Reposted from Dr. Judith Curry’s Climate Etc.
by Energy Meteorologist
A local example of the penetration problem for renewable energy in Texas
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) operates Texas’ electric power grid that serves 25 million customers in Texas. ERCOT’s sources of generating are natural gas (51%), wind (24.8%), coal (13.4%), nuclear (4.9%), solar (3.8%), and hydroelectric or biomass-fired units (1.9%). Power demand in the ERCOT region is typically highest in summer, primarily due to air conditioning use in homes and businesses. ERCOT region’s all-time record peak hour occurred on July 8, 2022, when consumer demand hit 78,204 MW.
This article describes an extended lull in wind and solar power during the period 8/1/22 – 9/12/22. I then describe what it would take in terms of a system with 100% renewable generation plus storage to produce sufficient electric power for Texas during such a lull.
For background, read these previous articles by Planning Engineer:
• Assigning blame for blackouts in Texas
• The Penetration Problem. Part I: Wind and Solar – The More You Do, The Harder it Gets
• The Penetration Problem. Part II: Will the Inflation Reduction Act Cause a Blackout?
August 2022 temperatures for Texas were fairly typical – hot (daily high temperatures frequently broke 100oF), but not exceptional. Texas temperatures during the first two weeks of September were slightly cooler than normal, with daily maximums in the high 80’s as a wet pattern enveloped most of the state. What was exceptional about this period was an extended lull in both wind and solar power in the ERCOT region.
This chart plots the actual electricity demand (load) for ERCOT during the period 8/1/22 – 9/12/22 vs combined wind and solar production of electricity. During this period of lull in renewable energy production, the demand loads were pushing into the mid and upper 70 GW range.
What would it take for a hypothetical electric power system to meet such a demand solely with wind and solar power?
Texas saw wind generation fall to 600 MW or lower with demand loads of 41-43 GW in the early AM hours when solar was zero, so it’s either 75 times wind capacity or a crapton of batteries. Either way, massive amounts of battery storage are needed in ERCOT for a 100% wind/solar/hydro grid. 400 – 450MWh of batteries would be needed to cover the extended wind lulls around Aug 22nd and Aug 30th, and during both events the batteries would be drained to 5-15% of capacity. Come the next day, you need excess energy to charge them so they can be used again the following night. The deepest discharge period (Aug 30th – Sep 2nd) during this time lasted for 63 hours and required a discharge of ~940 MWh while only charging ~75 MWh over that time period.
Clearly, a massive buildout of wind and solar would be needed to cover that gap. Two scenarios are considered here, using back-of-the-envelope calculations. Scenario #1: if you increase wind and solar 8 times current capacity AND add 900 GWh of battery storage, you would have been able to cover that month-long period with 100% renewables; this turns out to be much more cost efficient than the second scenario. Scenario #2: wind at 4.05 times current capacity and solar at 8.45 times current capacity with 5000 GWh of battery storage.
Yes this whole scenario is rather sketchy, but how much would it actually cost? For Scenario #1, 8X the current wind buildout and 8X the current solar buildout (364,000 MW) plus 900,000 MWh of battery storage, the cost would be $800 billion + transmission. This calculation assumes that the charge/discharge of the batteries is 100%; if you take into account losses, you need another 10-15% of battery storage. Additional transmission lines cost $2 to $5 million per mile. Scenario #2 is much more expensive than Scenario #1.
The scenario costs are based on the following cost assumptions (see References at end of post):
- Cost of Wind $1.35 Million /MW
- Cost of Solar $1.5 Million/MW
- Battery cost $385,000/MWh
Compare this with an estimated cost of nuclear power at $9 million /MWh, whereby that same amount of money for renewables ($800 billion) could build over 90 GW of nuclear power vs the 230,000 MW of renewables. The figure below shows the current renewable generation stack plus the buildout of nuclear power (red line). Using that money to build out nuclear power instead would yield more power than ERCOT would need for the coming few years even with steady load growth AND would use <1% of the land area of the renewables. If you site the nuclear power plants at old coal facilities and outdated gas plants, the transmission interconnection is already there and costs would decrease as more nuclear capacity is built.
The recent month long period was unusually light for wind and solar BUT that is what electricity grids need to be designed for. Assuming the 8xWind and 8xXolar + 900,000 MWH of batteries, this is what the summer would have looked like from a supply standpoint with batteries fully charged. A little overkill, IMO. Remember this assumes the charge and discharge of the batteries is 100% efficient, if you use a more realistic estimate you need to increase the battery storage by 10-15%
Power production from wind and solar hardware typically decays at 0.5% per year. Not much at first, but half way through their lifecycle it adds up to BIG numbers. Load growth as well needs to be taken into account, with 82 GW possible in the coming summer for peak demand. ERCOT has been averaging ~2 – 3% growth per year.
Since ERCOT is more or less an isolated grid, it is a good example for an academic/economic exercise such as this. With such an overbuild of wind and solar for ERCOT, there would be a great deal of curtailed/wasted power once the batteries were fully charged. This chart shows the hypothetical wasted power for the recent Aug/Sept period with the 8xWind, 8xSolar and 900,000MWh batteries. The grid would have wasted/lost a total of 37.54 TWh to serve a total load of 63.17 TWh. If you want to transport that power elsewhere, remember it costs $2 to $5 million per mile for new transmission lines.
Wind and solar are cheaper to build, but not when you take into account the overbuild and storage to fully serve the grid. When total costs are considered, nuclear power is the cheapest option while also having the smallest environmental footprint overall.
Here is a link [ERCOT Load vs Renewables ] to the spreadsheet, you can play around yourself with different scenarios.
References
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45136
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdfhttps://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
xhttps://www.transmissionhub.com/articles/2012/10/wecc-report-building-transmission-in-the-west-costs-1m-to-3m-mile.html
x
“Renewables”
Yup. You have to keep renewing them!
Ruinables….
“Unreliables”
No it’s not. It’s both.
Don’t forget, when unreliables are actually producing, they will need to charge up that metric crapton of batteries too!
… they will need to charge up that metric crapton of batteries…
___________________________________________
Yes indeed, it’s two windmills or one that’s twice as big and twice as expensive not to mention the price tag on the battery pack.
Or scrap the wind and solar and use coal, gas and nuclear. Lots cheaper and easier.
Not to mention RELIABLE.
I run the steady part of my household demand off-grid so I maximise the on-grid export. The system was cost minimised by selecting the best combination of solar and battery. The collection array is set by the May surface sunlight at 37S. The solar panels operate at a capacity factor of 3.8% and the battery can meet the demand without solar input for 48 hours. It has achieved 99.7% availability over 11 years now.
