IMHO, Matt's argument is clear and convincing. However (you knew that was coming, right?), one sentence is wrong: "So if you go build the [solar] plant somewhere that gets a lot of sunshine, your cost per megawatt is very low."
Why? The piece confuses megawatt with megawatt-hour. Consider Las Vegas NV (sunny) and Monterey CA (frequently foggy). Two identical panels, one in each city, would produce the same instantaneous power output (megawatt) at solar noon on a sunny day. The two panels would have the same cost per megawatt. But the panel in Las Vegas would produce more energy (megawatt-hours) per year because Las Vegas has more sunny hours than Monterey.
A megawatt is a flow rate of energy, but it does not sound like a rate. Rates typically include a unit of time, such as "gallons per minute" or "miles per hour". A megawatt is an energy flow rate of one megajoule per second.
A megawatt-hour is an amount of energy, specifically, one megawatt flowing from generator to consumption for one hour, or two megawatts flowing for 30 minutes, etc.
The panel in sunny Las Vegas would have a lower cost per megawatt-hour than the one in foggy Monterey, even though the two panels would have the same cost per megawatt.
Extremely well thought out post! An ancillary question is why do people care about the inputs when the outputs are what affects the climate. Seems emotional and irrational to me.
I feel like Matt strawmanned the argument for renewables here. I would have liked to see more acknowledgement of issues such as: methane is particularly bad on a 20-year horizon; fugitive emissions are a real problem; solar + wind is much less volatile when built out over a large geographic area; new industries are emerging to take the most intermitted RE production, leaving higher reliability output for essential services; small modular nukes face huge challenges in getting opex and capex down due to safety and security issues; there are lots of ways to balance RE.
David Osmond (@DavidOsmond8) runs a live simulation of the Australian national grid at 100% renewables with 5 hours storage (in plain English, a trivial amount assuming a small percentage of EV owners allow up to a third of their battery to be accessed for some kind of fee). Spoiler: most weeks it gets to 99.9% renewables. Yes there will always be some role for peakers but I don't see those being methane in the long term other than through some kind of political fix-up.
Nuclear sucks as a complement to intermittent renewable energy.
Very high fixed costs, slow ramping, and low variable costs? That sounds like something you're going to want to run as much as it can.
But in a grid dominated by cheap intermittent renewables, you need two things to complement it - short-term dispatchable power (and/or demand maangement), and seasonal storage of some kind. Neither of these use cases are a good match for what nuclear can do.
At this point, somebody's going to say something silly like "oh, we could use the surplus energy to recharge <energy storage technology of choice>". Well, guess what, if you're going to use energy storage tech, you may as well use the cheapest source of energy available to fill the storage, and it ain't nuclear.
I agree totally that anybody prematurely shutting down a safely operating nuclear plant is nuts. But the track record of nuclear is so unpromising, and it's such a poor match with the rest of the energy landscape, that wasting political effort trying to streamline the NRC and establish an effective construction pipeline for the things seems like misdirected effort.
To repeat myself, the payoff from matching Australia's rooftop solar installation costs is a far juicier, and far more politically viable, than trying to get nuke plants built.
My concern is that this is both true and fully decarbonising with this approach is prohibitively expensive. Is building out this approach locking us into an incomplete path or stranded assets?
So I believe Matt's central contention -that electricity costs are going to spiral out of control once renewable penetration reaches levels a lot lower than what's required to get emissions down to ~0 - is wrong, at least for the US and Australia.
Poking a finger into my eye hurts less than a sharp stick, so let’s hear it for fingers in the eye? I’m not even sure what we are doing here. Your power is to recast the framing and you’ve adopted a problematic industry framing even while pointing at the problematic industry framing.
