Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

Hillhater said:

So please explain how a system with 65% of its ENERGY supply unavailable, and only 10% of its ENERGY capacity in storage,....can function normally...if at all ??

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Depends where you are.

In a place like the PNW, where hydro is a big part of the equation, you use solar and wind to reduce the amount of water you release. All that water is then available for later - and all of that is renewable. You then use natural gas to make up the shortfall. Thus your natural gas plus hydro gives you peak generation capacity (i.e power) - but solar and wind give you most of the ENERGY (not power.) You can also use nuclear if you like, but it's not going to be cost effective there.

In a place like LA, where it's mainly natural gas, you use solar and wind to reduce/shut down gas plants. This saves the fuel that would otherwise be spent to run those plants. Nuclear provides the baseload, which is the load you never get below. In CA, for example, record high load was 50GW; record low load was around 15GW. So you build out 10-15GW of nuclear that runs full blast all the time, which is its most efficient operating point. You use storage to reduce the ramp rate (and peak) during the peak demand time of 7pm.

billvon said:

The solution, of course, will be a combination of both.

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Exactly what I have been saying here for the last year. We are not that far apart after all. Resource depletion will curtail material throughput due to steadily rising costs of extraction/ production in the next coming decades. The growth/ debt based economic system system we have relied on for the last 100 years will cease to be viable. Ideally we would try to phase in a new social system now but there is too much social momentum in desperately attempting to maintain business as usual with worldwide quantitative easing. So the next best thing is for enlightened individuals to study the coming options and be ready with some ideas of a plan B when the time arrives.

sendler2112 said:

Exactly what I have been saying here for the last year. We are not that far apart after all. Resource depletion will curtail material throughput due to steadily rising costs of extraction/ production in the next coming decades. The growth/ debt based economic system system we have relied on for the last 100 years will cease to be viable. Ideally we would try to phase in a new social system now but there is too much social momentum in desperately attempting to maintain business as usual with worldwide quantitative easing. So the next best thing is for enlightened individuals to study the coming options and be ready with some ideas of a plan B when the time arrives.

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I would also add that population reduction has to be part of the solution. The earth can handle the needs (and waste) of 6 billion people a lot more easily than it can handle the needs of 12 billion.

Planned parenthood and Women's education worldwide is a top priority. I would argue that the most important use for maintaining industrial and electrical capacity, after basic needs of water, cooking, lighting, is a worldwide internet of knowledge.

billvon said:

Hillhater said:

So please explain how a system with 65% of its ENERGY supply unavailable, and only 10% of its ENERGY capacity in storage,....can function normally...if at all ??

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Depends where you are.

In a place like the PNW, where hydro is a big part of the equation, you use solar and wind to reduce the amount of water you release. All that water is then available for later - and all of that is renewable. You then use natural gas to make up the shortfall. Thus your natural gas plus hydro gives you peak generation capacity (i.e power) - but solar and wind give you most of the ENERGY (not power.) You can also use nuclear if you like, but it's not going to be cost effective there.

In a place like LA, where it's mainly natural gas, you use solar and wind to reduce/shut down gas plants. This saves the fuel that would otherwise be spent to run those plants. Nuclear provides the baseload, which is the load you never get below. In CA, for example, record high load was 50GW; record low load was around 15GW. So you build out 10-15GW of nuclear that runs full blast all the time, which is its most efficient operating point. You use storage to reduce the ramp rate (and peak) during the peak demand time of 7pm.

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Again... That didnt answer the question , bill.
What happens on those days when either there is minimal solar ENERGY, or low wind ENERGY..or maybe even both ??... (There is plenty of real data from Germany and SA to show that this happens all too often )
Such that there is likely not enough generation to meet even daytime demand, let alone recharge any storage system ready for the evening peak or overnight demand.
All you have is the Nuclear running flat out and peaker gas plants !
What is the plan for when one or both of your primary energy sources doesnt come to the party ?

sendler2112 said:

..... I would argue that the most important use for maintaining industrial and electrical capacity, after basic needs of water, cooking, lighting, is a worldwide internet of knowledge.

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Most important ?..knowlege is very useful, but the world that we have has evolved without such convenience.
Communications and transportation are far more important uses of electricity , for a successful society.

A cargo bike in every home.

Hillhater said:

What happens on those days when either there is minimal solar ENERGY, or low wind ENERGY..or maybe even both ??

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In the PNW, you run off hydro.

In LA, you use storage, peakers and baseline nuclear.

What is the plan for when one or both of your primary energy sources doesnt come to the party ?

