Solar is 89% cheaper and wind 70% cheaper than it was in 2009
December 2, 2020 2:12 PM   Subscribe

 
Economies of scale and dumping toxic waste into Chinese rivers?
posted by sammyo at 2:55 PM on December 2, 2020 [15 favorites]


Now wacky heretical thought, don't scrap all the coal power plants. Don't want to use them much but coal stores perfectly and having an emergency backup **if used minimally** would be a valuable resource and not terrible if used only for rare instances.

The curve is amazing and may be what saves the world but some important use cases will remain, it's unlikely that some essential processes like say powering forges for recycling aluminum can be driven by pure solar.

Just my minimal driving around I see some quite large solar panel farms, so many nooks that can have a bunch of panels installed. Good news!!
posted by sammyo at 3:07 PM on December 2, 2020 [4 favorites]


For solar I would say:

NASA & the space programme.
Solar powered watches & calculators
Denmark going first mover on wind industry & Germany wanting some of that for solar & having technological capacity, national institutional infrastructure to do so and being willing to interfere with market and spend a load.
China seeing the emerging global market & grabbing the whole thing through massive scale up of manufacturing.

Wind is a longer story.
posted by biffa at 3:08 PM on December 2, 2020 [6 favorites]


I like grass and trees but why not put solar panels in all the highway separation medians? Lost of real estate not much shade (don't cut down trees) and it's already pretty ugly anyway ;-)
posted by sammyo at 3:09 PM on December 2, 2020 [4 favorites]


it's unlikely that some essential processes like say powering forges for recycling aluminum can be driven by pure solar.

I think high temperature industrial processing is where the hydrogen we hear so much about can probably do the most good. Stuff it will be hard to decarbonise with direct use of renewables. Much better use of H2 than home heating for example.
posted by biffa at 3:10 PM on December 2, 2020 [4 favorites]


There should maybe be some kind of required low cost gov subsidized insurance for home rooftop installations, I've heard some older installations are problematic at a time when a roof hits end of life or needs repairs, the folks doing good on their homes should be protected from sudden high costs.
posted by sammyo at 3:14 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


Back in late '05 I was thinking of getting into solar, as my sunny CA town had zero rooftop solar and I thought it might be a growth industry.

15 years later you can't throw a rock and not hit a rooftop panel but in retrospect it would have made a million times more sense for PG&E or some other entity to offer utility-scale "rack mount" solar installs in remote locations since rooftops are not the most economic places to locate solar arrays.

Ah, I see they have that now apparently.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 3:15 PM on December 2, 2020


I can't find it now, but I saw an analysis a few months back that argued that under relatively reasonable assumptions (renewable prices that have dropped 10x over the last decade manage to drop 2x over the next 5 years, interest rates stay low, fossil fuel prices stay at their current level) we could soon (within the next 5-10 years) hit a point where the cost of building new solar and wind capacity is cheaper than the cost of continuing to run coal and gas plants, even if you ignore the sunk cost of building the plants themselves.

(Also, coal is terrible for emergency backup or peak handling power, because coal plants are extremely slow and inefficient when they're being ramped up and down. If you must use a fossil fuel as backup, natural gas is light-years better in that role, but there's also a huge amount of work going into utility-scale energy storage that would be even better.)
posted by firechicago at 3:58 PM on December 2, 2020 [4 favorites]


I like grass and trees but why not put solar panels in all the highway separation medians?

Medians are run-off-the-road safety areas. No obstructions allowed unless it’s a safety barrier.
posted by Buy Sockpuppet Bonds! at 4:24 PM on December 2, 2020 [10 favorites]


Now wacky heretical thought, don't scrap all the coal power plants. Don't want to use them much but coal stores perfectly and having an emergency backup **if used minimally** would be a valuable resource and not terrible if used only for rare instances.

I guess it depends on what kind of emergency backup you're talking about, Maintaining plants and keeping them at the ready costs money and resources.

There's a town near Boston that has it's own municipally-owned and operated power plant. It's oil fired. If I recall correctly, it's on 15-minute standby--the plant is maintained such that if the regional grid needs more juice, it can be fired up and producing electricity in only fifteen minutes. Maintaining that level of readiness is done with the expectation that the plant will have an average number of operating hours per year and will net the town so much money when the electricity is sold to the grid.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:47 PM on December 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


I work for a utility, and so many large solar & wind farms have been installed here in the last half decade that applications for new projects have started to slow due to grid capacity constraints.

The limiting factors on solar and wind generation at the moment in areas that already have significant penetration are grid stability, transmission line capacity, and time of day pricing curves.

Grid stability is basically the amount of inertia in the larger power network. Big coal, gas, and hydro generators are amazing at providing inertia, because they have a gigantic steam (or water) turbine that physically resists spinning at a different speed. This keeps the system frequency stable even if you add or remove a bunch of power to the grid over a very short period (e.g. when a large transmission line trips off). Solar and wind plants provide power, but not much inertia. If you install enough solar and wind power the system inertia becomes low enough that it becomes vulnerable to blackouts and scenarios where different parts of the grid stop being synchronised and operate (if they can operate) as disconnected islands.

Transmission line capacity problems exist because traditionally we built power lines from large generators to urban centres, industrial plants, and mines. The overlap between the current transmission line network and the sunny places with cheap land used for solar and areas with lots of wind for wind isn't that great. A lot of rural lines are now saturated with generation.

Time of day pricing curve issues arise when the demand for power doesn't line up with solar/wind generation over the course of the day. You can actually have negative power prices during the sunny middle of the day and then sky high prices at night as residential demand increases, no solar generation is available, and a bunch of peaking gas generators turn online. The intermittent nature of wind also can lead to wild swings in the market price.

Due to these issues further declines in wind and solar plant pricing would be a good thing, but aren't actually going to increase renewable energy generation as much as you'd think. Government investment in the power grid to address capacity issues and enable demand to be shifted to when supply is available are what are going to determine the level of renewables that actually get installed.
posted by zymil at 4:55 PM on December 2, 2020 [48 favorites]


I like grass and trees but why not put solar panels in all the highway separation medians? Lost of real estate not much shade (don't cut down trees) and it's already pretty ugly anyway ;-)

Make them tougher so you can drive on them. Asphalt is somewhat recyclable, but ultimately not renewable and needs to be replaced eventually as well. (Bonus: sparkly blue roads. Pretty!)
posted by sexyrobot at 5:10 PM on December 2, 2020


(Bonus: sparkly blue roads. Pretty!)

I would think glare would be a huge issue, setting aside everything else.
posted by hearthpig at 5:29 PM on December 2, 2020


Unfortunately solar roads have thus far proven to be catastrophic failures; very expensive, prone to massive systemic failure, and with reduced output (roads are grimy). Not to say they’re impossible, but at this point nobody is going to install them without the manufacturer paying for everything up front and potentially agreeing to demolish and replace the road if it fails within X years.

