managed by the retail company. Who pays for them is often a sticking point and can go both ways.
What I think is indisputable is that it is the retail electric company who manages and maintains their grid, and manages it's demand and stability.
>sellers are the ones directly paying for the grid infrastructure.
This is absolutely not the case for the vast majority of that infrastructure. You just mentioned small connections. If you look at the grid, it is basically all retail companies[1]
You're using American-centric terminology that doesn't translate well to other countries, most of which have one national grid company that manages the transmission grid (which extends up to the generation facilities) and where 'retail companies' refers to local distributors who may operate their own distribution networks or who may just handle billing etc.
Yes, but the rest of the grid can not, except for some forms of hydro, flywheels, superconducting coils and grid scale batteries. They hydro has a fastest rate of change of about 1 minute from zero to full load and a bit slower to go back again and batteries can more-or-less match renewables for rate of change. The superconductor solution is the fastest but also the most expensive per KWh of storage.
In the time before renewables all of the rate-of-change limitations came from sudden increases or decreases in consumption, never from the supply side and this has subtle implications for the structure of the power grid and how much power companies can do to control the match between the two.
Think of it as a person walking across a rope with a balancing pole: you can overbalance for a short while because you can correct for that with the mass of the pole. But if the overbalance is too large for the mass of the pole then you will inevitably fall (brownout, blackout).
No, superconductor. Effectively an electronic version of the flywheel.
There is a company in the United States that has been making these for almost 20 years now, they are used for ride-through in hospitals and for windfarm output stabilization.
Not really, I've seen these units in the middle of the mountains sitting right next to a windfarm. About as inaccessible as it gets and yet they were there and humming along. Note that there is plenty of energy available for the refrigeration and that those units run for years unattended. Occasionally you need to top off the refrigeration gear but that's once every two years or so, a bit more involved than your average HVAC setup but not that much more involved.
It doesn't necessarily need to be non-renewables through. There just has to be spare capacity that the grid could count on being there. There just needs to be a way for the grid to pay for the capacity that's going to go unused a lot of times, whether it's batteries, extra water and turbine in a dam, or standby power plants.
A major problem here is that intermittency isn't consistent.
Okay, solar doesn't generate at night, so you would need to charge some batteries during the day and discharge them at night. Maybe that's fine.
But solar also generates less in winter. If we want to transition heating from oil and gas to electric, we need a lot of generation in the winter. If we build some more solar to do that, now there's way more than enough in the summer, so anything that can make up the shortfall in winter is only going to be used in winter. Duty cycle for whatever that is just got cut in half or worse.
Then sometimes it's cloudy for a week. Having enough battery capacity to make it through the night is very different than having enough to make it a whole week, or two. By the second or third day you need enough traditional generating capacity to run the whole grid at night -- but that capacity only gets used one week out of the year.
Now you want to say that gas is too expensive if it can only amortize its costs in those limited circumstances. But what do you want to do instead? You need something that can run the whole grid the week that it's cloudy, none of the options for that are cheap, but the alternative is everybody loses power that week.
But the capacity needed to top up that battery on a cloudy week is still less than having a gas plant having to meet peak demand.
Kinda like the BMW i3 with Rex. You charge it at home (solar), but when it gets low the on-board generator (gasoline 2 cylinder) can trickle charge your battery until you get home (where you have solar again).
That works in a car because a car's energy demands are bursty. The power to accelerate the car from a stop comes from the battery and then the car's energy requirements drop by 95% and the tiny engine can eek out a little more than the 5% needed to maintain cruising speed and use the rest to slowly recharge the battery.
The power grid doesn't work like that. The base load is around half of the peak load. It never drops to 5%.
That doesn't mean the batteries can't be useful. If the average load is 150GW but that's because it's 100GW at night and 200GW during the day, the batteries let you get away with having only 150GW of average generating capacity instead of 200GW, because during the times when the generation exceeds the demand you can put the surplus in the batteries.
But you still need to maintain an average of 150GW of generating capacity or the batteries will get empty and the power goes out.
I must say I fail to see how any of this is all that new. Winter affects how much air conditioning and heating is needed - and probably even when people go to work and return. You had to take that into account before solar issues. Now both consumption and production are affected by the season, sure, but that's still a known mechanism. Same for cloudiness vs air conditioning (and heating and lighting).
But wait, in most places hydroelectricity availability has always been a factor. And THAT was already variable depending on the season (and anomalous seasons). So anyway, both production and consumption have always been seasonal and weather-dependent.
With sometimes chaotic results when a winter is exceptionally mild like last winter in Europe, or strong. Not new either.
And then on top of that, in places like the American West, the prices to import electricity from neighboring regions or states have sometimes been chaotic. Also something that had to be taken into account for peaking gas-powered generation.
> I must say I fail to see how any of this is all that new.
The difference is the scale. Traditionally you had a particular amount of base load that would run all the time. Nuclear and coal. The load never dropped below their generation capacity so they never had to stop generating and making money to recover their construction costs.
Then you would have natural gas peaker plants that only ran for part of the day, but they still ran pretty much every day. And these would also allow you to shut down base load plants for maintenance during the lower demand season. So they still got plenty of use.
