> Hell, eleven percent of the energy that America currently uses, according to Saul Griffith’s excellent book Electrify, simply goes to finding more energy.
That's a pretty shocking stat too!
The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. It won't be free to transmit that energy, and the intermittent nature of the abundance will play hell with most capital intensive uses (eg crypto mining), but I'm super curious to see what new capabilities that people figure out for humanity.
I feel your last statement is imprecise and overly optimistic. It seems unusually difficult to find proper calculations about what a fully implemented low emissions strategy would look like for a particular country. The only example I have found is this report for the UK [1]. This report makes a number of key points:
1. The UK has to bring in solar power from other countries to meet emissions targets or have more Nuclear capacity.
2. Reduction in energy consumption is just as important as energy sources. This involves use of more efficient technologies, primarly through electrification.
These factors highlight that abundant renewable energy is actually not abundant enough in reality and is unlikely to be for a country like the UK, even with efficiency gains from massive electrification. Without nuclear investment, renewable energy needs to be imported which has infrastructure and geoplitical considerations, as well as being a single point of failure.
While great for its time that book has been thrust hopelessly out of date by technology change. I think some of MacKay's former students are looking to update it, since he is so sadly no longer with us. In particular, wind and solar and storage are dropping exponentially in cost, and it is no longer realistic to think that we could ever build nuclear within 20 years. The nuclear industry is in shambles, a collection of fuckups that can't build, can't ship, can't plan, can't even be honest, and results in jailtime for executives, whether they are from the US (can't build), or South Korea (can build, but faked the safety inspections).
The renewable industry is in contrast an incredible engine of technological advancement. Even enhanced geothermal systems, which have progressed perhaps the least, have advanced since MacKay's time. Ramez Naam has a great concise slide deck on this ongoing transformation:
I would like to refute your assertion that my statement was imprecise. It was extremely precise. And it is not overly optimistic, either. The amount of energy over-production will be determined by how cheap storage in relation to the costs of generation. If storage gets really cheap, then we will have less over-production, because it will be economical to store the production. But if zero-marginal-cost renewable energy continues to get cheaper faster than storage gets cheaper, it will be less expensive to have massive overproduction than to have lots of storage. Napkin math leads to predicitons very similar to RethinkX's prediction, which "traditional" energy wonks discount, but traditional energy wonks also accept ridiculous projections like the IEA's uncritically (sees Naam's slides for just how bad those are)
The UK and Japan are probably the two most difficult geographic locations to power with just solar and wind. But the dramatic drop in cost of off-shore wind is changing that dynamic. As are longer-term grid batteries, like those coming out of Form Energy, that are designed to be profitable from day one on the grid but with only occassional discharge.
To be clear, I am not advocating for nuclear energy. I don't have a preference for one non-fossil fuel energy source over an other. It is good to see that off-shore wind is becoming much more viable.
That slide deck repeats over and over that renewable prices have come down. That's great, but as I said in my original comment, it is hard to find actual calculations about this being implemented in a real country rather than breathless exhortations about the coming revolution.
That MacKay report is valuable for the energy distribution numbers - for example, it talks about the massive amount of panels and windfarms that would be required to meet demand and that this is unlikely to be feasible (notwithstanding the fact that the UK isn't very sunny). Maybe this isn't so true any more, but you seem to be saying that the UK should install an even more than massive amount of renewable capacity, along with various storage solutions to store the excess (presumably to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar). Maybe I don't have that right, but it seems to me to be overly optimistic. The recent energy crisis in Europe would seem to suggest that is the case in the medium term.
The "energy" crisis in Europe is a fossil fuel crisis, not a general energy crisis, the same as so many energy crises in the past, but this time the fossil fuel companies excellent PR engines have been able to cast it as the fault of energy sources that are not dominant on the grid.
The MacKay report was hopelessly and fruitlessly pessimistic on renewable energy, while embracing fraudulent technology like "clean coal" that has proven over and over to be a scam. It's not a fair shake at the world, and much less at the UK. I've been revisiting it since your comment, and though I thought it useful when I first read it, I no longer think it is helpful in understanding the scale of what we can do, and what needs to be done.
The RethinkX report I linked is one sort of model about a future energy grid, using very rough details. Christopher Clack's modeling is far more fine-grained, and his latest models are using historical weather combined with modeling down to the distribution node to run cost optimization strategies. I don't think he's fully published his latest yet (which shows huge cost savings by doing massive storage and solar deployments to homes and businesses within the next five years). But other reports are here:
IMHO, 90%+ renewables by 2040 is a foregone conclusion for 90%+ of the globe, unless governmental corruption requires that people are bilked by the coal and natural gas industries. The key design question for grids is going to be about the amount transmission & storage versus and amount of excess generating capacity from renewables nearby. Transmission is expensive, and not falling much in cost, if at all, so I have a feeling that future and new grids will have much less of it. Looking at those curves from Naam's slide deck should make you think about where we will be in another decade, or in two decades. Our current energy system has costs are split roughly equally fixed capex and fluctuating opex (based on fuel costs). The future grid will have nearly zero opex, and drastically lower capex. For the extreme outliers like the UK, they may lay down a few dozen GW of high-voltage DC to higher resource areas.
