You still need a base power plant and few others for controlling the amount of energy in the system. Using only renewable is kind o hard. If we can figure out a way to store energy the way we can access it very quickly with arbitrary output, we could move on to renewables exclusively.
No we need to be able to shed unwanted power. Generation using renewable sources can be over provisioned, and still be economically feasible. Power usage fluctuations are thé key issue to manage. As wind is a very good base load provider.
Don't look at capacity factor that is very misleading.
What? Please show us where the wind blows 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, every year.
Not being a nay-sayer, but your comment is very misleading.
"Good base load provider" means high availability - reliable enough so the lights don't go out. When's the last time you remember a power outage in the US that did not make the news? Yeah, that kind of availability. Outages are rare enough that they make the news when they do happen. Right now, wind cannot provide this kind of "base load" guarantee unless we overbuild a huge amount of capacity and implement a very sophisticated real-time system to manage all the inputs/outputs, and even then you'll be lucky to generate stable baseline load. China's trying right now and having a very difficult time both delivering stable power, and making money doing it[1].
What is base load? Its the minimum load required in a network or is it those plants for whom it is uneconomical to go below a certain output.
For the first no power plant is truly base load as all plants must shutdown sometimes. So you need to look at a system. So taking into account that in a large area like California it always blows some where, can wind generate the minimal base load at any time. For wind the law of large numbers eventually means that given a per wind turbine capacity factor of 36% a pure wind net achieves 36% capacity factor. If the 36% is the day peak load, then at 18% you are at night low load, considering that wind can be base load.
On the second base load is pump it when you got it e.g. because it costs to much to ramp down (coal, nuclear) or because you got the power anyway (wind, day/noon solar) then yes wind is base load.
Single wind turbines are not base load power plants, but when you have thousands of them over a large area they start to guarantee with high accuracy a minimal load with very good prediction properties.
Of course this ignores economic efficiency, but that depends very much on oil prizes.
e.g.
The us uses 18 million barrels of oil a day. That means the yearly oil consumption of the US is very roughly equivalent to the volume of oil required to flood Rhode island state one foot deep. Which on the face of it does not seem economically efficient but at the moment it is.
This paper proposes converting California's power generation over to wind and solar, with electric vehicles and electrically generated hydrogen vehicles replacing all others. All use of fossil fuels and nuclear power is to be phased out. Notably, it suggests that hydroelectric power should be used to balance loads. i.e. It proposes that California's power grid be stabilized with only hydroelectric power as an on-demand source of generation.
Firstly, in 2013 California imported 32.7% of it's electricity. California has little control over how this is generated. Of the power used by California, 40.8% is from Natural Gas, 8.1% is hydroelectric, 6.0% is Nuclear, 4.3% is from wind power, 4.2% is geothermal, 2.1% is from biomass, and 1.4% is solar[1].
Natural Gas and Nuclear power are both excellent on-demand sources of power, and currently meet 46.8% of California's electricity requirements. If these power sources are to be phased out, they must be replaced with energy sources that are on-demand. Wind and solar do not fit this description. Hydro does, but quintupling California's hydroelectric capacity will have a huge impact on the environment. This paper greatly underestimates how much on-demand power generation capacity a power grid needs in order to be stable.
Side note: California currently derives little of it's electricity from wind or solar power. Electric vehicle batteries carry a high environmental cost to produce, so it is imperative that the energy they are charged with be of renewable origin for any net environmental benefits to be reaped. Given that 40.8% of California's electricity currently comes from natural gas, it's clear that anyone plugging their EV's into California's grid is doing the environment no favors.
I'd like to clear up your terminology a little bit, since the way you use "on demand" actually means two different use-cases. You're referring to "spinning reserve" versus "on-demand" sources of power.
"Spinning reserves" are plants that we keep online in a "ready" state, but disconnected from the grid until we need them. "Spinning reserves" are kept online in the case of a failure elsewhere on the grid, or to adapt to load changes throughout the day. These plants are cost-effective for this use case.
"On-demand" facilities are plants that have very fast spin-up time, and so they can be brought "online" from a powered-off very quickly. These kinds of plants are also cost-effective to cycle between both states.
Natural Gas Combustion Turbines happen to have fast startup time (fast=minutes), and are cost efficient to keep running, so they're used on the grid for both "on demand" and "spinning reserve applications", as it's cheap to cycle them between both states and cheap to keep them spinning (as long as natural gas is cheap). Even better "on demand" sources of power are batteries, since they can be flipped on/off the grid like a lightswitch, but I digress.
Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, are awful for "on demand" applications since they take many days, weeks or months to fully power on/power off, and it costs a lot of money to do so. But, they are good as "spinning reserve" facilities, since they produce very cheap electricity once they are online.
More on generating responsiveness, as I understand it.
Natural gas plants can be "spun up" in about 15 minutes. This is because they run as directly-fired turbines, so there's no time required to build up a head of steam.
Standby diesel generators can be fired up even more quickly (a couple of minutes), though these are expensive and somewhat less efficient.
Hydroelectric power also has an activation response measured in single-digit minutes, or even seconds -- open a sluice gate, synchronize to the grid, and you're on. A fair amount of California's hydro power is used specifically to match against current demand and larger blocks of power bought from elsewhere.
Geothermal is also fairly responsive, though it's got a limited total output. For California, The Geysers (among the largest geothermal generating plants in the world) has a total capacity of 725 MW (this is down from the peak largely due to groundwater exhaustion, with various re-injection schemes proposed and partially adopted).
