Is the non-nuclear path feasible?
If one reads something along the lines of this: https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/future-energy-why-power-density-matters
one might walk away feeling like there isn’t a path towards 100% renewable energy supply without resources of higher power density than solar and wind.
The author makes a case for living (extremely) densely and supplying power with large centralized generation. If this is the model to follow, nuclear seems like a more sensible base-load than solar and wind, for land-use and transmission reasons.
Does this paint an erroneous picture? Is there a feasible wind/solar/storage path? Would a distributed model better incorporate wind and solar?
Peripherally, does the high cost of nuclear build-out vs the low cost of wind and solar take into consideration the future—and potentially immense— cost of transmission and storage upgrades as we approach 100% renewables? In other words, would a true-cost and future-accounted analysis deem that the cost of nuclear is comparably cheaper to wind and solar than we currently assign in our market?
I realize these are large, complicated questions, but I ask because I feel I have yet to come across a strong case for a viable path to 100% renewables… I’m wondering if anyone here sees even a hazy image of it. Is it out there?
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The author makes some pretty silly reductio ad adsurdum fallacy arguments, eg: "So a back of the envelope calculation will tell you that getting all of their energy needs from onshore wind will require covering half of the UK or Germany in wind turbines. "
And I suppose if everyone in the UK heated their homes by burning bundles of 10 pound notes it would be unaffordable too. It's a completely stupid straw man argument.
No sane person would be proposing an all-nuclear solution either at any price, but CERTAINLY not at the price of the Hinkley Point C project currently under construction in the UK (which is almost like making electricity by firing boiler using 10 pound notes as fuel . :-) )
So what? Nobody would ever propose a 100% onshore wind solution for UK's grid. The offshore wind capacity factors are north of 50% (and will be well north of 60% for Haliade-X class turbines), and although tepid compared to the US, the PV uptake in the UK is non-zero too. Leveraging low temp thermal loads currently served by lighting up fossils would take only about 1/4 the input energy of the existing paradigm, and the efficiency of electric vehicles is similarly better than the fossil burning transport alternatives. The hydro capacity is also non-zero, as is the import/export capacity from/to the European grids.
End use efficiency is still more than an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear power in the UK. But is it that much cheaper than upgrading connectivity to the Euro grids? What would that mean for the UK in the post-Brexit environment? It's possible to over-shrink the grid & trade boundaries to the point that the all-renewables model doesn't work, but one doesn't have to.
The smaller you shrink the geographical bounds of the transmission & distribution grids it's possible to make all solutions fail with the types of arguments used in that piece. The solutions will differ with location and need. Tiny low-population Denmark would have a tough time of it without being able to draw from (or pump into) Norwegian hydro, or the German & Swedish grids. The bigger the geography, the easier it is to manage. Tokyo doesn't need to source 100% or even 50% of it's energy needs within a 20 mile radius of the city center any more than it needs to produce all of it's food within those bounds.
In lower population density higher wind & solar resource regions such as Australia or the US it becomes a lot easier than low-resource/high population island nations such as Japan or the UK. The cost of the transmission resources has to be balanced against the cost of local renewbles & storage, but there isn't a strong (or really any) case for new nuclear at the cost of old-school nukes. If the costs of inherently fail-safe small nuclear reactors is low enough once they are produced in any numbers there may be a case for that technology, but since only one design is currently even licensed in the US, and the first one won't be on line before 2025, they will have to compete in a much lower cost renewables & storage market that what exists in 2020. I'm not convinced new nuclear has an economically viable future, or that it is some how "a necessary technology for going carbon free" anywhere other than on submarines.
A big advantage to centralized power generation near a city is that you can use cogeneration and district heating systems to use what would otherwise be waste heat to instead heat (and cool, using absorption chillers) buildings. This allows for very high energy efficiencies for whatever type of power plant you’re using. Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria, is almost entirely heated in this way. There is no reason a nuclear plant could not provide district heat the same way as natural gas or coal fired plants can.
Wind and solar don’t have the waste heat to use for district heating, so they don’t have that as a side benefit. A city does not have sufficient area to power itself with wind or solar either. This means a very large area is needed to provide the energy to run a large city if large conventional generating plants aren’t used. Moving that energy around with transmission lines isn’t particularly difficult, although you do lose efficiency the farther you have to move the energy.
Regarding Dana’s comment about the UK needing to link to mainland European power grids, I’m pretty sure the undersea distances involved with those links will require the use of HVDC interconnections. Those actually a lot of advantages in terms of controlling power flow, but they are also more complex and more expensive when used on shorter (which this particular application would be, in power transmission terms) links.