The UK just built a high voltage line to Norway. The eventual plan is to sell North Sea wind to Norway while the wind is blowing (which is almost all of the time, they're called trade winds for a reason). Some of that energy will be stored as pumped hydro and sold back to the UK when the wind isn't blowing.
Honestly please stop citing more than a decade old data on renewable energy. It's a highly dynamic sector, and data from the stone age of renewables is completely irrelevant for the discussion.
The book is obsolete on financial costs, but still useful for the physical scale of infrastructure required by various technologies. A lot of people have fairly poor intuition about that.
The bigger foibles are clean coal and nuclear. Clean coal has been impossible to build and CCS of fossil fuels has been a boondoggle whereever it's been tried. Nuclear has also proven to be nearly impossible to build, from France to Finland to the US. The UK has only managed to get one site going, Hinkley, and other planned sites have not had suitable bids, like Wylfa. So more nuclear is not a feasible route.
I think that enhanced geothermal systems (using heat from dry rock, kilometers down), could be a good resource that's just now getting developed in the UK, on the MW scale.
Solar will never be great in the UK, but average capacity factor is at 10%, and currently provides 4% of total UK electricity, which is a remarkable feat given historical costs.
I've said this in other comments, but there's a remarkable amount of hot air that went into the assumptions in this book, and its age is showing terribly. I bet that if MacKay were around still, he'd have massive updates, but the entire world was wrong when it was betting against renewables, and in favor of traditional fossil fuel companies' abilities to innovate.
Nuclear is difficult due to political issues and the poor state of the US industry, but it's not a physical impossibility. China is building quite a lot of nuclear power, including a GenIV plant that just went on the grid.
Political issues are not impeding France, Finland, the UK, or even the US's two sites. This is a misconception.
The underlying Gen3 (or whatever the AP1000 and EPR would be called), is fundamentally incompatible with our construction and logistics capabilities. China probably can't help us fix our processes, and I'm not sure we would trust them. Same goes for Rosatom, who is also building.
Even under the best of economic conditions, however, nuclear is not very favorable. Even China, with its unparalleled construction capability, is only planning a tiny tiny slice of its future energy capacity as nuclear, with much larger generation in wind and solar. And a lot of the planned nuclear will never be built, because renewables and storage are changing the economic case for nuclear.
Biomass is so very inefficient at capturing solar energy (maybe 2%, if that) that even at that small fraction of energy produced it contributes very substantially to the land use of the energy system.
Every right-wing blowhard has heard about Solyndra, but they never mention that the amount wasted of coal carbon capture, which doesn't work or even exist at scale, has spent multiple Solyndras worth of federal money.
Iirc it didn't really assume any arrangement, except maybe as an example. It calculated the physical requirements of different energy sources independently. The reader can start from there to get any particular combination.
I guess I don't find what's so difficult. All you need to do is look to Norway. If you want to make an argument that "the last bit is the toughest" - I guess? But they're already well, well on their way to a low emissions strategy.
As for it being impossible for a country like the UK: you're making some ridiculous assumption that the UK would need all energy to be produced on-shore. Does the UK get all of its coal and oil in-country? No? Then why do they need to get all of their energy in-country? If they need to import and store batteries or hydrogen or insert energy holding vessel so be it.
My understanding of the nuclear opposition from the renewable groups is that nuclear effectively has a massive upfront capex cost and delayed capex for decommissioning 3-5 decades later along with extremely low marginal costs to operate.
This means that in order to make "cheap" nuclear, you need to operate the plant at max capacity as long as you can. While this makes great "base load" it can't complement renewables like natural gas can, natural gas peaker plants can simply burn when renewables aren't available "low capex, high opex".
I'm curious how the UK is approaching the economics here, it's quite possible to reduce the capex of nuclear - and it's also possible to simply plan for something along the lines of a 40/60 split between nuclear and renewables where renewables take "peak demand" and high energy use industries.
>If a breakthrough of solar technology occurs and the cost of photovoltaics
came down enough that we could deploy panels all over the countryside,
what is the maximum conceivable production? Well, if we covered 5% of
the UK with 10%-efficient panels, we’d have
This paragraph is titled "Fantasy time". So before I start the criticism, I would like to thank him for clearly debunking fantasies about hydro and geothermal, where aside from ground-source heat pumps and sparsely populated mountains, they are simply too small. Photovoltaics are the largest source of sustainable energy by far, so the results of an overall analysis will be heavily dependent on the treatment of solar panels.
At the same time, I think it's practical to assume that humans will aggressively innovate the properties and production of PV panels, because the potential value is so large. But I'm going to stick with existing technology. The Agua Caliente farm in Arizona:
As such, describing solar farms as a fantasy, and upper bounding the efficiency at 10%, when there are existing installations built with solar panels at 16% efficiency, seems too pessimistic. Looking ahead to other technologies, perovskites, considered a low-cost option, were recently pushed to 25%:
and Alta Devices demonstrated 29% efficiency with a GaAs thin-film before a buyout by a Chinese firm led to a class-action lawsuit filed by disgruntled employees:
>most countries will be in the same boat as
Britain and will have no renewable energy to spare
A glance at a map will immediately show the viewer that Britain is one of the most poleward and densely populated countries in the world — a worst-case scenario for solar electricity. Even Japan has the benefit of sitting significantly further south.