Coal (virtually unused in California) and nuclear (one plant, Diablo Canyon) have very long ramp-up periods, but can be operated as "spinning reserve" by wasting their unused thermal output. This is particularly expensive for
It is easy to ramp Natural Gas electricity generation, making it suitable for on demand power (known as peakers), but the same is emphatically NOT true for nuclear (known as a base load source) - which produces a steady output and is very hard to turn up and down (similar to coal).
Solar and wind power would substitute baseload power (provided by nuclear plants) and solar and wind power transferred to pumped storage could substitute peaker plants.
The latter is not particularly efficient, but when you consider that solar and wind are dirt cheap these days, it still makes more sense to do that than use natural gas as peaker.
> Given that 40.8% of California's electricity currently comes from natural gas, it's clear that anyone plugging their EV's into California's grid is doing the environment no favors.
Actually, this isn't true at all. Only in Virginia & China and other coal-intensive regions is an electric car more polluting than a gas-guzzler.
> The latter is not particularly efficient, but when you consider that solar and wind are dirt cheap these days, it still makes more sense to do that than use natural gas as peaker.
Citation needed. Solar and wind are still way more expensive per KwH compared to nuclear or natural gas. Please show us figures demonstrating wind or solar production that costs less than $0.10/KwH
The solar market in the US isn't going anywhere anytime soon now that subsidies are gone.
I'm not anti-solar or anti-wind, but if they were cheap enough, we'd have MUCH more on the grid, and be planning for more on the grid. At the moment, we're still seeing isolated cases of experimental large-scale farms being built, but no "industry wide" construction rush like we're seeing with natural gas.
Nuclear? Maybe, but there are still safety concerns. Plus, the nuclear liability cap subsidy is still FAR too low for me to be convinced that those safety concerns are invalid.
> Please show us figures demonstrating wind or solar production that costs less than $0.10/KwH
Solar power is apparently going to be sold to Austin Energy for a tiny bit less than 5¢/kWh under a new 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with SunEdison.
>I'm not anti-solar or anti-wind, but if they were cheap enough, we'd have MUCH more on the grid, and be planning for more on the grid. At the moment, we're still seeing isolated cases of experimental large-scale farms being built, but no "industry wide" construction rush like we're seeing with natural gas.
The difference is that natural gas has superior lobbying (it's also got some great PR teams who are 'greenwashing' it).
This is why cheap solar panels get whacked by 30% tariffs despite pathetic evidence of dumping and why frackers are able to cause all manner of havoc with groundwater, earthquakes and mysterious illnesses and push the costs on to somebody else. At best they pay out token damages - http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/25/justice/texas-family-wins-... - but more usually, nothing.
Solar/wind adoption has been growing very fast, but it's constantly being beset by political roadblocks like the 30% tariffs - usually erected at the behest of the carbon burning companies, who still wield vast political power in the US.
We're very much at an inflexion point where current levels of technology is capable of providing a cleaner, greener future at a knock down price. it's just politics now that is preventing it from happening.
Specifically, it's lobbying done by oil, natural gas & utility companies to hurt their greener competitors.
Having trouble loading first article, as it just shows a headline [edit typo] but thank you for the citation, I'll take it with a grain of salt.
You're being misleading with your second article, however.
> If you removed the ITC (a federal tax credit for solar), the cost would probably be about 8¢/kWh. Still, that’s not bad.
It's a good start, but still not nearly "grid scale cost", and you're only getting electricity at that price when the sun is out. Not suitable for base-load generation, but for peaking. Useful, but not 100% availability useful.
Re: Natural gas - it depends. Prices fluctuate, so it goes both ways. There have been times where gas was much cheaper than many options, only to become a very expensive choice because prices went up. Imagine how the plant owners feel when they build a facility while prices are at one level, only to have to operate it at a higher price later!
The flexibility that combustion turbine plants bring to the grid, however, make them good choices as they have short startup times, work well as spinning reserves, and these days aren't too expensive to operate. When the fuel comes from within our borders, it is good for national security, too.
A bigger thing hurting greener competitors is bad information and idealistic proposals that do not have practical engineering foundations. I'm still making my way through the paper, but I'm incredibly skeptical these guys really understand the grid (grid grid grid) and how it's really put together.
Remember, the goal behind the grid is to provide very reliable power to customers at a decent price, and operate the utility at a profit. Consumers don't usually care where their energy comes from, but obviously "feel better" if it's from environmentally friendly sources. The "early adopters" among us might go for higher prices for cleaner energy, but no "mass market" consumer is going to accept lower grid reliability in exchange for a greener power supply or comparatively higher prices for a "greener" one.
You have just asserted your view that Solar/ Wind are only useful sources for peaking but the linked article contains an argument that they could plausibly be used for base load (with a linked sources). It seems reasonable to consider it your turn to argue against that rather than just reassert.
In light of your comment on the goals of the grid do you not think we have a moral responsibility to disregard what people appear to want to a certain extent and start doing what is sustainable? Even if it does have some cost some short term stability and price. Profit surly shouldn't be the only consideration.
It may not be the people right now that pay the cost of fucking up the planet but some people will. Do you not think everyone has a responsibility to consider the externalities?
This is my opinion, not fact - I personally don't think, even with over-provisioning, we can build enough wind/solar to make it our base load at a reasonable price unless we can make solar + wind much more efficient at generating (at least 2x more efficient than it is today). But even then there are technical challenges to a wind/solar grid that randomly changes at all times that not likely not cheap or easy to overcome.
I do agree with you - we must act in a sustainable way especially for the world of tomorrow. But, the mass market in the first world will likely not sacrifice stability for sustainability. Maybe they'll budge on price, but likely not on convenience.