It would only take a small fossil fuelled generator to improve the capacity factor. Also the array is fixed, capacity factor would improve with a tracking array but that comes at greater cost and complexity.
You CF of 12% and battery up around 60 hours looks reasonable.
On the other hand these figures are flimsy:
There is no allowance for synchronous condensers for ride-through on a system bump.
There is no allowance for the 8-fold increase in transmission infrastructure.
There is no allowance for the huge acquisition of land and rights of way.
There is no allowance for the legal costs associated with environmental hurdles.
There is no allowance for the transmission losses and round-trip losses in the battery (mentioned but not factored in the estimate).
And I bet no one has asked if China could supply all this stuff at those prices. They are paying a lot more for their coal than two years ago and that has to be factored into future prices.
The $800bn is WAY under what it would actually cost. Underestimating like this gives hope to fools pushing the stuff.
None of this expenditure will reduce global emissions. It simply shifts them to China with interest.
A more realistic cost is $2tr. That will buy about 7bn tonne of coal that would be sufficient to run Texas for over 30 years. All the “renewable” stuff will need replacement in about half that time. So on a global basis the strategy will double carbon intensity.
Being able to keep a RELIABLE source in the electric generation
mix versus totally replacing 24/7 solar with solar & wind (SAW)
reduces costs, which in Ken Gregory’s critique was > 90%.
Ken replaced the US 24/7 solar generation (~60% of the total
4kTWh annual use) completely with SAW & included battery
storage requirements, which peaked in June after a long winter.
He then recalculated seven scenarios that either increased SAW
to reduce battery storage and/or retained 24/7 solar. Having
to charge batteries with unreliable SAW alone needed a lot of
wasted overbuilt capacity.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/12/the-cost-of-net-zero-electrification-of-the-u-s-a-blog-post/
The same is true for unreliable solar alone, as those extra costs
you considered, make it even more expensive than it already is:
https://www.cfact.org/2022/01/19/unreliability-makes-solar-power-impossibly-expensive/
Also missing–the cost of terminals/substations at each end of every transmission line with at least load or source interrupting breakers, isolating switches, etc…several millions dollars at each end.
And it would be very helpful to always show the CO2 and temperature “savings” that are the purported benefits.
We’ll be saving the world after all.
HA!
There is also no allowance for the power used by each and every Wind Turbine 24/7/365.
Every WT needs approximately 10 to 15 percent of its rated output to perform its intended purpose and that power is needed 245/7/365. The “Rated Power” of a wind Turbine is the Maximum rated power it produces NOT the power it is producing at rated power. The power used to operate all of the equipment in the nacelle comes from a separate feed line from a separate source and through a separate meter than the generated power. Any first year electrician at any power plant can tell you that.
Really? This is the first mention I’ve ever seen of a meter on “the feed line from a separate source”. Wind supporters claim it’s “so small it’s not worth metering”. My impression is it’s intentionally hidden by the wind industry and their supporters because it distracts from the agenda. One “ancient” study suggested 8% which seems reasonable. I say, at least one turbine on every Wind Farm should be required, in the permitting process, to have such metering and continually posted on the internet. What’s the rest of the story?
I believe the cost comparisons are wrong because they seem to be LCOE-based, not FCOE, and not fairly compared over the much longer lifetimes of coal, gas and nuclear. When proper FCOE cost comparisons are used over these longer lifetimes, wind and solar come out at over twice the cost of coal, gas and nuclear. And that’s before including the additional support costs for wind and solar.
If only the hard working (?) staff in our national comedian’s office were to carefully read this and do the same sort of calculation for Australia. As Western Australia is not connected to the rest of Australia (electrically) Texas is just slightly larger than Australia.. Figures should be rather similar, except that we have no nuclear power.
Meanwhile the comedian is off to Egypt to attend the 27th COP. I hope he amuses the audience there. He doesn’t amuse us.
“Wind and solar are cheaper to build, but not when you take into account the overbuild and storage to fully serve the grid.”
Yes, they are, and the fuel savings are huge, especially at present prices. This whole analysis has nothing to do with the issue facing ERCOT planners, which is simply whether they should build a whole lot more wind and solar, as clearly they should. They can try to solve the 100% penetration many years down the track. Even if it can’t be done completely, the benefits of using the wind and sun as much as possible remain.
No Baseload to sustain power 24/7
Again, that is the 100% penetration model. It may be that we’ll always need something else for some periods of time (hydro is good). That doesn’t mean there is no role for renewables.
Again, that is the 100% penetration model. It may be that we’ll always need something else for some periods of time (hydro is good)
…Let me fix that erroneous statement…
Again, that is the 100% penetration model.
It may be thatwe’ll always need something elsefor some periods of time(hydro is good) Nuclear is far better.Smallest energy density footprint
Least amount of fuel requirements
Greatest possible capacity factor
Not weather dependent
(Even Hydro is dependent on weather to refill reservoirs)
Hydro isn’t much use in the UK.
Neither is solar.
How can you so completely miss the point of the whole calculation?
No matter how much you build it will always be rendered useless for periods of darkness combined with a drop in wind speed. The more units you build the more units will be out of action when the wind drops. It is like trying to fill a bucket with a hole that expands as fast as you increase the flow of water into it.
Nick always misses the point. Almost like he’s a lying troll….
If he didn’t miss the point, he couldn’t feed his
addiction- “Nickpicking”- as someone aptly put it.
Thomas Sowell advised that the best way to defeat
liberal arguments is to start at the beginning- in
the case of alt-NRG- 40ya. It was obviously crappy
then & unfortunately, still is today, when compared
to the old reliables.
While he stated that “fuel savings are huge, especially
at present prices”, he didn’t stop & consider that Nut
0 policy was the chief cause of those high prices. In
Nov 2020, I paid only $1.90 for gas before Brandon, etal.,
drove gas up to $5 & has only kept it @ $3.50 by draining
our emergency supply so as to keep more voters from
fleeing HIS pals in the upcoming election.
I may have found the reason why liberal ideas stink!
My question too, how can StokesyBaby miss the whole point, which is the holistic cost to the holistic savings of fossil fuel. Not at the level of a windmill, but at the level of an entire national grid?
And the answer is – simply astronomical, compared with nuclear power. Renewable energy of the intermittent kind costs a fortune and does not in the end reduce emissions of fossil fuel at all.
I’ve been told by quite a few leftists that when government pays for something, it’s free.
The scary thing is the left actually really think that is a fact. They believe governments actually generate income….
Missing the point and changing the subject are what Nick is paid to do.
I point you to the Goldman Sachs figures in a prevuious article. A ton on money spent on a less reliable grid and no net savings in emissions whatsoever.
You assert “the fuel savings are huge”. The data says you are in fact lying, and that the overall fuel consumption of a nation like Germany whicho goes massivelt renewable, is in fact completely unaltered.