Now you want to have solar and batteries which can satisfy the demand 98% of the time -- meaning some backup system has to recover its costs out of the remaining 2% of the time. But that backup system doesn't just have to pick up the extra 10% load because it's extra hot today. If it's cloudy long enough for the batteries to run down and it's night, your output from that system is now zero, but you still have the entire load of the power grid to satisfy. Where does it come from? An entirely parallel generating system that only gets used 2% of the time?
The alternative is to keep something like nuclear as e.g. 40% of the grid, and have it generate all the time as it does now. At which point that 40% of the generating capacity is more like 80% of the nighttime load and you're in much better shape to have to make up the last 20% than the entire 100%.
I think the article is not so much about how more difficult it is to price the energy of a gas peaking plant but instead about changing strategies by developers of such plants. There is the temptation to switch to battery plants now rather than later. There is the change in the equation that such plants used to be mostly priced by the energy provided (in contracted amounts) and that now they are more charging for contingency / continuity service. That is they are charging for a different service: not paid by the kW/hr but by the capability to produce on demand. And then subsidies, permitting, environmental concerns also are changing: easier to build batteries, hard to build gas. And lenders having to follow in the change in profitability mechanism.
> There is the temptation to switch to battery plants now rather than later.
But this is the problem, right? They don't serve the same purpose.
The battery plant allows you to store surplus solar generation during the day and use it at night. That's useful, but it's not the same thing -- because if it's cloudy for an extended period of time, you don't have surplus solar generation during the day, and your batteries are empty. What then?
The source isn't really the point. If you normally have 200GW of solar generation but it's cloudy so now you have 10% of that, you don't have surplus generation of any kind. The remaining power plants can't even cover the current load, the batteries are being discharged rather than charged and when they run out, what do you do?
I think most people are delusional about this, including the operators talked about in the article.
I believe this is mostly posturing and people trying to find ways to get some of that sweet subvention money flowing for renewable tech and associated. In other words, there are some profits to be made and for this they need to pretend that they don't know better.
Because as you said, this is not sustainable. The numbers don't work, if we only build battery with renewables someone has to lose power somewhere some of the time.
I worked around a small model with rather optimistic assumptions with zero concern for cost and a focus on efficient consumption to determine what would be required to make a single 1–2-person habitation completely sustainable off grid but with most of the modern confort.
I used past weather data and sunshine/wind values. It doesn't work.
The number of batteries you need is ridiculous and unrealistic when you scale up the model, that's before considering costs that are just insane.
I think renewables are a good technology especially because we can use the peaks to our advantage and work/organise society around that. In particular car battery charging and air conditioning are 2 very good candidates.
Realistically we still need reliable technology to ensure baseload at all times, especially at night. Personally, I think nuclear is just that but just saying that word is so political that people lose all rationality it seems, so we get sucks in meaningless debates and projections...
In a weird twist, most pro-renewables are also anti electric car, I swear ideological people are really unbelievable. I think the world became too political in general (a feminine way of "solving" problems) but in particular the field of energy is overrun by politics; which is kind of funny when you consider that the core skill to make everything work is rationality.
But I guess when we will get grid shut down like in South Africa they will agree that batteries don't work. It will be too late though...
If that's the situation, then you have just demonstrated that you can't do it like that. Solar plus battery. That's fine. You look for something else. For example you get a contract to fund a gas-powered humongous plant from the companies whose mandate it is to not run out of power. (but you probably can't get gas for that plant on a one-off basis - you'll have to store.)
The point is to do that use case planning (and fund a plant based on the results.)
Hopefully nobody is really getting themselves in that situation.
Complexoty causes high system costs at scale for energy grids with a large amount of intermittent renewables. Adding more stable adjustable sources like nuclear, hydro or geothermal will become more attractive than creating wildly intricate "smart grid" architecture. Just produce more power when needed instead of costly redistribution and storage.
Superb analogy indeed as this is the same approach I use in my next pursuit in breaking through to those from a technology background. The cache sources can be anything providing energy to be stored in the rapid response system while the cache system itself is modular in design allowing ingress and egress simultaneously based on inputs and outputs of demand. The fun part is designing and writing the software to control all the "cache" hardware. I have no idea what I am talking about though but I did stay in a Holiday Inn last night... or was it a Motel 6. :)
For those with their ear on the track when that sound resonates they will see the light, everyone else will be in the dark without energy storage. Costs are spiking everywhere and the U.S. government is having meetings near weekly exactly about this coming fun. Those meetings reflect frank direct statements about coming derailments and the grid has not changed since its inception and remains to be centralized to this very day. There are enough smart technologists here that can put together exactly what I infer, significant opportunity.
For those further interested check out YT: "Environment Hearing: Clean Power Plan 2.0 Will Jeopardize Reliable and Affordable Energy". As with anything making significant revenues however those threatened with revenue loss will play the dirtiest games to preserve their position, this includes increasing the pollution output that is making that revenue.
We should take a moment to acknowledge the Power MOSFet in this story.
For a guy who paid money for his first germanium transistor generating grid scale power with transistors is TOTALLY amazing.
In the 60s and 70s it was impossible to generate really large amounts of power with the bipolar transistors that were available. Large transmitters for example were still using Vacuum tubes into the 1990s.
This is actually great because it reduces the vastly outsized impact of gas prices on short-term electricity prices through peaker plants via the merit order system.
