Dave Roberts recommends that I take a look at Nat Bullard's deck of climate-related charts, and naturally I did. Here's a chart that should be familiar:
The price of solar has plummeted over the past decade. But as conservatives are constantly reminding us, the sun doesn't always shine. Then what?
The price of battery storage has plummeted too. All utility-scale solar plants now include battery storage so they can supply power 24 hours a day, and they can do this because the price of storage is a quarter what it was a decade ago.
Let me do some research------so I can compare solar prices to what I'm paying CON-ED now for power.
BRB.
Earn $280 per hour. The recruitment process may not be straightforward. With so many resources at your disposal, you can overcome any challenge. It is vital to list a wide range of job openings on job boards and search engines.
Take a look at this.......................................... https://careersrevenue29.blogspot.com/
This is the nightmare scenario for utilities--you can plot the predicted declines in price of solar and batteries, and compare it to residential electricity prices, and predict when it is that it will make sense to disconnenct from the grid entirely. First, in places like Hawaii with expensive electricity, and then increasingly in places like the Southwest, with abundant solar potential, and thereafter everywhere else.
South Australia is big on this. They have a lot of sun, so they've been pushing residential roof top solar and battery backup systems for at least a decade now. South Australia has limited water reserves, so they have also been pushing residential water storage and collection. New houses must have cisterns and, presumably, suitable plumbing for rain water.
There are still a lot of arguments for connections to the power grid, if only for load balancing, but local generation and storage can make a big difference in the need for centrally generated power.
Another REEELY nice thing about cheaper (and better!) batteries is, along with solar, it can help decentralize electricity generation, which in turn reduces losses and thereby both financial and environmental costs.
(And yes yes, production of both batteries and solar cells imposes environmental costs, but so does the production and installation of miles and miles and miles of cable, and distribution substations, and and and.)
It’s also national security, because a decentralized grid is hard to destroy.
now we need a chart for installation costs as well as the probability that the installer takes your money but leaves you with a non-functioning system
and how do you begin to price in the future risk that power company fuckery might require you to pay a $50/month flat rate connection fee while only paying you 3 cents per kWh for the power you generate?
Well, remember that you're already paying them money, with the risk they won't give you power for that money.
as well as the probability that the installer takes your money but leaves you with a non-functioning system
Yes, because that happens all the time, sure. You're trying to discredit a system by raising the specter of a phantom threat.
Meanwhile, let's ask people in Texas how they feel about their power companies handled the cold a couple of years back.
i'm certainly not a fan of anything related to texas, but my local power company has never had any issues but we've had a number of local solar companies shut down and abandon their customers
if you went solar and it worked for you that's great; i'd love to go solar if i thought the installer was trustworthy and would be around for the full warranty period, but this is america where companies can walk away from those pesky warranties by declaring bankruptcy any time they feel like it
i had a roof installed a few years back that leaked because they didn't install flashing around the chimney; the roofer made a couple half-assed attempts to silicone the problem away then stopped responding to calls/emails so ended up fixing it myself
not willing to repeat that experience on a 30k electrical system that may leave me without power in january while i pay lawyers and wait for the courts to figure it out
https://blog.citadelrs.com/solar-orphans
With all the solar power credits available, there were a lot of solar power scams involving overpriced, underpowered, poorly installed systems combined with a variety of predatory loans. It seems that no matter what we do as a society, the evil villain Finance and Free Enterprise comes in to screw it over. Even something as simple as feeding a mother feeding a baby gets turned into a multi-generational financial scam that leaves the mother impoverished and the baby starving while someone makes a nice profit out of the deal.
This is a very big deal. Particularly as a lot of grids increasingly shift to a winter peak (where peak electricity demand isn't 5pm on a hot August day, but 6am on a cold wintern morn, because more and more people use electric heat pumps instead of gas), the ability of batteries in particular and storage in general to shift that deliciously cheap solar generation from midafternoon to the next morning is going to displace all the gas plants that utilities spin up and down to satisfy electricity demand.
