I did. It doesn’t address many of the concerns out there. Cherry picked examples show proof of concept, but that doesn’t always scale up.
Hydro power is pretty awesome, and I know China has some huge projects in that realm, but that too has a price, as @emo_pinata pointed out. And like I said, hydro isn’t feasible in all areas of the US. I agree with the article that “renewables [can] be integrated into electric grid”. But there is still a lot of work to make that a reality.
Generation sites are not the best targets anyway. Targeting the grid is much easier and doesn’t rely on targeting a wide variety of production sites.
Another point to consider besides @Mister44’s very valid points is that places with some of the highest solar and wind generation percentages (Germany, Denmark, Spain) but no widespread geothermal or hydroelectric (so not Norway or Sweden) have incredibly high retail electricity prices.
Why does increasing the proportion of wind and solar increase the retail prices of electricity if they are 1) heavily subsidized and 2) cheap? The obvious answer would be the hidden costs of intermittency that people keep banging on about. It’s also important to note that none of the studies showing 100% renewable power is plausible predict this increase in prices, so they’re probably leaving out some crucial details about implementation.
I believe the USA can be energy independent with nothing more than full development of agriculturally derived, sustainable, renewable methane.
Thanks to the fracking boom, pretty much everything can be run on natgas (methane) at this point. And we have existing huge interstate transport pipelines and vast distribution pipeline infrastructures in our cities and towns.
It’s true we’d have to spend a fraction of the amount of money we’re spending on slaughtering brown people and propping up corrupt corporate welfare schemes to build out the crop digesters, which might be built on the old rail depots that served America’s distributed agricultural system before corporate agrimegamonoculture, using the rail right-of-ways to connect into new and existing pipelines. Such investments aren’t real palatable to Washington, and certainly not to Texas.
But jobs, green jobs, healthy jobs, sustainable jobs, a carbon neutral energy independent future… What’s not to like for regular folks?
That…doesn’t seem to be relevant to the argument I made…
But to address it, it’s an article describing how India is planning to deploy a bunch of solar capacity. Great! Except that if previous countries’ experiences are any indication, doing so will probably either increase the cost of retail electricity in India beyond the spending power of the vast majority of the country’s inhabitants, or result in a very inconsistent, unreliable grid that tends to fail exactly when people need it to work most.
India does have some advantages in deploying solar that Germany and the US don’t have – it’s much closer to the equator in particular. Then again, Spain is quite sunny and they still have very expensive retail electricity prices following a huge ramp-up in their deployment of solar electricity generation.
Currently, to provide reliable electricity generation solar and wind require either:
Anyone who’s telling you “this is simple – just build more solar and wind!” is not taking the real-world problem of energy production seriously.
True, it’s not that simple; you’re absolutely right. But the problems revolve more around capital than around technology.
Energy storage is effectively a solved problem at grid scale. If you’re in flatland or an arid environment (and thus can’t use 19th century Tesla type pumped storage) you can get a 100MW battery pack set up in less than 100 days, and clear a profit on it in less than a year. You can even spot batteries all over the place, in waste land left by the death of American factories for example, and thus extend the life of existing, undersized grids.
EDIT: In case you haven’t seen my many posts on the subject, I personally am an advocate of carbon-neutral sustainable methane, which is the most practical and socially responsible energy future I can see for the USA. I see wind and solar as adjuncts to that, not as primary energy sources.
EDIT2: I can’t reply to your post below due to the topic closing, but I did not ever say “storage is so cheap and widely available” I said it is readily available and quite profitable to implement, which is provably true. I have also made no reference to the price of electricity in European countries although I suspect the regulatory differences between those countries and the USA are the primary differentiators of their respective energy costs (the USA actively subsidizes nuclear fission with tax dollars, for example, and allows nuclear plants to disobey decommissioning setaside rules .
Your arguments have been refuted.
http://energypost.eu/renewable-energy-versus-nuclear-dispelling-myths/
Excellent articles, thanks for posting the links!
Or pumped-storage plants, or flywheels, etc. There are several ways to store energy, each with its own pros and cons.