Emissions data are misleading at best. Every player has a self-interest in controlling the narrative. Burning methane causes a whole supply chain of methane transportation before one gets to the open flame doing work at the end of the story. One can even power photovoltaics off a methane flame – at high efficiency. That doesn’t mean one ought to. Like the hydrogen combustion engine, a focus on the end of the pipeline is deliberately misleading and intended to confuse the conversation space. We are not hard enough on natural gas, and being slow to catch on to that is dangerous.
a) The industry reports its own compliance metrics. They underestimate losses.
b) Large losses/escape/emissions occur in the field – the pain before the work is done is real.
c) These emissions are all bad, as is the dominant paradigm ongoing demand for gas supports.
Any NG support slows the changeover; we don’t need a bridge to the future anymore we just need to build the things we already know how to build. Pointing out that the industry fixed problems when they were identified isn’t actually the point in favor of the industry. They didn’t report or discover the problems themselves and their incentives aren’t aligned to doing this work up front before a problem arises – clearly. There is also a demonstrable decline in emissions on days regulators are making inspections, this isn’t a game being played in good faith. And there is still the years of operation before detection to consider.
Fracking and Gas Exploration were useful for technological development, in the past. We're beyond those technologies for next generation geothermal. We need technologies for hot-rock drilling (maybe fracking but I prefer sealed systems) and parallel drilling; these are beyond the operational window for natural gas industry. Natural Gas and fracking got us here, but we are ready set them aside and keep moving forward. Most of the same companies can be in this new game, it just isn’t the same game they’ve been playing successfully for decades and they are understandably concerned about the transition. That’s no reason to continue supporting that industry’s easy ride and resistance.
Gas reliability isn’t better than solar and wind, the narrative of baseload generation has been blown apart with the NG freeze-up throughout Texas last year. Things deemed impossible a few years ago are happening today with renewable load provisioning:
The point of slowly boring hard boards is to ensure that we do not lose the capability to do the things we can do even today, and here we are losing that perspective. One can make the whole point about hydro and nuclear without bringing natural gas into the conversation, so why is natural gas in the conversation? Because natural gas is ‘cleaner’ than coal? Surely that’s not the bar we should be holding ourselves to. Natural gas is dirtier and more costly than alternatives that exist today and have a broader environmental and land use impact than the same. We just count those impacts differently. This is a policy choice; we should interrogate that choice and what motivates it.
NG assets, in particular liquification ports, are huge asset investments with long lifetimes. We’d be better off making those magnitude of investments in the work of over-provisioning renewable generation capacity so we can plow through future demand peaks and provide a super abundance of electricity through the troughs. Many climate (and general business) problems become easier with ubiquitous free electricity. Overabundance hasn’t been anyone’s goal for the last 100 years; the fuel delivery is the monetization path and limiting that supply is good for business. That’s the shift that is already in progress, and NG is on the wrong side of it. Your piece doesn’t even consider it a useful end, it is a hazard or sub-optimal condition to be avoided. That’s the framing that is most wrong through all of this. We can, and probably will, hold out and resist overabundance for many years or decades (many people will still get rich here) but it is a bad path for humans in general and the quicker we stop digging the hole deeper the better off we’ll all be. The store of geothermal energy on earth is comically larger than any other source available to us as a species.
Also, on the replacement paths… this isn’t how any of this works. (Many, esp. the ones still running coal) Utilities nominate their own first generating facilities and their incentives lead to assigning the least profitable/efficient/clean assets first not the most meritorious/efficient/cheapest. That coal or NG plant will not compete in the merit market where cost of generation dominates, so you as an operator need to load it into the system capacity outside of that competitive marketplace. That leaves the efficient resources the last to draw into the pool of supply that is utilized – it is deeply sub-optimal and supports a narrative of insufficiency as a replacement source. It isn’t an accident that renewable capacity is curtailed first and renewable back-connects have 15-year backlogs to supply their power to the grid. This is a system of fossil fuel consumption defending itself. It is not a physical fact of any of the power generating technologies; this is a policy choice and we’re in a position to advocate for less brain-dead policy here. Instead, we accept the extractor frame where supply must be limited and vast infrastructure of transportation of physical fuels must be defended and externalized.