Pathways that are cleaned daily could still work, but at that point it’s probably easier to just do a solar canopy over that same path.
posted by aramaic at 5:31 PM on December 2, 2020 [8 favorites]


Well, at that point (10+ years), it would be unlikely that you would be looking at the road while driving anyway, right? What with all the robots and self driving cars and whatnot.
posted by sexyrobot at 5:33 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


Roads would be an ideal location if it could be made workable. I'll probably read up on it more. Also, keep in mind grimy rubber tires and combustion would probably be going the way of the same dinosaurs they're made of in the same time frame. (10+ yrs.)
posted by sexyrobot at 5:39 PM on December 2, 2020


Also, fusion is a HUGE MISTAKE. Never on the surface of the earth. Even with the removal of all the excess atmospheric carbon, they will increase the surface temperature to literally boiling temperature within 400 years, just due to the waste heat produced.(!) We should definitely invest (should have a long time ago) in thorium nuclear power, which is SO much safer than uranium. (The main reason we have uranium power instead is a byproduct of nuclear weapon tech. With uranium plants you can make bomb ingredients.)
posted by sexyrobot at 5:50 PM on December 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


If we're looking for places to put solar installations, aren't parking lots the obvious choice? Sure, it costs more to elevate the panels, but the impervious surface is there already, the space is wasted most of the time, and the panels will keep cars cool in the summer.
posted by mollweide at 6:15 PM on December 2, 2020 [12 favorites]



Also, fusion is a HUGE MISTAKE. Never on the surface of the earth. Even with the removal of all the excess atmospheric carbon, they will increase the surface temperature to literally boiling temperature within 400 years, just due to the waste heat produced.


wat

this seems....deeply unphysical. most power generation is run by turbines that run off.....heat. the earth is an emitter. cite or calcs pls!
posted by lalochezia at 6:25 PM on December 2, 2020 [23 favorites]


aren't parking lots the obvious choice?

They do this a lot in California; another somewhat-surprising location they seem to use (at least, around here) is over part of a playground/lunch table area -- this has the added advantage of providing shade for the kids in summer and cover against the occasional winter rains.
posted by aramaic at 6:52 PM on December 2, 2020 [5 favorites]


unless you're running out of roofs to put solar on, there's no reason to start with roads

just maintaining roads well enough to not sprout potholes every time it rains seems to strain the budget of municipalities
posted by BungaDunga at 7:03 PM on December 2, 2020 [9 favorites]


Solar roads are up there with the hydrogen economy as crackpot ideas that somehow got traction.
posted by ryanrs at 7:08 PM on December 2, 2020 [8 favorites]


... We should definitely invest (should have a long time ago) in thorium nuclear power, ...
posted by sexyrobot at 8:50 PM on December 2

"TL;DR: Thorium will probably never leave the labs to reach industrial, electricity production scale. The physics is sound, the engineering and actual practical operating constrains just kill the concept." [link to longer explanatory reddit comment].

Solar and wind are cheap clean and available now. They sound like a great deal.
posted by ecco at 7:11 PM on December 2, 2020 [15 favorites]


the land use of renewables is large
This is absolutely, and counterintuitively, the case in Australia, which has a vast amount of land, on which huge amounts of sunlight reliably falls—which is also distant from major users of electricity. Our cities on the coast have some of the most expensive real estate in the world and accordingly tough land use and urban planning rules. In a city, for any individual land parcel, 'electricity generation' is unlikely to be the highest and best use, compared to say, housing, or a hospital, or a commercial precinct.

There's been a lot of Government policy aimed at subsidising-encouraging urban take-up of rooftop solar, but it again falls foul of property culture here (owners of housing baulk at improving their capital, even with a subsidy, because real property should be a source of cash, not its target). Anecdotally, I understand that it works the other way with wind farms—rural communities oppose them until the first few landowners install them, start talking in the pub about the subsidies they earn, then everyone wants one...
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:19 PM on December 2, 2020


Not solar roadways, but I wonder what the math is on railroad right-of-ways? Have to be kept cleared anyway. Long racks of panels along the tracks, feeding into a larger electrified rail network sub-grid.
posted by bartleby at 7:27 PM on December 2, 2020 [3 favorites]


Thanks ecco for having a good solid link for why thorium is problematic. I know enough to know that it IS, but it's pretty complicated and it's good to have a real explanation done by somebody who understands it well.
posted by notoriety public at 7:33 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


An expense I haven't really heard or asked about is weather-related insurance for things like domestic rooftop panels.

Maybe it's just thinking of North American weather extremes, but what happens in a hailstorm? "Well the houses are all okay and nobody's hurt, but that tornado/cyclone/hurricane sucked every watt of solar in the county into space. So we're kinda screwed for power until we can get a couple train loads of roof panels shipped down here and reinstalled. Luckily it's July, so we can just cook on the barbecue and go to bed when it's dark." When Buffalo gets a foot of snow overnight, there are plow trucks for the streets; what's the provision for deploying the army of panel-clearning brooms necessary to keep the lights on?

I'm not doomsaying! I just realized I haven't heard much of anything on the topic.
posted by bartleby at 7:42 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


Unfortunately solar roads have thus far proven to be catastrophic failures; very expensive, prone to massive systemic failure, and with reduced output (roads are grimy).

Costs are (as this OP is all about) coming down, and I'm sure reliability can be improved with trial and error.

But as to the "reduced output" - compared to what? Compared to an ideal solar farm setup? Sure. But literally any electrical generation provided by our highway system is more than we're getting from it now. You've got to weigh land use as a factor as well - if solar roads can be made cheap and reliable, even at a lousy rate of solar efficiency, then the simple fact that there's over 2.5 million miles of paved roads in the U.S. alone means you can, in fact, literally make up the reduced efficiency with sheer volume. In a lot of more developed areas you're simply not going to be able to find, or clear, a comparable amount of empty space for solar panel arrays no matter what you do. Plus the NIMBY brigades aren't gonna turn out in droves when you want to re-surface the highway the way they will when you want to bulldoze acres of woods for a solar farm. (The zoning battles over solar farms have already become one of the biggest local-level political issues in my neck of the woods, and we're still nowhere near to having an actually significant amount of solar power generation going on.)

This is why solar roads has such promise as an idea, IMO: if the technological hurdles can be overcome then then the social/political hurdles to implementation are comparatively trivial. You may have noticed that the USA in particular has been doing a lot better at overcoming technological challenges than social and political ones here in the 21st century.
posted by mstokes650 at 7:46 PM on December 2, 2020


Wow! This is an awesome potential case for my strategy class!

Also, I can’t favorite this enough:
unless you're running out of roofs to put solar on, there's no reason to start with roads

Think about big factory and warehouse roofs, and now imagine them as solar farms. Nice big flat roofs, often very close to power needs, and I’ve heard of lease contracts by a solar contractor to manage them. (I don’t have to imagine this, as the building next to my office has rooftop solar. Well, OK a little imagination since I haven’t been there since March, but you get the idea.)