As shown by their present predicament without Russian gas.
Whatver the truth about man made climate change, the reality and the demonstrable truth is that overall, in the context of build, maintenance, operation, lifetime and with the necessity to run backup, a renewable grid emits just as much carbon as a fossil one.
There are only two large scale low carbon electricity generation technologies that actually reduce emissions. And only one of them is more or less infinitely saleable. Hydroelectric power and nuclear power.
The rest are just expensive highly profitable virtue signalling nonsense.
So, Mr Stokes, why are you lying? One feels you are too intelligent to be taken in by a religious cult, ergo you have ulterior motives. Shares in a windfarm company perhaps?
Leo,
It appears to me that there are two major arguments that should be used for fossil fuels and against renewables:
You wrote:
“Whatever the truth about man made climate change, the reality and the demonstrable truth is that overall, in the context of build, maintenance, operation, lifetime and with the necessity to run backup, a renewable grid emits just as much carbon as a fossil one.”
Perhaps we should start with the second argument – which may be easier to establish – and the point you make before clinching our defence with the first.
Finally, there may be situations where on a small scale solar and wind can be justified. Years ago I grew up in a semi-desert areas with large cattle farms that were far from an electric grid. They used windmills to mechanically pump water into dams for their cattle and this worked well.
I’m relatively new here, but its my opinion that Nick knows he’s wrong, but just being a contrary petulant child.
But what do i know.
I refer back to a story on ICE vehicles and someone made a comment about the constituent parts of the tail pipe emissions of diesel, nick said no, it took me 10 seconds to find several references online that showed Nick was wrong and i said so, no response.
Apparently he was a reasonable human at one time but i see no evidence of it now, just pure contrarianism.
Oppose for the sake of opposing.
Nick uses his “intelligence” to protect his paycheck.
“the issue facing ERCOT planners, which is simply whether they should build a whole lot more wind and solar, as clearly”
Windmills and solar panels did not solve the cold weather natural gas problem first identified in February 2011, and added new hot weather problems in recent years. Anyone with common sense could see the warming signs. Except you, because you have no sense.
2021, but yes.
The cold weather problems caused rolling blackouts that affected 3.2 million Texans in February 2011. Happened again in the February 2021 extremely cold weather. Minor problems with very cold weather actually began in the 1980s.
“Windmills and solar panels did not solve the cold weather natural gas problem”
It is, as you identify, a natural gas problem. A modest amount of renewables won’t solve it; neither will a zero amount.
The natural gas problem goes away if we burn coal, which is what Texas and Australia should both be doing, More CO2 will not warm the surface but a tiny and immeasurable amount, and the extra CO2 will be a godsend for all living creatures in both places. More CO2 is GOOD!
CSIRO paid “research” is like flushing money down the sewer. The public will learn this the easy way, if the brainwashing of CAGW catastrophe stops being effective, or the hard way, if the brainwashing of CAGW fear-mongering continues to succeed and utility services keep building more pointless, stupid, and expensive, intermittent infrastructure. Guess which of these two options Nick will be working for?
Mid-term elections are here. Vote for Republicans. And you successful Republicans in the US House and Senate, please start working up the courage to vote the USA out of the UNFCCC and the United Nations. These things are simply hair shirts, and we can no longer afford them.
As I understand it, ERCOT have no mechanism for acquiring a reliable supply. Their system involves only a short term market, ie only minutes ahead. If they also had a baseload market – hours ahead – then I think they could solve all of the problems caused by unreliable supply.
So virtue signalling overrides cost and performance? What else are wind and solar but virtue signalling?
They are a good income for some people!
They are really good in the right amounts for a nice day —- of sailing….
As near as I can tell, the major part of the benefits accrue to the investors. Bigly.
The fuel savings are not huge. Fuel costs are the smallest factor for power plants. Way below labor and maintenance.
For once Nick, would you at least attempt to learn something about the subjects you pontificate on?
There are no benefits to wind and sun, since the real power plants have to be kept on hot standby to take over when wind and sun inevitably fail.
“The fuel savings are not huge. Fuel costs are the smallest factor for power plants. Way below labor and maintenance.”
As usual, said without evidence, and just untrue. Here, from the IEA LCOE table here, is the LCOE for electricity in Australia.
Take, for example, CCGT gas. Fuel cost $56.04 USD/MWh nearly ten times as much as O&M $6.59. Even the best black coal option has fuel at $29.66 vs O&M at $8.69.
What does Australia have to do with ERCOT? Natural gas is available mostly pretty cheaply in Texas. Currently around $6MMBtu, or about 2 cents/kWh. Most of the time around half that.
OK, the corresponding figures for US CCGT are O&M 5.30, Fuel 18.38
Still fuel is about 3x greater than O&M, and is still the dominant cost.
But now you have fuel costs that areca third of your assumption. The fuel savings have thus been reduced by two thirds, and the cost comparison invalidated.
What is invalidated is the statement to which I was responding
“The fuel savings are not huge. Fuel costs are the smallest factor for power plants. Way below labor and maintenance.”
Fuel is the dominant cost; a little less so in the US, but still dominant. Far higher than O&M, or even amortised capital. And renewables do not have fuel cost.
Nick,
Batteries alone are a sunk cost needing recovery (depreciation) along with a return to investors. Double the cost of wind/solar to allow charging is added also along with their entire cost from mining to processing to manufacturing and not just fuel. Pretty soon you start to pass the cost of fossil fuel.
None of your “cheaper” alternatives consider the environmental costs of mining and land use.
In fact batteries connected to the grid in Australia pay for themselves within a few years, and they are popping up everywhere. They are not used to provide power when the wind drops, but just to make a smoother transition to gas generation. But they are also great for grid stability and management.
The provision of ancillary services is a niche market with a limited size. As battery capacity gets to exceed that requirement revenues will be cannibalised and batteries will increasingly depend on arbitrage. That is, longer duration and fewer effective capacity turns. Providing ancillary services the batteries redeliver around twice their nominal capacity daily, usually while not having to exploit the extremes of their physical charge states that shorten battery life.
The economics get progressively stretched as you move through daily cycles, redelivering at sunset to less and less frequent opportunities requiring longer and longer duration and longer periods between charge and discharge with self discharge also eating the economics.
Batteries are not ever going to be the way to balance a renewables grid.
Insurance costs for those highly undependable prone to spontaneous combustion lithium batteries combined with their very toxic combustion emissions will eventually prohibit their use.
The real surprise is that they haven’t already been prohibited because regulators/legislators have ignored the issue. That willful blind eye will soon open to full sight, I think.
Nick, like griff before him, is trying to push two lies.