I think people over-estimate the dispatchability of hydropower. Often there are other constraints such as flood control, irrigation, and recreational uses that take precedence over power generation for the entities that are operating large dams.
I said this last time nuclear came up, but again, the problem with nuclear is that we went a lucky ~80 years without a land war in a country with a nuclear power plant. That luck has run out, alas. And long term, if the vision of 2200 is that there are lots of nuclear power plants around the world filling in the holes in renewable tech, I just don't see how that doesn't result in unprecedented catastrophes when, e.g, there's a war or a megavolcano or some other Black Swan event.
Should we continue to use the nuclear plants we already have? Yes. Should we figure out how to make safer plants using new technologies? Sure. Should we invest in making more plants using the currentish technology? I just don't see how we can do that and have a reasonable expectation of long term safety.
Would love to see MY dig in on some of the implications of an energy system with nearly free energy for parts of the day. Just looking at the supply side and how to recreate a fossil fuel based energy system with renewables seems off to me.
I think this article could be improved by adding a discussion about demand response. This is an important mechanism for enabling higher RE integration to the electric grid. With smart meters, utilities can send real time price signals to consumers, and equipment can be programmed to automatically adjust demand (e.g., EV charging or hot water storage tank setpoints) based on renewable supply, weather, & aggregate grid demand.
There's another element of natural gas that hasn't been talked about. Much of the gas on the world market comes from the same wells that are used to drill for oil, so as long as the world burns oil, the world will continue to extract gas, like it or not.
Once the gas is extracted, there are essentially three choices regarding what to do with it:
1) Burn the gas to accomplish something productive, such as heat a building or generate electricity
2) Burn the gas at the well in a giant fire, just to get rid of it.
3) Release the gas into the atmosphere, unburned.
Of the three options, 1) is the least environmentally impactful. 2) emits the same greenhouses gases as 1), but throws the energy away instead of using it. 3) is even worse than 2) because methane warms the planet much more than carbon dioxide.
Or 4, use it as feedstock for various chemical processes. If we manage to reduce overall oil consumption, this will become a larger fraction of the overall NG produced. And we can reduce the deliberately produced NG that is not from oil.
Matt's knowledge of clean energy is like the deployment of renewables on the grid: awesome, growing rapidly, and ready for even more valuable growth.
1. "awesome": this is an excellent writeup that will net-educate 95% of its readers. Kudos!
2. "growing rapidly": see previous. Also, he is shifting from nuclear-is-the-answer (false) to nuclear-is-a-tool (true).
3. "ready for even more valuable growth": see below
Broadly, what was true in the last decade (natural gas was the only viable complement to variable renewables) will not be true in the next decade. EV batteries, collectively, will provide enormous load shifting potential. Offshore wind is being built out at city-scale right now. As Matt has written elsewhere but mysteriously omits here, transmission is a valuable complement to variable renewables, and a dozen key additions would enable space-shifting at city-scale. Some of them will get built. Enormous investments in electrolysis and alternate-chemistry electric storage happening now promise economy-scale impact.
Shifting back to solar, wind, and lithium-ion storage: their exponential improvements in price/performance will continue. Exponential growth is hard to grasp, especially when two curves interact. As solar becomes "too cheap to meter", we'll find new ways to exploit it. As road transportation becomes a grid resource, it will soak up that cheap solar and displace some of the natural gas that is now turning on in the evening.
Resources for folks who would like to understand the next decade of clean energy growth:
1. @JesseJenkins, @TimMLatimer, and the rest of #energytwitter
I think these vastly overstate exponential cost reduction when we're talking about things out in the physical world. A solar panel and the battery system it connects to, at this point it's a much different point on the cost curve than at the early days people like to cite.
And demand is going to skyrocket for all of the minerals that are needed to build these things. On the one hand as prices rise, people will mine more of it, but the lags, mismatches, and volatility are really going to surprise a lot of people who just expect this nice, clean and continued reduction in price.