Additionally, some farm operations here in Australia are putting solar on warehouse roofs, along with biogas digesters for plant waste.

My other favorite thing was the small scale installations on bits of land in Japan, which was apparently a government initiative to diversify power after the Fukushima disaster.

Hm, couldn’t find a photo of that, so here’s a solar install in an abandoned golf course instead.
posted by ec2y at 7:48 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


what happens in a hailstorm?
Bartleby, I'm also a volunteer with my State's flood and storms emergency services agency, and the answer is—while they're hardier than they look, a decent hailstone will absolutely crater a PV panel. It's spectacular, a big spidery crunch. They're sometimes covered under residential home insurance but sometimes not. What was actually worse for solar was the ash from the bushfires last December/January; unless homeowners knew to (and were able to) get up to clean the layer of grime off, it acted as a light-blanket.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:49 PM on December 2, 2020 [6 favorites]


what's the provision for deploying the army of panel-clearning brooms necessary to keep the lights on

Autonomous drones, solar panel roomba. But really panels belong on farms where they can be managed en masse, seems to me.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:09 PM on December 2, 2020


But as to the "reduced output" - compared to what?

As compared to what was claimed at the time of install; the major projects thus far have produced roughly half of what they were supposed to almost immediately, and even less after wear-and-tear. The French experiment was intended to produce 150,000kWh/year, after three years it was making 40,000kWh. That level of degradation is astounding; my system is literally guaranteed to do very substantially better than that after it's intended complete lifespan (20yrs).

For 100m of road, or 32000SF of solar panel.

By way of comparison, the nine-panel array on my roof (9 panels is quite small; 156.6SF) made 4,596kWh in the past year by occupying one-third of the west slope of a four-slope roof geometry. For $14K before subsidies (of which $5K was labor and permits incidentally, so they'd have been amortized with a larger system but hey I'm cheap), as compared to $5.2 million for the French road system. My ROI is like nine years; I could have installed a much larger system but my house is pretty energy-efficient as-is and net-metering isn't really worth it. I may add more panels if I replace my 2006 car with a BEV because then time-of-use might start to bite.

Using the same square footage as my installed system (not my theoretical max roof area) you could install over two hundred houses' worth of solar (32000/156), producing roughly 900,000kWh (4500*200), noting that I've rounded down because hey why not. Those two hundred houses would cost roughly $2.8 million, or just under half of the French road, in exchange for roughly six times the output per year and minimum five times the lifespan.

I'm not saying people should stop investigating the possibilities, but the odds on solar roads are very long and only getting longer.

(with respect to hail, modern reputable manufacturers guarantee performance vs. one-inch hailstones, but not above that. Also, barring wildfires or dust storms, with a reasonably pitched array you won't need to wash your panels in the average year; for small arrays the efficiency loss is basically irrelevant and the next rain will solve it anyhow. All bets are off if you're operating a utility-scale system of course.)
posted by aramaic at 8:16 PM on December 2, 2020 [5 favorites]


what happens in a hailstorm?

My neighborhood has been through 3 hailstorms since I bought my house and many of my neighbors have solar. One really severe storm damaged panels and destroyed roofs - the other two 'normal' ones didn't effect them at all.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:18 PM on December 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


The timing of all this has been wonderfully amazing. This happened just when we got a President who made increasing coal mining and power plants one of his key issues. He put a coal lobbyist as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. He dropped many of the coal power plant and mining pollution rules.

But it was all for naught, because just as he was doing this, the marketplace was shifting, and no matter what he did, how many regulations he dropped, coal was just no longer economical. Coal power plants and mines have been closing all over the country. He even tried to sue to keep some of them open, but no one is going to keep a money-losing power plant open no matter what the legal challenges or political pressure.

All I can say is: Whew! The timing of the market absolutely, perfectly saved this country from enormous environmental damage.
posted by eye of newt at 8:41 PM on December 2, 2020 [10 favorites]


This is absolutely, and counterintuitively, the case in Australia, which has a vast amount of land, on which huge amounts of sunlight reliably falls—which is also distant from major users of electricity.

This doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem though, and along I40 in Texas is among the largest wind farms in the US, and Amarillo (population 200k) is the largest nearby city, and within 50miles to the west there are places with spotty cell service. They put in transmission lines that go a few hundred miles to the large populations to the east. Same is true in Arizona, where there is a solar farm more than 100 miles from Phoenix (and a coal plant along i40), so putting power generation out from cities is not unprecedented.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:45 PM on December 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


'I'm sure reliability can be improved with trial and error.

This is the hard part that kills dreams. The proof of concept demo is trivial.

There are plenty of physical constraints solar sytems have to operate under, why add friction-resistant and load bearing to the list unless you have to? When every parking lot, ditch, and roof is solar maybe then solar roads will make sense.
posted by benzenedream at 8:48 PM on December 2, 2020 [3 favorites]


Grid stability is basically the amount of inertia in the larger power network. Big coal, gas, and hydro generators are amazing at providing inertia, because they have a gigantic steam (or water) turbine that physically resists spinning at a different speed. This keeps the system frequency stable even if you add or remove a bunch of power to the grid over a very short period (e.g. when a large transmission line trips off). Solar and wind plants provide power, but not much inertia. If you install enough solar and wind power the system inertia becomes low enough that it becomes vulnerable to blackouts and scenarios where different parts of the grid stop being synchronised and operate (if they can operate) as disconnected islands.
This is entirely wrong for solar. Solar has infinite "inertia", as you say. It has an infinitely variable power factor, frequency, and amplitude on a sub-cycle basis; it needs only have a comms link with a controller (which they have, plus precise timing references). You're more limited by the inductance of the AC lines than of the plant itself! In fact, for many years the most common spot install of solar + a small bank of batteries (think: a shipping container) was for local grid support and power factor correction. *Availability* is another ball of wax, but if you're looking at sync or power factor problems, solar is your friend.
Due to these issues further declines in wind and solar plant pricing would be a good thing, but aren't actually going to increase renewable energy generation as much as you'd think. Government investment in the power grid to address capacity issues and enable demand to be shifted to when supply is available are what are going to determine the level of renewables that actually get installed.
I'll just quote myself from February:

NREL in the US has done a lot of research and talks on increasing variable renewable energy (VRE; e.g., wind and solar) on the US grid. Short version (for the continental US; Alaska and Hawaii have dedicated papers):
* we're currently running ~7ish% VRE in the continental US
* we could go to 25% VRE with very little expenditure or trouble
* we already have the technology and field-tested systems to manage all this up to about 50% VRE
* going to 90% total renewables and 50% VRE would require energy storage of about 10% of the total installed capacity, or about 140 GW of storage
* 140 GW of storage is about 4.5x what we currently have installed, and we do not have much storage installed right now
* adding that 110 GW of storage would cost us about right around $100B; not cheap, but cheap in the world of grid-scale things

To put it into perspective, for about half of the federal FY2020 "emergency fund" (mostly used to pay for overseas wars) and using technology and systems that already exist today, we could have a power grid that could handle 90% renewables, of which 50% is variable renewables like wind and solar.