A battery can only solve a local issue: a system for locally produced and consumed electricity, If the sourcing solar or wind is transformed to fuel, you also have storage, probably a gas or liquid. And you catch two birds with one stone: storage and distribution. That could be shipping, pipelines but also gas stations. Infrastructure we already have.
A few years ago I scraped some publicly-accessible data from https://www.iso-ne.com/ regarding the spot cost of electricity.
Then I fed it into a battery simulator that I wrote.
Based on my estimated cost of a grid-scale battery, I estimated a payoff in ~2 years; and then a lot of profit.
The biggest challenge is the politics and red tape of connecting something to the grid. The grid operators are used to power plants being multi-year projects.
My simulations were based on the iso-new England grid's spot fees. I estimated the cost of a grid scale battery based on what I paid for my powerwall, because I couldn't get data on the price of the mega pack.
I couldn't tell you if you'll save money with a powerwall in Australia. You'll need to look up local incentives for that. Understanding the economics of a power grid, it's only worth it if you have solar and don't have typical American-style "net metering," or you have solar and need backup for power outages.
What I can tell you is that, in the US, in 2019, I got a rebate for my powerwall that made it price competitive with a standby generator. (Cost a little more, but I don't pay for annual maintenance or fuel.) I don't feed into the grid with it. The incentives would need to be pretty lucrative, though, because if there's a power outage overnight, it'll drain fast! (All my outages since I got it happened during the day.)
What I can also tell you is that Tesla made a lot of headlines hooking up a grid scale battery to balance out an Australian wind farm. It prevented a frequency drop when a coal plant went offline.
> What I can also tell you is that Tesla made a lot of headlines hooking up a grid scale battery to balance out an Australian wind farm. It prevented a frequency drop when a coal plant went offline.
This is what I was referring to; I was wondering whether your calculation would apply to it.
It seems the core issue is that electricity pricing isn't taking into account that some power sources could just go offline for days/weeks. Perhaps they need to find a politically correct way to apply a tariff against unreliable sources and just pay for standby capacity.
This will cause renewable energy to become somewhat less attractive financially, but the alternative is a grid that becomes unreliable over time as gas power plants are decommissioned and don't get replaced.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadIn comparison, scaling from 0% to 100% load on battery storage takes 0,1 seconds, according to Tesla.
But yes, the batteries can respond much faster and are way better at this kind of support. It does lead to some situations that felt slightly weird to me where a battery will be selling a "spinning" reserve product. Luckily the weird linguistic artifact did not require us to actually rotate multi-ton batteries ;).
You are right that load isn’t independent of frequency, though. For those who are interested, in a simplistic and hand-wavy explanation, the torque imbalance between generation and load causes a change to the frequency. The net torque = torque of generation - torque of load = I*alpha, where alpha is the derivative of omega, or the angular frequency of the grid, and I is analogous to the inertia of the grid. If there is more generation torque than load torque on a generator (and the grid), the frequency increases and vice versa. Keeping the net torque constant, increasing the inertia makes the grid frequency derivative smaller for the same imbalance between generation and load, which is why it was typically desirable to have higher inertia synchronous generators.
What you were describing around changing fuel to maintain speed is typically frequency droop, which is where generators change their power as a function of the frequency, which is a distributed scheme for all generators to independently act to drive the torque imbalance to 0, with some insensitivity proportionality constant. For example, in California, gas turbines are assigned a droop value within the range of 3 to 5%, which means a 3 to 5 % reduction in frequency should result in a 100% increase in power, and vice versa. The total power should be provided in less than 30 sec typically.
For those that are really motivated to understand the interplay between generation, load, and frequency, look up the swing equation in the context of power system stability.
There is another aspect of synchronous generators that enable them to act to stabilize frequency independently, called the inertial response, which also has to do with their rotational energy. A generator at some frequency has KE = 0.5*J*omega^2 where J is rotational inertia and omega is angular frequency. If the frequency changes, it has a change in kinetic energy = 0.5*J*(omega1^2 - omega2^2) which is equal to some power for some period of time (= P*delta_t). This shows that as a generator sees a change in frequency, the shorter the duration, the larger the amount of energy is converted to power. Essentially, generators have an inertial response that act to inject power the faster frequency is falling, and vice versa, which is a self stabilizing function for grid frequency.
This loss of synchronous inertia as generators are replaced by inverter based resources (IBRs) is why managing grid frequency stability becomes more difficult. Various techniques are used to abate the loss of inertia, including emulating the swing equation within inverters to make them behave as synchronous generators and provide that inertial response. This is typically called grid forming with virtual synchronous machine.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2022.9717...
https://www.sandia.gov/files/ess/EESAT/2002_papers/00015.pdf
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-beg...
https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-earn-big-in-europe...
The regulations have some work to do catch up to allowing batteries to operate in a straightforward manner. For example, the big battery we launched in Texas had to be registered as both a generator and a controllable load with all sorts of weird issues around switching from discharging (being a generator) to charging (being a load) that a battery wants to do all the time. We found engineering solutions to them, but it's even better that the market operators are working on properly recognizing batteries as their own unique asset with their own advantages and challenges.
So the writing is on the wall for fossil fuels.
What's also important is that gas combined cycle kind of represented the end state of maximum power for minimum cost from fossil fuels. Wind and especially solar (perovskites, etc) and storage (sodium chemistries, etc) have lots of runway for further cost drops. So you might squeeze a couple percent out of gas combined cycle for LCOE in the next decade, but solar/wind may still drop by 50%.