I’m not an advocate for on-shore wind power, I think it ruins the landscape. I don’t like the idea of a future with hundreds of miles of wind turbines destroying the beauty of a natural landscape. Off shore wind doesn’t have that issue, and also benefits from the lack of landscape which allows for more consistent and predictable winds. The downside is that offshore wind is more complex, and thus more expensive, to build and maintain. More inland cities obviously don’t have the option to install offshore wind farms, so offshore installation is not always a possibility.
My own opinion is that wind and solar are never going to be able to completely power the modern world. The general trend in energy consumption has been increasing, contrary to what that article seems to show, but the rate of increase has slowed. The likely reason for that reduction in the rate of increase is probably the greater efficiencies of many modern devices. It’s true that in denser cities per capita energy consumption is likely to be less due to different transportation needs (it’s not much of a commute if you just ride an elevator or cross the street to get to work). I can tell you that most in North America are NOT going to want to be packed in Japan-style though, and the “quality of life” arguments are complex and not easily quantified.
These are very complex issues and there are no easy solutions. The trend seems to be more people both working AND living in cities. That means less commuting, so less energy consumption per person, but it also means more fuel used to bring in resources (food, etc), and more sanitation system demands. Everything has tradeoffs. Focusing entirely on energy consumption is not a good way to achieve a better future.
Bill
Bill,
I agree that focusing entirely on energy won't be a good way to access a healthy, prosperous future. It will be a big part of it of course. My feeling is that sometimes we'll adjust our lively-hoods to accommodate a modernizing energy and economic system, and other times, we'll have to work a little harder to adjust the modernizing energy system and economy to meet our desires. What's tough to say right now is how people will feel about things in the future. I personally don't have a desire to live in a big city, but perhaps the generational trend will be such (which it already is) they don't mind it, and even prefer it. I currently have no plans to move to much denser regions though!
I had a feeling I might see a Dana response.
I agree that solutions will be dynamic, varying regionally, and that linking grids will indeed make it so Japan doesn't have to produce purely local power, for example.
I think there are 2 things I'm scratching my head on.
1) Have we quantified the cost differences between building out strategic nuclear to supply base-load to metropolitan areas vs relying more heavily on energy farms, grid upgrades, and storage? I'm wondering if nuclear would alleviate some of the higher order transmission and storage costs as we approach 100% grid penetration, thereby being a net cost reduction mechanism. Has this been analysed and quantified?
While I agree that nuclear will take time if we were to build it out, and thereby the renewable and storage market will have gotten even cheaper, are our battery production technologies actually anywhere close to producing relatively affordable grid scale storage? I don't have a good sense of this.
2) Let's say the answer to #1 is that energy farms, smart linked grids, and storage still beat out nuclear cost-wise: okay my next concern is land-use. I'm finding it difficult to find agreed upon numbers for how much land we will need to utilize for energy production, but I do wonder if this issue isn't insignificant. While it's different in the southwest than the northeast where I am, how many acres of forest are we needing (or willing) to clear for solar farms? How much transmission will be needed to connect rural generation to the metro areas?
I work in land conservation, and so I will be witnessing interesting challenges in the near future regarding energy infrastructure vs forest and habitat protection. The methodology for decision making will clearly involve strategic answering to questions specific in nature. It won't be a broad brush. But, I suppose I am wondering if nuclear build-out could alleviate some of these likely-to-be-difficult trade-offs. Perhaps the trade-offs will be less than I am expecting.
>"I'm wondering if nuclear would alleviate some of the higher order transmission and storage costs as we approach 100% grid penetration, thereby being a net cost reduction mechanism."
That depends. Keeping EXISTING PWRs going can alleviate or spread out the cost of building out more transmission infrastructure more cheaply than a rapid expansion of the grid. But the speed of deployment is slow and the cost quite high for any new reactors. Even the giddiest projections of how quickly & cheaply SMRs can be deployed from those swimming in the nuclear Kool Aid bowl are still quite substantial relative to known & tested means of improving throughput on the existing grids and building new transmission lines.
>"I agree that nuclear will take time if we were to build it out, and thereby the renewable and storage market will have gotten even cheaper, are our battery production technologies actually anywhere close to producing relatively affordable grid scale storage?"
PV + 4 hours of storage is cheaper than a new gas peaker in most of the US right now (and winning bids in technology neutral RFPs).
Batteries are not likely to be the most cost effective solution for longer term storage. There's a case being argued for intermediate term energy storage in the form of hydrogen. Those drowning in THAT Kool Aid tank are even thinking of hydrogen for seasonal storage, or even storage & transport by ship in the form of anhydrous ammonia as a way to power up large island countries (notably "Aussie Sunshine shipped to Japan"), though the napkin math on that looks as bad or worse than middle-road estimates of ramping up PWR deployment due to extremely poor turnaround efficiency. Anhydrous ammonia is cheap to store even for the long term- there may be use cases where that will work, but it doesn't seem likely to become the new storage paradigm.