Yikes, those are some really bad assumptions. It's been a decade since I've read the book, so skimming now I'm seeing an awful lot of hot air in the assumptions that went into it.
For example, the mythical, never built, "clean coal" shows up in most of the potential scenarios for the UK! That was an obvious stinker back when the book was written, but to simultaneously give the benefit of the doubt to charlatans, and then misestimate solar and wind so much is pretty unforgivable.
I think we perhaps give the book too much credit because it converted everything into understandable units, which is the primary utility of the book. But that utility papers over a lot of really bad judgement, so using it as a guide for sustainable energy leads to really bad conclusions.
Yeah consumer panels are routinely 18 - 20% efficiency now. But these are the ideal numbers. To be fair he doesn't derate the efficiency of PV as happens in the real world, so the degree to which 10% is an underestimate is mitigated. I don't think this substantively changes the analysis, it just means less reliance on nuclear in the various models. Additionally, in a gloomy country like the UK the more you rely on solar the more you need advanced storage and grid solutions to deal with the inconsistencies.
And agree that the comment about other countries is not correct. Australia for example will pretty soon be able to meet 100% energy demand with renewables on sunny days and is looking to export power.
Agreed, the 10% seems like a solid estimate, at least for today, but it seems quite likely that new tech could bring that up to 15% or more, which is a 50% in efficacy. Wikipedia says that current panels are getting a 10% capacity factor now, which is only 40% - 50% of what can be had at sites with good solar. That capacity factor seems to be slowly climbing since 2008 as well.
This paragraph has some pretty bad predictions by MacKay though:
>The solar power capacity required to deliver this 50 kWh
per day per person in the UK is more than 100 times all the photovoltaics
in the whole world.
This is a completely irrelevant and pointless thing to state.
> At the start of this book I said I
wanted to explore what the laws of physics say about the limits of sus-
tainable energy, assuming money is no object. On those grounds, I should
certainly go ahead, industrialize the countryside, and push the PV farm
onto the stack. At the same time, I want to help people figure out what
we should be doing between now and 2050. And today, electricity from
solar farms would be four times as expensive as the market rate.
Overlooking that Solar PV had already fallen precipitously in cost in 2008, and assuming that a four-fold fall was not a given, was a huge mistake.
> So I feel
a bit irresponsible as I include this estimate in the sustainable production
stack in figure 6.9 – paving 5% of the UK with solar panels seems beyond
the bounds of plausibility in so many ways. If we seriously contemplated
doing such a thing, it would quite probably be better to put the panels in
a two-fold sunnier country and send some of the energy home by power
lines.
5% of the UK is about the same percentage of the UK that is occupied by houses and gardens. Putting solar panels on all roofs could probably get to 10 kWh/d or more. Converting only a very small amount of arable land, which has already been taken out of nature, to solar panels, could get the UK to 5% easily.
The skepticism of solar and embrace of tech like clean coal and nuclear were big misses here.
People used to say that nuclear would lead to power to cheap to meter. That never happened. I’m not sure it’s going to happen with renewables because of the large land use requirements.
Also is there anywhere in the world where adding wind and solar has led to lower electricity rates for ratepayers? European electricity and nat gas prices should go up about 50% this year.
Lastly, there was a story yesterday on HN about high fertilizer prices. The biggest reason for that is high natural gas prices, in part because of a lack of recent investment in new natural gas sources. There will be an energy transition, but so far the prices for energy and things derived from energy sources are really high.
Electrical grids change slowly, over half of all electrical equipment worldwide is 20+ years old and solar only very recently became cheap. Many places are seeing lower rates due to recent renewable energy investments, others are seeing higher costs due to heavily subsidized early adoption. Some like Germany have both effects at the same time.
So remember, the economics going forward on a 20+ year time horizons look very different from existing infrastructure. We still have extremely overpriced concentrating solar installations that are not even vaguely competitive with sub 2c/kWh PV solar. However when you sign a 20 year contract for all power produced at price X you don’t get to drop it when something else becomes cheaper.
There actually already instances of things being shut down early because the savings from new renewables are so great it is in everyone's interest to buy out the existing contract early.
Obviously that applies more for things with high ongoing fuel costs but I wouldn't be at all surprised if this applied to some early concentrating solar plants, particularly if they can reuse the land and grid connection for new renewables.
Everywhere? Even if you only look at energy prices it's probably fairly clear trend, once you start accounting for pollution, climate change, lower peak loads etc. The savings quickly run into Trillions.
Norway and Iceland come to mind. However, they obviously don’t use much solar power due to location. In terms of recent technology, Iowa is probably the clearest US example.
More generally you need to look at wholesale prices and more specifically inflation adjusted wholesale prices to see large drops from the recent solar price drops.
Of particular note is the graph showing prices in areas heavily reliant on coal, vs those with a high renewable usage.
Conclusion:
> Regions with higher use of natural gas and renewable fuel for electric power generation, in particular hydroelectric power, have seen prices rise more slowly than prices in regions that have predominantly used coal. Although it is not possible to attribute the differences in the retail price development solely to fuel mix, the significant role that capacity investment and fuel costs play in determining distribution rates suggests that at least part of the variation between these regions is explained by capacity shifts in the industry.
That is a massively misleading way to frame it. Hydro is well known as one of the cheapest sources of energy period. The problem being if you happen to have a river of energy. Bundling hydro (and natural gas!) into “renewables” to claim that all renewables lower grid prices (when most people take it to mean solar and wind are impractical) is misleading.
