Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

[Hanssing]

Here intermittency is fairly simple to solve, short-term storage is very cheap

Storage other than natural hydro is very expensive. $400/kWh for batteries with electronics.

That part you quote if for low-grade thermal storage ie. hot water, think you misunderstood the post.

 

[sendler2112]

I've read about thermal hot water storage to time shift solar energy by a whole season. How efficient can this be? I have also seen daily thermal storage with molten salt which requires a steam plant to convert back to electricity at 30%.

 

[Punx0r]

Storage other than natural hydro is very expensive. $400/kWh for batteries with electronics. And they last how many cycles? 15 years is 5,500 cycles.

Maybe today it does, but it likely won't in 5 years and almost certainly won't in 10. Adding storage in the future to an energy mix containing and increasing proportion of intermittent renewables is sensible and realistic and sure beats assuming defeat now and building more coal plants.

A large farm machine uses 570 Liters of diesel per day = 5,700 kWh per day. Even if you cut that by 2.5 for the extra efficiency of electric motors with round trip losses you get 2,300 kWh per day for a large size farm machine. 12 Tesla grid scale 200kWh powerpacks per day to hot swap in and out.

Why scaremonger based on worst-case scenarios? The above represents an extreme example of energy usage. Not long ago it was accepted BEV worked OK for cars but wouldn't for road haulage because it was too energy hungry and run too intensively. Now we are starting to see BEV trucks being announced that are suitable for limited applications. It's an upward trend. Just because many farmers will willingly run man and machine for 18+hrs straight without regard for safe working practices or even stopping for a piss doesn't mean renewable energy as a whole is a fail. Throw those guys some bio or synthetic diesel (you can make it with excess peak renewable energy if you really like) or even just dino juice and let them get on with it. Making significant reductions in fossil fuel use elsewhere is still worth doing and the technology will eventually mature till it's suitable to replace diesel for farming. Once it's cheaper those guys will jump on it anyway as they are notoriously [strike]tight-fisted[/strike] financially shrewd.

 

[sendler2112]

Why scaremonger based on worst-case scenarios? .

It's not called scaremongering. It's called raising awareness. It's farming. We use huge amounts of fossil fuel to try to grow enough food. All of this energy will need to be replaced. Changes of this magnitude to these type of systems take a century to implement. We have to be informed of the options ao we can make wise and pragmatic decisions now so as to push forward to meet these goals before our current fossil fuel wealth runs low and we no longer have the energy to do anything about it.

 

[billvon]

Low bids do not tell us what it really costs. The only thing that can really tell us what solar PV actually costs is to post the total expenditure for a completed project and it's recorded annual AC output. Then figure an expected life span. And add some operating and maintainance costs.

. . . and the organization making that bid has to take all that into account when creating that bid.

You are correct; the lowest bid does not tell us what the average cost is. Average costs for new solar bids worldwide are between 2.4 and 3.5 cents per kwhr - still considerably lower than most other forms of electrical power.

 

[billvon]

No bill, you said that, starting back in your Oct 6 post claiming passive heating could be used instead of gas or electric.

Either you are misunderstanding what I posted or are outright lying; either way, doesn't help your claims much.

Again, you seem to have forgotten that it was your idea to swap the current power supply for a renewable one, but couldnt explain how you were going to solar power The Cities like NY etc.

Same way we are doing it now. Keep in mind that A/C is largely sun synchronous.

I suspect those millions in India would happily exchange living conditions with you bill...give it a try !

No thanks! I use solar instead, as do many Indians.

I will let just you think that water lift thing through a bit more ....( you may need a pump somewhere in there !)

Yes it would! I will let you think and ponder what sort of energy could be used to power a pump that stores water for later use. Let us know if you come up with anything.

 

[sendler2112]

. . . and the organization making that bid has to take all that into account when creating that bid.

You are correct; the lowest bid does not tell us what the average cost is. Average costs for new solar bids worldwide are between 2.4 and 3.5 cents per kwhr - still considerably lower than most other forms of electrical power.

