EIA stats are pretty strong that fossil fuels are on their way out:
>The US has posted its largest annual volume of new
capacity in 20 years [with most of the growth coming from renewables] per @BloombergNEF using @EIAgov data
Fossil production and consumption is still increasing. Once you get all new capacity coming online to 100% renewables then you have to start replacing existing fossil fuel capacity with renewables. It is a very big hill to climb
> Fossil production and consumption is still increasing.
Are you talking worldwide? Or in the US? Because in the US and many other advanced economies total energy consumption is still increasing, but the total amount from fossil fuels is shrinking.
At a certain point it is going to no longer make economic sense to continue to build new fossil fuel based energy production (it already doesn't if externalities are accounted for).
It is a big hill to climb, but as the saying goes, "people vote with their wallets". Economic forces are pretty hard to resist.
According to the data on the page that you linked, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/, fossil consumption is past its peak. You can download the data as a CSV file from the hamburger menu on the chart "U.S. Primary Energy Consumption by Major Sources."
In the US primary energy from fossil fuel consumption was higher in 2007 than it was in 2022: 85.78 quads in 2007, 79.102 quads in 2022.
Production is unfortunately still rising because fuel exports provide an outlet for production that isn't consumed domestically.
The problem is what you'd expect - wind and solar are what are known as energy resources. They are not capacity resources. This is another way of saying what you already know - wind doesn't work in still air and solar doesn't work at night.
This presents a handful of challenges:
* Generators make a lot of their money when they run. WWS can displace thermal units, reduce their runtime/profitability and make them less economically viable. (Even though they currently provide essential services that cannot be replicated with wind or solar)
* Solar falling off at night (or during an eclipse) requires thermal generation to step in to make up the loss. Just as an example, the eclipse cost TX something like 14,000MW of generation over four hours. That's ~25% of grid load around the time. They had to turn on 14,000MW of generation over two hours, turn it back off over the next two, and then ramp it all back up as night fell. This is not easy to do.
* Wind and Solar are typically both distributed and remote. Power needs to be moved over long distances from many places. This adds both cost and complexity, but also the need for reactive support for voltage stability, etc.
I tend to support wind/solar, but you shouldn't lose sight of the fact it's very complex to get it right.
Historically, this has been hydro from surrounding states (like Washington, but also from Canadian BC). I'm not sure what it is today given current water challenges.
> Historically, this has been hydro from surrounding states (like Washington, but also from Canadian BC). I'm not sure what it is today given current water challenges.
If you look at the connection map, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-United-States-sho..., I guess the high capacity DC line that serves vegas could be siphoning some Utah power into socal, but there is much more capacity in the connectivity from Oregon and Washington.
Reading more, there are two high voltage DC lines into SoCal: one from a coal plant in Delta Utah (2.4 Gw, not just from that plant, but let’s say majority coal), the other from a hydro conversion station on the Columbia in Oregon/washington (3.1 Gw). Looking at the map above it looked like the latter one terminated in Las Vegas but I guess it actually goes into SoCal.
The source data doesn't clearly indicate the phenomena being pointed out on Twitter though. And the graph on Twitter cites that url as it's data source anyway.
5% nuclear vs 80% renewables on the chart linked. Really, the sane solution is the one that brings down the financial system (debt for existing oil plant and nuclear is substantial, and has decade long write down periods attached to it.)
Where are the cheap batteries? List prices are gradually coming down but availability remains limited for any large projects. And if you actually want to store a useful amount of energy, that takes a lot more than just a big box full of battery cells.
Note the 7GW of batteries already in California, 3GW in Texas. Texas will move much more quickly than California now because it's a profit based market with few barriers to entry.
There were other estimates in 2024 were for 14.1 GW for this year, but IMHO 30 GW is much more likely:
We are at the start of an exponential growth curve. As prices fall, more demand appears. There are plans for massive amounts of battery production capacity. BNEF has tracked 7.9TWh/year of planned factory capacity by the end of 2025 (probably only 50%-70% of that will get developed):
However, this is exactly on track with the estimates I heard, 3 years ago now, of 10x growth in production capacity every 5 years. By 2031 we should see 20-30TWH/year of production.
So...what's the story with grid-scale battery disposal? Are we heading for another series of super-fund cleanups? That's a lot of toxic material that's going to have to be disposed at end of life.
It will be recycled, there's tons of recycling facilities that are just waiting for recyclable material to show up. So far it's just defective new batteries that go into them.