The first is that the output of fossil fuel plants can be ramped up and down fast enough to keep up with the changes in wind and solar output.
The second is that if you decrease the power output of a fossil fuel plant by 10%, that you also decrease the amount of fuel used, as well as the cost of that plant by 10%.
The first is obviously false. WInd and solar vary as the wind and the sun vary. Anyone who has spent any time outdoors knows how fast the wind can change or clouds pass in front of the sun. About the only fossil fuel plants that can keep up with that are diesel generators and the smaller natural gas turbines.
The second is equally untrue. All plants have an optimal level that they are designed to run at. Run the plants at any level outside this range, and efficiency goes down. The further outside that range, the more inefficient they get. As a result, decrease the power output by 10% and you may only drop the fuel requirements by 3 to 5%. Decrease power output by 50%, and you may only decrease the fuel requirements by less than 10 to 15%.
Beyond that, fuel is one of the smallest costs of running a power plant.
Labor doesn’t go down at all.
You still need the same number of people to monitor the plant.
Maintenance not only does not go down, it may go up. Running the boilers at lower temperatures and reducing the temperature and volume of flue gasses and you run the risk of deposits building up that will then have to be removed, often manually.
Taxes and insurance also remain the same.
The only thing that drops is the amount of energy available to sell. Which means they have to charge more for the electricity in order to meet their costs.
“The first is that the output of fossil fuel plants can be ramped up and down fast enough to keep up with the changes in wind and solar output.”
This is obviously true. It’s happening now. And it can happen with higher levels of wind and solar, with increasing effort needed. Fossil fuel plants have always had to ramp up and down with fluctuating demand.
“The second is that if you decrease the power output of a fossil fuel plant by 10%, that you also decrease the amount of fuel used, as well as the cost of that plant by 10%.”
You can certainly save on fuel, and the renewable replacement has no fuel cost at all.
Unfortunately Wind and Solar aren’t “Fluctuating Demand” they’re Fluctuating Supply and sometimes they’re ZERO SUPPLY requiring the existence and maintenance of >100% FF back-up or many thousands of extremely costly and thermally dangerous TWh battery back-up systems which can and have Spontaneously combusted.
Even the redundancy of tripling supplies will simply create situations where triple the number of turbines or panels are producing nothing. Why go to the unnecessary expense of the redundancies?
Unfortunately Wind and Solar aren’t “Fluctuating Demand” they’re Fluctuating Supply
The obvious solution is for retail electricity customers to call their electricity suppliers to find out if the windmills are spinning before they turn on any electric powered devices. Even better: The utilities can aim closed circuit cameras all their windmills so customers can go online to see if they are spinning. each customer will be assigned his or her personal windmill to watch. I am hoping for a Nobel Prize for these brilliant suggestions.
Richard,
Have you ever read up on the effort in the 1960’s to design solar cookers? They worked as long as the sun was shining, but most people wanted to do the cooking in late afternoon or early evening. The issue with power consumers is that they want the power wen it is most convenient for them.
One electric powered device that can easily adapt to unreliable generation is a charger for an EV. The downside is if there is a lack of wind/solar generation for several days or the owner has limited time access to a charger.
One final comment, wind powered chargers were common in rural areas of the western US up until WW2. When the Rural Electrification folks came around to offer a electrical hookup they made it clear that the wind powered generator needed to be permanently disabled.
One thing is certain, if “they” did install cameras to verify spinning wind gen, and the cameras were dark, that might be the first indication that the power generation wasn’t working.
>Fossil fuel plants have always had to ramp up and down with fluctuating demand.
Not exactly as fast as the demand, though. The large heavy turbines and generators develop angular momentum as they spin. This provides inertia to buffer the grid each time the heavily loaded rush-hour subway trains pull away from stations, for example, so that the voltage and cycle rate remain within tight specifications…and synchronized in phase with other generators on the grid. The operator at the plant doesn’t have to crack open the throttle each time a train starts up and then throttle back when it starts to coast, all the while watching the cycle rate meter to keep the needle on 60 Hz. Spinning reserve does that. With wind turbines and solar panels there is no spinning reserve (unless you add some with large flywheels that have to be goosed with external energy from electric motors to keep them spinning.) So with wind and solar on the grid, you have to cope with rapidly fluctuating supply as well as rapidly fluctuating demand. This requires more spinning reserve than if it all came from the generators that are actually producing electricity and have to follow demand only. And solar isn’t even AC. It has to be inverted and phased electronically from DC before it can participate in spinning reserve. Sure it can all be done but it has to be paid for.
As to fuel cost savings, there is going to be a sweet spot where the fuel cost (variable) gives way to fixed cost considerations, especially if the weather-dependent generators are being pushed on you for emissions reduction, not for money saving. A regulator might say, “We want you to buy more windmills even past the point where the cost function is minimized, because we are prioritizing emissions over cost.” The IEA report that you linked to above shows how adjusting the carbon price up and down makes this explicit. Wind and solar become more cost-competitive, obviously, if the price of carbon is set arbitrarily high, but what if the voters won’t re-elect politicians who enact arbitrarily high carbon taxes?
There was a study done in Ireland a while back that showed that highly intermittent reliance on fossil fuel generation was leading to massively higher emissions than had been assumed. Coal plant has to be warmed hours in advance. CCGTs that can run at 60% efficiency in baseload operation drop to no better than OCGTs at around 40%, or less.
https://euanmearns.com/co2-emissions-variations-in-ccgts-used-to-balance-wind-in-ireland/
😂 🤣 😂 🤣
Proving your ignorance regarding managing dependable efficient generating plants.
nick, you said “Even if it can’t be done completely, the benefits of using the wind and sun as much as possible remain.”
and what benefits are those exactly?
Zero fuel cost, for one.
are you saying that when gas and coal are used to back up intermittent wind and solar that the fuel is free?
You need much less of it than if you had no wind and solar.
Zero generation availability for another
These high fuel prices are now feeding into the cost of building all this stuff in China. Spot coal price has risen 7-fold in the past two years. China is not fully exposed to the spot price rise but they are now using more of their expensive home production; currently 4,300,000,000 tonnes per year. NutZero requires a huge increase in Chinese coal production to make all the stuff that litters the countryside. They are getting to the point of not accepting US debt for the stuff they are making so that kills NutZero for the USA.
If there were no subsidies no one would be building unsustainable wind and solar generators. The visible and hidden subsidies have created an economic nightmare. It is unfolding in Europe now.
Electricity users require high reliability of supply. No wind and solar generators offers a reliability factor hioher than ZERO; the only guaranteed output. This is the hidden subsidy and it is an economic abomination.
How do you keep a grid load balanced with asynchronous (Uncontrollable) wind and solar. It simply cannot work?