>"Let's say the answer to #1 is that energy farms, smart linked grids, and storage still beat out nuclear cost-wise: okay my next concern is land-use. I'm finding it difficult to find agreed upon numbers for how much land we will need to utilize for energy production, but I do wonder if this issue isn't insignificant. While it's different in the southwest than the northeast where I am, how many acres of forest are we needing (or willing) to clear for solar farms?"
The land use issues vary by country- and it's a heluva lot easier to do with very low impacts on land usage in the US than in the foggy-dew UK.
There is NO need to clear even ONE acre of forest for solar farms anywhere in the US, even if that is sometimes done where it is economic, and allowed by local land use regs. An NREL survey a few years ago showed that the existing rooftops in the US had enough suitably angled & unshaded area to provide something between 1/3-1/2 of all electricity use in the US, even with 16% efficiency panels. See Figure ES-2:
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf
Even if only half of that is ever built, it's big slice of the pie, and it doesn't consider how cheap it is to cover existing parking lots or even roadways with solar canopies. Typical residential rooftop arrays in my are are using 20%+ panels, and it seems likely that before 2050 somebody will have developed a sufficiently stable perovskite solution for creating 30%+ efficiency PV/perovskite hybrid. If that happens the 33-50% technical potential of existing suitable rooftop area becomes a potential for 60-100%+ of all electricity being supplied solely by rooftop PV.
Nobody is proposing rooftop PV as the sole solution , but the power from commercial & industrial rooftop PV even at 2019 prices already beats the cost of new PWR nuclear, and the cheaper end of residential already PV beats it too:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019
At least in the US the land use problem is mostly insignificant. Agriculture & wind are for the most part comfortable roommates, as are offshore wind & fishing/shipping.
The total amount of storage & transmission upgrades needed to get there are generally overestimated by simpler models. More sophisticated modeling done 8 years or so ago showed that for the (fairly large geographically) PJM grid region it takes more storage & grid investment to manage an 80% renewables solution than a 100% renewables solution, and even costs more than the all-renewables solution, using conservative 2012 cost assumptions for the renewables. (I can't dig up the peer-reviewed study instantly, but it's out there). As wind & solar become cheaper and more efficient, the cost of simply overbuilding and curtailing the excess go down. The cost crossover points for overbuild & curtail vs. storage are moving targets, and are different for short term, intermediate term, and long term storage. Barring major changes in the slope of the financial learning rate of storage relative to PV & wind, the motion in that target keeps trending toward more curtailment.
Transmission lines don’t use much land, and in many cases the land is already allocated for such use (existing transmission corridors). A typical double circuit (the pylons with three heavy wires on either side, each ground of three wires is a “circuit”) running 765kv (the highest transmission voltage in common use today) can move just shy of 2GW (gigawatts). That’s a lot. There are brackets available to “reconductor” existing lines with two to nine individual wires per “wire” on a circuit. Normally either one, two, three, or four wires are used. Two wires doubles the capacity, etc. A typical right of way for such a line may 200 feet wide (there needs to be clearance on the sides of the line for both maintenance and safety). As you can see, a LOT of energy can be moved in a relatively small amount of space!
Heavily distributed things like wind power need their own grids. In my experience, that cabling has been largely placed underground, but that has issues. AC power brings into play something known as “reactance”, which, keeping things simple here, limits how far you can go with AC power in underground and undersea cables. All that means in this particular case is you can’t run the entire AC transmission network underground over any significant area.
There are stability issues (look into some of the studies done on the 138kv circuit connecting key west to mainland florida for some detail about this type of thing) when a large load is at the end of a very long line from a source of power. There are also reliability issues since that line can be damaged and the longer it is, the more there is at risk of damage. Don’t think that wind power (or solar) is really “distributed” either, it’s really not — even very large wind farms typically only interconnect with the transmission network in a few places. The wind turbines do NOT connect randomly into whatever line is nearby. These are manageable issues though.
For VERY long runs, you need to use HVDC, with convert stations on the end. This is because reactance isn’t an issue with DC, and the converter stations allow control over how the power is transferred into the AC grids. There are still line losses to deal with though, which is why very long runs are typically less efficiency than shorter runs.
Large linked grids will need more HVDC interconnections to manage power flows, but they allow for moving power around from where its available to where its needed (the pacific DC intertie is a good example of this). There will still need to be some local generation in some places to keep the system stable.
Wind generation needs VERY large areas to produce significant amounts of power. I’ve usually heard nameplate ratings of about 12MW per square mile or so, but that may be old info now. Solar is similar, it has to be spread out since only so much sunlight comes down to the earth per unit area. The transmission network can be thought of as a way to concentrate solar and wind power over a large area to bring the total numbers up to levels sufficient to power a large load center like a city, but the fact remains that the total amounts of land needed for large solar and wind farms is VERY large to get the total amounts of energy needed for a large city.