Plus, they're really not that toxic. Not as bad as fly ash from burning coal, or fracking fluid from natural gas, for example.
I'm a nuclear proponent, but similar arguments can be made for why we cannot solve our woes with nuclear. I'd also suggest scaling battery production is going to be less challenging than scaling nuclear production.
I’m pro-nuclear, but the cost isn’t fixable. It is improvable, and we need to have power sources that ramp up and down on demand, and to fill seasonal gaps. Nuclear is the best long-term bet for that.
However, as it is, coal plants already cost more than solar or wind. Almost all of that cost is in the turbines.
Unfortunately, nuclear plants use similar turbines, and the coal industry has already cost-optimized the death out of them. It is unlikely there are significant improvements coming.
So, even if the rest of the nuclear plant was free, it would still be uncompetitive on a raw $/kwh basis.
What about the 10 years being mired in the courts?
"The licensing process – something that can take more than a decade to complete – consists of a series of approvals by the NRC, including issuance of design certification, early site permits, limited work authorizations, construction permits, operating licenses and combined licenses for new nuclear power facilities."
I think this is one of the major limitations of framing everything in terms of profit. Sometimes a society needs to build services and run them at-cost for it to make sense.
If nuclear was our only choice for zero-carbon energy, I would say that we should change the subsidies and prices to make it profitable, or at least at-cost.
The problem with nuclear isn't that it's at-cost, the problem is that construction projects balloon into financial disasters that are too risky. Check out what happened to France's Areva due to constructing the Olkiluoto. It is literally owned by the French government to bail it out from their financial disaster. Or what happened to Westinghouse and parent company Toshiba due to trying to construct AP1000s.
We have better alternatives that are cheaper and are not such massive single points of failure. Right now the US government is throwing money hand over fist at nuclear, and if the industry can make a go of it and manage to construct some more, great, I have no problem with that.
But nuclear is fundamentally inefficient, expensive, and bad source of power compared to the alternatives. It's always always overpromised and underdelivered. Seemingly nobody in the industry has every made an honest construction estimate. I mean, of course there were a few successful construction projects, but on average it's been a disaster. Throw another $100B at it, see if somebody finally figures it out after 70 years, but it seems pretty doubtful. Nobody left in the industry seems to be capable or smart enough to deliver.
Yeah, transit advocates say that too, but it's the same thing: once you advertise that you don't want to make a profit, you'll find that people can make sure you make a loss. At-cost is the same as cost-plus and has the same problem: the only way for the guy building something for you to extract value from the thing is to raise the cost high enough.
It's a weird thing. American transit advocates will cry themselves hoarse that public transit should be free or run at a loss but almost every system in the world that's good (TfL, HK Metro, JR East) makes money. But every American system loses money hand over fist and sucks.
This makes it quite clear to me. It's very easy to be shitty losing money. It's very hard to be shitty and make money.
Most of those systems tax property increase when infrastructure is built and operate in dense cities with extremely anti-car regulation that gives them a guaranteed consumer base. Do the same in the US and it will magically become profitable, because there will be no alternative.
Sure. There are policies you can change. But if you believe these things shouldn't make a profit you won't put those things into place. It looks like anyone who wants transit to not make a profit just wants it to suck.
Levying taxes directly to the transit agency and punishing car usage doesn't incentivize the transit agency to make the transit not suck, it's just a different way for accounting in public funding.
I'm sure you have a complex model for this, but transit agencies that aim to make losses all suck and the ones that aim to make profits are good. So if someone is telling me the agency should make a loss, they want it to suck. The correlation is strong and whatever your model is, it isn't capturing some variable.
I don't have a complex model, it's just your test that is capturing the wrong variable. Every network you listed is "profitable" because the subsidies they get are in the "income" column instead of the "subsidy" column. The distinction between profitability or making a loss is purely nominative. In the US for example, the HK transit authority would be "aiming to make a loss" because its largest source of income are the taxes it is allowed to levy. Since in the US it's the government that levies the taxes which are counted as subsidies, the HK transit authority in the US would be classified as loss-making. Additionally the MTR in HK has pseudo-governmental powers in that it gets to expropriate, rezone, and resell land at a higher price, which would also be counted as a subsidy in the US and therefore it would be considered to be loss making.
So the problem isn't that my model isn't capturing a variable, it's that your test isn't capturing a variable and is taking in erroneous data points due to diverging definitions of your metric.