I also agree we shouldn't be purely profit motivated, but that's a complicated situation - companies like GE have incentive to suppress more "efficient" technology adoption because it affects their bottom line unless it's their IP. When I say efficient, I mean technologies that could be used to enhance the efficiency of current machines in our infrastructure. So, yes, they will advance tech when they can own it, but not when they cannot acquire it. They'll only play defensively, which isn't always going to be in line with "moral responsibility"
To me, that is a more sane and likely cheaper starting point today, so that we can more safely take risks like this paper proposes tomorrow.
> Profit surly shouldn't be the only consideration.
If you've figured out a way to motivate a large number of people to do something other than pure profit (where to the layman profit = employment = paying his bills) then I'm all ears. Shit, EVERYONE is all ears.
But thus far in the history of the world profit has been the best source of motivation we've discovered. When I say "profit" you can't say "ahh rapacious capitalism that's evil blah!" but rather you have to look at it as "the ability to stay alive and perhaps get ahead"
Very few people willingly take a pay-cut. Most of the time the way a person figures out that they need to accept less money for their work is that they get fired from a job and they start looking for a new one. They can't get hired at $x per year anymore so eventually they accept some percentage of $x in order to again have SOME income rather than NO income.
$x dollars per year is HIGHLY correlated with standard of living, so we can reasonably assume that people are not willing to accept a lower standard of living willingly either. They tend to accept a lower one only because they have to. This isn't a hard rule, but it's useful.
As a result it is easy to see that people probably won't willingly take their standard of living down because it's the right thing to do for the environment.
I agree that it would be better to do things for reasons which aren't purely profit-motivated. But I can't blame the world for not working that way because I haven't come up with a better system.
Hole in that logic: at some point more money is just ego. As I age and my cash flow lessens (mortgage paid off; kids thru school) I would certainly consider a job with < pay. In fact I have; I've joined a startup.
So I already addressed your point. I didn't say "no people" or "zero people" I said "very few". You're an outlier. That's great! But it's not reasonable to expect to organize the majority of people around things that motivate a minority of people.
To you the idea that more money is just ego is true; I have no problems accepting that you could believe such a thing. To other people more money isn't necessarily ego. It can be of course, but it isn't necessarily.
I mean, who really needs $200mm? Seemingly Elon Musk did and he's using it to make the world a better place re: Tesla and SpaceX.
Who needs $500k in the bank? Anyone who wants to do a startup and fund themselves rather than run the angel/VC treadmill.
Who needs to make $300k a year rather than $200k a year? Someone who wants to live in a nice place in Manhattan rather than commuting an hour from Brooklyn.
Who needs to make $75k a year instead of $50k? Someone with kids! Someone who doesn't have their house paid off yet. Someone who doesn't own a house yet. Basically everyone.
It's really great that you're in a position to be able to take a pay cut to work at a startup. But I don't think you took that pay cut altruistically; I imagine that you did in order to get something else that you want like more responsibility, more interesting work, to see your work used by millions of people, etc. I could be wrong of course but it seems unlikely to me.
Not all people want more money to spend on themselves. A great plenty do, but there are also outliers who use more money to make the world better. I suppose you could argue that even for those folks it's just ego. If that's the case then I am all for more ego if it drags the future -- kicking and screaming -- into the present.
That's just trying to change the underlying economics of profit.
Subsidies make things profitable which otherwise wouldn't be.
Taxes make things less profitable than they otherwise would be.
Regulations are a lottery-fine system where you "buy" a ticket to "win" by not complying with the regs. If you "win" the lottery you pay a fine of some sort. It's like speeding tickets in cars; they don't ensure 100% compliance with the speed limit but a rough approximation by fining some people who don't obey.
I agree with you that these are ways to change behavior and I would also agree that they're fairly effective. But I am not sure that they motivate people in non-economic methods. I think they just shift the landscape of the economics.
I think one possible way to motivate people to do something without economics is to make it illegal but poorly enforced. This will encourage contrarians to engage in it just out of spite. I'll agree that spite probably isn't the best driver of change but it's all I can come up with. This is supposedly what Frederick II did in Prussia during the 1700s to encourage people to cultivate potatoes for the sake of diversifying the food supply.
The other way I've heard of motivating people to do things is basically to ask politely. I saw a study somewhere (can't find the link after 10min) that compliance with the law is inversely proportional to the amount of force. It was related to speed limits and they found that the more aggressive the wording was regarding how it's illegal to speed the less people complied. This seems like it's on the other end of spectrum above: more authoritarian encouraged non-compliance and more polite encourages compliance.
>A bigger thing hurting greener competitors is bad information and idealistic proposals that do not have practical engineering foundations.
This is absurd and speaks to your lack of knowledge of the industry itself. Their biggest enemy is the oil/gas/utility industry who are explicitly out to destroy them (it's not a secret).
This is why the feed in tariff is being chipped away state by state by ALEC, how subsidies (though they shouldn't really be called subsidies) for 'not polluting' get removed, how subsidies for natural gas get ADDED and how 30% tariffs on solar panels get added.
All these things are designed to artificially shift the market landscape in favor of non-renewable, polluting, environmentally damaging technologies. And it's working.
>Remember, the goal behind the grid is to provide very reliable power to customers at a decent price, and operate the utility at a profit.
Remember that the goal behind the privatized grid is to make a profit. That's IT. That creates all sorts of absurd incentives and is the reason why California's electricity became very UNRELIABLE at one point.
It's also the reason why grids HATE rooftop solar with a seething passion and are desperately trying to destroy it. They can't make a profit out of electricity that you generate for yourself, can they?
They can make a profit out of unreliable, expensively generated electricity though.
>The 12,000 people dying per year from pollution in California costs the health system billions
Even if that number were true, does the "billions" come from a proper study which takes into account the fact that they'll inevitably die of something else anyway?
Also, air pollution from burning fossil fuels has been drastically reduced over the past few decades and will continue to be reduced as technology improves.