Utilities have valid concerns, especially locally, but have been crying wolf for so long in the pursuit of profits over commonwealth that we should take everything they say with a MASSIVE grain of salt. Dunno how it is where you are, but AEP and Dominion here in Virginia have been provably lying to the public for so long that they can go fuck themselves re renewable pearl-clutching. I'll listen to the folks who publish their research instead.
posted by introp at 8:48 PM on December 2, 2020 [25 favorites]


Storage is important too. In Moss Landing, California, there used to be a 2GW gas power plant.

There were 7 gas and oil steam power plant units at the site. Individual units were replaced and upgraded as they aged over the years.

But then the economics changed. The investors realized that if they replaced all the units with huge battery storage packs, it would be cheaper to build, and they could make more money while performing a similar power peak function. It is under construction now.
posted by eye of newt at 9:02 PM on December 2, 2020 [4 favorites]


Ugh, I hate these stats because they're totally misleading. Yes, the cost per installed megawatt for renewables is as low as they've ever been. But don't expect cheap emission free electricity any time soon. Even the best sited wind plants have capacity factors less than 40%. That means for every megawatt of wind, you have to have more than a megawatt of dispatch able power (likely natural gas) on tap, ready to go when the wind doesn't blow. If you add the price of that gas plant (or battery backup, or pumped hydro, or whatever), wind and solar are still the most expensive way to make electricity.

That's not too say I don't think it's worth paying extra to avoid GHG emissions, but let's not lie about the realities
posted by Popular Ethics at 9:47 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


> Government investment in the power grid to address capacity issues and enable demand to be shifted to when supply is available are what are going to determine the level of renewables that actually get installed.

A national US power grid would make electricity cheaper and cleaner - "The top 5 reasons to stitch together America's balkanized grids."*
posted by kliuless at 9:56 PM on December 2, 2020 [3 favorites]


> Solar roads are up there with the hydrogen economy as crackpot ideas that somehow got traction.

I read this the other day:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201127-how-hydrogen-fuel-could-decarbonise-shipping
...

But the real challenge for using it in long-distance shipping is how tricky it is to store. Hydrogen cannot simply replace bunkering fuel in the current system. To store it on board a ship as a liquid, it needs to be frozen using cryogenic temperatures of -253C (-423F), says Hubatova. And even then, it takes up a lot of space – around eight times more than the amount of marine gas oil needed to give the same amount of energy, according to EDF analysis.

The extra space needed by hydrogen has caused concern in the industry that it might need to clear out cargo to make room for the fuel. But an analysis from the ICCT has found that this barrier could be overcome. It found that 43% of current voyages between China and the United States – one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes – could be made using hydrogen without the need for cargo space or to stop more times to refuel. Nearly all the voyages could be powered by hydrogen with only minor changes to fuel capacity or operations, it found.

Ammonia alternative

Hydrogen is often used as a catch-all term for synthetic fuels, but many experts believe another option is actually better: using the green hydrogen to make green ammonia, another fuel which can be either combusted or used in a fuel cell. Ammonia is far easier to store than hydrogen (it needs refrigeration but not cryogenic temperatures), and takes up around half the space since it is far denser. It can also be converted back to hydrogen onboard a ship, meaning it could be loaded and stored on the ship as ammonia but ultimately used in a hydrogen fuel cell.

“At the moment, the best bet is to just turn [hydrogen] into ammonia, which is this ‘Goldilocks fuel’,” says Smith. “Ammonia is so much cheaper to store; you can store it at a pressurised tank, so you don't need to have any sort of cryogenics. It's only a small amount more expensive to make than hydrogen.”
An experimental hydrogen boat from France’s Energy Observer tests types of renewable energy (Credit: Peter Kovalev/Getty Images)
The caveats? First, ammonia is toxic to both humans and to aquatic life, so care will be needed. Second, the extra step to convert hydrogen to ammonia will use more renewable electricity, making ammonia that extra bit more expensive.

Still, ammonia is seen by many in the industry as the most viable option: a consortium of companies were recently granted EU funding to install the world’s first ammonia-powered fuel cell on a vessel in 2023.

Green hydrogen itself is already pricey, and for a long time many have doubted whether it could ever be cheap enough to see widespread use as a fuel. But the huge cost reductions in wind and solar over the past few years have helped to challenge this view, with some experts projecting the cost of green hydrogen to fall significantly more in the next decade.

...
posted by sebastienbailard at 11:06 PM on December 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


Lol imagine steam reforming natural gas to get hydrogen, then haber-bosching that into ammonia to fuel ships. Maybe the ship should just burn natural gas directly.
posted by ryanrs at 11:25 PM on December 2, 2020 [3 favorites]


The engineering to make the Thorium cycle work was done back in the 70s. However, it simply isn't practical for economic reasons and worries about proliferation risk from reprocessing give people the heebie jeebies. We've got plenty of uranium to run the current fleet already and have a bunch more sitting around in the form of nuclear weapons that could be reprocessed with zero additional capital investment if we wanted to do it.

If the necessary energy storage improvements don't pan out, it may be worth revisiting the idea of building new fission plants, but it's just as likely that fusion will be practical by then anyway, in which case it's a better option. There have been some pretty big advances in superconductors and construction ideas since the ITER design was finalized that should make smaller scale fusion viable in the near future. Whether they will end up being more economical than using excess solar to create hydrocarbons from atmospheric carbon dioxide and burning them in existing has turbine generators remains to be seen.
posted by wierdo at 2:38 AM on December 3, 2020


using excess solar to create hydrocarbons from atmospheric carbon dioxide and burning them in existing gas turbine generators remains to be seen

Is anyone proposing doing that? That sounds horrifically inefficient.
posted by ryanrs at 2:44 AM on December 3, 2020


If you add the price of that gas plant (or battery backup, or pumped hydro, or whatever), wind and solar are still the most expensive way to make electricity.

This simply isn't the case, as seen by the many grids where wind and solar are major contributors. That remains the case even on a day like today when, unusually, 50% of Britain's electricity is being generated by gas peaker plants, because it's grey and not very windy. The capital cost of peaker plants is not that high.
posted by ambrosen at 3:23 AM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


There's a housing society (sort of like an American condo except they own the land and usually multiple buildings) in Wrocław that installed panels on 35 high-rise apartment buildings providing energy for all common space use, elevators, lighting, power use for cleaning etc. Just the rooftop installation was enough to reduce energy bills by 75%. With Poland's reliance on coal, we've been seeing an absolute explosion of solar in the last two years, and we don't even have regulations yet for sell-back to the grid.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 3:32 AM on December 3, 2020 [4 favorites]


@SexyRobot

"Well, at that point (10+ years), it would be unlikely that you would be looking at the road while driving anyway, right? What with all the robots and self driving cars and whatnot."