They have graphs for both renewables with hydro and renewables without hydro, the effect is there for both. They also have a separate gas graph too.
But, hydro and gas pairing really well with solar and wind is an actual thing that helps lower energy costs so I don't see why that should be totally ignored.
Providing a set amount of electricity 24/7 of course has a cost as well as setting up renewable sources. But especially solar cells have only fixed/maintenance costs, but no "fuel" cost per amount of electrictiy produced. This leads to a price for the electricity, which mostly has to be reconed up to the point where the grid demands are satisfied. Any excess electricity is literally free and can be repurposed, as long as that purpose can utilize intermittant supply.
If you look at the German electricity prices at the power exchange, high renewable output correlates with very low prices. The amortized costs of renewables by now are distinctly lower than for fossil fuel and of course nuclear power. While large investments have to be taken, a further expansion of renewables should lower the electricity price in Germany (and the rest of Europe via trade)
Current prices are very high, because of gas shortage. I don't have a clear idea how it all started, but it seems there was a too large dependency on the spot markets vs. long term contracts, and now the spot markets have skyrocketed. There are political aspecst too - Russia for sure could extend their deliveries, but barely deliver what was contractually agreed upon.
It didn't help, that several French nuclear plants have been shut down without warning as safety problems were detected and have now to be fixed. Finally, the weather has been not so friendly for renewables in the last year, for the first time in many years, Germany had a small decrease in production year over year.
I can’t speak for other countries but I don’t think you understand just how much land America has. Drive across it sometime. The wind farms are on land that goes on forever.
> The global weighted-average cost of electricity of new onshore wind farms in 2019 was USD 0.053/kWh with country/region values of between USD 0.051 and USD 0.099/kWh depending on the region. Costs for the most competitive projects are now as low USD 0.030/kWh, without financial support.
> is there anywhere in the world where adding wind and solar has led to lower electricity rates for ratepayers?
We do not have a spare universe without such additions to answer that question.
Hornsea Project 1 (1.2GW nameplate electricity generation from wind turbines in the North Sea) is running right now and is paid £140 per MWh under CfD terms. So, on a nice fresh day that's £168 000 per hour.
In 2019 you could say that's a ludicrous subsidy, the market price for electricity in the UK was about £50 per MWh so the government (and thus rate payers ultimately) are paying about 200% extra to subsidise this wind farm.
On the other hand, today (in January 2022) the market price is fluctuating closer to £200 per MWh due to gas prices and so £140 per MWh looks like a bargain.
[ The way Contracts for Difference works is you sell your electricity like everybody else, via some mix of long term and short term contracts, and the government tops up the difference between the market price and your "strike price" so that your income is always determined by your strike price not subject to changes in the market price. This also means if market prices are higher (as they often have been this past year) you pay the government back the difference so you still only get the income your strike price guaranteed. As a result the risk of not generating electricity stays with you, as does the risk of not selling your electricity for market prices but the government eats your risk that market prices are far lower than you expected while also gobbling up any windfall profits if market prices are far higher ]
Now, if Hornsea and similar wind farms don't exist, does the UK magically pay the same price £140 per MWh for that electricity even though gas is expensive and it has no other source of electricity ? Or do the prices go up even further? Maybe with no other choice the UK buys electricity for £300 per MWh or even £500 per MWh. The lights must stay on after all.
Also there are secondary effects. If you propose a new wind farm today, to start construction in 2024 and be online in 2030, you're not going to get a strike price of £140 per MWh because of course prices came down due to investment in the sector. But if there was no investment, why wouldn't you find wind farms in 2030 just as expensive as they were in 2015 ? And not only did prices come down, efficiency went up as suppliers gained experience and competed to offer better products, when Hornsea was proposed a 8MW turbine was best-in-class, Hornsea Project 2 intends up to 15MW turbines. The taller structure offers not only more peak power output, it also delivers higher capacity factor because high altitude winds are more constant.
The problem is that battery costs are so expensive that to get that kW of unreliable power, you need to build a kW of reliable power to back it up. Then rates swing from the very cheap kW when the sun is shining and there are few clouds to the expensive rate on cloudy days or night, and at the end of the day you have to pay for double the capacity. That's why electricity rates go up on average after the introduction of cheap unreliable power.
The production of cheap, long lasting batteries that can be deployed at mass scale and survive large numbers of power cycles is the missing link between cheap unreliable power and actually realized lower costs. So people are declaring victory citing the unreliable rates while electricity consumers are faced with much higher costs. We don't have that victory yet.
Commercial capacity is free. There are no subsidies for building gas turbines. If they want to build more, gambling that they'll be used when the winds are calm and the skies are dark, they're welcome to try to get investment for that.
Looking at the cost of wholesale electricity supply (rather than the price households pay for "units" of electricity) I do not see your "up on average" for introducing "cheap unreliable power".
Ofgem says in June 2010 wholesale electricity cost £42.18 per MWh. By June 2015 that was £41.66 and by June 2020 it was... £28.42
However a year later in June 2021 it was £79.85. Now, what happened between June 2020 and June 2021 ? Did we install a lot more solar panels, build a huge wind farm? No, Vladimir Putin began squeezing Europe's supply of natural gas.