So if you have a ten year view (which is what you have fore investment in power projects) fossil fuel projects (and alas nuclear, which is 6x more expensive than wind/solar) simply don't balance the sheet.
Lots of hope. Lots of work to do.
EDIT: response to "why do you think solar/wind have bigger runway to drop in price:" (I hit my post limit)
Wind can simply scale up more, and there are other designs coming online. Wind I don't have the holy-crap-this-is-still-coming thing.
Solar however has made its gains with silicon, but perovskites are simply dirt cheap to manufacture, IF they can eliminate lead and get them to last long enough. I'm spitballing, but perovskites will probably drop the cost by 50% long term in solar.
Solar also really hasn't developed large scale multijunction, and perovskites + silicon may enable that. Multijunction is how you get the higher efficiencies by capturing more wavelengths and the like.
As for gas turbine, they already are exceeding the carnot efficiencies by capturing downstream heat cycles and other tricks. And I think the other thing as an energy financeer I'd worry about is that any fossil fuel power generation has to be worried about an eventual carbon tax imposed.
As the political power of oil companies wanes as their economic strength withers away as EVs and alternative energy undermine their economic value proposition, their ability to keep the environmental lobby from imposing a proper externality tax on carbon emissions with falter.
So any gas generation power plant could overnight have their costs increased by 10-50% or maybe worse. Best case: you have to pay for bullshit offsets, which will probably increase costs 10-20%. Medium case: they have to explicitly pay for the carbon scrubbing/removal, probably 50% increase or more to the generation cost. Worst case: we realize that fossil fuels carbon taxes should include a cost to remove PREVIOUSLY UNTAXED carbon that is sitting in the atmosphere. So then the cost could be exhorbitantly increased.
Likely SOMETHING is coming that will increase the cost of fossil fuel power and fuels due to carbon removal. It will start small and increase as the political strength of oil / gas wanes.
Could you tell on what you base this assumption?
sodium batteries have the potential to be dirt cheap and thus might be able to be rolled out for less of what lipos cost at scale especially in non-mobile applications where size and weight aren't that important.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38361094
At some point we may still need small gas power plants to charge the batteries but how many days a year would we have to do that?
It may be a touchy subject, but to me Nuclear power is absolutely not the future because for the money you can deploy so much renewables, including batteries, it just doesn't make sense. And they are never on time and on budget.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
Eh... The only one on your list that is currently a problem is planes. It's expensive powering semi trucks with them, that's why people mostly don't, and it's almost trivial for trains.
There is also no fundamental reason why planes should be impossible. There are several well understood possibilities for them, but very few people have focused on solving this problem.
My lazy googling suggests that 40% of freight movement is via rail in US. I can't find a full breakout, but the same site goes on to claim rail is only 1.7% of GHG, which means most of the rest is traveling by road, since waterborne freight is generally more efficient than rail.
In my head, semi-trucks (and maybe all cars?) only need 50-100 miles or so of range for low-speed (where batteries shine) warehouse/ports/downtown deliveries (or garage-charged commutes?).
Almost every trip I've ever taken beyond ~20 miles included at least some portion on a highway. Electric interstates could allow NY to LA in one shot and pulling off the highway with 100 miles to make the round-trip to wherever a load needed to be dropped off.
If attaching and detaching was automatic, there would be no need to electrify onramps or intersections or underpasses or anything expensive, just find the cheapest, straightest, easiest to electrify 80% of roads and slap up wires there.
If paved roads, then you're forgetting the enormous wear that heavy vehicles put on road surfaces (which would get much worse as labor costs were taken away as a downward pressure on road freight volume.)
If rail, then I think you could see some version of that as a logical upgrade to a high-utilization rail network in a high-trust society with a strong safety culture. I see the US becoming lower-, not higher-, trust.
Towns and cities are too large and too dense and too insanely expensive in terms of property prices to get new lines into or even close to.
(This might be less of a problem for freight compared to moving people, but many lines are mixed freight/passenger use, aren't they?)
In reality, such a series of actions could only exist in a society that got seriously focused on moving away from private auto, and that means density would increasingly be in style. As soon as the NIMBY floodgates came down, property prices would plummet in all but the smallest cores of desirable areas, since it would be readily apparent that you can't build all expensive areas to the level of intensity that justifies insane land values seen in sprawling cities.
Again, we could, but I recognize that we don't. Let's just not say that we can't.
This reminds me of many high GDP parts of Europe where there are towns of 500-1000 people every few km, connected by rail and busses.
But, yes, you would expect to see significant clustering. Nonetheless, the most effective clustering since the advent of indoor plumbing is the cluster of clusters, the city, and I doubt that would change. The connectivity is just so much better than a lineal expansion of small towns along a corridor.
I agree time wouldnt change that much, but presumably that time would translate to greater distances with better throughput and speed.
FWIW, I agree that electric trucking is the future, just disagree how close we are to that as a reality. My main gripe is how the problem tends to get oversimplified in people's assessment. "All you gotta do is.." is usually a red flag when talking about complicated problems. I'd argue that if it were simple, it would have been done already.
Trucks spend a lot of time loading, unloading and on mandatory driver rest breaks. Charging can and will be done during those times.