Bbleh's point above is also an excellent one. As much as fossil fuel types screech about "reliability," nearly all power outages are caused by trees falling on power lines. A hub-and-spoke grid with large powerplants wheeling power to disparate communities is more vulnerable to that sort of problem than is a distributed grid relying heavily on solar and storage.
Well, no, batteries don't, as a rule provide 24/7 backup power for solar plants - or any other type of power plant for that matter. (Lithium ion ) batteries are far, far too expensive for that to be a practical reality.
Compared to what, tho?
I spent a couple thousand on a battery. It can run our network, refrigerator, given enough power for the sparkers and blowers in the gas oven, and some of our lights for a full 24 hours.
Or I can have it shift power demand and power the TV as well for eight hours, giving me time shifting ability.
That battery will last at least ten years at this level of function. It's already saved us during weeks of outages: we only had to run the generator for a few hours a day to charge it up and run the heaters.
That's the half the cost as I'm paying for one kilowatt hour, per day, over ten years.
True: far better small-scale and decentralized. And also worth remembering that alternative battery technologies -- not heavy-metal or Li-ion -- have been in experimentation / development for decades, so there's a LOT of technology waiting to be further developed and exploited when money starts flowing to produce batteries at scale.
There are also other, simpler technologies for mid-scale storage, eg pumping water into reservoirs during slack demand and letting it flow back down through hydro during peak, but they're inherently inefficient. Still, a mix of small- and mid-scale storage, using various technologies, is still likely cheaper (and more reliable) than some gargantuan battery-farm at the center of a transmission grid.
Old car batteries can be re-purposed for grid back up.
There are some new battery startups with great promise (though I wouldn't be surprised if they are overpriced out of the gate). Increased power density and faster charge times and better lifetimes. Now can they go from lab to production...
For stationary storage, energy density is unimportant and charge times are usually unimportant. What counts is cost per kwh per charge cycle. A short life battery needs low initial cost, whereas a very long life battery can be quite expensive to buy and still be the economical choice.
From what I have read, sodium batteries have considerable potential for stationary applications. Basic physics says they won't match lithium's energy density, but apparently the people working on them think they will be long lived, and they should be relatively cheap to make; sodium is not hard to get.
Ford developed the first intercalated battery back in 1966. They even built prototype electric cars using it, but it was horribly impractical. If for no other reason the battery had to be kept at around 450F. The first commercially successful batteries using that technology were developed in the 1990s by the Japanese for portable video cameras. By 2016, they were ready for grid and household storage. Technologies often take 30-40 years to move from interesting prototype to niche solution to broad based, economy changing technology.
They actually are.
When you see LCOE of "4 hour storage", what they're saying is, the storage equal to 4 hours of full solar production. Overnight, usage plummets, so at least in the southern US, that "4 hour storage" by utility solar will carryover the whole night, with exceptions of cloudy days and very cold winter cycles.
Rolls eyes. Among other things, you just told me you don't know the difference between a kilowatt (a unit of power) and a kilowatt-hour (a unit of energy.)
Duh.
Crissa's explanation was right on, but I thought this was a straightforward explanation for you.
But you just can't fucking back down when you realize you made a stupid argument.
Chuckle. Doubling down I see. Since you think that Crissa's explanation was 'right on', you've made it abundantly clear you don't know what you're talking about; in no way shape or form does 'cutting usage' equate to 'increased storage'.
That's why the 'h' for 'hours' is so important; going from 4 GWh to 8 GWh is a doubling of storage capacity. Going from 4 GW to 8 GW is a doubling of rate of discharge.
And since I _really_ don't like know-nothings who pretend to be know-it-all (whoever it was really had your number when they nailed you as a USENET crank), I finish by noting that petawatt lasers are a thing. And nobody, nobody at all ever pretendend for even an instant for even the dodgiest science sound bite that a petawatt output meant these lasers were run off the combined output of several hundred (thousands really) municipal power plants.