Unobtanium batteries of zero cost is the solution.
Eny Fule kno that!
“It simply cannot work?”
It is working now.
Waddayamean it’s working now? It’s 11pm and solar is producing nothing right now
Though it was when you made your post but only for another 2-1/2 hours then it suddenly dropped off to nothing for the rest of the day
The grid is working now.
The grid is also powered by reliable FF generation with zero input from Solar at the time of your posting.
Install synchronous condensers that give the inertia to ride through faults until the protection clears the fault. Up until South Australia got their condensers running, they paid gas plants to stay on line just to provide the system inertia. That required some fuel burn. Synchronous condensers use little energy just to keep spinning.
Batteries have proven their ability to outperform steam plant governors on longer duration fluctuations if the battery is big enough.
But the cost of the synchronous condensers are not considered as part of the wind or solar cost. It is just a system cost so more “low” cost “renewable” can be added to the grid. Likewise for the batteries, additional transmission lines and myriad other system costs that do not get included in the “renewable” generating cost.
Did SA ever get to include the costs of their fleet of diesel generators that used to “firm” their wind & solar contributions?
(Doncha jus luurve them 2 spinwords –
“firm” meaning “prop up when they fall over”
and
“demand management” meaning “turn your electricity supply off at the mains”)
Oh, we’ll work it out in the future some time. Just keep destroying FF energy generation and jobs and give more and more and more taxpayer’s money to China to build and build and build more unreliables…..She’ll be right mate!
Last time I did those calcs ten years ago total build out cost of an offshore wind farm including DC cables were something like £3bn/GW, Before the cost of gas backup was added. That is £3bn per average GW. I mean are we talking average here, at <30% capacity factor, or nameplate?
In general when Greens and reneable fantasist quite prices, its foir a 12 year lifespan nameplate capacity at < 30% capacity factor as against a 60 year lifespan >90% capacity factor nuclear set.
In short you get 16.5 times more electricity from a nuclear power staions of ‘similar capacity’.
They blandly quite this fraudulent stuff, and the ArtStudents™ cheer, and no one seems to notice that they are, in fact lying.
Greentards always lie.
Ok, I admit to have read through this fast and thus may have missed something.
I saw this: “This calculation assumes that the charge/discharge of the batteries is 100%; if you take into account losses, you need another 10-15% of battery storage. “
Battery technology today is neither long lived nor robust. You should not discharge below 20% capacity, most chemistries would prefer to never go below 30%. To ensure capacity over a 20 year lifetime, you need to install enough capacity to allow a 20% reduction over time.
In other words, you install something that uses up to 80% of the installed capacity of the batteries, and you never discharge them below 30% capacity. This means you need to install twice what you will actually use.
I do believe that would change some of your cost figures.
It’s all a fantasy-
https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2022/october
No solar at night and they reckon we’ll all be charging our EVs to boot? It’s not gunna happen. No way no how end of story.
Another factor is that you lose between 10 to 20% of your energy charging and discharging the batteries. So you need to increase your installed base of wind and solar to account for that.
And you need to be able to handle a longer wind- and sun-free period. This is one of the massive weaknesses of wind + solar + storage systems: when the storage is used up, everyone is stuffed. NB. That’s completely different to fuel systems. With a fuel system you just get some more fuel. With a wind + solar + storage system you have to get more electricity to re-charge the storage, and more electricity is exactly what you have not got.
And consider the psychology of the customers. Now when we have a winter ice storm or a thunderstorm that knocks over some trees and the power goes out, we know that the utility guys are busting their butts to fix the damage and get the power back on. In a big hurricane (like Fiona in Nova Scotia), or the Quebec ice storm of the 1980s, linemen and engineers come from all over the region and across the border to help. Everyone cheers when their lights come back on and its a case of waiting your turn.
But if you have a wind drought and the storage goes flat, the lights and the fridges go off and you don’t know when they’ll come back, neither does the utility company. You will know that no matter how hard the humans try, they can’t make the wind blow. And if it does start to blow, they have to charge the storage systems first, then start serving customers.
Even if the wind droughts happen less often than ice storms and hurricanes, the misery will be much worse just for not having any idea when the power will be restored. People get very nervous in the dark, especially in winter.
The battery discharge would only go low a few times a decade. Most of the time, the battery would work in the top 10%. That is observed in Figure 4; recalling this was taken as a demanding month with high average and peak demand.
The battery may only be used to the design depth of discharge several times a decade, (or yearly), that is not in doubt.
Now ponder this. When the battery is 100% full, all users will be granted equal access to power and a guarantee could be written to match the current supply arrangements. But what happens when the battery falls to say 80% and the forecast is for no sensible wind nor solar to maintain the charge for all demand for a period of say 10 days out. Do you, A, start cutting off the users with rolling blackouts so that the critical users will still have power for the duration of the recharge lull? Or B, don’t cut the demand and after say 3 days, the battery is now down to 20% and will not be able to maintain your critical users for the full remainder of the forecast weather lull?
Clearly the answer should be to start culling supply early. So who is cut off first, domestic, industrial, government? And let’s say you start the curtailing of load on day 3 and do this for two days, inconveniencing multiple users. And then guess what, the weather does what weather does and changes, potentially all that curtailing was in vane. Is there a chance for recovery of costs against the supplier? Do the media go up in arms for dear old gran who died in a cold house?
And now ponder this, what if the weather forecast says that reliable wind will blow on day 6, so no need for early curtailing of load. And then the weather does what the weather does and the wind still doesn’t blow. For another 10 days. What happens then? Does the grid go black?
Surely having no real back-up is not the plan. Or is it?
No real back-up has to be the plan. If there was a plan for back-up, the back-up would have to be able to supply the entire affected grid at full demand power indefinitely. That’s a lot of gas turbines sitting around rusting most of the time.
That is irrelevant to the issue I raise.
That would be hugely costly. If the battery only gets used infrequently it must charge a huge margin on that use. Plus self discharge losses would become highly material over that kind of timescale, not to mention the enhanced risks of fire with storing large amounts of energy for protracted periods, needing additional cooling that also eats into round trip efficiency.
It’s not as bad as thought-
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-42-year-study-shows-wind-and-solar-droughts-in-100-renewable-grid-not-as-bad-as-thought/
But the dooming is always worse than thought.
With no link to the actual study it is not evidence, especially when cited by Giles Parker. Alook at methods and data would be a starting point. All similar work I have seen for Australia – e.g. by Blakers for AEMO – has been deeply flawed.
Just typical RenewEconomy stuff, lots of assertions without any factual information to backup those assertions.