You have never shown us any cost analysis of any completed solar farms to support any of these claims. Companies rise up to bilk national governments. They make a low bid. The board members take their huge commission and then milk an eight figure salary as long as they can until the project goes bankrupt and leaves the loan providers holding the bag.
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None of this is real. It doesn't exist yet. Until you post a report of something that has actually run for a year and state the verified cost of the project, None of this is real. There are also considerations in currency exchange rates when discussing India and China where there seems to be disparity between the relative value of money. ..
So in lieu of finding the actual cost or production data for one of the newest solar plus storage farms on the planet at Tesla- Hawaii I will just use your method and come behind everyone of your yet to be built pricing posts to state the purchase agreement that Tesla has. They are contracted at $0.139/kWh and received a 30% Federal rebate. So I am just as fair to say that that facility "costs" $0.18/kWh over 25 years. And it only has enough storage to time shift the solar production for 6 hours into the evening after the other solar fields have died out. They still run the diesel plants every night but the batteries help cut that by 6 hours. For $0.18/kWh.
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Hey everybody! Solar plus 6 hours storage costs $0.18/kWh!
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Too bad this amount of storage is not even close to replacing steady baseload plants in any industrialized nation so it still cannot be compared to non-intermittent sources.

 

[Punx0r]

It's farming. We use huge amounts of fossil fuel to try to grow enough food. All of this energy will need to be replaced. Changes of this magnitude to these type of systems take a century to implement.

That's an estimate and a pessimistic one at that. It will take a while and especially so to "complete" due to diminishing returns seen when attempting to convert almost any process/system, but a significant chunk of change could be achieved in 20-30 years just taking an approximate look at what's changed in the last 10-20. I struggle to think of anything that too 100 years to implement in modern history. Not the mechanisation of farming, not aviation, not steam-to-ICE, not even the industrial revolution as a whole.

 

[sendler2112]

The shear manufacturing of the batteries alone will take the full production of dozens of GigaFactories for decades. The 100 years part is the increase of electrical demand by a factor of 3 to replace the vanishing fossil fuels. There will be tens of thousands of new power plants required to replace even just the current 7TW that is not already electricity.

 

[billvon]

You have never shown us any cost analysis of any completed solar farms to support any of these claims. Companies rise up to bilk national governments. They make a low bid. The board members take their huge commission and then milk an eight figure salary as long as they can until the project goes bankrupt and leaves the loan providers holding the bag. None of this is real. It doesn't exist yet. Until you post a report of something that has actually run for a year and state the verified cost of the project, None of this is real.

I will repost this, since you apparently missed it the first time:

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The Topaz plant started construction in 2011 and finished in 2014. (Which means it started when solar was considerably more costly than it is now.) It is a 550MW plant that generates 1100 GWHR per year. It cost $2.4 billion. Thus costs are 7.2 cents per kwhr over 30 years, 4.3 cents per kwhr over 50 years.
=============

Solar generation exists now. It works. It's real. It provides power for millions. Utilities are buying it because it is cheap. It kills a lot less people than coal. Those are facts - perhaps inconvenient, but the truth isn't always convenient.

 

[Hanssing]

I've read about thermal hot water storage to time shift solar energy by a whole season. How efficient can this be? I have also seen daily thermal storage with molten salt which requires a steam plant to convert back to electricity at 30%.

Its quite efficient.
You volume grows to the power of 3, but you cost off wall and insulaiton only grows to the power of 2, and this is important!
1 m3 of water stores app. 1.16kWh/K. So you can store app. 70K*1.16kWh/K = 81 kWh/m3 of water
So a kube-shaped tank with dimension 10*10*10m holds 81 Mwh of thermal storage
And a kube-shaped tank with dimension 20*20*20m holds 650 Mwh of thermal striation storage!

Due to tax-reasons these plants shot up in DK (political again, doh!), and some of he districheating plants are online:
http://solarheatdata.eu/

 

[sendler2112]

Thus costs are 7.2 cents per kwhr over 30 years, 4.3 cents per kwhr over 50 years. .