Now fuck off and crawl away you nasty, stupid, deeply unserious, deeply ignorant, horribly out of their depth person.
California already has about 5000MW (about 4 hours of storage, so 20,000 MWh total) installed. And they're going to more than double that this year. It's basically all Lithium. As the other poster notes, this is 4 hours of continuous output, so in practice sufficient to cover nighttimes where energy consumption is much lower.
"Battery storage. U.S. battery storage capacity has grown rapidly over the past couple of years. In 2023, U.S. battery capacity will likely more than double. Developers have reported plans to add 9.4 GW of battery storage to the existing 8.8 GW of battery storage capacity.
Battery storage systems are increasingly installed with wind and solar power projects. Wind and solar are intermittent sources of generation; they only produce electricity when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. Batteries can store excess electricity from wind and solar generators for later use. In 2023, we expect 71% of the new battery storage capacity will be in California and Texas, states with significant solar and wind capacity.
Battery storage adds stability to variable energy sources such as wind and solar. Wind and solar are both intermittent resources; they can only provide electricity when the wind is blowing or when sunshine is available. Batteries solve the intermittency problem by storing extra energy produced by wind or solar generators for use later.
More than 75% of the 20.8 GW of utility-scale battery capacity that owners and operators reported that they plan to install from 2022 to 2025 is located in Texas (7.9 GW) and California (7.6 GW).
A total of 10.5 GW of utility-scale solar capacity is located in Texas; developers plan to install another 20.4 GW between 2023 and 2025. In addition, 37.2 GW of wind capacity is located in Texas, more than in any other state, and developers expect to add an additional 5.3 GW over the next three years.
As more battery capacity becomes available to the U.S. grid, battery storage projects are becoming increasingly larger in capacity. Before 2020, the largest U.S. battery storage project was 40 MW. The 250 MW Gateway Energy Storage System in California, which began operating in 2020, marked the beginning of large-scale battery storage installation. At present, the 409 MW Manatee Energy Storage in Florida is the largest operating battery storage project in the country. Developers have scheduled more than 23 large-scale battery projects, ranging from 250 MW to 650 MW, to be deployed by 2025. "
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55419
'GW' is a unit of power, not a unit of energy.
feel free to take it up with whoever wrote the EIA report. the point however is that battery storage capacity has grown rapidly at solar utilities, your pedantry on how EIA provided their capacity metric aside.
So making something of the difference between power and energy is being 'pedantic' is it?
I don't think you realize how thoroughly you've disqualified yourself as a person with anything meaningful to say in this conversation. As a side note, this is preciselfy the sort of obfuscatory crap I get from the anti-nuke squadies; 'nuff said, I trust.
But hey, I'm well-known for my tolerance of such idiocies, so let's see what others say: Who here thinks that making something of the difference between energy and power is splitting hairs or being pedantic?
why are you so angry? like all the time in all your comments. it seems like a tough way to live.
Chuckle? Angry? Amused is more like it. I'll cop to being disgusted once upon a time, but that sentiment had mostly died by the beginning of the new century.
You, OTOH, can't cop to making seriously huge frikkin' obvious mistakes. So tell us again: is the difference between power and energy 'pedantic'? I do so love watching people shoot themselves in the other foot just to prove that the first time wasn't an accident.
as i already explained, the point however is that battery storage capacity has grown rapidly at solar utilities. the fact the EIA chose to present the growth in terms of power instead of energy is immaterial to that point. It's common for discussions about battery storage capacity, especially in the context of grid storage or large-scale battery installations, to refer to the power capacity because the power capacity is a critical specification for peak shaving, or load leveling etc where the ability to quickly release or absorb energy is important. So yes, the difference between energy and power was and is pedantic. Have an angry weekend!
Tsk tsk, don't know the difference between load levelling and storage either, I see.