Bill
>"Wind generation needs VERY large areas to produce significant amounts of power. I’ve usually heard nameplate ratings of about 12MW per square mile or so, but that may be old info now. "
That is indeed dated info- it's the right order of magnitude when viewed from the lens of old-school management efficiency, but not levelized cost of output for current best practices for onshore wind farms, nor particularly relevant to offshore wind. Yes, downwind turbulence from nearby turbines means stacking them tighter takes an efficiency hit, but the levelized cost of that hit can be pretty cheap when the turbines are cheap, and the real estate is expensive.
https://sciencing.com/much-land-needed-wind-turbines-12304634.html
There is now software (from multiple vendors) for managing more densely packed wind farms, eg:
https://www.ul.com/apps/openwind
https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/services/digital-optimization
Capacity factors of better class wind farms in the US are now roughly 40%, up substantially from a decade ago, now producing a lot more MWH per NAMEPLATE MW, and that trend continues.
Wind and agriculture share space comfortably, as does fishing/shipping and offshore wind. Very little exclusive land is needed to accommodate the wind power, even though the wind farm is spread out over larger areas.
Twelve megawatts is just ONE Haliade-X. It doesn't need a square mile of ocean to operate effectively. In good-to-better locations will deliver about 1.5x the capacity factor of even the best onshore wind installations, and more than twice what better-class onshore installations were delivering a decade ago:
https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind/haliade-x-offshore-turbine
A simple MW per square mile rule of thumb isn't going to determine much. Annual GWH per square mile using best in class turbines & management practice matters a lot more.
The thing about rapidly moving targets is that they move, often too quickly to keep track of, which is why there professionals devoting their careers to it. Even slow moving targets such as the cost of nuclear are hard to hit with any accuracy, but the trend is in the opposite direction of renewables.
The sun is nuclear so I'd say no.
Ambri in Cambridge, MA appeared to offer a promising solution to energy storage.
https://ambri.com/
Is their product feasible?
Possibly, and it could play a part. The biggest issues are energy new density, and longevity (charge/discharge cycles before replacement) along with the usual cost issues. They claim to have the longevity issue pretty much solved, and if they can get maybe 20-30 year life out of their cells then I think I’d consider that issue “solved” too.
Energy density is a bigger issue. What people don’t usually understand is the massive scale of the utility system. The average home uses an average of about. 1kw all day, every day. That’s 720kwh per month. To put that in perspective, TSA doesn’t want you to bring more than about 320 watt hours (0.32kwh) worth of batteries with you on a flight. And that’s just residential electrical load. Industrial loads are MUCH more.
Does that mean these batteries can’t play a part? No, it doesn’t — but it does mean that simplistic “solutions” like “we’ll use battery storage and solar!” Isn’t actually going to work.
Bill
I think the focus on the '100%' solution causes problems
Oklahoma[!] supplied nearly 40 percent of its electricity with wind
Texas and the Dakotas have good numbers.
When you mix wind with solar, hydro, and storage, you can come up with a pretty good mix
The problem that has not gone away with nuclear is storage. A simply massive amount of nuclear waste is building up and it is not going away[for 10k years]
If Oklahoma can do that in ~15 years, the US can get to 50 percent renewable grid pretty easily. From there the path forward will me much more clear than it is today.
50 percent gets us to 1975 numbers for electricity generation
75 percent puts us back to 1965
Everyone has a problem with every source of power.
I hate wind farms
I hate hydro dams
I hate nukes
I hate power lines
Jezuus fookin christmas you are fiddling while Rome burns.
How is that lovely mountain view going to look when it doesn't rain for a decade?
Yes please I will have another windmill thank you.
Don't those power lines look lovely at sunset.
Don't the coal companies laugh when the environmentalists fight each other
Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good
I don't want to downplay the nuclear waste issue, but some people make a case that the amount we have to deal with (at least in volume) is actually not 'a simply massive amount.'
Far example, all the U.S. nuclear waste could fit on a football field stacked 10 yrds tall, I've heard. Maybe it's disingenuous, given the toxicity of it...
I believe the Terrapower traveling wave reactor—if developed—can utilize much of this old waste as fuel, creating a more stable waste byproduct in its place. That alone may be reason to pursue that reactor, even if it doesn't play a huge role in grid supply. (Bill Gates is involved in this project)
I think your point about getting to something like 50% first, then re-evaluating prospects for going further, is a good one. Relevant technology is evolving quite rapidly, and it's hard to predict what things will look like in 10, 15, 20 years.
On the other hand, we don't want to shoot for 50% as an end goal, and find we've built ourselves into a corner. In other words, some forward thinking—even if it involves some predictive unknowns— may be necessary to unlock the path in a timely manner. Especially if we decide nukes ARE a key player, since they take some time to develop. But this applies to grid upgrades as well, nuke issue aside.