>There are no technical, or financial reasons why this can't be done. It just comes down to competence and corruption
One point one trillion dollars, in the presumably-optimistic case proposed. That's $30,000 for every man, woman and child in California.
From the abstract of the PDF we are reading... right at the top: "avoid $103 (31-232) billion/yr in health costs"
103 * 10 years == $1 trillion
As you can see from the first paragraph in the article, the saved health care costs would cover it.
"World Health Organization: Air pollution kills 7 million people a year"
"Air pollution is behind nearly 200,000 early deaths every year in the United States, according to a new study by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology."
"California, they found, topped the charts with an estimated 21,000 early deaths every year due to air pollution, largely as a result of road transportation and commercial and resident emissions."
The article does NOT take into account recent advances like solar thermal in Australia (base load cost close to coal), and car batteries in Denmark (1000s of cars used to store power in the grid). It also doesn't include biofuels like are used in Germany for more than wind+solar currently.
I think whats being missed is 7 million people are not going to become eternal, they're going to die anyway at a higher cost (medical costs only go up, for multiple generations much faster than inflation, so an identical death in 2004 and 2014 will by definition cost more in 2014)
Its a good idea. There's no point in causing unneeded pollution. Not to mention pollution doesn't instantly magically cause death among a very small segment of humanity, it ruins quality of life for pretty much everyone which as a side effect culls off the 1% with the worst lung function or whatever.
Where it goes off the rails is there's a business model around extracting all the net worth from 99% level individuals before they die, to eliminate inherited wealth from the middle and lower upper classes. Having them die from something else, a little later, a little more expensively, isn't going to magically make that business model go away.
...and the will. There a are lot of things that can be done. It comes down to a complex sociopolitical situation. Naïve to past 'corruption' on everything that doesn't go our way.
I'm not sure why you'd discuss this without mentioning the section of the linked article which addresses exactly this issue (maintaining a stable grid with 100% renewables, and current levels of hydroelectric power):
> Here, we do not model the reliability of an optimized future California grid but discuss a recent optimization study in which 100% WWS in the California grid was modeled for two years. Hart and Jacobson[30] used a stochastic optimization model of system operation combined with a deterministic renewable portfolio planning module to simulate the impact of a 100% WWS penetration for California every hour of 2005 and 2006. They assumed near-current hydroelectric and geothermal but increased geographically-dispersed time-dependent wind, solar PV, and CSP
with 3-h storage. They constrained the system to a loss of load of no more than 1 day in 10 years and used both meteorological and load forecasts to reduce reserve requirements. They found that, under these conditions, 99.8% of delivered electricity could be produced carbon-free with WWS during 2005/2006
> The result of Hart and Jacobson[30] suggests that, for California, a large part of the intermittency problem of wind and solar can be addressed not only by combining the two, but also by using hydroelectric and CSP with 3-h storage to fill in gaps. The remaining differences between supply and demand can likely be addressed with the inclusion of demand-response management; energy efficiency measures, CSP with storage longer than 3 h, additional pumped hydroelectric storage, distributed or large-scale battery storage, compressed-air storage, flywheels, seasonal heat storage in soil, out-of-state WWS resources, the addition of flexible loads such as electric vehicles, vehicle-to-grid methods, and oversizing the number of WWS generators to simplify matching power demand with supply while using excess electricity for district heat or hydrogen production.
If you want to refute this, you need to start with Hart and Jacobsen, and work from there.
I don't think so, I think they are only looking at balancing the supply side (making calculations using the demand patterns from 2005/06), demand-management is then another possibility that goes on top of that.
As far as I can gather, although they get almost 100% of energy from renewable sources, they still maintain a significant natural gas backup. As long as it delivers a stable grid, with significant carbon reductions (they talk about 80% reduction) at a reasonable cost, I don't care.
I'd like to take a moment to point out another really great "renewable" technology that is a clever arbitrage hack using power prices: Compressed Air Energy Storage. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAES)
To me, this is "Grid 2.0" technology. You are moving energy from times where you have cheap excess and placing it on the grid in times of expensive need. If we are going to move to a grid with a lot of renewables, technologies like CAES and pumped hydro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...) are two necessary ingredients.
The primary difference between CAES and pumped hydro is that CAES is cost effective for both medium (50+MW) and large (500+MW) installations, while pumped hydro is cost effective only at large scale (500MW+) installations.
I wish I could find the PDF from a research group on the topic of CAES. Their thesis is that we could generate most of the USA's power by installing solar in the south west. The power would get pushed to the rest of the US and stored in CAES repositories using natural caves. Each cave system should provide 3 days of sustained use for its region. This would allow for power disruptions. I can't recall if they also included natural gas as a fallback incase of protracted outage.
It does open us up to a single point of attack, but I thought it was an interesting idea.
CAES works, but has some challenges, most notably the Ideal Gas law: PV = nRT
That means that as you increase (or decrease) pressure, you increase (or decrease) heat.
This affects CAES two ways.
On storing high-pressure gas (usually air), you're creating significant heat of compression. In thin-walled structures (e.g., compressed air tanks), this is generally wasted to the environment. In subterranean storage, often in largely spent (but not fully exhausted) natural gas reservoirs (proven high-pressure gas capacity), you risk explosions within the storage reservoir as hot gas enters.
On energy recovery, you've got the reverse problem: the expanding air cools rapidly. In most CAES systems, apparently, the solution is to create a combined-form recovery, in which both expanding gas _and_ natural gas combustion (to raise the gas temperature) are used, so recovery isn't fully from the compressed air storage itself.
That said: it is among the more promising options, others being pumped hydro (including sea-based pumped hydro), thermal storage, and seawater-based Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis (low round-trip efficiency, but excellent scalability and very long-term storage).