How do you define your "back yard"? I mean, perhaps very few people are willing to literally abut a nuclear power plant, but how far are most people OK with it? Looks like I'm about 150 miles from the nearest one, and about 180 miles from the second-nearest[0].
There's a lot of empty land in the US. Sites suitable for a nuclear plant are definitely more likely to be occupied (due to plants needing to be near bodies of water for cooling), but still, we can probably build a lot more.
I lived by one growing up and have a friend who works at the same plant now.
We got a subsidy for living within 10 miles. I don't know the details, but basically a "hey sorry if things go wrong" check.
The one thing with nuclear that many people seem to either not be aware of under play is the thermal pollution. The heat generated and pumped into the rivers does some gnarly stuff, including affecting the o2 and ph of the water, drastically changing the ecosystem in the area.
While I don't want a nuclear power plant literally in my back yard, I'd rather live 10 miles from a nuclear plant than 10 miles from a fossil fuel plant.
I spent the first 25 years of my life (and my parents spent almost their entire lives) living about 15 miles from a nuclear power plant without any issues.
If we could build nuclear plants as quickly or cheaply as renewables, that'd be a sane solution. Right now nobody can do that, which makes nuclear less of an option. Even China is now building vastly more renewables than nuclear, and they're the world's leaders in building nuclear plants.
Many countries you can build nuclear plants safe, fast and cheap. The regulation is the problem. Of course some regulation is needed, but nuclear is one of the most overregulated markets in the world.
Not really, because the return on investment in nuclear is the elephant in the room. Not only does it require massive expenditures and take years to bring online, it also takes decades for it to become profitable. Not many people are willing to make that investment when the lifecycle of solar and wind are orders of magnitude shorter.
Big supporter of renewables, but what's missing here is the make up of what's getting imported. The overnight baseline appears to still be majority imports from, I assume, non-renewables?
How does this stack up with the other relatively recent news that Cali was asking people to unplug their EVs because the grid couldn't handle it? Was that just due to the fluctuating nature of renewables (cloudy, windless days)?
> The above-displayed meme was inaccurate. California did not tell "everyone" not to charge their electric cars. In reality, residents were asked to charge their cars at a time other than when the energy supply was limited.
> A voluntary alert advising Californians to conserve energy during a specific time frame was issued in mid-June 2021 to “help balance supply and demand” on the power grid during an extreme heatwave in the region. Unplugging electric vehicles during peak usage times was one recommended measure included in a list of power-saving strategies issued by the California System Operator.
The original link was from 2021, and not to nit-pick but the 2022 link is not electric-car specific, it was just a "Reduce power usage (which includes cars)" advisory notice.
Kinda weird actually that the NYT spun that into an electric-car issue.
The electrical grid has many different resources that can be constrained. For example, the entire grid may not have adequate supply to meet demand, a transmission line may not have adequate capacity to deliver electricity from generation to load, or a substation may not have enough transformation capacity to delivery electricity from the transmission grid to the distribution grid.
As a society (natural monopoly), we pay to meet peak demand. In fact, most of the cost of electricity (in the US, in most markets...) is not the marginal cost of generation, but the amortization of fixed costs.
My reducing the peak demand, we reduce the need to build new infrastructure that is unnecessary for all but 8755 hours a year.
How is this interpreted any other way than power generation is inadequate and temperamental sources are being used to accommodate the inadequacy and this won't work when conditions aren't right... like on a cloudy day?
> power generation is inadequate and temperamental sources are being used
> this won't work when conditions aren't right... like on a cloudy day
30 of the last 38 days had 100% renewables covering demand. There was no power outages during the other 8 days.
How is this interpreted in any other way than California renewables provide significant coverage of power demand, and California has the infrastructure for the other moments in time.
(Edit to add: I love solar. I have solar panels installed on my house. I sell more solar than I use from the grid. I also have to rely on grid power for 14-18 hours each day.)
The US needs to tax its biggest corporations heavily and funnel the funds into rebuilding its infrastructure sector, including the entire nuclear industry. That’s the only way we can have passively safe reactors everywhere.
The price of electricity in CA is higher largely due to overhead, not input cost. (The price varies widely by the incumbent utility; PG&E is expensive, while Santa Clara power sitting right in the middle of their territory is 50% cheaper.)
And if we all paid for externalities, the cost of fossil fuels would be much higher than they are.
I'm curious though how much of the price we pay for power in CA is because of power generation, versus how much goes to power distribution infrastructure and maintenance.