A quick look at the articles referenced indicates that they are NOT actual studies of what’s really happening, just more modelling. But what is really happening in Australia, based on actual continuous study of wind energy in the “National” grid over 900 days, is that Australia regularly has Dunkelflautes of up to 48 hours duration, at an average of one significant dunkelflaute about every 3.5 days.
This is a MAJOR problem for renewable backups, since if batteries were to be used, the amount of batteries required would be staggering.
This Texas grid hot weather problem is in addition to the existing cold weather problems with natural gas, first identified in February 2011, and never fixed.
In extremely cold weather there is not enough natural gas in Texas for heating and creating electric power. Natural gas production fell 45% in the week of extreme cold in February 2021. And delivery was dependent on electric powered pumps, but there was a shortage of electricity.
Two problems at the same time — both caused by extremely cold weather:
(1) Sharp drop in natural gas production
(2) Problems transporting the natural gas was produced.
I suppose ERCOT was praying for high wind speeds to bail them out? But roughly half their windmills had blade icing and were stopped — no optional blade heaters were purchased for Texas windmills. And there’s often not much wind during extreme cold weather and extreme hot weather. So even the Texas windmills could not tolerate extremely cold weather with blade icing!
The windmill haters here will blame Texas February 2021 blackouts entirely on windmills. That is false. They are windmill deniers! Windmills frequently have minutes or hours with little or no output. You can’t blame windmills for a lack of wind. You can blame the people who added windmills to the Texas grid when they had a cold weather problem with their natural gas energy infrastructure, first identified wiry a blackout in February 2011. Wasting money on windmills meant a lot less money available for productive energy infrastructure weatherization investments.
With lots of windmills and solar panels, an electric grid’s reliability declines. The first problems are usually with extreme cold weather or extreme warm weather. But with enough windmills, you can have reliability problems in every season. Windmills belong in museums, not connected to electric grids.
Solar panels belong in tanning salons. Perhaps the leftists who dreamed up the Nut Zero delusion belong in prison.
You should not blame windmills for a lack of wind. Windmills require 100% natural gas backup that works in extreme weather. So why buy windmills when you need natural gas backup too? There is no logical reason to add windmills to electric grids, although there might be a few exceptions for exceptionally windy areas.
US grid reliability easily met the 99.9% reliability goal before there were windmills. Now we are at 99.9% and reliability is falling. More windmills and solar panels cause lower electric grid reliability. Who does that?
Windmills failed, other plants shut down to protect themselves from damage due to frequency issues caused by wind doing a face plant (@30% of generation).
Pipeline pumps REQUIED to be electric by eco-zealot demand = gas pipelines stop moving product. STATIONARY product moisture content freezes where MOVING product would not.
Windmills ARE the cause of 2021 blackout, they are the domino that sets the whole mess into motion.
Sorry, but wrong
There were few windmills in use when cold weather caused the February 2011 Texas blackout
There were lots of windmills when cold weather caused the February 2021 Texas blackout
Between February 2011 and February 2021, there was rapidly increasing installations of wind farms in Texas, but no blackouts.
The common factor in the February 2011 and February 2021 blackouts was extremely cold weather that limited the production and delivery of natural gas.
There are many nations that use lots of windmills. At times there will be little wind for them. Perhaps once a week. Just like in Texas. But despite all those windmills, you only had a blackout in Texas.
What a coincidence?
Texas is the only nation with lots of windmills that has had a blackout
And that blackout was during extremely cold weather
The prior blackout in Texas was also during extremely cold weather, even though there were few windmills at the time.
The common thread is extremely cold weather in Texas, not windmills.
Had they been building natural gas instead of wind and solar, there would have been no blackouts.
Not true. There was insufficient gas supply for the existing natural gas power plants, so more gas power plants would not have helped solve the cold weather problem.
There was insufficient dispatchable capacity, so when they had no reserveca single trip led to a cascade of trips from which the system was unable to recover because demand disconnection cut fuel supply.
Regardless, the root cause seems to be a mindset that they had been using too short of a reference freeze, link buried. Maybe even deeper blame the culture and too much professional lack of use of experience, field work and homework. Elders are supposed to be skeptical of youngsters, this time we have an excess of examples from those that never grew up.
Good news is that windmill importation on the central coast seems to be diminishing, saw one with blade on ground last month. Summer seemed to have more wind than usual when it was hot.
If we can’t blame windmills for a lack of wind, then how can we blame natural gas plants for a lack of natural gas?
Windmills are not designed to produce power when there is no wind
Natural gas power plants are deigned for all weather conditions but require a sufficient natural gas supply in all weather conditions, and they get that everywhere except in Texas !
To be specific, the problem in Texas is the natural gas infrastructure can not perform properly in extremely cold weather, from production of natural gas to delivery of that gas, and the problem has been worsening since it was discovered in the 1980s.
I’m certain spending lots of money on windmills made the problem worse. Windmills without optional blade heaters can’t be stopped and thawed out. They become worthless until the ice melts. So Texas had half the windmills iced up, the other half with little wind, and not enough natural gas supply to prevent blackouts. So many problems takes talented bureaucrats.
“Windmills are not designed to produce power when there is no wind”. That’s the problem in a nutshell. Make windmills that can deliver power in all conditions, and virtually all your problems are solved. To encourage that, all Texas has to do is to add hours-ahead power into their market system. Incidentally, that also fixes the problem of gas supply failing in cold weather – there would be incentive for gas suppliers to weatherize their installations (in the current system there is no such incentive so it isn’t done).
“Windmills are not designed to produce power when there is no wind”. That’s the problem in a nutshell.
Everyone knew that 10 years ago, or even 20 years ago. No one with sense would add windmills to a grid where 99.9% reliability is the primary goal.
The real problem, I’m sorry to say, is leftists make decisions that lack common sense, as if they want America to decline. Windmills are just one symptom of the leftist “We hate America as it is” disease.
An hours ahead market is not enough. You need a proper dispatchable capacity market because it takes a lot longer than a few hours to build a new power station and maybe additional grid to connect it.
As a non-technical layman, I found this article and the comments thought provoking. I wondered what would the cost be if this grid could be run on 100% natural gas?
Think of it this way. To build a reliable grid from unreliable renewable energy supplies, you have to build the renewable energy generation, then add all of the new transmission infrastructure, then add frequency stabilization, and then finally back it up 100% with FF generation (generally gas).
Then, to reduce costs by saving on save on labor and maintenance and increase the reliability of the system you have to demolish the renewable part.
Or you could just build the gas fired part stand-alone for $.50 on the dollar.
/s
But seriously, it does not make sense to depend entirely on any single energy source. Look what’s happening in Europe with their dependence on gas. Each energy source has its own pros and cons and those are for the most part complimentary to each other. Coal/Gas/Nuclear/Hydro all required. And yes, even some wind if you keep it under 20% grid penetration. Solar is OK for some smaller scale boutique applications.