Since you don't like being mocked for your ignorance, why don't you, you know, actually read up on the subject instead of flying off the handle? Win-win for both you and your audience.
Grid batteries serve the same function as flywheels in internal combustion engines.
Its all great, and when you have a solar and battery system you see how much power flows from the sun for free, and how it can run an entire house and a couple of cars. And you see how the batteries are the key.
The cloud on the horizon is that the only reason what I would call "personal" solar works now is not only the lower cost, but that the cost of personal solar is less than the cost of "delivered electricity" from the utility.
The only reason for THAT is not the cost of the actual electricity, its the cost of the entire grid, and the maintenance of the grid. Since we can't all go off grid, and the grid needs to be there, the challenge from a public policy perspective is figuring out how to keep the grid if more and more people opt in to personal solar and batteries.
First, the grid is there. The wires and poles and substations and switches and so on are there. And if the demand for transmission and distribution decreases, which it will if "local" generation and storage increases, then the costs will be mostly or entirely maintenance, and some of it may even be no longer needed. We will need less grid, rather than more.
And second, the fact is, we'll still need some grid. First, there are some things (let's say, aluminum refining) that require enormous amounts of power that can't possibly be generated locally, and there are also things like street lighting, both of which require centralized, high-capacity generation. And second, the grid is like insurance: it "socializes" supply, and there's a social benefit to that. There will be times when local generation isn't enough and you need a town-scale grid, and there will be times when even that isn't enough and you need larger-scale transmission. Fine. We pay for insurance because it's better than the alternative.
My hope is that we return to thinking of electricity the way we used to, ie as a public utility rather than as a privately vended commodity. The "deregulation" of the St. Reagan era certainly helped some businesses, but from the standpoint of providing reliable electricity to the country, it was abominably short-sighted foolishness. Thanks again, Republicans!
A grid sufficient to our current needs is there. A grid sufficient to our "virtually everything is electrified" required future is not there, yet.
We'll need to install about a million miles of cable between now and 2050 if we want to get to net zero by that date. For comparison, maybe 20,000 miles of new cable was installed between 2010 and 2020.
The truly wonderful news in all this: from a *purely business* perspective, coal has no future.
The only challenge now is getting past the stereotype that blue collar work in the fossil fuel industry is a badass Marlboro Man kind of job, whereas working in renewables is for a bunch of frail vegans in pink tutus or something. This is actually a thing, believe it or not, even though some of the toughest work in the world involves climbing up 350-foot turbine towers in gale-force winds to fix or inspect components and stuff.
"The truly wonderful news in all this: from a *purely business* perspective, coal has no future."
China is building two new coal plants every week. See here.
Because if there is one thing we know about the Chinese Communist Party, it is that they put rational considerations first.
China is moving to a renewable grid backed by on-demand fossil fuels just like the US is, except they're using coal (ugh) whereas the US has access to lots of natural gas. In all of these designs, the idea is that fossil plants are "dispatchable": they won't generate power whenever wind and solar are producing, but there will be lots of spare capacity that can be spun up when needed. They have also designed a regime where they will pay coal plants *not* to generate, so most of those coal plants will have low utilization. In practice, if you can use renewables 90% of the time then burning coal the other 10% is huge progress -- at least until storage prices drop and they can shut down all that coal.
Not a China cheerleader here, but this is the sort of thing you do when you're serious about building out renewables rapidly, long before storage prices have become an economical replacement. China's emissions are now set to peak next year and enter a structural decline. The country is also building unbelievable amounts of storage (including battery and pumped hydro), nuclear, and large numbers of HVDC cables so they can draw power from huge desert solar plants.