I didn't think 7 cents was anywhere close to what you have been saying. Which is why I posted about SolarStar and Topaz first and thought it was making my point.
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Solar PV provides sometimes power to millions with no storage and still has to rely heavily on something that makes constant baseload power to even approach 40% of the grid. Batteries for just 12 hours generally triple the cost/kWh and are an ongoing cost similar to fuel.
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Are solar farms expected to last 50 years? The panels might approach this but the inverters will be questionable to 30.
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And there are of course operating and maintenance expenses but they are fairly low at 1-5%/ year of the original cost. 1% per year raises the 30 year number to
9.36 cents and the 50 year number to 6.45 cents if everything will really last that long. Now we are getting closer to reality.
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And Topaz is located in a near ideal California desert and does 24% of capacity. Solar in NY is predicated at 13% which makes it a little less than twice as expensive.
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[billvon]

I didn't think 7 cents was anywhere close to what you have been saying.

Solar cost 7 cents in 2011. Now it's 2.5 to 3.5 cents (average bids) and goes as low as 1.79 cents (latest bid.)

Are solar farms expected to last 50 years? The panels might approach this but the inverters will be questionable to 30.

Probably true; they will need repairs. Older inverters often used electrolytic caps, which dry out with time. Fortunately modern designs do not.

Even absent failures, though, inverters will see regular replacement. Not because they need to be replaced, but because improved designs will allow more energy transfer (and thus more profit) over time. In addition, since utilities now seek additional services from inverters (like power factor support) solar facility owners may seek these new revenue streams.

And Topaz is located in a near ideal California desert and does 24% of capacity. Solar in NY is predicated at 13% which makes it a little less than twice as expensive.

Yep. And as PV prices fall further that price per kwhr will continue to fall.

 

[sendler2112]

What is a realistic price/kWh ongoing for 18 hours of battery storage?

 

[Ohbse]

At this point arguing that solar PV is not cheap is akin to arguing the world is flat. It's very hard to take you seriously when there's plenty of observable reality you're choosing to ignore. Your belief that it's not possible to make money at 1.79c/kwh thankfully doesn't change the fact that no business is going to sign up for a contracted supply agreement where they lose money for every unit supplied. If they're bidding 1.79c/kwh, then costs are in fact *lower* than that. In a year or two you'll be able to check out financial disclosure if any of these companies are public and look at exactly what these energy divisions are making.

Storage costs are a LOT less than $400/kwh at grid scale. Tesla's own figures put cell cost at $140/kwh and that was prior to the further economies of scale with gigafactory ramp up.

It doesn't take a century to change anything. 100 years ago we didn't even have sliced bread. From the wright brothers first flight to the first commercial jet airliner was less than 50 years. First man in space until we landed on the *MOON* was only 8 years. Your lack of vision is disturbing.

 

[billvon]

What is a realistic price/kWh ongoing for 18 hours of battery storage?

For residential systems, you will see a range from $392/kwhr (the Tesla powerwall) to $80/kwhr (the venerable T105 flooded cell.) Commercial systems are, of course, much cheaper.

 

[sendler2112]

It doesn't take a century to change anything. .

You are all completely failing to grasp the scale of trying to replace 10 TeraWatts. Currently. It will go way up before it goes down. That is for sure. And not just to install the carbon free generation. Even if we could snap our fingers today and have a magic fleet of reactors appear that can crank out 10 TW day and night to replace all of the carbon, how many mobile batteries does it take to replace all of the liquid fuel that is burned in our fleets of heavy machines and ships? How much will the wires and transformers have to increase to go up 66% to charge all of this. You have no idea of the scale we are dealing with and how long it takes to manufacture all of this stuff. And how much energy it takes to make all of this stuff.

 

[billvon]

You are all completely failing to grasp the scale of trying to replace 10 TeraWatts.

And people in 1950 completely failed to grasp how hard/expensive/dangerous/impossible it was to travel to the Moon. They didn't have data on what would happen to humans outside the Van Allen radiation belts. They didn't know if long term exposure to zero-G would kill an astronaut. They had never flown any vehicle anywhere near the size of a Saturn V. They didn't even have usable _transistors_ much less modern computers. They needed the energies available from LH/LOX fueled rockets - and no one had made any engine of any sort that was able to run on liquid hydrogen.

To most people, the whole concept was ridiculous. Even to some engineers and scientists it was impossible - and they knew for sure because they knew how hard it was.