The CPUC seems on course to a pricing change in CA which will see our price per kwh drop, but will introduce a new fixed fee just to be connected to the grid, under the claim that buildings which generally are powered by their own solar/batteries are not contributing to the cost of e.g. wildfire risk remediation and tree-trimming. But I haven't seen a clear analysis showing the breakdown of how much of costs go to proactive maintenance, vs generation, vs giant settlements for having burned whole towns, etc.
6.8¢ here in Wyoming for wind imported from Idaho; regular is 5.6¢ [1]. Our power company is a local coöperative and doesn’t burn down half the state every decade.
>in Virginia I pay 13c.Quick search shows at least 80% of my power comes from nuclear and natural gas, so it's not like we're putting out rediculous emissions over here.
But at 13c you are also not paying what your power costs. Someone else does (or will eventually have to).
Happy to see progress here, but days like today seem like easy targets for meeting demand with renewables: Most of the state seems to be between 55-75°F (low demand), cloud cover seems light, and the days are reasonably long (high supply).
Again, progress is nice. But I'm still skeptical how well the state's grid can handle another major statewide heatwave, to say nothing about the transition to EVs.
That's the beauty of it: you just keep adding solar, wind, and batteries. And with battery cell manufacturing scaling up [1] [2] [3] [4], I would expect utility scale storage deployments to skyrocket (pushing out fossil generation).
This was always the future, it simply arrived earlier than expected.
Why do we need to currently develop large scale storage? That is only needed for full renewable grid and we are long way from that. The current answer to storage are natural gas power plants which emit CO2. We should be comparing the feasibility of storage to those.
It is much better to use today's money to build more renewables instead of wasting it on expensive storage. Some storage makes sense to reduce the evening peak. But we will have a better idea of what storage we need, and what storage is cheapest to build in a decade when there are a lot more renewables.
They are built, sit on concrete pads in containers for at least 15-20 years, and then are recycled when reaching end of life. Far more friendly than burning coal or fossil gas, or nuclear waste no one wants to store. There is no perfect solution, only least worst options.
As an energy storage solution, pumping water up into a tower and then letting it drop during high demand is simple. Its earth friendly because then at peaks it can take some of the load off the generation, which could be less environmentally friendly. Renewables are better than fossil fuels, and not spending the energy to build solar panels is better than the process to create solar panels.
As long as it's not a toxic battery, then it should be a pretty good interim.
>> But I'm still skeptical how well the state's grid can handle another major statewide heatwave,
This is a PGE problem. They have jacked up our rates to fix their lack of maintenance and planning... I reman suspect that they will do anything of benefit for the state or their customers. Meanwhile we have a mandate from the state to make stoves, heaters and cars electric real soon!
As a Bay Area resident im going to say this out loud: between the states mandates and PGE's prices it looks a hell of a lot like we just redlined a big chunk of the bay.
Excluding Nuclear/Hydro, 35% of California's energy is from intermittent energy. Germany is around 45% so there is room to grow. I suspect it will get more and more expensive to scale past 50% -- the state will be required to keep all of the non-intermittent energy infrastructure for cloudy days.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadBad news for companies that make their profit by burning dead dinosaurs.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/
>The US has posted its largest annual volume of new capacity in 20 years [with most of the growth coming from renewables] per @BloombergNEF using @EIAgov data
https://twitter.com/ShanuMathew93/status/1779902695719006648
> Solar and battery storage to make up 81% of new U.S. electric-generating capacity in 2024
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424#:~:tex....
Are you talking worldwide? Or in the US? Because in the US and many other advanced economies total energy consumption is still increasing, but the total amount from fossil fuels is shrinking.
At a certain point it is going to no longer make economic sense to continue to build new fossil fuel based energy production (it already doesn't if externalities are accounted for).
It is a big hill to climb, but as the saying goes, "people vote with their wallets". Economic forces are pretty hard to resist.
In the US primary energy from fossil fuel consumption was higher in 2007 than it was in 2022: 85.78 quads in 2007, 79.102 quads in 2022.
Production is unfortunately still rising because fuel exports provide an outlet for production that isn't consumed domestically.
This presents a handful of challenges:
* Generators make a lot of their money when they run. WWS can displace thermal units, reduce their runtime/profitability and make them less economically viable. (Even though they currently provide essential services that cannot be replicated with wind or solar)
* Solar falling off at night (or during an eclipse) requires thermal generation to step in to make up the loss. Just as an example, the eclipse cost TX something like 14,000MW of generation over four hours. That's ~25% of grid load around the time. They had to turn on 14,000MW of generation over two hours, turn it back off over the next two, and then ramp it all back up as night fell. This is not easy to do.