I'm seeing a lot of misinformation on this thread, and I think it would be useful to point hacker news at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), which is a cited source in this paper. They are an engineering-based, independent, non-profit research company. And their headquarters is in the "heart" of Silicon Valley next to Xerox...
Full disclosure: I am not an EPRI employee, but I've read a lot of their papers and presentations. Their research is original and unbaised. Their engineering is pragmatic and chocked full of raw 100% reality. I wish some of the websites people are citing here were talking to places like EPRI first, but instead write sensationalist headlines that hide details and misinform, making sane, coordinated discussion difficult.
I suggest hacker news check them out and maybe send some emails to get better information about this proposal and learn more how the grid truly functions politically, economically, and technically.
Yes, there are other members, but PG&E does not join groups which accelerate the rollout of renewables (especially distributed renewables); it focuses on slowing them. So your "independent" and "unbiased" assertions are quite misleading.
EPRI is largely comprised of traditional utilities, it has major operations outside of California, particularly in North Carolina, which is home to much more conservative utilities than PG&E (whose own record is increasingly checkered).
EPRI is generally positive source of information, but I would hesitate to call it unbiased in all regards.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 87.9 ms ] threadDon't look at capacity factor that is very misleading.
What? Please show us where the wind blows 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, every year.
Not being a nay-sayer, but your comment is very misleading.
"Good base load provider" means high availability - reliable enough so the lights don't go out. When's the last time you remember a power outage in the US that did not make the news? Yeah, that kind of availability. Outages are rare enough that they make the news when they do happen. Right now, wind cannot provide this kind of "base load" guarantee unless we overbuild a huge amount of capacity and implement a very sophisticated real-time system to manage all the inputs/outputs, and even then you'll be lucky to generate stable baseline load. China's trying right now and having a very difficult time both delivering stable power, and making money doing it[1].
[1] http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1171987/analysis---c...
For the first no power plant is truly base load as all plants must shutdown sometimes. So you need to look at a system. So taking into account that in a large area like California it always blows some where, can wind generate the minimal base load at any time. For wind the law of large numbers eventually means that given a per wind turbine capacity factor of 36% a pure wind net achieves 36% capacity factor. If the 36% is the day peak load, then at 18% you are at night low load, considering that wind can be base load.
On the second base load is pump it when you got it e.g. because it costs to much to ramp down (coal, nuclear) or because you got the power anyway (wind, day/noon solar) then yes wind is base load.
Single wind turbines are not base load power plants, but when you have thousands of them over a large area they start to guarantee with high accuracy a minimal load with very good prediction properties.
Of course this ignores economic efficiency, but that depends very much on oil prizes.
e.g. The us uses 18 million barrels of oil a day. That means the yearly oil consumption of the US is very roughly equivalent to the volume of oil required to flood Rhode island state one foot deep. Which on the face of it does not seem economically efficient but at the moment it is.
Firstly, in 2013 California imported 32.7% of it's electricity. California has little control over how this is generated. Of the power used by California, 40.8% is from Natural Gas, 8.1% is hydroelectric, 6.0% is Nuclear, 4.3% is from wind power, 4.2% is geothermal, 2.1% is from biomass, and 1.4% is solar[1].
Natural Gas and Nuclear power are both excellent on-demand sources of power, and currently meet 46.8% of California's electricity requirements. If these power sources are to be phased out, they must be replaced with energy sources that are on-demand. Wind and solar do not fit this description. Hydro does, but quintupling California's hydroelectric capacity will have a huge impact on the environment. This paper greatly underestimates how much on-demand power generation capacity a power grid needs in order to be stable.
Side note: California currently derives little of it's electricity from wind or solar power. Electric vehicle batteries carry a high environmental cost to produce, so it is imperative that the energy they are charged with be of renewable origin for any net environmental benefits to be reaped. Given that 40.8% of California's electricity currently comes from natural gas, it's clear that anyone plugging their EV's into California's grid is doing the environment no favors.
[1]http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/electricity_gen_1983...
"Spinning reserves" are plants that we keep online in a "ready" state, but disconnected from the grid until we need them. "Spinning reserves" are kept online in the case of a failure elsewhere on the grid, or to adapt to load changes throughout the day. These plants are cost-effective for this use case.
"On-demand" facilities are plants that have very fast spin-up time, and so they can be brought "online" from a powered-off very quickly. These kinds of plants are also cost-effective to cycle between both states.
Natural Gas Combustion Turbines happen to have fast startup time (fast=minutes), and are cost efficient to keep running, so they're used on the grid for both "on demand" and "spinning reserve applications", as it's cheap to cycle them between both states and cheap to keep them spinning (as long as natural gas is cheap). Even better "on demand" sources of power are batteries, since they can be flipped on/off the grid like a lightswitch, but I digress.
Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, are awful for "on demand" applications since they take many days, weeks or months to fully power on/power off, and it costs a lot of money to do so. But, they are good as "spinning reserve" facilities, since they produce very cheap electricity once they are online.
Natural gas plants can be "spun up" in about 15 minutes. This is because they run as directly-fired turbines, so there's no time required to build up a head of steam.
Standby diesel generators can be fired up even more quickly (a couple of minutes), though these are expensive and somewhat less efficient.
Hydroelectric power also has an activation response measured in single-digit minutes, or even seconds -- open a sluice gate, synchronize to the grid, and you're on. A fair amount of California's hydro power is used specifically to match against current demand and larger blocks of power bought from elsewhere.