The question remains: why, if storage is so cheap and widely available, do Germany, Spain, and Denmark have such severe problems with retail electricity prices?
Reading your article, I see that it cost $50 million to produce one 100MW battery once. No doubt if Musk can keep making these the cost of manufacturing will drop. But he can’t charge his own costs if he wants to expand production – and he would need to ramp up production dramatically to be able to produce on the scale needed to meet grid-level requirements for the industrialized world. From wikipedia (emphasis added):
End users in the United States consumed approximately 3.82 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2017.
The battery in question can meter out at most 100000 kilowatt hours in one hour before it needs to be recharged (probably much less depending on the specific physics of the battery and the inefficiencies involved). (ETA: OK, so this is actually massively complicated. We’re using on average 44 million KWh per hour, so let’s say we only need to account for half of that with these batteries – 220 of them at $11 billion – not as bad as I thought. But we also have to produce the electricity they’re delivering and store it in the first place.) So there’s a huge scalability problem, and the process of scaling up the production of batteries like this is going to contribute massively to the CO2 emissions problem that we’re ostensibly trying to solve.
The “profit on it in less than a year” issue is not exactly clean cut. First of all, it’s unclear how often the power company can sell power off the battery without depleting it. Second of all, the article claims that they “barely had to pay anything at all to generate electricity” – well, yes and no. They had to charge it with the wind farm they’re running, so the costs of generating the electricity really need to be determined by amortizing the costs of running that facility over the course of its lifetime. In other words, the storage and production need to be considered as a single system to determine the real costs and benefits – and this is exactly the point I was making from the outset.
It’s clear that adding a giant $50 million battery to a wind farm doesn’t make the wind farm less expensive – it makes it $50 million more expensive (plus the costs of transporting and installing etc. if that isn’t already factored in). But when the cost of wind-generated electricity is given in the sorts of studies linked by @strangefriendbb they don’t factor in the added costs of storage and/or backup generation that are needed to make them viable. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to get a realistic account of the costs and benefits of any given means of producing electricity.
Actually, those articles don’t refute my arguments at all. For the first one, the article presents Germany and South Australia as examples of countries where renewable electricity has been able to replace fossil fuel-based generation for a significant portion of demand. What I argued was that everywhere that this happens seems to wind up with extremely high retail electricity prices. Behold:
https://me.me/i/retail-electricity-prices-of-nem-states-including-taxes-compared-to-18203923
Australia as a whole has low electricity prices – because most of Australia gets their electricity from cheap-as-dirt coal generation! South Australia, where 40% is supplied by wind and solar, has the highest retail electricity prices in the world!
The article also talks about studies showing that in computer simulations renewables can supply most of the world’s energy needs. OK, but so far in the real world, everywhere that wind and solar exceed 30% of electricity generation, retail electricity prices go out of control. So these studies by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory and similar disinterested parties are maybe missing some important details.
The second article is presented in “myth/fact” format which is basically always a red flag for a presentation of info that is dumbed down and simplified to present only one side of a controversial issue. Regardless of that, I’ll take a look when I get a chance – but at a glance it doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the argument that I’m actually making which is again: when large-scale wind and solar are deployed, retail electricity prices go through the roof.
The first article also discusses “smart grids” as a potential partial solution to the intermittency problem. I agree! BUT:
Now, I’d really like to believe that all the technology is in place for a glorious renewable energy future. But if I apply even the tiniest bit of skepticism (you know, that magical stuff that makes science and engineering work in the first place?) to the kinds of articles you’re posting, I can see that they’re presenting highly biased, one-sided accounts of the very real engineering, cost, and environmental tradeoffs involved in producing renewable energy. It doesn’t help anyone to ignore the costs and downsides of renewable energy. We have to take a realistic look at the benefits and drawbacks and make sure the benefits make the drawbacks worth it. Articles like the ones you’re posting tend to make that harder rather than easier because they do their damnedest to hide the downsides. Notice that the “reneweconomy.com.au” didn’t even mention the retail price of electricity in South Australia in the discussion of how 1/3rd of their electricity comes from wind. That’s not a balanced, scientific look at the issue.
Good point.
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