Comment by XorNot
5 hours ago
How is it hard? It's difficult to build electrical generation these days and not go renewables because they're so cheap and fast to deploy.
It's not a total solution, but market forces wise everything says "build solar and batteries with your money". Governments practically don't need to do anything for this to be the default.
I am a non-hater of renewables. I add this because in plenty of _your_ circles, you are either all in on renewables or you are a coal thumper, basically. I am neither. We need to add nuance by complicating this conversation.
The main problem of renewables is that it is intermittent and that fact remains to be solved. I want this solved or at least improved because it is the bottleneck. In fact, it is such a bottleneck that its energy generation factor is noted as 1:10, i.e.: a power plant rated at 100MW, registers as 10MW in comparison to nuclear and hydro (and obviously coal and gas.) So this means that to add a 1MW worth of energy generation to the grid, 10MW must be built.
Another problem that hits wind farms is that when there's wind blowing somewhere, it tends to blow everywhere, or some large area. So suddenly there is too much energy want to flow in to the grid which hits the core of the problem with grids at this point because energy that is inserted into it, must be extracted to the exact same magnitude at the same time. So a 100GW demand must be met by 100.0GW production. Now if 110GW is produced, something _MUST_ consume it, so there are two choices:
1. make someone consume it, i.e., sell it to them. They have to buy it so the price will drop until there are enough buyers and this does not stop at 0, prices will go in to the negative. So the market will pay you to use electricity. The market. Or:
2. shut off the power plants until we are back at 100GW (or whatever can be met by consumption.)
3. there is also a catastrophic third option. If you have a situation where too much energy (read power if you want to) is inserted into the grid, then its frequency will rise, this damages the infrastructure and connected consumers, so they will get disconnected. Read large and broad power outages. These situations are also non-trivial to recover from. I.e.: to "restart the grid" afterwards. See what happened in Spain last(?) year.
How do you run a power plant in a market that demands payment to accept the energy you want to sell? You cannot. So this is the windfarm paradox, feel free to compare to Russel's paradox. It goes something like this:
A windfarm makes money whenever the wind blows because only then does it have energy to sell.
A windfarm cannot make money whenefer the wind blows because then the market price goes to zero.
So a windfarm makes money when the wind blows and does not blow at the same time.
To solve this problem, energy consumption must be made capable of also being intermittent. Either run "factories" intermittently, which might very well be part of the solution. And/ or, have huge accumulation capacity in the grid that can swallow the over generation.
TLDR: renewables is the easy answer but very hard thing to do. The hard answer is the one I have given, together with getting more nuclear going which is difficult and expensive. But.. what can we do?
It sounds like your issue is with capitalism, not with renewable energy. Luckily, we have plenty of examples of aspects of society that have been deemed too important to leave purely to market forces. In fact, electricity generation is already (mostly) one of them.
As solar and batteries become even cheaper (we're already at the point where they're cheaper than anything else) we can just choose to overbuild capacity and turn down/off whatever other generation isn't necessary at any given time. Utilities already have to predict grid usage based on weather and all sorts of other factors, so it's not like this isn't something that isn't already happening.
> The main problem of renewables is that it is intermittent and that fact remains to be solved.
It is solved.
Grid-scale batteries are being mass-produced today.
It will continue to get even better, but it is reasonably well solved even now.
This sounds like my friend Mick who developed a gambling habit, but assured me that his method was flawless. If you lose, double your bet next time to cover the loss. If you lose that one, double it again. You can't keep on losing.
2 replies →
Batteries don't solve the storage problem, but surely you know this.
China is pursuing the strategy you're describing, but there's a reason they're also building nuclear, they're increasing LNG infrastructure, they haven't phased out coal, and they've built a huge amount of oil storage.
Solar and wind can be part of that strategy but it's not so simple, otherwise people would do it
> China is pursuing the strategy you're describing, but there's a reason they're also building nuclear, they're increasing LNG infrastructure, they haven't phased out coal, and they've built a huge amount of oil storage.
This opinion is rather simplistic. China is reported to have 60% of it's energy needs already supplied by renewable sources, but this transition creates different types of challenges such as preserving the power grid's inertia. Otherwise you might see yourself in a scenario such as the Spanish blackout. This means having in place strategies for fast response (gas) and baseline (hydro storage, nuclear) to prevent the scenario.
batteries are the fastest response power. gas is high maintenance, & bad capex as an intermittent source.
Bateries do solve storage problems. And yes, china energy strategy is based on wind and solar - their portion of China energy production is massively growing.
Batteries can solve short term (days to a week at most) storage problems, they don't solve seasonal storage problems - making sure you have enough energy all the way through a cold, not very sunny, and not consistently windy winter.
If you don't believe me, run the numbers of how many kg of lithium batteries China would need to supply an entire week of energy in the middle of winter (all energy, not just current electricity demand, because in this scenario we're assuming everything is 100% electrified).
Also if you're potentially going to be fighting a war, you need more energy, not less, and it's even more important for it to be reliable year-round.
This is why China is doing what they're doing, they're not idiots and they know that wishful thinking is not a strategy