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You mean like when your nuke goes down, like ours did? You are SOL. Better pray your storage, peakers, RE and DR gets you through the crisis.

billvon said:

In the PNW, you run off hydro...

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If there is enough hydro do do that (there isnt..and cannot be) ..why bother with solar and wind ?

billvon said:

....In LA, you use storage, peakers and baseline nuclear.

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Not enough storage..( 10% wont even touch it),
.. so in effect you need 100% back up from Nuclear /Fossil generators . !

Bill said you install wind & solar to give 50% of required energy. This does not mean "if wind and solar run at peak output it yields 50% under ideal circumstances". Installing excess wind and solar capacity to yield 50% of required energy in 90, 95%, 99% etc (your pick) of days is obviously more sensible.

That's all assuming that you want your RE to be exclusively solar & wind, which seems to the preferred definition of "RE" by its opponents as it exaggerates its shortcomings.

Hillhater said:

What about the hot (or cold, ..sub zero) evenings with no wind ?
After 2.5 hrs your storage is gone and you are left with a possible 35% generation capacity !
Probably not enough to keep esential services operating.!

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Taking this at face value, simply: heat pumps reduce demand for electrical heating to 1/3rd and thermal storage to last till the next day is trivial.

Also, once again, you know the sun always shine and the wind always blows somewhere, right? And that it's quite feasible (as in already done commercially) to transmit power thousands of miles to where it's needed?

I have lived in a home with heating that stored heat at times when there is a surplus of cheap electricity and releases it later when electricity demand is greater and supply shorter. The heaters cost peanuts compared to gas heating and the system was popular in the 1970's when nuclear was going to provide plentiful (but inflexible) and cheap energy for all.


We have electricity suppliers that only supply from renewable sources for those who want to responsibly sources their electricity. Is there an equivalent service Hillhater could use to guarantee 100% of electricity comes from coal plants? Sure, it might cost a little more, but at what price our principles and ethics?

Punx0r said:

Bill said you install wind & solar to give 50% of required energy.

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50% of required ELECTRICITY is possible with rebuildables plus battery (hydro where available) storage. Keep in mind that this would only be 10% of total primary ENERGY consumption.
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The whole entire media discussion keeps mistakenly saying % of "renewable ENERGY". When what they really should be saying is % of "renewable ELECTRICITY". World electricity is 1/5 of primary energy.

Finally some pragmatic analysis is making it's way online discussing the inability of solar and wind to ever seamlessly replace liquid fuel and carbon energy at the immense scale we depend on in order to keep the world economy viable.
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But what is the current combined share of solar photovoltaic energy and solar thermal energy, wind and tidal energy, and geothermal energy? (I am not including hydroelectric power and biomass here?
The figure is actually much smaller: a mere 1.5 per cent.
in actual quantities, the share of petroleum and gas increased twice as much as renewable electricity between 2011 and 2016.
The energy transition is unfolding much too slowly and will not be completed by 2050.
The stumbling blocks are greater and more numerous than the resistance of the fossil fuel industry.
Peak oil and the slow expansion of renewable energy will result in a decrease in the total quantity of energy available by 2050 or thereabouts.
The shortfall will bring about degrowth,
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-11-21/the-limits-of-renewable-energy-and-the-case-for-degrowth/

Hillhater said:

billvon said:

In the PNW, you run off hydro...

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If there is enough hydro do do that (there isnt..and cannot be) ..why bother with solar and wind ?

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Because if you ran the hydro at full output all the time, you would run out of water.

For a more local example, both Lake Mead and Lake Powell Are at "dangerous levels" - 38 and 48 percent respectively. (Last time they were full was 2000.) This will only get worse as the climate warms, collection decreases and cities demand more water and power. Solar/wind energy represents water that the dam does not have to release for power - and thus helps deal with water shortages there.

Not enough storage..( 10% wont even touch it)

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10% would significantly reduce the peak demand, which is where the problem is.

, .. so in effect you need 100% back up from Nuclear /Fossil generators . !

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California has 100% backup from natural gas ALONE, without nuclear or coal. The maximum load, ever, was 50.12GW (Sept 1 2017) and California has 51GW of natural gas generation capacity. A large percentage of that is combustion turbine plants, which are hideously inefficient. Thus the energy that solar and wind generate goes to keeping them off-line, increasing the state's overall energy efficiency.

There's no reason for this to change in the future. All those natural gas plants are sunk costs, and so utilities will start to mothball them, keeping them in reserve for the mythical very hot day when there's no sun.