Speaking of forward thinking on the grid, if anyone has some time to burn, this was an interesting read in regards to grid architecture and market models for dealing with distributed resources:
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/30/17868620/renewable-energy-power-grid-architecture
Far example, all the U.S. nuclear waste could fit on a football field stacked 10 yrds tall, I've heard.
I do, actually consider that a massive amount
Especially since there is no football field willing to host it
Anywhere
It’s not much at all compared to the emissions from a conventionally fueled plant, it’s just that you can see what is left from the nuclear plants while the conventional plants vent much of their waste products to the atmosphere. One exception to this is fly ash, which is a waste product from coal-fired plants. You’d be surprised how much of this material is produced in a typical plant.
The US is also the only country in the world that doesn’t reprocess spent nuclear fuel. If this were to change, and it should, much of that nuclear “waste” could be reprocessed, used to continue fueling the plants. The total volume of nuclear waste is greatly reduced with this process.
Bill
Much of the waste is not actually fuel
Take a shipping container full of miscellaneous nuke waste and burn it in downtown Manhattan, not a fun prospect.
So the security of simply moving and storing waste is the reason for 50 years of inaction.
We have had 3 significant nuclear accidents in 40 years, two of which have significant dead zones. Do that math going forward 200 years.
So, yes,while nuclear's issues can be dealt with, thus far they have not been
Give me the windmills, batteries and solar please.
Maybe taking seriously the prospect of climate change will force the hands to set up the storage facility that was envisioned in Nevada or Utah or wherever that was
Not to pour (nuclear) fuel on this fire but this is a good article that I recently skimmed.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/when-it-comes-to-nuclear-power-could-smaller-be-better
I read an article about micro-nukes in National Geo 10 or 15 years ago and haven't heard much since. It made the building and even continued use of the large first generation nuclear power plants seem ridiculous.
What I found interesting about the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan was that the earthquake didn't really damage the reactor, it was ocean water flooding the mechanical rooms and shorting out the pumps that supplied cooling water to the reactors. Without a steady supply of cooling water the reactors over heated and then exploded.
If the electrical grid in the US should become damaged (or crash) most reactor cooling systems only have a short amount of time running on backup generators before they too will fail.
You should do a search of where in the US there are nuclear plants, nuclear fuel storage sites and where the resulting contamination zones are should the reactor ever meltdown or explode.
Newer designs don’t have those issues and rely on gravity systems for what cooking they need in an emergency. It should be noted that the reactors at Fukushima didn’t “explode”, nuclear reactors can’t explode in a nuclear explosion — the fuel is not enriched enough. What did happen was a steam explosion due to lack of cooling. There is a very big difference and it’s important to make the distinction. In the specific case of Fukushima, it’s worth mentioning that the utility operating the plant had been warned about the risk from flooding and chose not to do what was recommended to protect against such an issue.
The backup generators have to run lot enough to safely shut the reactor down, they don’t have to run indefinitely. The backup systems are supposed to be capable of allowing that.
It’s worth noting that there has really only been one significant nuclear event in the US at three mile island and that was really pretty minor. The most significant event was probably the one at Chernobyl, but that was an old RBMK reactor design WITHOUT A CONTAINMENT BUILDING of any kind. As far as I know, there has never been a large scale reactor design in the west that didn’t have a containment building.
An interesting tidbit about Chernobyl from a friend who lived there at the time: it was dangerous to eat strawberries in that region. Strawberries apparently concentrated one of the radioactive contaminants that were released from the plant. Coconuts do the same in the area or bikini atoll.
Bill
Well fortunately smarter people than I are thinking this stuff through. Time will be revealing. I think there is no question that adding 'intelligence' to the grid will be a key, no matter the exact resource mix. And market models will need to reorganize.
I do think that—despite the buzz about new renewables being so cheap— we are going to find a transition is quite expensive, no matter how we slice it. Many already suggest that added renewables—even at relatively low penetration levels— actually add costs to ratepayers (much debate about this).
I would love it if renewables could come to fruition within our current standard market, but I don't see that as viable; especially beyond certain penetration percentages (perhaps 30% or so?).
As far as nuclear, I understand the concerns, specifically with the older light water reactors. But there has also been little innovation over the decades on an implementation scale (perhaps for good reason). There are however—at least theoretically—very promising technologies that significantly reduce the waste and safety issues, such as the traveling wave reactor and thorium salt reactors. The SMR's may prove useful too. I suppose my feeling is that research into such techs could prove valuable, despite current cost challenges. Who's to really say though (certainly not me).
Hell we are already at 17 percent renewables now, 30 percent will happen with the retirement of coal as it has gotten too expensive.
Wind has suddenly gotten cheap, very cheap.