Fortunately we did it anyway, and in less than 20 years there were people on the moon.

That was harder technically. For renewables + storage we don't even have to invent anything new; we just have to build out what we have, and that has been happening at exponentially increasing rates. And we are still on the shallow part of the S-curve.

Today we are at 305GW for solar (2016 numbers). If the present growth rate holds, then we will see:
1.1TW by 2020
12.5TW by 2025
49TW by 2031

So that "impossible" target could be hit within ~10 years without doing anything other than continuing the current expansion rate. And if you assume 20% utilization factor for solar, then you'd replace all that 10TW (energy, not power) by 2031.

Needless to say, that's not a great target. We should not aim to replace all our energy needs with direct solar. Wind will play a role as well, and it's non-synchronous relationship to wind is very useful. (In fact, in most places, peak wind is delayed from peak solar, which greatly helps the "7pm peak" problem that utilities have.) Nuclear would be great if they can ever solve the cost and safety issues - and through thermal dissociation, HTGR's can even create fuel from air and water. Coal use will drop rapidly, absent massive government subsidies to try to keep it alive for purposes of political correctness. Natural gas will be the "gap filler" that will largely replace baseload generation and serve as a buffer for unexpected drops in renewable production. And of course hydro will be around forever - albeit for peak rather than baseload power.

The remainder of the "gap filler" will come from dispatchable load. The biggest of these loads will be EV charging, since it doesn't need to happen at any specific time as long as it happens at some point during the day. Thermal storage systems for A/C and process heat will help as well.

Liquid/gaseous fuels will rule air and sea transportation for another few decades before storage catches up with the needs of these vehicles. While there are electric training aircraft and seagoing vessels today, these are mostly curiosities rather than workhorse products. That will change as lower-cost batteries make more economic sense.

It is also worth noting that the natural gas we save by using renewables for electrical power generation will make up a large portion of our transportation fuel - and since overall demand for natural gas will drop, that fuel will be cheaper than ever before.

So yes, energy needs worldwide will go up rather than down. Most of our new generation will be renewables - and the rate this happens at will blow you away.

 

[sendler2112]

Here is an easier way to visualize the scale of our energy dilemma since saying 10 TW continuous power use today doesn't really mean anything that we can immediately comprehend. 75% of this is fossil energy. Lets say we just want to replace 5TW continuous in 100 years. That is 5,000 nuclear reactors. 50 per year for 100 years.
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Or 40,000 Topaz solar farms in the ideal desert location. More if you distribute them in poorer weather areas where half of them are only doing 15% instead of 24% of the nameplate capacity. That is 400 Topaz solar farms per year, every year for 100 years.
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Still sound easy?
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And if you go with solar and didn't make a couple days worth of storage to go with it, every area of the world will have to completely shut down for 18 hours every evening.
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still sound good?
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If you want to make just 18 hours of battery storage for your 40,000 giant solar farms over the next 100 years, that is 90TWh.
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Tesla states an annual production For GigaFactory 1 of 35GWh/y by 2020.
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https://www.tesla.com/gigafactory
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This is the complete output of 25 GigaFactories for 100 years.
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To replace just half of current energy saying nothing of how to use it to grow crops or carry them where they are needed.
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We got it made
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[liveforphysics]

Plenty of sunshine.

The rest is symantics, makes no difference if you're able to imagine how today or not.

 

[billvon]

Here is an easier way to visualize the scale of our energy dilemma . . .Still sound easy? . . .still sound good?

Who said it would be easy? Nothing worthwhile is easy.

 

[Hillhater]

No bill, you said that, starting back in your Oct 6 post claiming passive heating could be used instead of gas or electric.

Either you are misunderstanding what I posted or are outright lying; either way, doesn't help your claims much.

Again, you seem to have forgotten that it was your idea to swap the current power supply for a renewable one, but couldnt explain how you were going to solar power The Cities like NY etc.

Same way we are doing it now. Keep in mind that A/C is largely sun synchronous..

? But the way we do it now is with a utility supply grid ?
..OK, so i guess i can assume you are backing off from your suggestion of "unwired" domestic existence for urban dwellers. !