* Wind and Solar are typically both distributed and remote. Power needs to be moved over long distances from many places. This adds both cost and complexity, but also the need for reactive support for voltage stability, etc.
I tend to support wind/solar, but you shouldn't lose sight of the fact it's very complex to get it right.
And coal from Utah. That's still huge at night.
Reading more, there are two high voltage DC lines into SoCal: one from a coal plant in Delta Utah (2.4 Gw, not just from that plant, but let’s say majority coal), the other from a hydro conversion station on the Columbia in Oregon/washington (3.1 Gw). Looking at the map above it looked like the latter one terminated in Las Vegas but I guess it actually goes into SoCal.
Also, I don't want a nuclear power plant in my backyard.
I know that's the problem :)
I understand there are issues, however...
The problem with nuclear is the same one that it's always been: it's too expensive. Nobody wants to go bankrupt.
Meanwhile we have cheap batteries and super super cheap solar and wind to charge them.
EIA said developers expect to add 30GW in 2024 here:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202
Note the 7GW of batteries already in California, 3GW in Texas. Texas will move much more quickly than California now because it's a profit based market with few barriers to entry.
There were other estimates in 2024 were for 14.1 GW for this year, but IMHO 30 GW is much more likely:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424
We are at the start of an exponential growth curve. As prices fall, more demand appears. There are plans for massive amounts of battery production capacity. BNEF has tracked 7.9TWh/year of planned factory capacity by the end of 2025 (probably only 50%-70% of that will get developed):
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-...
However, this is exactly on track with the estimates I heard, 3 years ago now, of 10x growth in production capacity every 5 years. By 2031 we should see 20-30TWH/year of production.
Plus, they're really not that toxic. Not as bad as fly ash from burning coal, or fracking fluid from natural gas, for example.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2023/11/02/redwood-...
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/
(Redwood Materials was founded by Tesla's CTO co-founder JB Straubel)
However, as it is, coal plants already cost more than solar or wind. Almost all of that cost is in the turbines.
Unfortunately, nuclear plants use similar turbines, and the coal industry has already cost-optimized the death out of them. It is unlikely there are significant improvements coming.
So, even if the rest of the nuclear plant was free, it would still be uncompetitive on a raw $/kwh basis.
Cost of mining and transporting the coal?
(“Turbine” also includes stuff like the boiler, generator, etc, etc. I should have written “cost of the plant, minus the coal furnace and the fuel”)
"The licensing process – something that can take more than a decade to complete – consists of a series of approvals by the NRC, including issuance of design certification, early site permits, limited work authorizations, construction permits, operating licenses and combined licenses for new nuclear power facilities."
The problem with nuclear isn't that it's at-cost, the problem is that construction projects balloon into financial disasters that are too risky. Check out what happened to France's Areva due to constructing the Olkiluoto. It is literally owned by the French government to bail it out from their financial disaster. Or what happened to Westinghouse and parent company Toshiba due to trying to construct AP1000s.
We have better alternatives that are cheaper and are not such massive single points of failure. Right now the US government is throwing money hand over fist at nuclear, and if the industry can make a go of it and manage to construct some more, great, I have no problem with that.
But nuclear is fundamentally inefficient, expensive, and bad source of power compared to the alternatives. It's always always overpromised and underdelivered. Seemingly nobody in the industry has every made an honest construction estimate. I mean, of course there were a few successful construction projects, but on average it's been a disaster. Throw another $100B at it, see if somebody finally figures it out after 70 years, but it seems pretty doubtful. Nobody left in the industry seems to be capable or smart enough to deliver.
It's a weird thing. American transit advocates will cry themselves hoarse that public transit should be free or run at a loss but almost every system in the world that's good (TfL, HK Metro, JR East) makes money. But every American system loses money hand over fist and sucks.
This makes it quite clear to me. It's very easy to be shitty losing money. It's very hard to be shitty and make money.
So the problem isn't that my model isn't capturing a variable, it's that your test isn't capturing a variable and is taking in erroneous data points due to diverging definitions of your metric.
How do you define your "back yard"? I mean, perhaps very few people are willing to literally abut a nuclear power plant, but how far are most people OK with it? Looks like I'm about 150 miles from the nearest one, and about 180 miles from the second-nearest[0].
There's a lot of empty land in the US. Sites suitable for a nuclear plant are definitely more likely to be occupied (due to plants needing to be near bodies of water for cooling), but still, we can probably build a lot more.