Ofgem even has a gas price chart next to the electricity charts so you can see this obvious correlation.
Gas prices went up, and they're going to stay up unless you think Putin is suddenly going to decide he's happy for Ukraine to join NATO and put American troops on his border.
If you need natural gas for its chemical properties this just sucks, too bad. But many more of us are using it for heating or electricity and those are things we can move away from gas, insulating ourselves from this problem and helping to fight global warming.
The reason why you need to look at what households pay is because the electricity companies are the ones who need to deal with the volatility and what they charge to customers is the price of reliable energy. Wholesale prices are very volatile, but residential prices are much more stable, reflecting an average of wholesale prices. So it is better to sample them than to sample the random noise of wholesale prices.
I also disagree thoroughly with the idea that you can take 3 samples from statistical noise and deduce an average, as you have done.
I also think it's laughable that natural gas prices are controlled by Putin. That's a deep rabbit hole you've fallen into, as it's a global market, and natural gas prices respond to general supply and demand, not the dictates of Putin "squeezing" anyone. In particular, when there is less wind or Europe takes a coal plant offline, for example, then demand for natural gas goes up. Now what do you think happens to the price when demand goes up? The idea that high natural gas prices are dictated by some shadowy enemy, rather than lack of substitutes such as wind, oil, and coal, is not a good analysis of the problem. Frankly it sounds a lot like those who says inflation is caused by "corporate greed" rather than an expansion of the money supply.
In general, please avoid blaming changes to prices on political enemies, as that's pure misinformation. It does not elucidate or explain any actual cause of price changes. It literally makes people less informed, less able to understand the world around them. It's the opposite of what we should be trying to do.
> The reason why you need to look at what households pay is because the electricity companies are the ones who need to deal with the volatility and what they charge to customers is the price of reliable energy.
Nope. The price households pay is "capped" by government policy. Bread and circuses my friend. The result of electricity companies being unable to "deal with the volatility" is that they go bankrupt, if you'd followed that Ogem link it probably highlighted that it has information for UK consumers worried what happens when their supplier goes bankrupt, as huge numbers have (the answer is, in very short term future, nothing important since of course the retail electricity companies don't actually supply any electricity to anybody, they're just an artificial construct).
> I also disagree thoroughly with the idea that you can take 3 samples from statistical noise and deduce an average, as you have done.
I linked Ofgem's site which shows you all this data over an extended period, I just gave you three examples to save on reading, and you... averaged them and then complained this is statistical noise.
> I also think it's laughable that natural gas prices are controlled by Putin.
Laughable or not, Putin in practice controls the Russian company Gazprom which supplies most of Europe's natural gas. That company chose to supply only the bare minimum of what was contracted, even though its buyers would like to buy closer to the upper end of their contract range. Because politically this is in Putin's interest.
Now of course Britain, far from Russia and with its own oil fields and other sources, is not directly depending on Russia for gas, unlike several other important European countries, however, you correctly notice that supply and demand influences pricing. For Britain's neighbour's who can't get Russian gas the British gas is suddenly very attractive, raising its prices, and thus we're back to where we began, Putin is ultimately why you can see that big spike in the Ofgem charts that you are pretending is "just noise"...
Supplying the US with enough solar power for 100% of requirements would require 16,000 square miles, plus one more for batteries.
That's a lot, but in a country with 3.6 million of them, not a big deal. That's about how much we use for cemetaries. We use a lot more for parking lots.
Land use is a problem for some countries, Singapore can't go 100% solar. But most countries are fine.
Singapore us extremely unusual at 51.7 TWh/year on 724 km2 of land. However, they are far from energy independent right now. They currently import the fuel to generate electricity, so they could also just import electricity directly.
Presumably while keeping back up generators for strategic reasons.
Thinking that nuclear fission stations would lead to super cheap power is somewhat naive. Nuclear power stations are incredibly expensive to build. There is the cost of fuel, decomissioning and ongoing costs for waste disposal - note that most of this is not spent fuel rods, but things like PPE which can only be used for a certain amount of time.
Wind and solar have at times pushed wholesale prices negative in Germany in the past - that doesn't necessarily translate to a cost for users (ie homeowners). I'm not super familiar withWe really need much better local storage so that people can soak up excess power, or fabled smart appliances that communicate properly to use electricty at an appropriate time.
One issue is if you run a power plant which is difficult to shut off quickly, or the time to start up is also prohibitive. You might choose to take the hit and pay for the grid to take your power, rather than shutdown and lose out when demand increases in the future. If I understand correctly, this cost is sometimes passed to consumers (e.g. if your supplier owns the plant). So consumers actually lose when prices go negative - indeed if you have your own generators, in theory you should also be paying to supply the grid when demand is negative if you don't disconnect your feed. What should happen in an ideal world is you'd store/use it locally (say charge your car up).
> Wind and solar have at times pushed wholesale prices negative in Germany in the past
Germany has extremely high electricity prices for the consumer. It doesn't matter if it's occasionally negative if the average is extremely costly, because you need electricity all the time.
It's also everything else, especially the monopoly on transmission.
Energy is a supply and demand game like everything else.
'Hydro One' in Ontario has a CEO, workers, and a quasi monopoly.
On what planet would they, in all self-interest ever decide to lower rates for something?