Sounds good, but as South Australia shows, results in high energy costs. South Australia, with its high percentage of renewables, has the highest energy cost in Australia and is up there with the highest energy costs worldwide.
That sounds like my friend’s recipe for making delicious Brussels sprouts. First, fry up some sprouts in a pan with some butter. Then, add some bacon, and fry that up too. Next, remove the Brussels sprouts and throw them away, and voila, you have a tasty dinner 🙂
You would build 100-120GW of gas generation at a cost of $120bn every 40 years, so amortisation plus interest of say $6bn a year. Fuel cost would be 2-4 cents per kWh generated (using gas at 3-6$/MMBtu). Add in maintenance, property taxes, water, etc.
The grid itself has mostly longer duration assets: 80 year life is a reasonable basis on average. Probably a $1.5bn p.a. renewal programme plus $2bn in financing charges. Same again for local distribution at lower voltage. In total you should come in below 10 cents/kWh at retail.
Over the very long lifetime of a gas power plant, you would have cheap reliable energy. The north-west of Western Australia has an isolated power grid (NWIS) that powers all the heavy industry in that area and run almost entirely off cheap natural gas. Also Western Australia has a 15% domestic gas reservation policy, so the southern power grid (SWIS) also obtains 40% of its power from the same cheap natural gas. When they built the main gas pipeline though the main capital, they installed small gas peakers in the suburbs along the gas pipeline, so Perth currently doesn’t have any power problems during their hot summers.
Based on ERCOT wind data for 2018 and an $80/kW battery cost, I calculated that total battery backup of an all-wind system would require 69 hours of storage if there were enough wind capacity to average 2.2 times the average load. I.e., you’d need to waste 55% of the wind output to keep your storage requirement below three days’ worth. For no waste, my calculation was a 957-hour requirement: nearly forty days of storage–even if you ignore charge and discharge loss.
And remember that Texas is a particularly good location for wind power.
“..if there were enough wind capacity to average 2.2 times the average load.”
Hi Joe, how can you make that assumption? You took wind data for one year, 2018, for your calculations. Why did you pick that year? The worst-case wind generation scenario is zero wind for longer than 3 days.
I was making the best case for batteries based on the data I had at hand: 2018. Obviously, some other year would give different results; if you do get absolutely no wind for three days, then of course you would need at least three days’ storage.
The point, though, is that you need a lot more storage if you don’t want to pay for a lot of excess wind capacity.
Did you allow for the extra power required to recharge the batteries after a prolonged wind outage? This recharge power would be on top of the worst-case grid delivery requirements.
No.
Again, that exercise was intended to show that battery back-up is prohibitive even under assumptions very favorable to wind. The only assumptions I can think of that instead were perhaps biased against wind were (1) that curtailment was negligible in the ERCOT data I used and (2) a fuel price about equal to what it was when I wrote that piece.
I have every reason to believe that when the rubber meets the road the case for battery back-up is even worse than my back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested.
When designing any system and fleshing out costs and availability you should always design for Worst Case. If you design for best case (presumably to present a better bottom line figure) you wind up with a system than can’t function under worse case situations, Which will present themselves sooner or later.
Give him a break. Even finding a long run of data can be a nightmare. Then you have to adjust it for capacity buildout. He is doing the right kind of sums, although I think his battery cost is low, and he is looking at output rather than installed capacity, which I guess would be of the order of 6 times average demand to allow for the capacity factor achieved.
You’re right on both counts. I intentionally employed a low battery price, and I expressed the wind-turbine quantity in terms of Texas-average rather than nameplate output. (My guess is that in most places the ratio of average to nameplate would be lower than it is where Texas windmills are located.)
Again, I intentionally made optimistic assumptions to show that total battery backup is prohibitive–at least if government policies don’t make fuel prices astronomical.
Need to include a reliability percentage as a starter.
Now that the clocks have gone back (to GMT) solar seems hopeless
There isn’t any wind to speak of round these parts either.
I can see just how miserable they want us to be.
Liz Truss had her policies exactly right: By borrowing she could keep the country going, and by fracking for gas she could generate the wealth to pay off the debt (and put money in the bank for later years like Norway has done). Mr Smarty-Pants Rishi Sunak may think he is a genius with money, but without energy you can’t create the money in the first place.
With Liz Truss, there was one winter to try to survive. With Rishi Sunak there are two, followed by five Kier Starmer winters, followed by at least one more winter before anything can be fixed. I wonder: in which direction will small boats be taking the thousands of people across the Channel in 2025?
From the article: “If you site the nuclear power plants at old coal facilities and outdated gas plants, the transmission interconnection is already there and costs would decrease as more nuclear capacity is built.”
That sounds like a very good idea to me.
There is a way forward, if our politicians will just take it. Stop with the windmills, and start with new nuclear power plants.
Canada’s “Candu” nuclear powerplants make a whole lot of sense.
We have been fighting renewables for more than three years now. We have written dozens of submissions, written to countless politicians and journalists. We were invited to speak at a parliamentary hearing in Canberra against a climate bill. We have been doxed by the Guardian and banned from writing for the local rag. I was cancelled by all my leftist artist friends. The account that we operate out of on the internet has been shut down six times. We have grown by word of mouth and we now support 25 groups across three states. No money has exchanged hands at any time, our ultimate aim is to educate as many people as we can and to change legislation.
We requested to be notified of any new developments being applied for in our area. That has not happened. We did some further research today. The wind and solar within a relatively short distance from us is now up to 7,000MW. That doesn’t include BESS backup, substations or transmission lines. The countryside here is stunning and teeming with native wildlife and our region has been named the top regional destination in NSW.
I am gutted, I don’t think I have anything left to give.
You did the right thing to help your nation
They did the wrong thing to hurt their nation.
You were on the right side of the battle.
Thanks Richard. I’ll likely go down fighting, I had a pacemaker installed last year, your words may well be my eulogy.
“What was exceptional about this period was an extended lull in both wind and solar power in the ERCOT region.’
Please support this statement that this was “exceptional”. Certainly daily lulls, usually during peak demand, is common in the summer for Texas. I have not looked for the data, but you must have, to state that this year’s lull in wind was unusual. Please provide the data supporting your statement.
For the period Aug 8th thru Sep 12th this was the lowest wind energy potential going back to (at least) 2004. That was the last year where the majority of the state had below normal winds at 80m for that stretch of days. Back in 2004 wind was just starting in Texas vs the 30+GW currently installed. Basically this period was the lowest wind potential in at least 15+ years. Solar is more difficult as this year was the first year it was highly impactful as far as penetration. Go back a year or two/three and solar falls to 3GW and then less than 1GW
The optimal configuration for nuclear ERCOT would be 55 to 60 GW capacity along with batteries or other form of energy storage to even out the day/night difference in demand. The time constants for daily load following unfortunately are not that different from Xenon-135 buildup.