And if you make your entire plan contingent upon rapid continued price decreases, somebody ends up paying if you don't get it done... Whether it's the rate payer, the taxpayer, or the people suffering through reliability issues.
Thanks for the resources, I will have to take a look at those.
I don't understand your assumption that ev batteries will shift load but I can only assume that you think that we will eventually use people's cars to store energy and only charge them when the grid has excess power and then drain them or not charge them when the grid doesn't have enough. That just isn't going to happen. Range anxiety is already the number one obstacle to EV adoption, dictating when people can or can't charge their cars simply won't be acceptable to most people. Evs will change when electrical consumption happens, but most charging is going to happen when people get home from work, which is already one of the daily peaks in power consumption, making the problems of non-baseload power worse, not better.
"assumption ... eventually ... just isn't going to happen": we are doing this now. Dozens of efforts are under way, including my project and a second I know of at my Fortune-200 employer. You are correct to note the co-incidence of "peak plugin" with the evening peak, but that *incredible opportunity* is being exploited today and will scale to 10s of GW in the next few years; 100s soon thereafter.
I think these programs are a very good idea, since making consumers react to power prices to alter their consumption habits is good. But I'm a little skeptical of how much energy consumption can be altered this way and how many people will accept it. Very little of the energy I personally use can be scheduled for off-peak consumption, and the few things I could possibly change would be annoying enough that I wouldn't do it without a large financial incentive. My current energy bill wouldn't be high enough to change my consumption habits and if you try to tell a large group of people to change their consumption or face higher prices you will have the same pushback you get with a carbon tax. As far as charging goes, if I'm going to delay charging one of my vehicles I have to be pretty confident that I won't need it any time soon. I have a PHEV and the few times I have decided I didn't need to charge it right away when I got home I ended up forgetting I needed to run an errand later and always regret it.
Agree that many consumers won’t make many changes without significant incentives and the the fear of not having a charged car will limit uptake. A couple minor points though: 1) Peak pricing will be pushed by utilities, not the legislature like a carbon tax, so faces a much smaller implementation hurdle. 2) More and more devices will shift demand automatically, especially with thermostats and water heaters, as you can easily bank some of the temperature changes overnight.
No utility is going to change my thermostat temperature or decide when I get to take a shower. Pretty sure most people feel the same way. I would rather pay more for electricity than live in a cold house.
Matt keeps mentioning geothermal and the upside looks really good, so I don't understand what's holding it back. There appear to be some regulatory hurdles, some technical ones, and some environmental ones (maybe from environmental groups who have "lost the plot"), but I don't grasp the relative weight of each.
Your article explains
Thank you Matt why the oil and gas industry supports renewable solar and wind and fuels nuclear opposition.
IMHO, Matt's argument is clear and convincing. However (you knew that was coming, right?), one sentence is wrong: "So if you go build the [solar] plant somewhere that gets a lot of sunshine, your cost per megawatt is very low."
Why? The piece confuses megawatt with megawatt-hour. Consider Las Vegas NV (sunny) and Monterey CA (frequently foggy). Two identical panels, one in each city, would produce the same instantaneous power output (megawatt) at solar noon on a sunny day. The two panels would have the same cost per megawatt. But the panel in Las Vegas would produce more energy (megawatt-hours) per year because Las Vegas has more sunny hours than Monterey.
A megawatt is a flow rate of energy, but it does not sound like a rate. Rates typically include a unit of time, such as "gallons per minute" or "miles per hour". A megawatt is an energy flow rate of one megajoule per second.
A megawatt-hour is an amount of energy, specifically, one megawatt flowing from generator to consumption for one hour, or two megawatts flowing for 30 minutes, etc.
The panel in sunny Las Vegas would have a lower cost per megawatt-hour than the one in foggy Monterey, even though the two panels would have the same cost per megawatt.
Extremely well thought out post! An ancillary question is why do people care about the inputs when the outputs are what affects the climate. Seems emotional and irrational to me.