Don't believe the hype.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 4:46 AM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


Is anyone proposing doing that? That sounds horrifically inefficient

There are a couple of what amount to research plants working on carbon capture for creation of synthetic hydrocarbons, yes. When you can literally get paid to use electricity, as is becoming common in areas with large amounts of solar, efficiency isn't that great a consideration.

Given that it is becoming increasingly clear that we are going to need that kind of technology to have any hope of keeping the warming to a livable level as we continue to blow past the IPCC's worst case projections despite the massive shift in electricity production, I'm happy people are finding ways to do the research needed at a relatively low cost.
posted by wierdo at 4:48 AM on December 3, 2020


Not solar roadways, but I wonder what the math is on railroad right-of-ways? Have to be kept cleared anyway. Long racks of panels along the tracks, feeding into a larger electrified rail network sub-grid.

This made me chuckle. We can't even get the owners to let us run trains on a lot of railroad right-of-ways!
posted by srboisvert at 4:50 AM on December 3, 2020 [4 favorites]


On that point, it has taken over a decade for my county to come to an agreement to run trains on an underutilized section of track that the railroad has already double tracked for their own passenger rail project. A private passenger rail project that is more about real estate than actual trains, mind. The trains will at best break even, but they stand to make billions from developing more of their property as a side effect. And it's not an insignificant sum of public money for the trackage rights. $20+ million up front plus a few million a year, as I recall. Totally worth it, if it ever happens, but still.
posted by wierdo at 5:02 AM on December 3, 2020


Yes, the cost per installed megawatt for renewables is as low as they've ever been.

This is true, but its not what the FPP is about. The FPP presents the data that shows per unit energy cost, new wind and solar is cheaper than new fossil fuel plant. You can see other publications say the same thing, for example, Lazard's latest figures.

Even the best sited wind plants have capacity factors less than 40%. That means for every megawatt of wind, you have to have more than a megawatt of dispatch able power (likely natural gas) on tap, ready to go when the wind doesn't blow.

I haven't seen someone make this claim in about a decade. Why would you need to have more than a MW of gas to cover for a MW of wind? How does that make sense? Even if the wind turbine was totally non-operational why would you need to cover it with more than a MW of gas capacity? But the real world data we have for countries with large volumes of variable RE suggests we don't need anything like the same capacity available as back up. Some flexible response back up is needed but no one is coming up with a figure over 100%! The existence of the grid networks means responses can be managed across continents. Additionally, not all flexible response has to be fossil based. Norwegian hydro has helped Denmark to balance its network. In the future we will see more demand side response and more battery technology or other energy storage mechanisms.
posted by biffa at 5:07 AM on December 3, 2020 [8 favorites]


If you add the price of that gas plant (or battery backup, or pumped hydro, or whatever), wind and solar are still the most expensive way to make electricity.

While it's true that you need to go beyond LCOE and look at system cost, this is not really the case any more. The biggest cost component of gas turbine LCOE is fuel cost which means that its low utilisation LCOE is not catastrophically higher than its high utilisation LCOE.

LCOE is a valuable concept for comparing technologies but it breaks down a little when you are modelling whole energy systems, especially if you are also including heating and transport. What you really want then is a marginal value curve of adding X MW of capacity to the system given what the rest of the system looks like. This does mean that you no longer have a point estimate but a curve and that this curve depends on the rest of your system. You run an optimiser across that portfolio, optimising both generation/storage/network capex as well as actual unit dispatching in order to get the lowest cost mix, constrain your test technology to be X MW more and then run the optimiser again. The difference, minus the costs of the technology itself, is then compared to LCOE. If it's higher than LCOE, you want to add more of the technology, it it's lower then you want less.

Obviously this is sensitive to lots of assumptions that are exogenous to the technology being modelled. If you assume really cheap batteries, the optimal configuration has lots more variable output renewables than if you assume expensive ones despite the LCOE of the renewables themselves being the same in both scenarios.

This is also the argument for leavening the bread of a largely variable renewable power system with small sprinkles of technology like nuclear, gas turbines with or without CCS, and even electrolyser/hydrogen/fuel cell systems - even though those are high-cost technologies, you end up with a much cheaper system by adding small amounts of them.

For instance, the UK and large parts of the US could get about 80% of electrical power from renewables by just keeping existing gas generation plants (key point: it's already built so you're only paying marginal operating cost for the next few decades). In this situation the capacity of gas generation is a much bigger fraction of total capacity than it is of total energy delivered.

Of course there are grid stability constraints and there are ancillary benefits to having spinning inertia on the system but improvements in power electronics are substantially increasing the role that renewable generators can play in that kind of system stability.

I will note that while there is debate in the energy systems modelling community about precisely what the future mix is, the good news is that every single model includes an optimum amount of PV and wind that is substantially more than almost any grid currently has installed which means that from a policy / "what do we do between now and 2025" point of view it is very clear what the least regret investments are:
-Energy efficiency
-Electrification of cars
-PV and solar
-Storage for grid stability
-Upgrades to T&D infrastructure

We've got more good investments that work in almost any plausible future scenario in those categories than we will have available resources in the next five, maybe even ten years so there is little ambiguity about next year's capital spending priorities.

There will come a time when definite decisions have to be made about the use of alternative energy carriers like hydrogen, about the role of nuclear, about CCS, etc. but we have a lot of low-hanging fruit on the carbon abatement tree left to harvest before we need to have an answer to those questions that actually drives big capital investments. That doesn't mean the debate about long term plans isn't important, just that it doesn't need to be driving capital spending decisions.
posted by atrazine at 5:26 AM on December 3, 2020 [6 favorites]


> This made me chuckle. We can't even get the owners to let us run trains on a lot of railroad right-of-ways!

And it's not like we don't use buildings with roofs, so it'd better to make sturdy solar roofing tiles/panels than try to make solar panels that don't break when you drive over them with your car.
posted by sebastienbailard at 5:26 AM on December 3, 2020


If we're looking for places to put solar installations, aren't parking lots the obvious choice? Sure, it costs more to elevate the panels, but the impervious surface is there already, the space is wasted most of the time, and the panels will keep cars cool in the summer.