There can be some interesting industrial use cases for solar that don't require storage. For example, we could use solar power to refine materials for... making solar panels. If the plant is mostly automated, it can run whenever it is sunny, and sit idle otherwise. It will have some predictable annual production capacity, which may be sufficient to make that feasible.

cricketo said:

There can be some interesting industrial use cases for solar that don't require storage. For example, we could use solar power to refine materials for... making solar panels. If the plant is mostly automated, it can run whenever it is sunny, and sit idle otherwise.

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Yep. Real time pricing will make that a reality.

Another example - desalination. Around here, desalination is done by reverse osmosis, which means pressure.

So pump seawater into a water tower during the day when solar is available. At night, let the tower provide the pressure to continue the desalination.

cricketo said:

There can be some interesting industrial use cases for solar that don't require storage. For example, we could use solar power to refine materials for... making solar panels. If the plant is mostly automated, it can run whenever it is sunny, and sit idle otherwise.

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Technically, that may be possible,...but it would reduce the utilisation of that production facility by 60_75% ,.(.or more if the weather doesnt cooperate)
I guess you could just install 3-4 times the manufacturing capacity to compensate ?

billvon said:

Another example - desalination. Around here, desalination is done by reverse osmosis, which means pressure.
So pump seawater into a water tower during the day when solar is available. At night, let the tower provide the pressure to continue the desalination.

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.....again, possibly technically feasible, but you do realise those towers would need to be 2000+ feet high, and supporting typically 250,000 tons of water.
Imagine the Burj khalifa,..... but with a water tank the size of a football stadium on the top !
Technically possible ??....but do you see any financial issues here ??

Hillhater said:

.....again, possibly technically feasible, but you do realise those towers would need to be 2000+ feet high

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You need them to be 300 feet above plant level to create the 150psi pressure differential between the input to the RO system (1000psi) and the brine outflow (850psi.) The economizers to do this are already present in the plant. The way to build such a tower is to put it on the 260 foot tall hills a few miles north of the plant in Oceanside.

billvon said:

Because if you ran the hydro at full output all the time, you would run out of water.

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Aside from the shortage of water, there is also the problem of power (MW) to meet those 40-50 GW peaks.
It doesnt exist, nor would it if you doubled the current installed hydro capacity in CA

billvon said:

Not enough storage..( 10% wont even touch it)

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10% would significantly reduce the peak demand, which is where the problem is....

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10% of CAs daily usage is 55-60 GWh...a healthy storage target, presumeably pumped hydro ?
To "significantly reduce" that peak demand it would need to output 10-20 GW for 2-3 hours.
Again, that level of hydro power is equivalent to redoubling all the existing hydro power in CA .
Do you see any financial issues there ?
And remember, we are considering a senario where solar and wind has failed to produce, so that storage is likely already used earlier in the day to keep business rolling.

billvon said:

California has 100% backup from natural gas ALONE, without nuclear or coal. The maximum load, ever, was 50.12GW (Sept 1 2017) and California has 51GW of natural gas generation capacity. A large percentage of that is combustion turbine plants, which are hideously inefficient. Thus the energy that solar and wind generate goes to keeping them off-line, increasing the state's overall energy efficiency.

There's no reason for this to change in the future. All those natural gas plants are sunk costs, and so utilities will start to mothball them, keeping them in reserve for the mythical very hot day when there's no sun.

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Better hope the authorities keep that in mind going forward...
But be aware, there are not insignificant costs to keeping that much capacity available and intermittently utilised .
That all adds to the cost of supply

billvon said:

Hillhater said:

.....again, possibly technically feasible, but you do realise those towers would need to be 2000+ feet high

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You need them to be 300 feet above plant level to create the 150psi pressure differential between the input to the RO system (1000psi) and the brine outflow (850psi.) The economizers to do this are already present in the plant. The way to build such a tower is to put it on the 260 foot tall hills a few miles north of the plant in Oceanside.

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You still have to generate the 1000 psi somehow in the process.

sendler2112 said:

the inability of solar and wind to ever seamlessly replace liquid fuel and carbon energy

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This is the problem: why the critics of RE are cannot believe the naivety and hubris of RE proponents. Because they expect RE to do exactly what coal & oil did with no changes and no compromises: seamlessly replace it, as you say.. To them, solar & wind (which to them, is what RE is (geothermal and hydro don't count) must provide baseload power to an unchanged demand profile. Bauxite smelters and cement plants MUST be able to run on any given night. Aircon units MUST run in the early evening. EVs MUST be charged at night, cos that's how it's always been in, in a society built around inflexible, baseload thermal generators and damned if they're going to change when their AC runs or sort their garbage. They never used to have to, why should they have to now?!