The biggest expense in a trucking operation is diesel. Trucking has cut-throat margins. Once electrification starts in the industry, everyone will switch quickly, or go bankrupt. Some routes will be hard to electrify, but the cost savings on the rest will be worth a lot more than a little bit of inconvenience.
It's not easy, but the savings will incentivize overcoming the obstacles.
The point is, it's a lot of money and that money has to come from somewhere. Most economists would say it makes the most sense to get that money from the people who most use the roads. That sounds like a mileage tax, tolls, or some other mechanism. I don't see why EVs would get a (literal) free ride here.
If California wanted to collect similar revenue, that 0.15 would be about 35% of the operational fuel cost.
It'll be more likely if a high amperage grid connection is also expensive at the charger location. A battery and a low amperage connection can replace a high amperage connection for an infrequently used charger.
The more conditionals that get levied the farther off the solution seems to be and the less of a slam dunk electrification appears. They're solvable, but I think it's reasonable to expect a cost and timeline for each of those before we start touting electrification as a great solution just on the horizon.
The original claim was: out of planes, trains, and automobiles, the only one that's a problem are planes.
Short answer: It's solvable, but a heck of a lot more complicated than that statement lets on.
Even if you insist that big-box retailers represent the peak of retail capitalism, is it so difficult to imagine that these might be placed along a central corridor with rail running along the back, each store able to pluck the intermodals off the flatbed car, and load empties back onto it? Spaced out so that every business could unload at the same time?
Everyone's always bitching about cars and how they've made things awful. But how much traffic/carbon/misery would we eliminate if freight were taken off the highways?
As with the debate between cars vs. trains, semis lose out to trains by a lot, even when trains use fossil fuels. Trains rule.
I'm an absolute supporter of renewables, and I'd love to see support for fossil fuels phased out, but it's been a long climb to reach the point where that's feasible.
My uneducated guess is that we could have moved the timelines forward at least a decade, and that matters a lot when you're dealing with exponential cost/deployment curves (not to mention possible climate feedbacks.)
I'm not really sure it would have gone faster instead of just having been a very large waste of money. A lot of the reason that renewables are cheaper now has to do with 30 years of advancements in electronics and power storage and semiconductors and solid state materials etc etc etc that just _took that long to invent_. It's not like people decided a few years ago that 'oh it's time to invent better batteries'. There's always been motivation to build better batteries and people have been working on that non-stop since electricity was discovered.
That counterfactual is like: What if we had invested more in building neural networks in 1970, where would we be today. Well, the problem is we didn't have cheap powerful GPUs back then, so it probably wouldn't have mattered?
We sort of got cheap renewable energy "for free" from a lot of technologies that we invested in for other reasons.
Now, there could have been technical solutions for these issues found in the 80s or 90s, but more probably than not the engineers back then would not have thought about this beyond the obvious corporate aspects - after all, it's much more "practical" to focus on connecting the big power plants together and just vaguely estimate the required consumption.
It's probable that, if you sat at a design meeting in the 80s and proposed, as "an energy-efficient solution", to have a small computer in every consumer's breaker box that monitors the incoming electricity, sends the info through a combination of radio and country-spanning wires to a central server, and then do analytics on it to predict when the power is needed, you'd have been laughed out of the room. And yet, that's how smart grids work nowadays and it is the correct solution to this problem.
The improvements in energy storage and solar/wind renewables would have started decades earlier, sure, and that would have mattered. But I don't think anybody would have been able to use them the way we can use them today if it was done twenty or thirty years ago, and the technology might have died down instead. It's hard to know for sure, but it's a very plausible outcome.
Premature investment doesn't lead to early results, just wasted money. There is an optimum time for such, and it's almost certainly true that this time wasn't in the 1970s, the technology simply wasn't possible.
The 1970s do not represent a point in time in which investment/research became feasible, they represent a point in time at which it became obvious to everyone that the-then current energy technology was disappointing for a variety of reasons.
I don't think you could have gotten much of a head start. Maybe 1-2 years. I don't see you getting an extra 10 out of it, even in the best possible circumstances. Half of what makes it possible now simply didn't exist. Changes in global logistics, materials science, manufacturing capacity, and a hundred other things.
If time travel were possible, and you could go back with all the knowledge and plans from today, even then 10 years is about all you could hope for. Some things can't be rushed. Sure, you've eliminated all the false paths, the bad decisions and backtracking, but booting up this part or that part of the supply chain is a slow process.
This is the crucial point. Political uncertainty about the future energy system is jacking up the rate of return investors are demanding of gas plant projects without contracted revenues. This is the main reason why gas projects are falling through. At the same time, there is currently no scalable storage system for time-shifting surplus renewable generation over weeks-to-months, so that it can offset renewable troughs. This means surplus renewable generation is simply being wasted, and for that reason, is so low cost that even hours-to-days battery storage - which is a mature storage system - is economical. It's far less clear this is a long-term proposition for at-scale storage, as the longer you can store energy for the higher the efficiency of matching surplus to deficit. Hydrogen and pumped hydro can store energy for far longer.
When renewables are in excess, the spot (instantaneous) energy price will drop to near zero (or sometimes negative in weird situations). That is good for existing (short term) batteries (they can recharge cheaply), but it will also provide price signals to people considering investing in longer term storage (since their cost of energy could be near zero, they only have to recoup the costs of building and operating the storage).