Batteries would need to supply about 12 hours max for load smoothing.
Energy reliability requires investment in reliable energy production. Wind and solar aren’t 24/7 reliable. Consequently, putting wind and solar into baseload grid supply requires MORE, not less, investment in fossil fuels and nuclear. The liberals in charge (and that includes the fools appointed to ERCOT by clueless administrations) have zero, repeat zero, understanding of energy grid economics. Vote them out or be prepared to empty your pockets.
And BTW liberals, my friends in the energy industry are having one of their best, unbelievably lucrative earning years since Carter’s foolish 70s-era Energy Plan and his cardigan sweaters. Thank you very much.
When doing your calculations on how much wind/solar will be needed, are you including enough extra capacity to charge the batteries? You can’t just calculate how much is needed to cover current demand, the needs to be excess power to charge the batteries.
To preserve expensive batteries you would not want to charge over 90% or discharge under 10% — that’s a 20 percentage point capacity problem.
Battery output must cover the worst case wind and solar climate plus some margin of safety. Worst case would require an analysis of sunlight and wind speed for at least 50 years. That worst case period could be topped by even worse wind and solar weather in the future, so some margin of safety is needed. Most likely sufficient battery backup would not be affordable, so these are all moot points
It has been calculated that the 100MW battery installed in Adelaide at a cost of £45m could power the three emergency wards at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, UK for 24 hours on a single charge.
The current back up is provided by two diesel generators that can operate for as long as fuel is available and cost £0.25m
Texans need not worry, ERCOT has told us the grid is marginally better than it was in 2021. Nevertheless I am keeping my generator well fossil fueled.
Large solar farms do not mix well with large hail storms, Little town not too far south of me in Texas found that out when the newly built out solar array was essentially trashed. Lots of toxic chemicals mixed with the broken glass meant that a previously productive pasture wasn’t going to be much use for God’s intended purpose, and an expensive clean up before rebuilding the solar farm
The 87MW solar project 3 kilometres from us on 310 hectares is thin film cadmium/tellurium. It has already been struck by lightning, we don’t know how badly it was damaged but many of the inverters had to be replaced. The whole project has been a financial disaster based on the reports they had to put out when it was listed on the stock exchange.
We also had an out of control grass fire some weeks ago which came within metres of the substation and panels. The grass was long and dry from winter frosts but the ground was boggy from all the rain we’ve had. They must have brought in fire trucks from far and wide in their panic but none could get near it. It took three helicopter water bombers to extinguish the flames in the end.
We get big fires out here, particularly in the summer. They haven’t even considered the extent of the fire risk to our communities and to the town itself. There are hundreds of square kilometres of beautiful rural land out here which they intend to turn into a renewables hub. They are up to 7,000MW planned so far that we know of and will include 100’s of wind turbines at 280m high and 200m wide, solar, BESS backup, substations and new transmission lines.
The developers are rubbing their hands together with glee that our government has learnt nothing from the crisis in the Northern Hemisphere. Or even as our own crisis will see electricity prices go up an additional 50% by next year. Australia is one of the most resource rich countries in the world and they don’t want us to use it. They actually believe that Australia can be 80% renewables by 2030, and most of that would have to be wind and solar with backup.
John can you give me a few details about the storm incident? Name of the town, size of the project and type of panels. We keep writing submissions against these projects but it would be good to put forward actual examples.
It would make sense to use wind and solar for industries that can work with intermittent power, and not connect it into the grid at all.
I think our blog host has been fallen down the rabbit hole. The Greens, by talking so much about the electric grid, distract us from the real problem. People like our blog host chase their tails showing the difficulty of making the grid go green. Difficult is not impossible. Just ask the ruling elite of New York State.
To the point: Our blog host’s calculations are just for the electric grid.
Most of the energy we use is not used on the electric grid. Think industry, transportation, and home heating. The attached graphic shows energy production in TX in 2020 by source based on data from the EIA. Wind and solar are the main components of non-combustionable renewables. This type of power source accounted for about 4% of energy consumption in that year in Texas.
When you see such numbers, you realize that reducing CO2 production to the extent demanded by the climate models is simply impossible using only wind and solar power with battery backup.
I think that is a better way to carry the discussion forward.
Yes. Electricity accounts for only about 20% of final energy consumption worldwide.
For daily conditions here is the ERCOT Link.
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
Is the next step to look at life-time costs? Like 100% replacement of the Batteries every 5-7 years.
A very good article on the myth of renewables. There is another point which is missing and that is the batteries, and how big they must be. It would take around 1 million tons of batteries to store each GWhr (1 kWhr/kg) of power. For Texas alone this is many times the quantity of batteries ever manufactured! If every State wanted batteries this would exceed the known reserves of LiCO3 (Lithium Carbonate) by many times. Either we dig up most of China and South America, or think of a better idea! The cost would also not be $385,000 / MWhr, it would probably end up 10 to 100 times as much, as the rest of the World wants Li batteries too. Here comes WW3 for raw materials alone….
An EV new chum city slicker gets off his patch-
https://thedriven.io/2022/11/02/another-sorry-tale-of-broken-ev-chargers-and-unrealistic-range-expectations/
No wonder waiting times for Toyota hybrids are two years and more.
I guess the cheaper claim was in comparison to nuclear? Costs for wind are roughly $1,100-1,500 per kW of nameplate capacity. A coal-fired plant is probably one-half as much — unless the regulators become a sticky burden. Does anyone know the cost per kW of an advanced ultrasupercritical plant?
Anton Lang has a 4 part series on coal power at PA Pundits entitled Coal Fired Power Dying – Not So Fast. Lots of info there. Might answer your question.
https://papundits.wordpress.com/2021/05/29/coal-fired-power-dying-not-so-fast-part-one-introduction/
includes links to the other parts.
Pretty good article. I would like to point out that you calculate ERCOT can install 90GW of nuclear to meet the same demand that ~80GW of renewables would meet, or a 10% advantage to nuclear. I think that analysis is decent. My models come up with a slightly different tradeoff, but then I allowed the three main variables to slide in order to optimize (wind capacity, solar capacity, storage capacity), and I also allowed Natural Gas + Direct Air Capture (DAC). That model has natural gas running at~5% capacity factor. Overall it would give the advantage to non-nuclear zero carbon by ~10%.
The really important thing is that those two pathways are remarkably close price wise (it’s not as if one costs 2x the other), and both are cheaper than gas at $8/mmbtu.
It will be interesting to see where this leads.