If energy prices went down a little bit, they could actually increase their transmission prices, lower end prices to users by a tiny fraction, and that's that. That's how a value chain monopoly works.
Getting rid of the transmission problem, at lest for 'last mile' would be a giant leap.
> On what planet would they, in all self-interest ever decide to lower rates for something?
In Ontario electricity rates are one of the biggest political footballs. Every election there's a stupid electricity rate promise from every party. That's how rates will go down in Ontario.
"People" who were "Greatest generation" and "Silent generation" adults who lied to us, lied to my face, when they knew it wasn't the truth. Civilian nuclear power (at least terrestrial nuclear power) is, and always was a grift. Initially as a way to keep military nuclear programs going, but later as a grift unto itself by elements of the MIC like GE and Westinghouse who couldn't contain their greed any better than they could radioactive waste.
> Lastly, there was a story yesterday on HN about high fertilizer prices.
Keep in mind that you can't make urea without carbon dioxide.
Currently, you just can not electrify its production. It would take many years of research before you can do it in any sizeable amount. This is different from ammonia, that is just an equipment renovation away (so, a few years of investiment), but ammonia isn't useful as fertilizer.
> Ammonia (NH₃) is the foundation for the nitrogen (N) fertilizer industry. It can be directly applied to soil as a plant nutrient or converted into a variety of common N fertilizers
> Ammonia has the highest N content of any commercial fertilizer, making it a popular source of N despite the potential hazard it poses and the safety practices required to use it. For example, when NH₃ fertilizer is applied directly to soil, it’s in a pressurized liquid that will immediately become vapor if exposed to air after leaving the tank. To prevent such releases into the atmosphere, growers use various tractor-drawn knives and shanks to place it at least 10 to 20 cm (4 to 8 inches) below the soil surface. Ammonia will then rapidly react with soil water to form ammonium (NH₄⁺), which is retained on the soil cation exchange sites.
Yeah, ok, ammonia is not completely useless as a fertilizer. You can't do that process in any soil, and can't repeat it many times on the same place either. But it is used a few times in a few places.
(Interestingly, I live in a place that would gain a lot from it, yet people overwhelmingly prefer to use magnesium and calcium during the PH correction of the soil. Now I'm curious about the reason.)
There is also ammonium nitrate, that is a much safer and easier to handle carbon-free alternative to ammonium and much more widely applicable. It is still more dangerous and harder to handle than urea, and also requires equipment renovation (so, don't expect people to change any fast). But if the carbon becomes a hard constraint, people will very likely migrate to it or something similar. The problem we are seeing right now is that any migration takes time and money.
Yeah, it's one of the top 5. Notice there are no numbers there.
It's hard to find numbers, most places basically ignore the usage as a direct fertilizer. It seems to be much more popular on the US than anywhere else, for the US I was able to find this (it's old, but it's what I have):
> Urea is the most popular source of dry N fertilizer, accounting for 79% of the
total dry N used. Ammonium sulfate has risen in popularity. In 1988 it constituted 14% of the dry N market. (https://www.canr.msu.edu/field_crops/uploads/archive/E0896.p...)
Most countries just equate nitrogen fertilizer with urea.
Also most of roofs yet uncovered by panels. And you can do dual use: solarpanels that provide shade for agriculture use, etc.
Land or technology is not the problem - competing with cheap fossil energy in the ground is, as well as the massive investment required to make the complete transition to renewables.
Is it, though? It sounds like plain old production costs.
I mean, unless you build a coal plant right into a coal mine, a natural gas generator at each gas well, you don't store any surplus wind power... Energy is needed in parts of the energy production chain to keep it working.
That puts it at an energy return on energy invested of around 9, which is pretty damn bad.
Wind is at 18 right now, solar at something like 15. These will only go up as they become cheaper and cheaper. Given how frequently renewables are critiqued for low energy return on energy investment, 11% is a pretty pathetic stat. I think it's pretty clear that these industries are the walking dead. I should have switched my total market index funds to exclude the fossil fuel companies a few years ago, before they lost so much of their value recently.
> That puts it at an energy return on energy invested of around 9, which is pretty damn bad.
Is it, though? That sounds pretty awesome, specially as renewables lower/eliminate energy imports thus improve a country's balance of trade.
Also, one aspect of renewables that results in energy dissipation/loss is energy storage. Wind and solar farms generate energy that don't coincide with peaks in demand, thus that production is stored and reintroduced in the grid resulting in a drop of efficiency. However, it would be stupid to argue that losses from, say, restocking the reservoir of a pumped storage hydroelectric plant, specially one which has been retrofitted as an energy reservoir, makes the technology worse than only generating power during periods where demand surpasses supply.
> For example, suppose we had single 1KW solar panel, and the panel had a very low ERoEI of 4 (which is certainly an underestimate [1]). Even if you increased the ERoEI from the very low value of 4, all the way up to to infinity, so that no energy was required to replace that solar panel, it would make little difference--it would increase the amount of NET energy obtained by only 25%. On the other hand, if you could build 3 such solar panels, instead of 1, then you would triple the net energy obtained. In this case, building two more solar panels had 12x greater effect than increasing the ERoEI to infinity.