I don't think you should be a paid shill for gas. I think you should be a paid shill for nuclear.
I feel like Matt strawmanned the argument for renewables here. I would have liked to see more acknowledgement of issues such as: methane is particularly bad on a 20-year horizon; fugitive emissions are a real problem; solar + wind is much less volatile when built out over a large geographic area; new industries are emerging to take the most intermitted RE production, leaving higher reliability output for essential services; small modular nukes face huge challenges in getting opex and capex down due to safety and security issues; there are lots of ways to balance RE.
David Osmond (@DavidOsmond8) runs a live simulation of the Australian national grid at 100% renewables with 5 hours storage (in plain English, a trivial amount assuming a small percentage of EV owners allow up to a third of their battery to be accessed for some kind of fee). Spoiler: most weeks it gets to 99.9% renewables. Yes there will always be some role for peakers but I don't see those being methane in the long term other than through some kind of political fix-up.
Ok
Nuclear sucks as a complement to intermittent renewable energy.
Very high fixed costs, slow ramping, and low variable costs? That sounds like something you're going to want to run as much as it can.
But in a grid dominated by cheap intermittent renewables, you need two things to complement it - short-term dispatchable power (and/or demand maangement), and seasonal storage of some kind. Neither of these use cases are a good match for what nuclear can do.
At this point, somebody's going to say something silly like "oh, we could use the surplus energy to recharge <energy storage technology of choice>". Well, guess what, if you're going to use energy storage tech, you may as well use the cheapest source of energy available to fill the storage, and it ain't nuclear.
I agree totally that anybody prematurely shutting down a safely operating nuclear plant is nuts. But the track record of nuclear is so unpromising, and it's such a poor match with the rest of the energy landscape, that wasting political effort trying to streamline the NRC and establish an effective construction pipeline for the things seems like misdirected effort.
To repeat myself, the payoff from matching Australia's rooftop solar installation costs is a far juicier, and far more politically viable, than trying to get nuke plants built.
My concern is that this is both true and fully decarbonising with this approach is prohibitively expensive. Is building out this approach locking us into an incomplete path or stranded assets?
Short version: no.
Longer version: there are multiple studies/plans out there suggesting that very high proportions of renewables won't break the bank.
There's this one for the US from a group of Stanford academics: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/21-USStates-PDFs/21-USStatesPaper.pdf
And the draft grid management plan for the Eastern Australian energy grid has as its central scenario ~95% renewables by about 2040: https://aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/isp/2022/draft-2022-integrated-system-plan.pdf?la=en
So I believe Matt's central contention -that electricity costs are going to spiral out of control once renewable penetration reaches levels a lot lower than what's required to get emissions down to ~0 - is wrong, at least for the US and Australia.
Poking a finger into my eye hurts less than a sharp stick, so let’s hear it for fingers in the eye? I’m not even sure what we are doing here. Your power is to recast the framing and you’ve adopted a problematic industry framing even while pointing at the problematic industry framing.
Emissions data are misleading at best. Every player has a self-interest in controlling the narrative. Burning methane causes a whole supply chain of methane transportation before one gets to the open flame doing work at the end of the story. One can even power photovoltaics off a methane flame – at high efficiency. That doesn’t mean one ought to. Like the hydrogen combustion engine, a focus on the end of the pipeline is deliberately misleading and intended to confuse the conversation space. We are not hard enough on natural gas, and being slow to catch on to that is dangerous.
https://twitter.com/EvanDSherwin/status/1506550473834213376
a) The industry reports its own compliance metrics. They underestimate losses.
b) Large losses/escape/emissions occur in the field – the pain before the work is done is real.
c) These emissions are all bad, as is the dominant paradigm ongoing demand for gas supports.