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/images/US_nuclea...
Why would you not want a nuclear power plant near you? I would love to live by one.
We got a subsidy for living within 10 miles. I don't know the details, but basically a "hey sorry if things go wrong" check.
The one thing with nuclear that many people seem to either not be aware of under play is the thermal pollution. The heat generated and pumped into the rivers does some gnarly stuff, including affecting the o2 and ph of the water, drastically changing the ecosystem in the area.
I spent the first 25 years of my life (and my parents spent almost their entire lives) living about 15 miles from a nuclear power plant without any issues.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
(Not sure the headline makes sense without that?)
They even say so in the first paragraph.
> A voluntary alert advising Californians to conserve energy during a specific time frame was issued in mid-June 2021 to “help balance supply and demand” on the power grid during an extreme heatwave in the region. Unplugging electric vehicles during peak usage times was one recommended measure included in a list of power-saving strategies issued by the California System Operator.
Couldn't find a 2023 news article though
Kinda weird actually that the NYT spun that into an electric-car issue.
https://www.caiso.com/Documents/california-iso-extends-flex-...
As a society (natural monopoly), we pay to meet peak demand. In fact, most of the cost of electricity (in the US, in most markets...) is not the marginal cost of generation, but the amortization of fixed costs.
My reducing the peak demand, we reduce the need to build new infrastructure that is unnecessary for all but 8755 hours a year.
https://terraformindustries.com/
> this won't work when conditions aren't right... like on a cloudy day
30 of the last 38 days had 100% renewables covering demand. There was no power outages during the other 8 days.
How is this interpreted in any other way than California renewables provide significant coverage of power demand, and California has the infrastructure for the other moments in time.
For between 15 mins and 6 hours.
Last I checked there are 24 hours in the day.
(Edit to add: I love solar. I have solar panels installed on my house. I sell more solar than I use from the grid. I also have to rely on grid power for 14-18 hours each day.)
Quick search shows at least 80% of my power comes from nuclear and natural gas, so it's not like we're putting out rediculous emissions over here.
Just thought it was important to put into perspective the cost of this.
And if we all paid for externalities, the cost of fossil fuels would be much higher than they are.
The CPUC seems on course to a pricing change in CA which will see our price per kwh drop, but will introduce a new fixed fee just to be connected to the grid, under the claim that buildings which generally are powered by their own solar/batteries are not contributing to the cost of e.g. wildfire risk remediation and tree-trimming. But I haven't seen a clear analysis showing the breakdown of how much of costs go to proactive maintenance, vs generation, vs giant settlements for having burned whole towns, etc.
[1] https://www.lvenergy.com/energy-efficiency/learn-about-green...
But at 13c you are also not paying what your power costs. Someone else does (or will eventually have to).
Again, progress is nice. But I'm still skeptical how well the state's grid can handle another major statewide heatwave, to say nothing about the transition to EVs.
This was always the future, it simply arrived earlier than expected.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... | https://archive.today/8Dy4D ("China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants")
[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/04/12/catl-unveils-first-ma... ("CATL unveils first mass-producible battery storage with zero degradation")
[3] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights... ("Lithium-ion battery capacity to grow steadily to 2030")
[4] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202 ("U.S. battery storage capacity expected to nearly double in 2024")
That would be the "killer app" for these stellar renewable supply milestones.
https://www.mr-sustainability.com/stories/2021/overbuilding-...
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/05/14/overbuilding-solar-at...
It is much better to use today's money to build more renewables instead of wasting it on expensive storage. Some storage makes sense to reduce the evening peak. But we will have a better idea of what storage we need, and what storage is cheapest to build in a decade when there are a lot more renewables.
As an energy storage solution, pumping water up into a tower and then letting it drop during high demand is simple. Its earth friendly because then at peaks it can take some of the load off the generation, which could be less environmentally friendly. Renewables are better than fossil fuels, and not spending the energy to build solar panels is better than the process to create solar panels.
As long as it's not a toxic battery, then it should be a pretty good interim.
This is a PGE problem. They have jacked up our rates to fix their lack of maintenance and planning... I reman suspect that they will do anything of benefit for the state or their customers. Meanwhile we have a mandate from the state to make stoves, heaters and cars electric real soon!
As a Bay Area resident im going to say this out loud: between the states mandates and PGE's prices it looks a hell of a lot like we just redlined a big chunk of the bay.
Cool, but still a long ways to go.