I get what you are saying, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to say it is "BS". Here is a different pov:
You are about to build 1 solar panel. Where should you put it it? Somewhere with a lot of sun (EROEI of 1:10) or somewhere with a little sun (ERORI of 1:4). All else being equal, you would put it where you get more sun. Of course, as you build more and more panels, you ask yourself "when should I stop", and the answer is "when it costs just as much to install as I get back" (ERORI 1:1)
A separate calculation is "I have invented a more efficient solar panel! Should I replace existing solar panels?"
Thats not a real problem, nor a real solution. If you have a panel already built, the energy input is a sunk cost. It has no relevance to where you put the panel to maximise its output, you only care about the E part, not the ROEI part which is the hard bit to calculate. And no-one used it that way anyway.
Zooming way out, you also don't stop building panels on a global scale when EROEI reaches 1.0000001. You stop when there's an opportunity cost. Can that same input be used for something more valuable? Then stop building panels, even if their EROEI is massive. We're not phasing out fossil fuels because their EROEI is below one, for example.
Similarly, We have plenty of different solar panel designs, with different EROEI's. We're not building the ones with the highest score on this metric, and we shouldn't, it's not as important as other things like mass scale manufacturing capability. Especially because what we are building generates electrical energy. If energy is the deciding factor we can make some, by building solar panels.
I used BS specifically because it is a real thing that you can actually measure. Its just that it was only ever found to be useful to people who were making most of their facts up anyway. Its not a lie if the person saying it doesn't care if its true or false, its just BS.
I feel that demand shifting is something that is talked about least but will automatically happen at a larger scale than we envision when marginal cost of electricity is low. Hopefully that leads to cheaper versions of many expensive items with high embedded energy costs.
> you don't have to pay for the negative externalities of carbon.
We aren't yet seeing much indication that there will be a global tax/fee on the externalities of carbon. That means even if local policies are implemented for certain cases (eg. no gas cars in the city, no coal power in one state), there will always be somewhere on earth willing to burn dirty coal to make helicopter fuel for export.
>The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation.
Well, by now, it seems like completely the opposite: thanks to nuclear plants shutting down and CO taxes, we are starved of energy.
I still remember the outcry when the EU banned incandescent bulbs in 2009.
CFLs were crappy and full of heavy metals, Halogen was half-assed, LEDs were expensive, too blue and too weak.
People were defending their radiant heaters in full force, but everybody underestimated exponential development in a market suddenly put into full force solving this.
By the last stage where 40W bulbs were being phased out, nobody was interested in them anymore, because LEDs were simply better with cheaper TCO.
Solar and battery are still on exponential track down the cost curve (with wind saturating, but still going strong).
Nuclear and fossils are not.
The energy world will look very different 10 years from now.
I used to be anti nuclear, then I was pro, but by now I‘m back to anti. Main reason being that it‘s too slow to move the needle by now. Any new nuclear project by now - even if we’d change public sentiment and regulations today - is so time, planning and capital intensive that by the decade it goes online, it‘ll be outcompeted by overprovisioned solar roofs + battery storage even in the worst locations except maybe the arctic circle.
Without proliferation risks and however you get rid of the radiated mess.
I believed the same things in the same order (anti, pro, too slow), but I'm not anti nuclear now. Let it try and compete. We'll get a better electricity supply either way. Yeah, letting it persist wastes time and money, but so what? Every other system we have in life has a lot of waste too.
I would be strongly antinuclear if the nuclear industry somehow manages to persuade politicians to shut down wind, solar, and battery technologies, though. But that's very unlikely.
I’ll take contaminated mushrooms and wild boar to climate change and the large scale disease brought on by fossil fuels. Nuclear is much safer, even accounting for these absolute outliers.
If you look over the last 10 year, renewables have reduced the CO2 emissions considerably in Germany, reaching 50% in 2020. However, while 2020 was a record year with a huge increase vs. 2019, 2021 was back on the 2019 level, as the weather was very average.
> thanks to nuclear plants shutting down and CO taxes, we are starved of energy.
There are countries which already started transitioning to renewable energies which not only endured long periods of energy independence from renewable sources alone but also already reported energy production surpluses which even led to null and negative energy prices.
Therefore your baseless assertion regarding shutting down nuclear and coal plants seems to be totally made up and completely unfounded.
Can you provide any basis for your assertion, and point out any rational basis for that so-called "energy starvation" scenario?
The abundance of cheap energy is based on renewable sources. They need to be built in the form of wind power and photovoltaics and others first. Blocking this of course raises the energy costs.
In Germany, the previous government has done a lot to stall further builtup of renewable energies. The builtup was only a fraction in recent years compared to the top years. If the builtup had continued (or even accellerated), Germany would be an even larger exporter of electricity than it is.
> In Germany, the previous government has done a lot to stall further builtup of renewable energies.
I find this assertion hard to believe. Merkel has been in charge of Germany's federal government for the past two decades, and throughout this period Germany's energy production from renewable sources has skyrocketed from virtually none to the leading energy source, with a share of over 60% of the nation's energy production.
In fact, if anything, Germany's production from renewables has been accelerating.
Well, for one, I don't understand it either, why Merkel didn't see the change through. It was, however, started by the red-green government before Merkel. They set up the system which guaranteed a price for any renewable energy producted (initiall very high, decreasing for later installations).