Except, of course, shedding heavy industrial users during peak demand periods has always been a feature of the grid, even in the days when it was almost entirely fossil-fuelled.

One thing that has changed over the past few decades is fewer factories/institutions have their own backup generators. They have become less necessary as the grid has become more reliable. The worst problems the UK has ever had with electricity supply was due entirely to a reliance on coal - rolling blackouts, domestic supply cut off to keep industry running, factories only given power three days a week, TV broadcasts cut off at 10:30PM etc. If solar or wind generators had been available the people back then would have been clamouring for them.

Hillhater said:

Do you see any financial issues there ?

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How much was invested over the last ~150 years building fossil fuel infrastructure?

Hillhater said:

But be aware, there are not insignificant costs to keeping that much capacity available and intermittently utilised .

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I'm prepared to pay for it through my electricity bill.

Punx0r said:

This is the problem:

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Did you read the article? You must have missed the part about solar, wind, wave, and geothermal, still being only 1.5% of total world primary energy. Or the other part about the actual increase in oil and gas energy consumption from 2011 to 2016 being twice the increase in production from Rebuildables. The "massive" increase in build out of RE over the same period is not even keeping up with growth. Let alone replacing anything. RE proponents seem bound by wishful thinking to stay blind to the scale of energy consumption.
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As access to liquid fuels become less and less over the next three decades, our ability to do work in keeping the world economy will be less and less. Fossil fuel enabled this moon shot of population and economic growth we have enjoyed for the last 100 years. Degrowth is inevitable as fossil fuel slips away.
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Please read the article.
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https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-11-21/the-limits-of-renewable-energy-and-the-case-for-degrowth/
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I agreed with you that RE will not seamlessly replace fossil fuels and that society will have to change as a result.

My only question would be that, given the rapidly increasing deployment of solar & wind over the past few years, is that statement still true is 2017 & 2018 figures are included?

Edit: It certainly seems so, at least for electricity production:

Some 98 gigawatts of new solar capacity were installed worldwide in 2017, far more than the net additions of any other technology, including fossil fuels and nuclear.

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https://unfccc.int/news/world-added-far-more-new-solar-than-fossil-fuel-power-in-2017

BTW I dislike how the article in your link excludes hydro and biomass from it's definition of RE. and then asserts:

But what is the current combined share of solar photovoltaic energy and solar thermal energy, wind and tidal energy, and geothermal energy?...The figure is actually much smaller: a mere 1.5 per cent. That’s the net result of the last 45 years of progress on the energy transition

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Yes, that's pretty pathetic if it represented 45 years of sustained effort to transition from fossil fuels. In reality, serious effort has only happened over the last ~5-10 years. 5 years for PV in particular, and that article neglects the best (latest) two of those years. 45 years ago PV panels were space technology.

See exponential growth in PV 2006-2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

Punx0r said:

:

Some 98 gigawatts of new solar capacity were installed worldwide in 2017, far more than the net additions of any other technology, including fossil fuels and nuclear.

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https://unfccc.int/news/world-added-far-more-new-solar-than-fossil-fuel-power-in-2017

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One comment...Nameplate !
Or as bill would say,,...."thats Power, not Energy".....do you understand the difference ?
You really need to wise up to those UN dik heads.!
Allowing a generous CF of 0.2, it would seem that the world actually gained a useable average of less than 20GW (or 175 TWh) of solar power.
For comparison, China alone added 45.0 GW ,..(300+TWh @ 0.8CF), of fossil generation ..JUST CHINA !

..And then they go on to admit how much MORE ($160.8bn) was invested in solar , than any other technology !
So they are saying the cost for solar was more,... but the energy produced is much less than that from fossil sources.
That figure of $160.8 bn for 98 GW of solar , ($1.6/W ), is worth remembering when folk start throwing around the cost of building solar plants..... especially considering that over half of that capacity (53GW) was installed in China with its "extreme" labour and overhead costs ! :wink:

Punx0r said:

How much was invested over the last ~150 years building fossil fuel infrastructure?

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Who knows !....
....but at 19/20th centuary prices, and spread over 150 years....it would have been realistic and affordable, as reflected in the electricity costs of that period.
But , forcing the build out of huge ammounts of generation capacity over a couple of decades is a completely different game

Punx0r said:

I'm prepared to pay for it through my electricity bill...

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That is just as well !, you will likely be paying for it already,
Remember those countries leading the way with wind & Solar are experiencing huge increases in electricity costs