I've been peripherally involved in a couple of solar canopy projects, where they are building big carports over the parking lot and putting solar panels on those. It seems great for anyone using the parking lot since the roof will keep the sun and snow off your car. But I am surprised that these projects pencil out versus putting panels out in an abandoned farm field, where you don't need to build structures, deal with stormwater, or any of the other issues with parking lots. And, parking lots are small, compared to the amount of open and unused brownfield/greenfield spaces out there.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:12 AM on December 3, 2020 [2 favorites]


Parking PV works out because you can often use most of the power "behind the meter" and export the rest through either net metering or a separate export meter. Behind the meter power doesn't have any of the tax, balancing, dispatching, etc. costs on it so it is always better value to use it locally without it going onto the grid than to export it. On the other hand, yes the construction cost of ground-mount on a field is way cheaper so these things have to be balanced.
posted by atrazine at 6:37 AM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


We scoped putting covers with panels over the car parks at my work in the UK. The expense of the construction threw off the economics. I think this is one of those things where warmer climates that already need covers for the summer will be doubly advantaged. The other issue was that my employer did not want structures on car parks which might get turned in to new buildings in the next ten years, but it was mostly the economics.

If we put roofs on all the railway lines to mount solar, it would be one less barrier to reintroducing third class open carriages. Winner-winner.
posted by biffa at 6:42 AM on December 3, 2020


If we put roofs on all the railway lines to mount solar

Some folks are thinking of, or actually trying to, attach them to the railway sleepers.

No idea how they deal with leaves or snow etc., but perhaps with that many potential panels they don't have to care about any given section of track.
posted by aramaic at 7:30 AM on December 3, 2020


Of course there are grid stability constraints and there are ancillary benefits to having spinning inertia on the system but improvements in power electronics are substantially increasing the role that renewable generators can play in that kind of system stability.

I wonder if we will end up with enormous flywheels being run by large motor/generators purely for frequency inertia. They aren't for energy storage so stupid high speeds and vacuum enclosures wouldn't be needed. They would probably run it in some sort of reduced atmosphere, but there is a big difference between -5 psi or -10 psi gauge vs. a 'full' vacuum system. Who needs fancy electronics when we can use big dumb things?
posted by TheJoven at 8:49 AM on December 3, 2020


Looks like I'm at least 15 years late on the concept.
posted by TheJoven at 8:56 AM on December 3, 2020


Also worth nothing that grid inertia requirements are driven by the largest modelled in-feed loss... which are usually large fossil fuel plants themselves. So if you have a big coal fired power plant, you need your grid to be resistant to it dropping off... and therefore you need another few big coal fuelled power plants.
posted by atrazine at 9:24 AM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


if the technological hurdles can be overcome

Isn't that the same with everything, though? A half-baked idea doesn't become a great one if you spend ages working on the technological hurdles.

Until every flat industrial roof has panels, solar roads make absolutely no sense. Do roads have existing grid connections? Buildings do, and in many cases you can have simplified connections where rather than delivering net power, the building appears as a smaller load. Roofs also don't have heavy vehicles hurtling along them, dealing with Fourth Power Law wear loading (so if your car has half the axle load of a truck, the truck tends to cause 16× (= 2⁴) the damage.
posted by scruss at 9:57 AM on December 3, 2020 [2 favorites]


I wonder if we will end up with enormous flywheels being run by large motor/generators purely for frequency inertia.

Frequency inertia is just a consequence of the method of power generation for large central plants with spinning generators. The generators are required to spin at the precise revolutions to generate the desired 60 Hz. Any deviation in rotational speed results in a change in line frequency.

When there is a large change in power load, the spinning generator slows down or speeds up in response just like a spinning motor under changing load. Think of your electric drill speed changing as the load changes.

The inertia of the spinning mass resists this change in speed so that a small speed change results in more power output to match the new load. The generator operator must then increase or decrease the fuel controls to make up for this loss in speed.

Typically the frequency change will be less than 0.5 Hz and the recovery time will be a few seconds to a few minutes.

Wind turbines, on the other hand, are completely divorced from this frequency effect because they use power switching electronics to synthesize the desired frequency. So they can produce the desired frequency independently of the speed of the turbine blades.

Wind turbines can actually provide superior "inertial" response simply by changing their electronic controls and varying the pitch of the blades.

Solar panels are a similar case as their AC frequency is synthesized from their DC output using switching electronics.

So providing load stability and frequency control to compensate for conventional generator frequency variation is simply a matter of software. So far, utilities in most cases are not using these frequency response capabilities of wind and solar, but as they increase their percentage of power generation, they will have to incorporate load response into the grid controls.
posted by JackFlash at 10:01 AM on December 3, 2020


coal plants are extremely slow and inefficient when they're being ramped up and down.

Yeah, my dad was a manager at a coal plant, and the periodic shutdowns they had to do were a Big Fucking Production.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:43 AM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


Even with the removal of all the excess atmospheric carbon, they will increase the surface temperature to literally boiling temperature within 400 years, just due to the waste heat produced.

Wait, where are you getting this for a kind of power plant that... doesn’t actually exist yet? For any form of power that unlocks large quantities of energy that aren’t part of any existing system on Earth, coupled with an infinite projection of increasing demand, one could presumably calculate that there could eventually be enough waste heat to fry us regardless of CO2 emissions? But I don’t think that’s specific to the generation step.
posted by atoxyl at 10:44 AM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


If you are the government of Ohio you respond to that news of renewables becoming vastly cheaper by proposing a three year moratorium on all new projects and stopping all work on projects underway.

Hasn't actually passed yet, but Ohio is the state that passed the single most corrupt energy bill so far this century just last year.
posted by sotonohito at 10:56 AM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


Wasn't one proposal for storing energy a simple water tower that pumps water up with excess daytime energy and uses a water wheel to generate power on the way down during the night? Is the fatal flaw that you would require huge amounts of water for a small city?
posted by benzenedream at 12:57 PM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


As someone who has to go out to industrial accidents, the idea of mass storage and use of ammonia fills me with enormous dread. I've had to see what happens after an ammonia plant fire. It can be really ugly. In water, it would be an uncontrollable disaster.

I really, really hope ammonia isn't a contender for future energy storage.
posted by bonehead at 1:01 PM on December 3, 2020 [3 favorites]


benzenedream: pumped hydro is a working tech, Germany has about 6GW in place, with more across Europe. It needs to be a pretty decent scale in order to be useful. I'm not sure whether a water tower would be enough.
posted by biffa at 1:12 PM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


Storage, whether pumped hydro or lithium batteries, is not a limiting technology at this time. Until you have near 100% coverage of daytime power from wind and solar, it makes more sense to ship excess power to somewhere that needs it rather than the huge expense, and waste and inefficiency of storage conversion. So you need a better grid, not expensive and exotic storage schemes.

At this time, if you are diverting excess renewables into storage, it just means you are running your non-renewables longer to fill the gap. That's why storage makes more sense when you get closer to 100% renewables.

Storage makes sense in some limited scenarios, such as Australia, where you have large areas with isolated grids.
posted by JackFlash at 1:38 PM on December 3, 2020 [2 favorites]


Maybe it's just thinking of North American weather extremes, but what happens in a hailstorm? "Well the houses are all okay and nobody's hurt, but that tornado/cyclone/hurricane sucked every watt of solar in the county into space. So we're kinda screwed for power until we can get a couple train loads of roof panels shipped down here and reinstalled. Luckily it's July, so we can just cook on the barbecue and go to bed when it's dark."