The production did indeed skyrocket, with the peak of over 50% renewable power in 2020. But in the last 3 years the built-up of new wind generators has stalled. Hitting a peak of 5GW/year in 2017, it went down to below 1 in 2019. This was due to several changes by the government. On the one side they replaced the flat fee which was paid for electricity produced to a complex auction schema, on the other side there were more and more restrictions about where one could build wind generators. Also the amound of solar power was even capped. It seems that the situation has improved somewhat, the build-up of renewables was a bit higher in 2020 than in 2019, but hasn't reached the past peaks again yet.
> On the one side they replaced the flat fee which was paid for electricity produced to a complex auction schema (...)
Aren't you referring to the initial subsidized program where private companies were enticed to invest their own cash in renewable energy sources in exchange for assured profitability during the initial period?
Well, the new distance requirements for wind parks are stricter, than for a garbage burning plant, for example. And there are still villages being removed, because of coal - so it is far from 100% support, but overall I would not agree, that the previous government was stalling renewables. But there was and is lots of general movement into renewables, so maybe there would have been a wind and solar boom, despite governments efforts.
Won’t the intermittent nature hurt crypto less than other industries? We currently have a crypto mining company setting up in Texas where energy is cheap with the understanding that they might have to shut down and start up at a moments notice due to demand from the rest of the grid.
As long as these sources are available at all times in aggregate across the globe, crypto mining should be one of the most resilient industries.
I don't know how the situation is now but when I looked into it a few years ago the rapidly increasing hash rate of the mining hardware meant that running them only half the time didn't meant that it just takes twice the time to recoup your investment but that you might not make back at all.
> The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. It won't be free to transmit that energy [...]
It won't be free to transmit that energy, but that transmission will also be zero-marginal cost. The cost to operate power lines and transformers doesn't depend on how much power it's going through them.
Transmission is not a near zero marginal cost, and the cost to operate absolutely does depend on the design capacity, including the operating voltages and number of sources and taps.
Additionally, wider geographic distribution of power sources greatly increases the number of transmission lines and overall amount of right-of-way and materials needed per generated kwh.
And because you can't assume a usage of near 100% of transmission capacity due to intermittent solar and wind, having to over-build transmission capacity reduces overall efficiency even greater, meaning even higher transmission costs for equivalent grid capacity.
Right now in certain seasons there's huge amounts of curtailed renewable power. For example in 2020 California threw away 1.5TWh of solar power that was in excess of what the grid needed.
As renewables go to higher and higher percentages of generation, this amount of curtailment will increase dramatically. Battery farms won't solve this entirely, because regardless of the mix of batteries, we are going to be building a system that serves a seasonal minimum of energy production.
During the seasonal maximum of energy production, probably in California alone, we will have dozens of TWh per year that can not be consumed on the grid, and may not even be able to be transmitted on the grid.
There's even a good amount of slack in most current solar farm designs. Due to the cost balance between inverters and panels, it's quite common to have more DC power from panels than the inverters can convert to AC for the grid. As batteries get cheaper, batteries are taking some of that DC power right now. But there's still the seasonal effects of generation.
From what I have heard from my energy business acquaintances, the only alternative source that has a hope of surpassing fossil is nuclear. Solar panels and wind have their own issues: rare earth minerals, difficult upkeep, and in the case of the non-mirror solar- toxic pollution as they breakdown. I hope some combination of nuclear, geothermal, hydro, mirror-solar, and wind can combine to satisfy energy needs, but I am not optimistic.
"is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. "
We're nowhere near that. I don't believe that energy will be truly available in abundance until fusion or later.
The 'new capabilities' we need are in storage, smarter regulation about transmission because the monopolies are ugly etc..
Any new technical game changers are in the works. Disruptive technologies don't come out of nowhere. There's someone in a lab, working away on something, already publishing papers for what will one day be fairly transformative.
I don't think that fusion will ever provide terrestrial energy abundance. The current fusion schemes under consideration all resort back to being a heat source to boil water and drive a turbine. Renewable energy + storage is within striking distance of undercutting the just the steam turbine side of fusion. Since the only benefit of fusion I've ever heard is a huge amount of energy from a small amount of space, which presumably allows lower costs for that heat energy, let's assume best case of zero cost for fusion. In that scenario, fusion-driven electricity is more expensive than renewables, so it will be renewables providing abundance, not fusion.
If somebody figures out direct conversion of fusion to electricity, that would change my projections. Also it's possible that for non-terrestrial applications, fusion might be the best applications. But I think it's far too early in the development of space travel to predict what sort of energy mechanisms we may use.
Renewables are nowhere near what you indicate, that's the problem.
There is no future in which a Canadian throws up a panel and gets vast amounts of cheap energy.
Fission would by far and away be the cheapest form of energy: it's literally hot rocks that boil water. What makes it expensive is dealing with the radiation ans safety.
Fusion, without those artifacts might yield vast amounts of free energy. But we don't really know.
Wind and Sun are never going to provide vast surpluses of electricity, they're just going to help us come down a bit off of fossil fuels.
That's a pretty shocking stat too!
The energy transition is about to thrust us into a world where for long periods of time, we have massive energy abundance of zero-marginal cost energy generation. It won't be free to transmit that energy, and the intermittent nature of the abundance will play hell with most capital intensive uses (eg crypto mining), but I'm super curious to see what new capabilities that people figure out for humanity.