Any NG support slows the changeover; we don’t need a bridge to the future anymore we just need to build the things we already know how to build. Pointing out that the industry fixed problems when they were identified isn’t actually the point in favor of the industry. They didn’t report or discover the problems themselves and their incentives aren’t aligned to doing this work up front before a problem arises – clearly. There is also a demonstrable decline in emissions on days regulators are making inspections, this isn’t a game being played in good faith. And there is still the years of operation before detection to consider.
Fracking and Gas Exploration were useful for technological development, in the past. We're beyond those technologies for next generation geothermal. We need technologies for hot-rock drilling (maybe fracking but I prefer sealed systems) and parallel drilling; these are beyond the operational window for natural gas industry. Natural Gas and fracking got us here, but we are ready set them aside and keep moving forward. Most of the same companies can be in this new game, it just isn’t the same game they’ve been playing successfully for decades and they are understandably concerned about the transition. That’s no reason to continue supporting that industry’s easy ride and resistance.
Gas reliability isn’t better than solar and wind, the narrative of baseload generation has been blown apart with the NG freeze-up throughout Texas last year. Things deemed impossible a few years ago are happening today with renewable load provisioning:
https://twitter.com/krorourke/status/1508931598086860801
The point of slowly boring hard boards is to ensure that we do not lose the capability to do the things we can do even today, and here we are losing that perspective. One can make the whole point about hydro and nuclear without bringing natural gas into the conversation, so why is natural gas in the conversation? Because natural gas is ‘cleaner’ than coal? Surely that’s not the bar we should be holding ourselves to. Natural gas is dirtier and more costly than alternatives that exist today and have a broader environmental and land use impact than the same. We just count those impacts differently. This is a policy choice; we should interrogate that choice and what motivates it.
NG assets, in particular liquification ports, are huge asset investments with long lifetimes. We’d be better off making those magnitude of investments in the work of over-provisioning renewable generation capacity so we can plow through future demand peaks and provide a super abundance of electricity through the troughs. Many climate (and general business) problems become easier with ubiquitous free electricity. Overabundance hasn’t been anyone’s goal for the last 100 years; the fuel delivery is the monetization path and limiting that supply is good for business. That’s the shift that is already in progress, and NG is on the wrong side of it. Your piece doesn’t even consider it a useful end, it is a hazard or sub-optimal condition to be avoided. That’s the framing that is most wrong through all of this. We can, and probably will, hold out and resist overabundance for many years or decades (many people will still get rich here) but it is a bad path for humans in general and the quicker we stop digging the hole deeper the better off we’ll all be. The store of geothermal energy on earth is comically larger than any other source available to us as a species.
Also, on the replacement paths… this isn’t how any of this works. (Many, esp. the ones still running coal) Utilities nominate their own first generating facilities and their incentives lead to assigning the least profitable/efficient/clean assets first not the most meritorious/efficient/cheapest. That coal or NG plant will not compete in the merit market where cost of generation dominates, so you as an operator need to load it into the system capacity outside of that competitive marketplace. That leaves the efficient resources the last to draw into the pool of supply that is utilized – it is deeply sub-optimal and supports a narrative of insufficiency as a replacement source. It isn’t an accident that renewable capacity is curtailed first and renewable back-connects have 15-year backlogs to supply their power to the grid. This is a system of fossil fuel consumption defending itself. It is not a physical fact of any of the power generating technologies; this is a policy choice and we’re in a position to advocate for less brain-dead policy here. Instead, we accept the extractor frame where supply must be limited and vast infrastructure of transportation of physical fuels must be defended and externalized.
I have worked in electrical power generation for over ten years and this is the best article I have ever read summarizing our energy situation.
I think people over-estimate the dispatchability of hydropower. Often there are other constraints such as flood control, irrigation, and recreational uses that take precedence over power generation for the entities that are operating large dams.
I said this last time nuclear came up, but again, the problem with nuclear is that we went a lucky ~80 years without a land war in a country with a nuclear power plant. That luck has run out, alas. And long term, if the vision of 2200 is that there are lots of nuclear power plants around the world filling in the holes in renewable tech, I just don't see how that doesn't result in unprecedented catastrophes when, e.g, there's a war or a megavolcano or some other Black Swan event.