Geothermal is also fairly responsive, though it's got a limited total output. For California, The Geysers (among the largest geothermal generating plants in the world) has a total capacity of 725 MW (this is down from the peak largely due to groundwater exhaustion, with various re-injection schemes proposed and partially adopted).
http://www.calpine.com/media/Geysers_Factsheet.pdf
Coal (virtually unused in California) and nuclear (one plant, Diablo Canyon) have very long ramp-up periods, but can be operated as "spinning reserve" by wasting their unused thermal output. This is particularly expensive for
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit... can be used as an alternative form of on demand form of power. This is already being done in Michigan and Virginia.
Solar and wind power would substitute baseload power (provided by nuclear plants) and solar and wind power transferred to pumped storage could substitute peaker plants.
The latter is not particularly efficient, but when you consider that solar and wind are dirt cheap these days, it still makes more sense to do that than use natural gas as peaker.
> Given that 40.8% of California's electricity currently comes from natural gas, it's clear that anyone plugging their EV's into California's grid is doing the environment no favors.
Actually, this isn't true at all. Only in Virginia & China and other coal-intensive regions is an electric car more polluting than a gas-guzzler.
Citation needed. Solar and wind are still way more expensive per KwH compared to nuclear or natural gas. Please show us figures demonstrating wind or solar production that costs less than $0.10/KwH
The solar market in the US isn't going anywhere anytime soon now that subsidies are gone.
I'm not anti-solar or anti-wind, but if they were cheap enough, we'd have MUCH more on the grid, and be planning for more on the grid. At the moment, we're still seeing isolated cases of experimental large-scale farms being built, but no "industry wide" construction rush like we're seeing with natural gas.
Citation provided:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/22/solar-and-wind-power-n...
>Solar and wind are still way more expensive per KwH compared to nuclear or natural gas.
Natural gas? Hell no:
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/13/solar-sold-less-5%C2%A2k...
Nuclear? Maybe, but there are still safety concerns. Plus, the nuclear liability cap subsidy is still FAR too low for me to be convinced that those safety concerns are invalid.
> Please show us figures demonstrating wind or solar production that costs less than $0.10/KwH
Solar power is apparently going to be sold to Austin Energy for a tiny bit less than 5¢/kWh under a new 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with SunEdison.
>I'm not anti-solar or anti-wind, but if they were cheap enough, we'd have MUCH more on the grid, and be planning for more on the grid. At the moment, we're still seeing isolated cases of experimental large-scale farms being built, but no "industry wide" construction rush like we're seeing with natural gas.
The difference is that natural gas has superior lobbying (it's also got some great PR teams who are 'greenwashing' it).
This is why cheap solar panels get whacked by 30% tariffs despite pathetic evidence of dumping and why frackers are able to cause all manner of havoc with groundwater, earthquakes and mysterious illnesses and push the costs on to somebody else. At best they pay out token damages - http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/25/justice/texas-family-wins-... - but more usually, nothing.
Even in spite of that, the gas companies have been piling on debt to keep the fracking boom alive - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-30/shale-drillers-feas... - which is a story that usually doesn't end well.
Solar/wind adoption has been growing very fast, but it's constantly being beset by political roadblocks like the 30% tariffs - usually erected at the behest of the carbon burning companies, who still wield vast political power in the US.
We're very much at an inflexion point where current levels of technology is capable of providing a cleaner, greener future at a knock down price. it's just politics now that is preventing it from happening.
Specifically, it's lobbying done by oil, natural gas & utility companies to hurt their greener competitors.
You're being misleading with your second article, however.
> If you removed the ITC (a federal tax credit for solar), the cost would probably be about 8¢/kWh. Still, that’s not bad.
It's a good start, but still not nearly "grid scale cost", and you're only getting electricity at that price when the sun is out. Not suitable for base-load generation, but for peaking. Useful, but not 100% availability useful.
Re: Natural gas - it depends. Prices fluctuate, so it goes both ways. There have been times where gas was much cheaper than many options, only to become a very expensive choice because prices went up. Imagine how the plant owners feel when they build a facility while prices are at one level, only to have to operate it at a higher price later!
The flexibility that combustion turbine plants bring to the grid, however, make them good choices as they have short startup times, work well as spinning reserves, and these days aren't too expensive to operate. When the fuel comes from within our borders, it is good for national security, too.
A bigger thing hurting greener competitors is bad information and idealistic proposals that do not have practical engineering foundations. I'm still making my way through the paper, but I'm incredibly skeptical these guys really understand the grid (grid grid grid) and how it's really put together.
Remember, the goal behind the grid is to provide very reliable power to customers at a decent price, and operate the utility at a profit. Consumers don't usually care where their energy comes from, but obviously "feel better" if it's from environmentally friendly sources. The "early adopters" among us might go for higher prices for cleaner energy, but no "mass market" consumer is going to accept lower grid reliability in exchange for a greener power supply or comparatively higher prices for a "greener" one.
In light of your comment on the goals of the grid do you not think we have a moral responsibility to disregard what people appear to want to a certain extent and start doing what is sustainable? Even if it does have some cost some short term stability and price. Profit surly shouldn't be the only consideration.
It may not be the people right now that pay the cost of fucking up the planet but some people will. Do you not think everyone has a responsibility to consider the externalities?
I do agree with you - we must act in a sustainable way especially for the world of tomorrow. But, the mass market in the first world will likely not sacrifice stability for sustainability. Maybe they'll budge on price, but likely not on convenience.
I also agree we shouldn't be purely profit motivated, but that's a complicated situation - companies like GE have incentive to suppress more "efficient" technology adoption because it affects their bottom line unless it's their IP. When I say efficient, I mean technologies that could be used to enhance the efficiency of current machines in our infrastructure. So, yes, they will advance tech when they can own it, but not when they cannot acquire it. They'll only play defensively, which isn't always going to be in line with "moral responsibility"
To me, that is a more sane and likely cheaper starting point today, so that we can more safely take risks like this paper proposes tomorrow.