This makes me nervous/skeptical about electrifying, say, residential heat and cooking in general. When Hurricane Sandy hit (which was in a November) my house lost power for two weeks, which was about the median. But we still had heat and water, so my household didn't need any direct help. We didn't need to evacuate. All the emergency response stuff was stretched, at full capacity, but we were not an additional burden on it, because we had heat and water.

For that matter, I'm pretty sure residential electricity was near the bottom of the priorities; the grocery store had electricity, so people could get food, way before anyone could have cooked the food on an electric stove. And the apartment complexes (more likely to have electric stoves) had power before we did. Im really pretty sure that this played a role in prioritizing electricity restoration.

The new energy efficient gas appliances typically have electronic brains regulating things, but those electric brains can be run off a car battery (as we did for our furnace). Because the actual heat is coming from gas. The more stuff is electric, the more disastrous it is to lose electricity.

There's a similar problem with electric cars: if your car is stranded, you can physically carry 5 gallons of gas to the car. If your electric car is stranded, ???

It really makes me want to say, just, work this out in the non-residential sectors first, please, change my life last. And if everyone feels that way it's a real problem.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 1:54 PM on December 3, 2020


Storage and grid upgrades go hand-in-hand. Often (always) it's easier to build small utility-scale storage (batteries!) than get a new transmission line built, etc. Often (always) it's easier to build a new transmission line rather than commission new pumped hydro storage.

If our end goal is maximizing VRE sources ASAP to minimize CO2 emissions, paying the pollution and build cost of storage might be the right choice at times (most of the time).
posted by introp at 1:55 PM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


This makes me nervous/skeptical about electrifying, say, residential heat and cooking in general

The California Solution is to install solar plus a battery backup. They're relatively expensive now, because so few people have batteries (relatively speaking), but I expect they'll get cheaper as BEVs proliferate (Tesla, for one, is thinking about using too-worn-for-cars-but-still-usable batteries in their Powerwall). With a right-sized system you can run practically forever as long as you're willing to downsize your electrical usage (eg: don't run your AC). The battery system I was looking at (I do not have one yet) would run my house for three days without any sun or grid power, and three days without sun is essentially impossible here (on my lowest day so far, January 16th 2020, I got 2.34kWh, and on January 17th it was 9.9kWh for a total of 231kWh for that entire month).

I still suspect there's more to be done re: "smart island effect" where you section off neighborhoods in an outage and those with panels effectively help power those without, but that's a technical topic beyond my understanding so I could be hideously dangerously wrong on that.

Conversely, a dual-fuel portable generator that can run almost my entire house cost me $1K, so I bought one just in case (yay, PGE threatening to cut power every time there's wind because they had to pay for all those people they killed). Note: I can live without AC; people in Florida would probably need a bigger model, and this one is already a 300lb bastard with an equally-heavy cable.

Conversely yet again, if I did spring for a battery array my house would run forever even in an apocalypse, whereas my generator requires fuel.
posted by aramaic at 6:52 PM on December 3, 2020


I wonder if we will end up with enormous flywheels being run by large motor/generators purely for frequency inertia.--TheJoven

Flywheel storage systems are available,, though the scale is small. I'm not sure how they compare in costs and efficiency to battery or pumped hydro.
posted by eye of newt at 8:36 PM on December 3, 2020


My first link messed up. Here's where I meant to link.
posted by eye of newt at 9:03 PM on December 3, 2020


There's also been some research into using electric cars as essentially portable batteries, filling them up when there's too much power in the system and letting them discharge at night when power is expensive.
posted by Merus at 9:57 PM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


OK, but you better give me an electricity discount if you want to put cycles on my vehicle batteries.
posted by ryanrs at 10:53 PM on December 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


When I priced it out a few years back, it would have cost about $4000 for enough portable solar panels and batteries to keep lights on, the fridge running, devices charging, and run the window AC in the bedroom at night in the duplex I was living in at the time. The major sacrifices were the hot water heater and the electric stove, bit I've already got a camp stove, so that last one is fine.

If prices have dropped by half, it's getting into the realm of reason, but outages in my neighborhood just don't last that long. It only took three days after Irma and much less where I'm living now since we live directly next to a major distribution line. In a much stronger storm than that I'd have to evacuate anyway, so it makes it hard to spend that much money for backup power.
posted by wierdo at 11:21 PM on December 3, 2020


Addressing comments in line below:

Grid stability is basically the amount of inertia in the larger power network. Big coal, gas, and hydro generators are amazing at providing inertia, because they have a gigantic steam (or water) turbine that physically resists spinning at a different speed. This keeps the system frequency stable even if you add or remove a bunch of power to the grid over a very short period (e.g. when a large transmission line trips off). Solar and wind plants provide power, but not much inertia. If you install enough solar and wind power the system inertia becomes low enough that it becomes vulnerable to blackouts and scenarios where different parts of the grid stop being synchronised and operate (if they can operate) as disconnected islands.
This is entirely wrong for solar. Solar has infinite "inertia", as you say. It has an infinitely variable power factor, frequency, and amplitude on a sub-cycle basis; it needs only have a comms link with a controller (which they have, plus precise timing references). You're more limited by the inductance of the AC lines than of the plant itself! In fact, for many years the most common spot install of solar + a small bank of batteries (think: a shipping container) was for local grid support and power factor correction. *Availability* is another ball of wax, but if you're looking at sync or power factor problems, solar is your friend.
I don't disagree, you can construct a solar plant to effectively function as a fully fledged statcom and source of system stability by installing some batteries and a well-tuned control system. The issue in the market I'm familiar with is there is no incentive for the solar plant owner to do so as there is no market mechanism to compensate them for providing inertia. I believe there is inertia pricing in the UK. I think that will eventually turn up here but currently we've just gone with government funded synchronous condensers and pumped hydro.

Due to these issues further declines in wind and solar plant pricing would be a good thing, but aren't actually going to increase renewable energy generation as much as you'd think. Government investment in the power grid to address capacity issues and enable demand to be shifted to when supply is available are what are going to determine the level of renewables that actually get installed.
I'll just quote myself from February:

NREL in the US has done a lot of research and talks on increasing variable renewable energy (VRE; e.g., wind and solar) on the US grid. Short version (for the continental US; Alaska and Hawaii have dedicated papers):
* we're currently running ~7ish% VRE in the continental US
* we could go to 25% VRE with very little expenditure or trouble
* we already have the technology and field-tested systems to manage all this up to about 50% VRE
* going to 90% total renewables and 50% VRE would require energy storage of about 10% of the total installed capacity, or about 140 GW of storage
* 140 GW of storage is about 4.5x what we currently have installed, and we do not have much storage installed right now
* adding that 110 GW of storage would cost us about right around $100B; not cheap, but cheap in the world of grid-scale things

To put it into perspective, for about half of the federal FY2020 "emergency fund" (mostly used to pay for overseas wars) and using technology and systems that already exist today, we could have a power grid that could handle 90% renewables, of which 50% is variable renewables like wind and solar.
I don't disagree here either mostly. I've seen rural areas reach somewhere around that 25-30% intermittent generation penetration level already via large solar plants with just current best practice and no real issues arose beyond some protection trips. Hitting 50% intermittent is going to need serious grid investment even beyond the 10% storage you flagged though, as to hit that level you will likely need geographically diversified wind and solar and that means building significant long distance transmission capacity.