If cost of storage and operation is lower than battery operators can sell it for, then eventually the cost producers will sell at will increase. It will be interesting to watch
Yes, and that means generation will become unprofitable.
We seem to be a decade or so away from the point where the investment on generation can't be decided by direct ROI. And nobody is preparing for this. Governments need a long time to regulate that kind of thing... so we can expect some problems on the near future.
For that time period. At the same time, using energy becomes supremely profitable. This isn’t a weird quirk of the power markets; compute time is also instantaneous. It’s just less noticeable because we haven’t unified a market for it. These are amply solvable problems.
For the time period that the most common generators generate the most energy. By itself, that guarantees that there won't be enough investment to create excess renewables. Or at least that markets won't make that investment.
If you want excess renewables (and they are a safety and security necessity), you need to fund it by something that isn't interested on direct ROI.
Sure, agreed. I don’t think this is something we should necessarily want. But if it is, it would require subsidy.
My understanding is that this can be true in some regions but requires fairly aggressive use of, not only overbuilt renewables (which may pose challenges in land use and siting), but also long haul transmission (also difficult to site), demand response, etc. And then there's the scary possibility of an extended weather anomaly (several weeks with no wind and minimal solar).
Having some long term storage in the mix, probably in the form of green hydrogen or another e-fuel, greatly increases our options for building a robust fossil-free grid.
Putting more clean firm sources such as nuclear or advanced geothermal in the mix also helps, but I am not optimistic regarding nuclear, and advanced geothermal is still pretty immature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcgECmaMkAg
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/09/07/the-best-electricity-pl...
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/14/overbuilding-solar-at...
https://energycentral.com/c/em/overbuilding-curtailing-renew...
https://ases.org/firm-power-generation/
> Governments plan to double renewable capacity by 2030, and tripling is within sight, according to a newly released report.
> Many countries are already on track to exceed their national targets, and more ambition is achievable to bring a tripling of global renewables within reach, according to an analysis of national targets by energy think tank Ember.
> The report analyzes renewables targets for 57 countries, plus the EU, that collectively represent 90% of global power sector emissions. According to these targets, global renewable capacity will reach an estimated 7.3 terawatts (TW) in 2030, more than doubling from 3.4 TW in 2022. More than 75% of renewable capacity in 2030, where stated, will be from solar and wind.
> However, the current renewables boom is already outpacing governments’ planned growth. The world could achieve a doubling just by continuing the deployment achieved in 2023 throughout the rest of the decade – yet all signs point to a more rapid growth curve.
> If the countries analyzed by Ember continue the growth rate of 17% achieved since 2016 throughout the rest of this decade, it would put the world on track for a tripling of renewables.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...
> The most striking growth has been in solar power, according to Myllyvirta. Solar installations increased by 210 gigawatts (GW) this year alone, which is twice the total solar capacity of the US and four times what China added in 2020.
> The analysis, which is based on official figures and commercial data, found that China installed 70GW of wind power this year – more than the entire power generation capacity of the UK. It is also expected to add 7GW of hydro power and 3GW of nuclear power capacity this year, said the report.
https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/delivering-a-reliable-...
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_(facility)
This is a simplification of what is a highly complex, interdependent, path dependent and regulated system, with long lead times, and more priorities than just least-cost. The energy system's development isn't the unfolding of an endogenous economic rationality - it's very messy! For all those reasons, it's usually best understood through the lens of political economy.
Also, I don't know why you think there's an anti-green sentiment implicit in my comment. My own views are precisely the opposite.
I'm assuming this is because so much of the energy market is directed through political mechanisms like subsidies, research funding etc. It's the political uncertainty that undergirds the economic uncertainty.
One way to start thinking about the question is to benchmark society before gasoline.
Mass use of gasoline kicked off around 1900, with the popularization of the automobile.
You can compare life now versus 1900 to get one estimate. The world definitely had problems and Wars before 1900.
What the world would look like today had gasoline never been discovered is a lot more tricky, but my gut feeling is that we would be worse off than today.
>You can compare life now versus 1900 to get one estimate.
I think this is probably too broad because it assumes a causal connection between gasoline and all of those differences. The industrial revolution had been decades underway before cheap oil, and would have continued if oil was never found in Pennslyvania. But cheap oil definitely helped speed it along faster.
That is certainly true. I meant using it a benchmark to extrapolate from. In many ways it seems to me that the industrialization at that time had a pretty negative trajectory, with a heavy basis in coal and brutal industrial towns. It is quite possible that we are living one of the best possible timelines from 1900.
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas
In other words, if you think it's hard to implement a new energy policy in part because of monied interests, those monied interests are providing certainty in policy. To ground it in more real terms, I may not want to bet on new energy tech if the have an economic advantage based on who's in the White House. By contrast, betting on fossil fuels has more certainty because those interests are protected almost regardless of who's in the White House.
Your argument about lobbyists creating certainty doesn’t follow. Not all people in an industry have the same interests (gas generators and gas producers both like gas but price impacting regulation will create divergences). Lobbyists may reduce certainty because, for example, a super convincing lobbyist might instigate changes to an staid regime. The cumulative impact of different, less effective lobbyists over time may wash out or it may cause branches.