The problem is scale, and wind has obvious resource and siting limits. I've seen those larger percentage renewables numbers too, but I never see them reflected in the generation mix of the ISO's. Coal/gas/nuclear dominate completely. Wind has gotten higher yes, and is rather impressive in the ERCOT (Texas) region where I've seen up around 30ish% or so, but I'm not so sure that can be duplicated elsewhere.
I've attached pics of the MISO (midwest) and PJM (much of the eastern US) generation mix charts from this morning. These are real time charts, accurate as of about an hour ago.
Bill
Right now, ISO New England reports renewables at 12%, hydro at 10% with the rest gas and nuclear. No coal.
Might as well put up the links for the quasi-real time ISO-NE charts:
https://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/
It's sunny and temperate today in New England. Note the mid-day lull in grid load- that is from all of the behind-the-meter PV that is NOT represented in the pie chart (and never will be, since it's not separately metered.) That's a big slice of the pie that is a known quantity, but invisible to the grid operator.
It takes a deeper accounting than the real time metered date accurately measure behind the meter renewables the overall energy source pie. That behind the meter generation won't show up the PJM or MISO pies either, since it's not directly metered or controlled by the grid operators. It's there, it's real, and it's BIG, but visible to the grid operator only as missing load, not as generation.
There's a similar quasi-real-time state-by-state graphic for Oz here:
http://reneweconomy.com/nem-watch
If one looks just at New South Wales or Queensland you'd be tempted to say "Holy shit- there's no F'n' way to go zero carbon." But looking at South Australia or Tasmania it's a different picture entirely. When you consider the SA grid was inadvertently islanded from the main Australian grid for a few weeks recently due to a major transmission line fault and that it did NOT go down (thanks in some significant measure to the response speed of a large, but not overwhelming Tesla grid battery) it's pretty easy to see the future. One of the biggest consequences turned out to be higher than normal curtailment of the SA wind & PV output due to the limited inability to export to the neighboring states.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-to-be-energy-island-for-two-weeks-four-wind-farms-sidelined-30929/
The US has a more resource-rich grid than Australia, somewhat crummier PV potential (though still great compared to Yurp), and much better wind potential. Batteries needed.
The ISO-NE interconnection queue is currently dominated (95%) by solar, wind, and storage projects:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/wind-solar-and-storage-take-up-95-of-iso-new-england-interconnection-queu/573680/
The 21 GW of capacity in those proposals is roughly 75% of the all-time grid peak load for this grid territory. It's only a matter of time before the ISO-NE charts start to look more like the South Australia's.
I'd be very surprised if residential rooftop solar, which is probably most of the rooftop solar out there, is going to represent more than another chunk of those graphs about the size of the chunk marked "solar" now, which I would assume to be utility-scale solar that the ISOs can "see". I'd expect that rooftop solar capacity is probably less than 100MW or so. Any numbers on that? I haven't ever seen any but I am curious...
Today is a cloudy day here in Michigan at least, I imagine you North easterners probably have similar weather, so the solar numbers in those pie charts are probably smaller than they'd be on a nice, clear summer day. Grid load will also be a fair bit higher on those nice, clear summer days. Solar is a good match to peak air conditioning load, but not so useful in the winters here in the frozen North.
Bill
>"Wind generation needs VERY large areas to produce significant amounts of power. I’ve usually heard nameplate ratings of about 12MW per square mile or so, but that may be old info now. "
That is indeed dated info- it's the right order of magnitude when viewed from the lens of old-school management efficiency, but not levelized cost of output for current best practices for onshore wind farms, nor particularly relevant to offshore wind. Yes, downwind turbulence from nearby turbines means stacking them tighter takes an efficiency hit, but the levelized cost of that hit can be pretty cheap when the turbines are cheap, and the real estate is expensive.
https://sciencing.com/much-land-needed-wind-turbines-12304634.html
There is now software (from multiple vendors) for managing more densely packed wind farms, eg:
https://www.ul.com/apps/openwind
https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/services/digital-optimization
Capacity factors of better class wind farms in the US are now roughly 40%, up substantially from a decade ago, now producing a lot more MWH per NAMEPLATE MW, and that trend continues.
Wind and agriculture share space comfortably, as does fishing/shipping and offshore wind. Very little exclusive land is needed to accommodate the wind power, even though the wind farm is spread out over larger areas.
Twelve megawatts is just ONE Haliade-X. It doesn't need a square mile of ocean to operate effectively. In good-to-better locations will deliver about 1.5x the capacity factor of even the best onshore wind installations, and more than twice what better-class onshore installations were delivering a decade ago:
https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/offshore-wind/haliade-x-offshore-turbine
A simple MW per square mile rule of thumb isn't going to determine much. Annual GWH per square mile using best in class turbines & management practice matters a lot more.
The thing about rapidly moving targets is that they move, often too quickly to keep track of, which is why there professionals devoting their careers to it. Even slow moving targets such as the cost of nuclear are hard to hit with any accuracy, but the trend is in the opposite direction of renewables.