I think at that point demand management is going to be more efficient than either storage or additional transmission capacity, but battery prices could crater or another storage technology could take off.
Utilities have valid concerns, especially locally, but have been crying wolf for so long in the pursuit of profits over commonwealth that we should take everything they say with a MASSIVE grain of salt. Dunno how it is where you are, but AEP and Dominion here in Virginia have been provably lying to the public for so long that they can go fuck themselves re renewable pearl-clutching. I'll listen to the folks who publish their research instead.
The utilities I'm familiar with are government owned and do not own generators so there isn't really an incentive for us to lie to the public about the cost of the network upgrades we're going to need to reach high (>30% ish) intermittent renewable generation penetration. If anything, the government would probably prefer we err on the side of optimism.
posted by zymil at 2:27 AM on December 4, 2020 [3 favorites]


OK, but you better give me an electricity discount if you want to put cycles on my vehicle batteries.

The basic idea of using EVs for grid balancing is that consumers will be incentivised to charge their cars at periods of low demand and selling it at times of high demand to make a profit. Whether people fancy having someone use their vehicle for this is quite a big issue. A lot of the models seem to assume it will be a goer, but it seems to me like it has a lot of potential to not be very popular for the reasons you raise, will consumers be happy to have someone discharging and recharging their cars (ie the idea of ceding control over whether they can drive off, whether this is a real problem or not) and what the cost in terms of battery life will be.

Allowing the local network manager to use it for other network services would be another potential way to get a return, but the same barriers may apply.
posted by biffa at 3:47 AM on December 4, 2020


There's also been some research into using electric cars as essentially portable batteries, filling them up when there's too much power in the system and letting them discharge at night when power is expensive.

The first stage of this, which is doing load shaping by timing slow-charging but without the round-trip discharge is already happening. In the UK you can get half-hourly metered power and set your car to charge only when power is cheap (or when charge state drops below a reserve level). Of course this works better if you have a home charger but it's one reason why network reinforcement need has not materialised in quite the way people thought it would, EV charging only drive substantial network reinforcement for fast/rapid chargers and for slow charging during peaks, we could get to 50% EV penetration without triggering much reinforcement work if they're all on slow chargers with time of use pricing.

OK, but you better give me an electricity discount if you want to put cycles on my vehicle batteries.

There have been cyclical cost models developed to model the effect of various V2G scenarios on battery lifetime, basically you want to use only very slow discharge and/or if the grid wants more, more will have to be paid to battery owners for rapid discharge due to the wear effect. This also needs to take into account minimum charge levels for vehicles - nobody wants to get to their car at 6pm only to find that its been deep discharged between lunchtime and the end of the workday and they now have a range issue getting home.

Also, it is very possible that people will have battery leases and that the balancing will be done by the lessor / ultimate owner of the battery in exchange for a reduced cost to the consumer.

Based on reasonable assumptions of peak to base power price difference and limiting depth of speed of discharge, you pretty easily get to $400+ dollars a year in revenue generated from a vehicle that is regularly plugged in both overnight and during peak times (IOW a commuter car with offstreet parking and charging at both ends which will not be universal but also not that rare). That is enough to matter for most people, about 4% - 5% of monthly leasing payment for a high end Model S and the delta between the cheapest and most expensive power will rise with the increasing penetration of renewables, it would not surprise me to see people offsetting as much as 15% of their monthly payments by the 2030s although to get as high as that you would be sacrificing both convenience and ultimate battery life to capture as much of that revenue stream as possible.
posted by atrazine at 3:52 AM on December 4, 2020 [1 favorite]


It looks like Australia's planning a second battery-based system to back up their grid. I'm guessing these are cheap for Tesla to roll out one after the other since they have a steady stream of used but serviceable batteries from their customers' cars.

https://www.theverge.com/21551342/australia-power-grid-victorian-big-battery
A battery covering an area the size of a football stadium is planned to come online next year in Victoria, Australia. French renewable energy company Neoen announced yesterday that it received a contract to build the 300MW battery, which would become one of the largest in the world.
"The battery is supposed to stabilize Victoria’s grid"

The battery is supposed to stabilize Victoria’s grid and prevent some of the blackouts that have beleaguered the state in recent summers. It also supports Victoria’s renewable energy goals and helps move Australia away from coal, which is still the country’s primary source of energy.

...

The new battery would be more than twice the size of another one operated by Neoen in South Australia, which was the largest lithium-ion battery in the world when it came online in 2017. Like the older battery, the new one will use Tesla’s technology. The one in Victoria will be made up of Tesla’s new Megapacks, which were unveiled last year. The Megapack was developed to replace fossil fuel-burning “peaker” plants that come online during demand peaks.

...
posted by sebastienbailard at 4:50 AM on December 4, 2020 [2 favorites]


Last year, I switched to a renewable energy provider, and just this payday I was reminded of how awesome it is because the bill for three months was just a tiny bit higher than my former bill for one month. This is in Copenhagen, so I don't have my own windmill or solar cells.
The somewhat famous waste to energy power plant here is already redundant, because families and businesses are so much better at recycling.
At our family farm that I manage, we have solar, and geothermal heating. Still the electricity bill is a bit high. I will change to the renewable provider when they get to our region.
What we really need is an international smart-grid, so we can get power from Scandinavian rivers as well as Saharan solar plants.
Meanwhile, look at Samsø.
In some countries, like the US and UK, there is still a lot to be won by improving the energy efficiency of buildings. This can be done using organic methods which don't in themselves create CO2 issues.
Maybe we can return to sail-powered ships. I have no doubt that we will all be in electric cars in a decade.
We can do a lot with existing technological improvements already. Then we have to innovate. But let's get the basics done right away.

That said, I don't believe in a technological quick-fix. We will have to change our habits and our economy. The factory farms need to go, and with them their providers in the Amazonas and other vulnerable regions. So our diets need to change. And our consumer economy needs to change. When I talk with the young people I know, this doesn't seem to be a big deal. But they are not living in the slums of Lagos or the suburbs of Shanghai.
posted by mumimor at 12:36 PM on December 4, 2020 [1 favorite]


The future I dream of is equator-HVDC-cable-belt cooperation. Follow the sun.

Unfortunately, we'll instead get burbclave fuck-you-got-mine microgrids.
posted by anthill at 12:51 PM on December 4, 2020


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