Should we continue to use the nuclear plants we already have? Yes. Should we figure out how to make safer plants using new technologies? Sure. Should we invest in making more plants using the currentish technology? I just don't see how we can do that and have a reasonable expectation of long term safety.
Would love to see MY dig in on some of the implications of an energy system with nearly free energy for parts of the day. Just looking at the supply side and how to recreate a fossil fuel based energy system with renewables seems off to me.
I think this article could be improved by adding a discussion about demand response. This is an important mechanism for enabling higher RE integration to the electric grid. With smart meters, utilities can send real time price signals to consumers, and equipment can be programmed to automatically adjust demand (e.g., EV charging or hot water storage tank setpoints) based on renewable supply, weather, & aggregate grid demand.
There's another element of natural gas that hasn't been talked about. Much of the gas on the world market comes from the same wells that are used to drill for oil, so as long as the world burns oil, the world will continue to extract gas, like it or not.
Once the gas is extracted, there are essentially three choices regarding what to do with it:
1) Burn the gas to accomplish something productive, such as heat a building or generate electricity
2) Burn the gas at the well in a giant fire, just to get rid of it.
3) Release the gas into the atmosphere, unburned.
Of the three options, 1) is the least environmentally impactful. 2) emits the same greenhouses gases as 1), but throws the energy away instead of using it. 3) is even worse than 2) because methane warms the planet much more than carbon dioxide.
Or 4, use it as feedstock for various chemical processes. If we manage to reduce overall oil consumption, this will become a larger fraction of the overall NG produced. And we can reduce the deliberately produced NG that is not from oil.
Matt's knowledge of clean energy is like the deployment of renewables on the grid: awesome, growing rapidly, and ready for even more valuable growth.
1. "awesome": this is an excellent writeup that will net-educate 95% of its readers. Kudos!
2. "growing rapidly": see previous. Also, he is shifting from nuclear-is-the-answer (false) to nuclear-is-a-tool (true).
3. "ready for even more valuable growth": see below
Broadly, what was true in the last decade (natural gas was the only viable complement to variable renewables) will not be true in the next decade. EV batteries, collectively, will provide enormous load shifting potential. Offshore wind is being built out at city-scale right now. As Matt has written elsewhere but mysteriously omits here, transmission is a valuable complement to variable renewables, and a dozen key additions would enable space-shifting at city-scale. Some of them will get built. Enormous investments in electrolysis and alternate-chemistry electric storage happening now promise economy-scale impact.
Shifting back to solar, wind, and lithium-ion storage: their exponential improvements in price/performance will continue. Exponential growth is hard to grasp, especially when two curves interact. As solar becomes "too cheap to meter", we'll find new ways to exploit it. As road transportation becomes a grid resource, it will soak up that cheap solar and displace some of the natural gas that is now turning on in the evening.
Resources for folks who would like to understand the next decade of clean energy growth:
1. @JesseJenkins, @TimMLatimer, and the rest of #energytwitter
2. Chris Goodall's weekly roundups: https://www.carboncommentary.com/newsletter-archive
3. https://www.canarymedia.com
4. California generally: our grid is at solar-saturation now, and we're pushing the GW-scale alternatives to gas as fast as we can. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/california-lowers-electric-sector-ghg-target-directs-procurement-of-more-t/618733/
5. China: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/02/25/state-grid-of-china-unveils-plans-for-100gw-battery-fleet/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-aims-build-450-gw-solar-wind-power-gobi-desert-2022-03-05/ @EnergyIceberg
6. 100% clean islanded grids via solar overbuild , li-ion, and electrolysis: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/02/21/barbados-to-host-50mw-128-mwh-solar-hydrogen-battery-facility/
I think these vastly overstate exponential cost reduction when we're talking about things out in the physical world. A solar panel and the battery system it connects to, at this point it's a much different point on the cost curve than at the early days people like to cite.