Dana, the capacity per square mile I meant wasn't so much from the turbine capacity, but from the tendency of the "front" turbing to cause turbulence that would limit the amount of ex tractable power from the "back" turbine. Basically you can't just smash a bunch of wind turbines in a row and keep getting power out of the wind over and over again, there is going to be some minimum spacing which is required to be able to have a large enough moving mass of air for the wind turbine to work with. The "four per square mile" rule was something I'd read some time ago about the spacing requirements.
No doubt bigger/better turbines would be able to get more power out, either from a larger set of blades "catching" a larger volume of moving air, or a more efficient generator system. My understanding is that the generator system itself is pretty efficient and there isn't much room for improvement there, so more power out would mean a bigger overall turbine. There is still going to be some limit for how much energy can be extracted per unit land area though, even if it's more than it is now (or was then). My only question would be how much more energy can be extracted per unit land area before some practical limit starts getting in the way.
I do like the idea of OFFSHORE wind. Why waste those winds out there? No one around to complain about the view, either. Seems like a win-win. The transmission issues can be dealth with with existing HVDC technologies, so it's entirely doable to build large scale offshore wind farms. I'm just not a big supporter of LAND based wind farms.
Bill
>"Dana, the capacity per square mile I meant wasn't so much from the turbine capacity, but from the tendency of the "front" turbing to cause turbulence that would limit the amount of ex tractable power from the "back" turbine. Basically you can't just smash a bunch of wind turbines in a row and keep getting power out of the wind over and over again, there is going to be some minimum spacing which is required to be able to have a large enough moving mass of air for the wind turbine to work with."
That is/was completely understood. But the nameplate capacity per square mile is just one part of the equation when figuring out how much to expect out of the array. The capacity factors continue to grow with hub height, better blade design, but also better control software to mitigate those turbulence effects. The improvements in capacity factor even over the past 5 years has been substantial, even on existing wind farms.
>"There is still going to be some limit for how much energy can be extracted per unit land area though, even if it's more than it is now (or was then). "
True, what isn't there can't be collected, but we can collect a LOT more with 2020 technology than with 2010 technology, and at the financial learning curve of wind it's even becoming economic to re-power many existing wind farms with newer-better stuff, often even with a decade or more of anticipated service life on the existing turbines. The slice of the pie that could be served by wind a decade ago is well in to double-digits percentage larger even on the same land footprint, at a lower cost than continuing to maintain & repair the older equipment. And newer blade designs are now able to turn what had been uneconomic wind resources in lighter-wind areas into something that pays- the size of the suitable land area keeps growing.
Wind's footprint limitations are only a "problem" for the US when considering wind in isolation. This is no different from PV in that regard. Note that at 25%+ PV efficiency more than half the power in almost all US urban areas can be sourced locally without taking up ANY additional real-estate. Table 2, p19 assumes 16% PV, at an 80% DC-AC conversion efficiency: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf So the slice of wind power NEEDED to hit 100% renewables will likely be going down as the panel price of PV keeps falling, and the efficiency goes up. Both are experiencing pretty steep cost declines, but the financial learning curve of PV is faster than that of wind. Wind is cheaper than commercial & industrial rooftop PV right now, but probably won't be in 2030: https://www.lazard.com/media/451081/lcoe-2.png
The learning curves for PWR nuclear seem to be negative- the newer stuff is more expensive to build than the old stuff. The learning curves (or even the starting price point) for SMR nuclear is unknown. It's worth building some, but it will have to be pretty cheap or have a very fast learning curve to compete with PV + wind + storage. I'm all for building a small fleet of SMRs with subsidy support just to see how it all shakes out, but I'm not particularly sanguine about the prospects for new-nuclear of any type for solving any real world problems in time.
The land-use issue as presented by you Dana looks more promising than I had anticipated. I think there is an argument to be made for putting solar as much in the built environment as possible, even if it is more expensive than large-scale vegetated-land based farms (though hard to convince ratepayers of this maybe).
Re cost of renewables: maybe someone can help me understand this statement found in ISO-NE 2020 regional outlook:
"Because large-scale renewable resources typically have higher up-front capital costs and different financing opportunities than more conventional resources, they have had difficulty competing in the wholesale markets. Therefore, the New England states are promoting, at varying levels and speed, the development of specific clean-energy resources to meet their public policy goals."
(https://www.iso-ne.com/static-assets/documents/2020/02/2020_reo.pdf)
It makes it sound like renewables are relying on RPS's and subsidies to be competitive, rather than suggesting they have become cost competitive on their own. Am I reading that wrong?
Is it just that the LCOE is low but the capital is high, creating entry barriers?
On another note, they also point out (as I've seen others do) that carbon pricing is a much more efficient way to deal with GHG reductions as opposed RPS's (renewable portfolio standards).