What China is doing right now is nothing short of a second industrial revolution. For countries like the US who view China (perhaps quite rightly) as a military threat: we should view China's energy transition the same way that forward-looking people viewed Germany's surge in industrial and engine technology during the runup to WWI and WWII, i.e, we should be absolutely terrified and running to catch up.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-new-coal-plants-set-become-costly-second-fiddle-renewables-2023-03-22/
I like solar and wind power and hope they become the dominant source of electric power over the next 25 years (unless a better alternative is found). However, while batteries are great for short term backup, and smoothing out the daily ups and downs of solar and wind, there are still rare periods where both solar and wind produce very low power for extended periods. This might go on for a week or more. In these cases, you either live with blackouts, or you keep natural gas power plants on standby. Now if you have to have a fossil fuel power plant standing by for each major cluster of solar and wind farms, that means solar and wind are actually quite a bit more expensive.
The paper referenced below introduces the Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity (LFSCOE), a cost evaluation metric that compares the costs of the power source plus storage. One summary of the paper declares, “Idel says in Texas, the LFSCOE of wind and solar of $291 and $413 respectively, are two to four times the cost of nuclear power, which comes in at $122, and five to 10 times more expensive than natural gas, which comes in at $42 per MWh.”
I hope this paper is flawed. One thought is that all electric power plants need some backup due to unexpected plant outages as well as scheduled maintenance. Not sure if the paper accounts for this. (Sorry, haven't read it all.)
Google "sciencedirect Robert Idel levelized full system costs of electricity".
It would be much cheaper to only have to winterize a few gas peaker plants that we only use in an emergency, than to keep burning gas as the median peaks.
The SSRN site has a link to the PDF -- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640
His premise is that at 100% installed solar or wind, there is an excess cost for the periods where power generation is zero and thus you have to get power elsewhere. The ways to do this is to oversupply capacity and storage, both of which carry enormous excess costs. Alternatively, one can get power elsewhere -- but at market rates -- which cost substantially more.
His figures reflect a certain common sense that the cost of all this power supply is going to be much more in Germany than compared to Texas, for obvious reasons of differences in sunshine.
Idel notes that if LCOE is at one end of the extreme measuring stick of costs, his LFSCOE is at the opposite end.
The question you want to ask yourself is, why would companies -- both utilities and investors -- accelerate solar and wind investment over other technologies, other than regulatory factors? Cost, right?
One thing any LCOE comparison does not take into account is a cost on carbon, however. I think the current cost to remove a ton of CO2 should be added, IMO. It would of course make nuclear the winner in all outcomes, except for the regulatory hurdles and time to completion of a new nuclear power plant (over a decade).
All of these analyses assume that storage costs won't come down in the next 20 years*, which is an absurd assumption to make if you look at recent history and plant construction. You could sit around in 2004 and say that solar PV is too expensive to be widely deployed in 2024 and you'd be technically right. But your analysis would have zero predictive value.
* 20 years being an arbitrary number, but roughly equivalent to the time horizon for planning and building nuclear.
That's not quite true. Idel actually addressed that.
However, I think solid state batteries would be a paradigm shift in technology that would shatter storage costs.
If the International Energy Conservation Code were to include battery storage as one of the options to meeting energy efficiency/conservation requirements, I think we could lower the marginal cost of power generation across the board in this country. Alternatively, people could install batteries now and use price arbitrage to save money on electricity without solar panels installed.
People and the power distribution companies that provide their electricity have always had very misaligned incentives. It will be fascinating to see how this struggle plays out as the market undergoes drastic change.
The distribution companies are currently spending an incredible amount of time and energy trying to capture these cost savings for themselves. There are only a few ways to maintain stable profit growth when demand and billable costs are falling.....the regulatory hammer is the best.
I'd do the BOTEC myself to show just how far the storage side of the equation lags behind the reality when people talk about an all-renewables future, but the usual dimwitted partisans would challenge those calculations. So here's a link concenrning the battery specs necessary for that particuar vision, and here's one about just how dam foolish expecting dams -- or any other gravity-type storrage -- to carry the day really is. Don't go there, folks. Just don't ... go there. Unless you have some hard figures to back you up that is, and the canonical all-renewables dimwit doesn't.