...Today we are at 305GW for solar (2016 numbers). If the present growth rate holds, then we will see:
1.1TW by 2020....

you do not seem to have grasped the concept of "nameplate capacity" for solar...
so you can reduce those figures by a factor of 5 , for sunbelt areas, and more like 10 in the "not so sunny" regions.
AND....then we get to the storage unpredictable/intermittent issue and just how much "firming/ storage you need for a functional system ?

...
What is a realistic price/kWh ongoing for 18 hours of battery storage?.

...For residential systems, you will see a range from $392/kwhr (the Tesla powerwall) to $80/kwhr (the venerable T105 flooded cell.) Commercial systems are, of course, much cheaper....

the most popular commercial installations currently seem to be the Tesla Powerpack systems .
the last declared cost of such a system was US$350,000 MWh ....if you consider that much cheaper ?

life expectancy of 30-50 years ?
We have a history of solar installations in Australia, dating back to early experimental systems in the 1980s. ..37 yrs ago ?
These were installed to power remote outback communities and services (lighting water, communications etc) but obviously early tech was not as durable or refined as current systems, but they were carefully monitored and maintained.
Even so, the more recent, improved, systems ( late 1990s installed) lasted less than 10 yrs before being superceeded and decommissioned.
I have personally seen some of these sites , small <1MW of panels, with containers of batteries and diesel generators for back up,.. but the panels and batteries are mostly unuseable now and look to have been for some time.
i do not believe you can expect any complex electronic equipment or batteries to survive in these exposed hot climate conditions for anything like 30 years..Even Musk has only proposed a 20 year life, and he is the biggest optimist i have heard .
Tesla powerwall systems are specified to retain 70% capacity after 10 years.

 

[Hillhater]

..Ooops !..
i forgot to remind you again about those solar output figures..

...The Topaz plant started construction in 2011 and finished in 2014. (Which means it started when solar was considerably more costly than it is now.) It is a 550MW plant that generates 1100 GWHR per year. It cost $2.4 billion. Thus costs are 7.2 cents per kwhr over 30 years, 4.3 cents per kwhr over 50 years.
=============

That 1100 GWh/yr is obviously a total..which you could consider as 92 GWh /month , or 125MW equivalent continuous, .(and we know it cycles 100% , 0 to max every day), .
....but it also has an annual cycle with some months below 60 GWh and summer months at 140GWh !
..that is a 100+% capacity variation to deal with....
...how do you "Firm" that kind of variation when you start to consider TW scale systems ?

 

[Jil]

"all" we need is electricity from nuclear or renewables And a lot of it.

Just forget the "nuclear" Too dangerous, complicated, and in addition impossible to decommission economically.

I'm an engineer in solar industry, and I used to work in nuclear industry before, and even before on oil platforms. So I'm just missing an experience in coal mining to have a complete chronologic overview

And I'm totally convinced of the brillant future of renewable energy, solar (photovoltaics for electricity, thermal for heat) in particular.
Why ? Because photovoltaic is already one of the most competitive source of electricity and it's going even cheaper (in France the main utility company, EDF, who operates 58 nuclear plants, has declared recently that it will not be able to beat the price of renewable energies anymore with new nuclear reactors), simple and fast to build (and to dismantle after use), very well accepted by the neighbourhood. And concerning the storage, well especially on this forum you are aware of the huge improvements in the price and capacity of Li-ion storage, as an example you can see what Tesla is building in South Australia : 100MW/130 MWh storage, in 6 months.
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/29/tesla-now-100-days-build-south-australias-129-mwh-energy-storage-facility-free/

 

[sendler2112]

Who said it would be easy? Nothing worthwhile is easy.

It's not easy.
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400 giant 500MW solar farms commisioned per year, every year. 25 GigaFactories cranking out batteries for 100 years. We currently have world production capacity of 2. What scale of mining operations does it take to feed this?
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People are way overconfident in the techno salvation.
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I think we should be hearing alarm bells from fossil fuel depletion. Make a more focused effort. Forget luxury globe trotting and $1000 suits. Forget 20mpg SUV's. Forget Mars. And worry about Earth.
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We here on ES are preaching to the choir. How do we reach the spoiled general public? Buy air time in the middle of the football game to broadcast a TedX talk?