If you've figured out a way to motivate a large number of people to do something other than pure profit (where to the layman profit = employment = paying his bills) then I'm all ears. Shit, EVERYONE is all ears.
But thus far in the history of the world profit has been the best source of motivation we've discovered. When I say "profit" you can't say "ahh rapacious capitalism that's evil blah!" but rather you have to look at it as "the ability to stay alive and perhaps get ahead"
Very few people willingly take a pay-cut. Most of the time the way a person figures out that they need to accept less money for their work is that they get fired from a job and they start looking for a new one. They can't get hired at $x per year anymore so eventually they accept some percentage of $x in order to again have SOME income rather than NO income.
$x dollars per year is HIGHLY correlated with standard of living, so we can reasonably assume that people are not willing to accept a lower standard of living willingly either. They tend to accept a lower one only because they have to. This isn't a hard rule, but it's useful.
As a result it is easy to see that people probably won't willingly take their standard of living down because it's the right thing to do for the environment.
I agree that it would be better to do things for reasons which aren't purely profit-motivated. But I can't blame the world for not working that way because I haven't come up with a better system.
So I already addressed your point. I didn't say "no people" or "zero people" I said "very few". You're an outlier. That's great! But it's not reasonable to expect to organize the majority of people around things that motivate a minority of people.
To you the idea that more money is just ego is true; I have no problems accepting that you could believe such a thing. To other people more money isn't necessarily ego. It can be of course, but it isn't necessarily.
I mean, who really needs $200mm? Seemingly Elon Musk did and he's using it to make the world a better place re: Tesla and SpaceX.
Who needs $500k in the bank? Anyone who wants to do a startup and fund themselves rather than run the angel/VC treadmill.
Who needs to make $300k a year rather than $200k a year? Someone who wants to live in a nice place in Manhattan rather than commuting an hour from Brooklyn.
Who needs to make $75k a year instead of $50k? Someone with kids! Someone who doesn't have their house paid off yet. Someone who doesn't own a house yet. Basically everyone.
It's really great that you're in a position to be able to take a pay cut to work at a startup. But I don't think you took that pay cut altruistically; I imagine that you did in order to get something else that you want like more responsibility, more interesting work, to see your work used by millions of people, etc. I could be wrong of course but it seems unlikely to me.
Not all people want more money to spend on themselves. A great plenty do, but there are also outliers who use more money to make the world better. I suppose you could argue that even for those folks it's just ego. If that's the case then I am all for more ego if it drags the future -- kicking and screaming -- into the present.
The beginning of course is articles like this one.
Subsidies make things profitable which otherwise wouldn't be.
Taxes make things less profitable than they otherwise would be.
Regulations are a lottery-fine system where you "buy" a ticket to "win" by not complying with the regs. If you "win" the lottery you pay a fine of some sort. It's like speeding tickets in cars; they don't ensure 100% compliance with the speed limit but a rough approximation by fining some people who don't obey.
I agree with you that these are ways to change behavior and I would also agree that they're fairly effective. But I am not sure that they motivate people in non-economic methods. I think they just shift the landscape of the economics.
I think one possible way to motivate people to do something without economics is to make it illegal but poorly enforced. This will encourage contrarians to engage in it just out of spite. I'll agree that spite probably isn't the best driver of change but it's all I can come up with. This is supposedly what Frederick II did in Prussia during the 1700s to encourage people to cultivate potatoes for the sake of diversifying the food supply.
The other way I've heard of motivating people to do things is basically to ask politely. I saw a study somewhere (can't find the link after 10min) that compliance with the law is inversely proportional to the amount of force. It was related to speed limits and they found that the more aggressive the wording was regarding how it's illegal to speed the less people complied. This seems like it's on the other end of spectrum above: more authoritarian encouraged non-compliance and more polite encourages compliance.
They're non-economic at least on the surface.
This is absurd and speaks to your lack of knowledge of the industry itself. Their biggest enemy is the oil/gas/utility industry who are explicitly out to destroy them (it's not a secret).
This is why the feed in tariff is being chipped away state by state by ALEC, how subsidies (though they shouldn't really be called subsidies) for 'not polluting' get removed, how subsidies for natural gas get ADDED and how 30% tariffs on solar panels get added.
All these things are designed to artificially shift the market landscape in favor of non-renewable, polluting, environmentally damaging technologies. And it's working.
>Remember, the goal behind the grid is to provide very reliable power to customers at a decent price, and operate the utility at a profit.
Remember that the goal behind the privatized grid is to make a profit. That's IT. That creates all sorts of absurd incentives and is the reason why California's electricity became very UNRELIABLE at one point.
It's also the reason why grids HATE rooftop solar with a seething passion and are desperately trying to destroy it. They can't make a profit out of electricity that you generate for yourself, can they?
They can make a profit out of unreliable, expensively generated electricity though.
Solar PV is modestly more expensive, but has seen prices falling at ~20% annually (50% every 3.5 years) since the 1970s.
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/04/16/solars-dramatic-cost-fal...
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/graph-of-the-day-solars-99-c...
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/citigroup-how-solar-module-p...
The 12,000 people dying per year from pollution in California costs the health system billions. This saving can be used to fund projects.
There are no technical, or financial reasons why this can't be done. It just comes down to competence and corruption.
Even if that number were true, does the "billions" come from a proper study which takes into account the fact that they'll inevitably die of something else anyway?
Also, air pollution from burning fossil fuels has been drastically reduced over the past few decades and will continue to be reduced as technology improves.
