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AssortedInterests t1_je4gsd4 wrote

Reply to comment by Wwize in U.S. renewable electricity surpassed coal in 2022 by altmorty

Power systems engineer here. The renewable energy source may be cheaper, but there's a hidden (for now) cost in the intermittent nature of them. Right now we still burn enough fossil fuels that we can dispatch them up and down to balance the system without huge quantities of energy storage, but those days are numbered if we're serious about de-carbonization. Between large scale and long-term energy storage and the transmission reinforcement that will be required to de-carbonize building heat especially in northern climates, there is some serious sticker shock brewing to get us to our 2050 goals.

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Badfickle t1_je4yu04 wrote

eh. Grid scale battery factories are being built quite rapidly and prices are dropping. There's good reason for optimism.

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omar_strollin t1_je52cc4 wrote

And old EV batteries can be used for home storage as they phase out

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trevize1138 t1_je56y5f wrote

I've been told that "dead" EV batteries go to landfills where they leak lead into groundwater. Are you saying that's BS? /s

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omar_strollin t1_je5uw98 wrote

:) for anyone who has been misled, EV batteries are very valuable and often repurposed and, if not, recycled.

Just kidding, they’re thrown into day care center and spontaneously combust, killing all inside.

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trevize1138 t1_je6dlfb wrote

Dead batteries will de-magnetize your credit cards and give your psycho ex your current phone number.

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AntifaDoesntExist t1_je5br3y wrote

these same pricks would be the ones who would thump their chest about nuclear and how "safe" waste storage is.

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trevize1138 t1_je5d3zx wrote

Right? Even if the storage issue were solved and nuclear was somehow safe it's also losing out to solar/wind/batteries now strictly on economics. It's becoming a whole new market where power generation and storage can be done very small scale with home solar being so cheap. Nuclear is old fashioned because it's still just massive grid generation. Power is getting democratized beyond that now.

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altmorty OP t1_je5ydpw wrote

It's so funny watching conservatives bash renewables and storage, and then quietly install it for themselves. This is while they campaign for more nuclear, while blocking its development anywhere near them.

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danielravennest t1_je6nyub wrote

Texas has the most wind and solar of any state in the US. One reason is they have been set up to lease property for oil and gas for a long time. Switching to leasing for wind and solar is straightforward. The land-owners only care that their lease checks clear.

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Layer_4_Solutions t1_je6zxjk wrote

They are being built, but they are not being built rapidly.

Price drops have also slowed significantly the last few years.

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Badfickle t1_je7iwhg wrote

Well we had a huge spike in lithium prices the last two years which has since dropped as new sources have come on line. Lithium is now 50% the price it has been the past 2 years.

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Wwize t1_je52nzn wrote

Renewable energy is cheaper EVEN WITH BATTERIES. So even that "hidden cost" that you mention isn't enough to make it more expensive than coal.

Clean energy is cheaper than coal across the whole US, study finds

>Almost every coal-fired power plant in the country could be cost-effectively replaced by local solar or wind and batteries, according to a groundbreaking new analysis.

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SalsaBueno t1_je4x6mi wrote

So we encourage solar and wind generation on the home scale. Smaller scale battery storage will be easier to attain, and that should fill most of the gap.

Of course there will always be a need for backup power for sensitive locations, so we may or may not ever completely do away with fossil fuels, I feel like we might at least bankrupt OPEC.

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Markavian t1_je4nzqp wrote

Is that fixable with sufficient energy storage and overproduction (spare renewable capacity)? Similar to maintaining a gas fired peaker that you only need once a day?

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ACCount82 t1_je56unt wrote

Yes. But electricity is notoriously hard to store. Building enough storage gets really expensive really quick - preventing it from being competitive with natural gas.

It's not an impossible challenge to solve though.

First, the larger a grid is, the more resilient it is to the intermittent nature of renewables, and the less storage it needs. Being able to shift electricity around at great distances is great for grid stability, and a hypothetical planet-scale grid could go full renewable with impressively little storage. A large and robust joint grid, like that of EU or US-Canada, offers a lot of benefits still. Which is why a lot of industry voices are calling for more grid integration, both within the countries and between the countries - like between US and Mexico.

Second, "smart grid" tech can be used to balance the grid on the demand side instead of the supply side. If electricity prices are allowed to change during the day in small intervals, and consumers, ranging from industries and to home appliances, are designed to take that into account, you can get a lot of flexibility by soft-controlling demand. Raise power prices for 19:00 to 19:30, and watch all the ACs pre-heat or pre-cool beforehand to sit the "expensive" interval out, all the parked EVs suspend their charging process, all the washing machines shift their cycle around, all the home-scale batteries shift to using internal power, all the datacenters undervolt their servers, and so it goes. Thus, you get to "eat" a part of the peak on the demand side, and you need less storage capacity to cover what remains.

Third, "full renewable" is not a good goal to strive towards. Fission or possibly even fusion (not yet, but maybe in 20 years?) could make for "green" baseline generation that can be controlled to cover for deficiencies of renewables.

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Layer_4_Solutions t1_je702fb wrote

Sure, but large scale storage and overproduction significantly increase the cost.

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danielravennest t1_je6n788 wrote

"Other Energy Storage" i.e not pumped hydro, which has been around for decades, reached nearly 9 GW this January. That's nearly double what it was 12 months earlier. To the extent regular hydro is available, it can act as storage by saving the water behind the dam when other renewables are running. The US also has nuclear supplying around 19% of utility power.

The first iron-air (reversible rust) battery plant has started construction in West Virginia. I ron is much cheaper than lithium, but also much heavier. So these will be stationary batteries. The first version is designed for 100 hour run time, vs. about 4 hours for Lithium-ion.

It will still take work to break our fossil fuel addiction, but there are solutions coming along in the near future.

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GrowFreeFood t1_je51z5t wrote

Yeah except for the super obvious solution that no one has thought of but me. And if you want to know the solution. Just figure out how to pay me.

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