ISO-NE has even gone so far as to create a system to deal with stranded asset and subsequent rate increase issues supposedly created by RPS's if left unabated; namely with CASPR—Competitive Auctions for Sponsored Policy Resources. Seemingly a bit of a controversial move that may disfavor renewables for a time, while supposedly retaining lower rates and better reliability.
I'm not really sure what carbon pricing does to alleviate the issues introduced by RPS's but seems worth looking into.
>"Because large-scale renewable resources typically have higher up-front capital costs and different financing opportunities than more conventional resources, they have had difficulty competing in the wholesale markets. Therefore, the New England states are promoting, at varying levels and speed, the development of specific clean-energy resources to meet their public policy goals."
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>"Is it just that the LCOE is low but the capital is high, creating entry barriers?"
That's basically it, but it's more nuanced than that. The cost of renewables is almost ALL capitalization costs, with every low O & M. The majority of the cost of a ccNG plant is fuel & maintenance. In newer markets getting access to the necessary capital at a sufficiently low interest (like nuclear plants) requires some amount of regulatory carrots & sticks.
Also despite the trend lines, the LCOE of new offshore wind is currently more expensive than the operating cost of existing fossil burning (or nuclear) plants within the ISO-NE region, and needs some amount of subsidy & regulatory push to get it built. At the moment there isn't a carbon tax lever to work with, so state mandated minimums become a fallback.
Also, the structures of markets within the ISO-NE (like most ISOs) for things like capacity or frequency & ancillary services have evolved to be very incumbent-friendly, and often devalues or even shuts out variable-output sources from those markets. There are constant flows of issues to be resolve going in front of the FERC on behalf of various stakeholders in those markets, which really HAVE to evolve to be able to take advantage of the capabilities of new technology, and in the process incumbents will have to take a hit to share an newly adjusted market with new competition. Not surprisingly creates some push back that needs resolution at the higher regulatory level eg:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ferc-allows-storage-to-access-new-england-real-time-energy-markets/549436/
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/rtos-need-better-market-signals-for-using-gas-analysts-say-as-iso-ne-prep/572328/
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ferc-passes-on-vineyard-wind-emergency-request-for-iso-ne-auction-delay/547712/
When looking at wind it is very important to filter your google results for the last 2 years, things are changing very fast. There is an unfortunate article from Forbes or something from 2015 declaring wind dead....
WRT subsidies, wind has almost outgrown them, the [theoretical] unsubsidized cost of wind is lower than coal
Considering that he have the current technology to move electricity 1000 miles from Radisson in Quebec to Boston, I think worries about siting of wind installations are a non factor
And to drift on topic, nuclear is about the most expensive source of energy, not including the unknown cost of dealing with long term waste[the corporations will spin off the nukes and have them declare bankruptcy, that is how they will deal with it]
The technology to move power over long distances exists, but it is not perfect. There are very real issues when the majority of a power supply is located very far away from a load center.
Nuclear plants are required to plan for decommissioning as part of their operation. Some area will have this detailed out on their electric bill as “nuclear decommissioning” or similar. The plant are not abandoned in bankruptcy when they reach end of life. What has occasionally happened is that a third party will attempt to extend the life of a plant and fail to make the project viable, in which case the plants are decommissioned as originally planned. There are no abandoned nuclear plants out there decaying like ghost towns.
Bill
>"Considering that he have the current technology to move electricity 1000 miles from Radisson in Quebec to Boston, I think worries about siting of wind installations are a non factor"
Techonology is one thing, local politics is another. Whenever large transmission lines cross provincial/national/state/local boundaries it adds not just cost & complexity, but also delay. It's not clear whether Vogtle 3 & 4 or the Grain Belt Express will be finished first (or ever):
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/grain-belt-express-power-line-gets-thumbs-down-in-missouri/article_9ed22d74-8068-5ac9-ac4d-5ed6b3bc7dce.html
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/georgia-utility-regulator-more-delays-likely-for-vogtle-nuclear-plant
The various transmission line proposals for hooking up Massachusetts to hydro resources in Quebec keep plodding through local objections on the routes, and may take a Watts Bar 2 period of time to get built the way it has been going, with plenty of organized opposition on various grounds, sometimes with dark money backing eg:
https://www.nrcm.org/programs/climate/proposed-cmp-transmission-line-bad-deal-maine/
https://www.mainepublic.org/post/maine-ethics-panel-investigate-whether-group-opposing-cmp-transmission-line-must-reveal-donors
https://www.gazettenet.com/Agency-OKs-$1B-hydropower-transmission-line-hurdles-remain-31858921
As with the recent transmission line faults that islanded South Australia from the main Australian grid, over-reliance on large amounts of power from remote sources carries all sorts of risk, from weather & seismic events to nefarious actors or even international politics.