And demand is going to skyrocket for all of the minerals that are needed to build these things. On the one hand as prices rise, people will mine more of it, but the lags, mismatches, and volatility are really going to surprise a lot of people who just expect this nice, clean and continued reduction in price.
And if you make your entire plan contingent upon rapid continued price decreases, somebody ends up paying if you don't get it done... Whether it's the rate payer, the taxpayer, or the people suffering through reliability issues.
Thanks for the resources, I will have to take a look at those.
I don't understand your assumption that ev batteries will shift load but I can only assume that you think that we will eventually use people's cars to store energy and only charge them when the grid has excess power and then drain them or not charge them when the grid doesn't have enough. That just isn't going to happen. Range anxiety is already the number one obstacle to EV adoption, dictating when people can or can't charge their cars simply won't be acceptable to most people. Evs will change when electrical consumption happens, but most charging is going to happen when people get home from work, which is already one of the daily peaks in power consumption, making the problems of non-baseload power worse, not better.
When people charge will also depend on the cost of charging as different times of day.
Maybe this is how your power bill works, but my utility does not differentiate cost based on time of day.
So write whoever regulates your electric utility [or whatever form of political praxis you prax] and demand that they goad the utility to do so. :)
Yeah...no thanks. I'd rather just ask them to increase power from carbon neutral base-load sources.
Agreed but you have to be sure the carbon neutral base-load is lowest cost. That why you need at least a "shadow" carbon tax.
"assumption ... eventually ... just isn't going to happen": we are doing this now. Dozens of efforts are under way, including my project and a second I know of at my Fortune-200 employer. You are correct to note the co-incidence of "peak plugin" with the evening peak, but that *incredible opportunity* is being exploited today and will scale to 10s of GW in the next few years; 100s soon thereafter.
Higher electricity prices at peak rates will become more and more common and will definitely have an effect on when people charge.
https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-options/time-of-use-base-plan/time-of-use-plan.page
I think these programs are a very good idea, since making consumers react to power prices to alter their consumption habits is good. But I'm a little skeptical of how much energy consumption can be altered this way and how many people will accept it. Very little of the energy I personally use can be scheduled for off-peak consumption, and the few things I could possibly change would be annoying enough that I wouldn't do it without a large financial incentive. My current energy bill wouldn't be high enough to change my consumption habits and if you try to tell a large group of people to change their consumption or face higher prices you will have the same pushback you get with a carbon tax. As far as charging goes, if I'm going to delay charging one of my vehicles I have to be pretty confident that I won't need it any time soon. I have a PHEV and the few times I have decided I didn't need to charge it right away when I got home I ended up forgetting I needed to run an errand later and always regret it.
Agree that many consumers won’t make many changes without significant incentives and the the fear of not having a charged car will limit uptake. A couple minor points though: 1) Peak pricing will be pushed by utilities, not the legislature like a carbon tax, so faces a much smaller implementation hurdle. 2) More and more devices will shift demand automatically, especially with thermostats and water heaters, as you can easily bank some of the temperature changes overnight.
No utility is going to change my thermostat temperature or decide when I get to take a shower. Pretty sure most people feel the same way. I would rather pay more for electricity than live in a cold house.
For resources, reddit.com/r/energy can be useful as well.
There are some shilling posts there, but also several good commenters and the discussions can be pretty interesting.
Matt keeps mentioning geothermal and the upside looks really good, so I don't understand what's holding it back. There appear to be some regulatory hurdles, some technical ones, and some environmental ones (maybe from environmental groups who have "lost the plot"), but I don't grasp the relative weight of each.
Some explainers:
* https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/take-geothermal-seriously
* https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/11/13/21537801/climate-change-renewable-energy-geothermal-heat-gshp-district-heating
* https://austinvernon.site/blog/drillingplan.html
* https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/30/geothermal-technology-has-enormous-potential-to-power-the-planet-and-fervo-wants-to-tap-it/