"future energy systems" means, in this case, battery and EV tech. Had it said "legacy energy systems" I agree that it does not follow. However, as stated, they are saying "we just don't know what's going to be on the political horizon. Maybe a ultra-conservative will be in the white house and all of these subsidies that help foster future energy systems will go out the window." Again, it's about the volatility of less-entrenched, prospective industries that are more reliant on policies to make them viable.
Entrenched lobbyists, almost by definition, want to keep the status quo. So I don't think we can agree that they are likely to institute massive changes. Put differently, do you think it's more likely that fossil fuel subsidies or that renewable subsidies will be dramatically reduced if the WH changes parties in the next election?
Eventually, the system will land in a semi-stable equilibrium. Getting there may be quite painful, though.
Capitalism is NOT an inherently stable system when the time scales of production and consumption have a mismatch. Look at farming and the feast/famine cycles it goes through. Practically all "developed" countries stabilize their agricultural sector, somehow, precisely for this reason.
Capitalism will happily take plants offline faster than new investment can replace. The grid needs a certain amount of base production or it becomes unreliable--which defeats the whole point of a "grid" in the first place.
Batteries are not enough by themselves. You need a combination of batteries, solar, HVDC links over larger areas (to give you diversity to ride out weather), gas plants, and nuclear plants. Many of these will be unprofitable to build but are necessary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
> Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said.
> Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate.
> "It does become more complex," Nigel Scott, head of structured trade and commodity finance at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, said.
> Investors are putting increased scrutiny on the modelling, he added.
- so basically, maintaining a large-scale grid is an optimization problem. And batteries merely shift the answer to "how much of which each type of equipment should we have?" around some. Kinda like someone architecting a DC-scale system has to understand trade-offs between L1 cache / L2 cache / L3 cache / local-to-core RAM / more-distant RAM / SSD / HD / Tape - vs. what equipment is actually available - at what prices, lead times, configuration limitations, ...
Batteries are kind of the RAM/cache in the system: - Big merchant batteries like Hornsdale are kind of like more distant ram RAM - Batteries co-located with renewables are kind of the local to core ram - UPS and similar are cache - Pumped hydro is probably Tape ;)
It feels like we might still be lacking a good/widely deployed HD/SSD equivalent in this space, hopefully new/emerging technologies (maybe the sodium chemistries others are mentioning) will be able to fill that in.
Hydro would be more like your RAM.
It makes much more sense. They are the ones that can choose what part of the grid they plug on, and they are the ones choosing if they provide the service or not.
Typically electric companies pay for the grid infrastructure and operation currently. Electricity producers like solar plants out in the desert is not paying to maintain the poles to your house.
What I think is indisputable is that it is the retail electric company who manages and maintains their grid, and manages it's demand and stability.
>sellers are the ones directly paying for the grid infrastructure.
This is absolutely not the case for the vast majority of that infrastructure. You just mentioned small connections. If you look at the grid, it is basically all retail companies[1]
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/California-electric-grid...
Tesla power wall does that.
In the time before renewables all of the rate-of-change limitations came from sudden increases or decreases in consumption, never from the supply side and this has subtle implications for the structure of the power grid and how much power companies can do to control the match between the two.
Think of it as a person walking across a rope with a balancing pole: you can overbalance for a short while because you can correct for that with the mass of the pole. But if the overbalance is too large for the mass of the pole then you will inevitably fall (brownout, blackout).
There is a company in the United States that has been making these for almost 20 years now, they are used for ride-through in hospitals and for windfarm output stabilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...
https://www.amsc.com/gridtec/renewable-interconnectivity-sol...
Enjoy the read. It's interesting stuff.
Her's a nice article:
https://www.fingridlehti.fi/en/what-is-inertia/
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-beg...
Okay, solar doesn't generate at night, so you would need to charge some batteries during the day and discharge them at night. Maybe that's fine.
But solar also generates less in winter. If we want to transition heating from oil and gas to electric, we need a lot of generation in the winter. If we build some more solar to do that, now there's way more than enough in the summer, so anything that can make up the shortfall in winter is only going to be used in winter. Duty cycle for whatever that is just got cut in half or worse.
Then sometimes it's cloudy for a week. Having enough battery capacity to make it through the night is very different than having enough to make it a whole week, or two. By the second or third day you need enough traditional generating capacity to run the whole grid at night -- but that capacity only gets used one week out of the year.
Now you want to say that gas is too expensive if it can only amortize its costs in those limited circumstances. But what do you want to do instead? You need something that can run the whole grid the week that it's cloudy, none of the options for that are cheap, but the alternative is everybody loses power that week.
Kinda like the BMW i3 with Rex. You charge it at home (solar), but when it gets low the on-board generator (gasoline 2 cylinder) can trickle charge your battery until you get home (where you have solar again).
The power grid doesn't work like that. The base load is around half of the peak load. It never drops to 5%.
That doesn't mean the batteries can't be useful. If the average load is 150GW but that's because it's 100GW at night and 200GW during the day, the batteries let you get away with having only 150GW of average generating capacity instead of 200GW, because during the times when the generation exceeds the demand you can put the surplus in the batteries.
But you still need to maintain an average of 150GW of generating capacity or the batteries will get empty and the power goes out.
But wait, in most places hydroelectricity availability has always been a factor. And THAT was already variable depending on the season (and anomalous seasons). So anyway, both production and consumption have always been seasonal and weather-dependent.