>There are no technical, or financial reasons why this can't be done. It just comes down to competence and corruption
One point one trillion dollars, in the presumably-optimistic case proposed. That's $30,000 for every man, woman and child in California.
103 * 10 years == $1 trillion
As you can see from the first paragraph in the article, the saved health care costs would cover it.
"World Health Organization: Air pollution kills 7 million people a year"
"Air pollution is behind nearly 200,000 early deaths every year in the United States, according to a new study by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology."
"California, they found, topped the charts with an estimated 21,000 early deaths every year due to air pollution, largely as a result of road transportation and commercial and resident emissions."
The article does NOT take into account recent advances like solar thermal in Australia (base load cost close to coal), and car batteries in Denmark (1000s of cars used to store power in the grid). It also doesn't include biofuels like are used in Germany for more than wind+solar currently.
Its a good idea. There's no point in causing unneeded pollution. Not to mention pollution doesn't instantly magically cause death among a very small segment of humanity, it ruins quality of life for pretty much everyone which as a side effect culls off the 1% with the worst lung function or whatever.
Where it goes off the rails is there's a business model around extracting all the net worth from 99% level individuals before they die, to eliminate inherited wealth from the middle and lower upper classes. Having them die from something else, a little later, a little more expensively, isn't going to magically make that business model go away.
> Here, we do not model the reliability of an optimized future California grid but discuss a recent optimization study in which 100% WWS in the California grid was modeled for two years. Hart and Jacobson[30] used a stochastic optimization model of system operation combined with a deterministic renewable portfolio planning module to simulate the impact of a 100% WWS penetration for California every hour of 2005 and 2006. They assumed near-current hydroelectric and geothermal but increased geographically-dispersed time-dependent wind, solar PV, and CSP with 3-h storage. They constrained the system to a loss of load of no more than 1 day in 10 years and used both meteorological and load forecasts to reduce reserve requirements. They found that, under these conditions, 99.8% of delivered electricity could be produced carbon-free with WWS during 2005/2006
> The result of Hart and Jacobson[30] suggests that, for California, a large part of the intermittency problem of wind and solar can be addressed not only by combining the two, but also by using hydroelectric and CSP with 3-h storage to fill in gaps. The remaining differences between supply and demand can likely be addressed with the inclusion of demand-response management; energy efficiency measures, CSP with storage longer than 3 h, additional pumped hydroelectric storage, distributed or large-scale battery storage, compressed-air storage, flywheels, seasonal heat storage in soil, out-of-state WWS resources, the addition of flexible loads such as electric vehicles, vehicle-to-grid methods, and oversizing the number of WWS generators to simplify matching power demand with supply while using excess electricity for district heat or hydrogen production.
If you want to refute this, you need to start with Hart and Jacobsen, and work from there.
To me, this is "Grid 2.0" technology. You are moving energy from times where you have cheap excess and placing it on the grid in times of expensive need. If we are going to move to a grid with a lot of renewables, technologies like CAES and pumped hydro (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...) are two necessary ingredients.
The primary difference between CAES and pumped hydro is that CAES is cost effective for both medium (50+MW) and large (500+MW) installations, while pumped hydro is cost effective only at large scale (500MW+) installations.
It does open us up to a single point of attack, but I thought it was an interesting idea.
That means that as you increase (or decrease) pressure, you increase (or decrease) heat.
This affects CAES two ways.
On storing high-pressure gas (usually air), you're creating significant heat of compression. In thin-walled structures (e.g., compressed air tanks), this is generally wasted to the environment. In subterranean storage, often in largely spent (but not fully exhausted) natural gas reservoirs (proven high-pressure gas capacity), you risk explosions within the storage reservoir as hot gas enters.
On energy recovery, you've got the reverse problem: the expanding air cools rapidly. In most CAES systems, apparently, the solution is to create a combined-form recovery, in which both expanding gas _and_ natural gas combustion (to raise the gas temperature) are used, so recovery isn't fully from the compressed air storage itself.
That said: it is among the more promising options, others being pumped hydro (including sea-based pumped hydro), thermal storage, and seawater-based Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis (low round-trip efficiency, but excellent scalability and very long-term storage).
See:
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electric...
http://www.reddit.com/r/RenewableTech/comments/29t6t7/seawat...
(Disclaimer: I'm mod of those subs).
http://www.epri.com/
Full disclosure: I am not an EPRI employee, but I've read a lot of their papers and presentations. Their research is original and unbaised. Their engineering is pragmatic and chocked full of raw 100% reality. I wish some of the websites people are citing here were talking to places like EPRI first, but instead write sensationalist headlines that hide details and misinform, making sane, coordinated discussion difficult.
I suggest hacker news check them out and maybe send some emails to get better information about this proposal and learn more how the grid truly functions politically, economically, and technically.
Yes, there are other members, but PG&E does not join groups which accelerate the rollout of renewables (especially distributed renewables); it focuses on slowing them. So your "independent" and "unbiased" assertions are quite misleading.
EPRI is largely comprised of traditional utilities, it has major operations outside of California, particularly in North Carolina, which is home to much more conservative utilities than PG&E (whose own record is increasingly checkered).
EPRI is generally positive source of information, but I would hesitate to call it unbiased in all regards.
J&D's proposal for a US national wind, water, and sun energy system: (http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad11...) is one of the more complete such prosals around. See more links on their website:
http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/susen...
Recently they've been providing proposals for each of the 50 states:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/WWS-5....
David McKay's Without the Hot Air (http://www.withouthotair.com/) is one of the few comparable efforts I'm aware of, though RMI/Amory Lovins Reinventing Fire (http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781603585385-0) probably belongs in the mix.
Also being discussed on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/RenewableTech/comments/2d8ptl/a_road...
(Disclaimer: I'm a moderator of that sub).