With sometimes chaotic results when a winter is exceptionally mild like last winter in Europe, or strong. Not new either.
And then on top of that, in places like the American West, the prices to import electricity from neighboring regions or states have sometimes been chaotic. Also something that had to be taken into account for peaking gas-powered generation.
The difference is the scale. Traditionally you had a particular amount of base load that would run all the time. Nuclear and coal. The load never dropped below their generation capacity so they never had to stop generating and making money to recover their construction costs.
Then you would have natural gas peaker plants that only ran for part of the day, but they still ran pretty much every day. And these would also allow you to shut down base load plants for maintenance during the lower demand season. So they still got plenty of use.
Now you want to have solar and batteries which can satisfy the demand 98% of the time -- meaning some backup system has to recover its costs out of the remaining 2% of the time. But that backup system doesn't just have to pick up the extra 10% load because it's extra hot today. If it's cloudy long enough for the batteries to run down and it's night, your output from that system is now zero, but you still have the entire load of the power grid to satisfy. Where does it come from? An entirely parallel generating system that only gets used 2% of the time?
The alternative is to keep something like nuclear as e.g. 40% of the grid, and have it generate all the time as it does now. At which point that 40% of the generating capacity is more like 80% of the nighttime load and you're in much better shape to have to make up the last 20% than the entire 100%.
But this is the problem, right? They don't serve the same purpose.
The battery plant allows you to store surplus solar generation during the day and use it at night. That's useful, but it's not the same thing -- because if it's cloudy for an extended period of time, you don't have surplus solar generation during the day, and your batteries are empty. What then?
I worked around a small model with rather optimistic assumptions with zero concern for cost and a focus on efficient consumption to determine what would be required to make a single 1–2-person habitation completely sustainable off grid but with most of the modern confort. I used past weather data and sunshine/wind values. It doesn't work. The number of batteries you need is ridiculous and unrealistic when you scale up the model, that's before considering costs that are just insane.
I think renewables are a good technology especially because we can use the peaks to our advantage and work/organise society around that. In particular car battery charging and air conditioning are 2 very good candidates. Realistically we still need reliable technology to ensure baseload at all times, especially at night. Personally, I think nuclear is just that but just saying that word is so political that people lose all rationality it seems, so we get sucks in meaningless debates and projections...
In a weird twist, most pro-renewables are also anti electric car, I swear ideological people are really unbelievable. I think the world became too political in general (a feminine way of "solving" problems) but in particular the field of energy is overrun by politics; which is kind of funny when you consider that the core skill to make everything work is rationality.
But I guess when we will get grid shut down like in South Africa they will agree that batteries don't work. It will be too late though...
The point is to do that use case planning (and fund a plant based on the results.)
Hopefully nobody is really getting themselves in that situation.
For those with their ear on the track when that sound resonates they will see the light, everyone else will be in the dark without energy storage. Costs are spiking everywhere and the U.S. government is having meetings near weekly exactly about this coming fun. Those meetings reflect frank direct statements about coming derailments and the grid has not changed since its inception and remains to be centralized to this very day. There are enough smart technologists here that can put together exactly what I infer, significant opportunity.
For those further interested check out YT: "Environment Hearing: Clean Power Plan 2.0 Will Jeopardize Reliable and Affordable Energy". As with anything making significant revenues however those threatened with revenue loss will play the dirtiest games to preserve their position, this includes increasing the pollution output that is making that revenue.
Stay Healthy!
A battery can only solve a local issue: a system for locally produced and consumed electricity, If the sourcing solar or wind is transformed to fuel, you also have storage, probably a gas or liquid. And you catch two birds with one stone: storage and distribution. That could be shipping, pipelines but also gas stations. Infrastructure we already have.
That would be enough to buy 80000 cars with 100kWh and provide 8gWh and would be 8x more than Germans biggest water energy storage.
Did I miss something?
Sounds absolutely doable in a few years to have massive more energy storage available.
Combined with a lot more and cheaper renewable energy
Then I fed it into a battery simulator that I wrote.
Based on my estimated cost of a grid-scale battery, I estimated a payoff in ~2 years; and then a lot of profit.
The biggest challenge is the politics and red tape of connecting something to the grid. The grid operators are used to power plants being multi-year projects.
Is this applicable to the South Australia Powerwall installation?
I couldn't tell you if you'll save money with a powerwall in Australia. You'll need to look up local incentives for that. Understanding the economics of a power grid, it's only worth it if you have solar and don't have typical American-style "net metering," or you have solar and need backup for power outages.
What I can tell you is that, in the US, in 2019, I got a rebate for my powerwall that made it price competitive with a standby generator. (Cost a little more, but I don't pay for annual maintenance or fuel.) I don't feed into the grid with it. The incentives would need to be pretty lucrative, though, because if there's a power outage overnight, it'll drain fast! (All my outages since I got it happened during the day.)
What I can also tell you is that Tesla made a lot of headlines hooking up a grid scale battery to balance out an Australian wind farm. It prevented a frequency drop when a coal plant went offline.
This is what I was referring to; I was wondering whether your calculation would apply to it.
This will cause renewable energy to become somewhat less attractive financially, but the alternative is a grid that becomes unreliable over time as gas power plants are decommissioned and don't get replaced.