One point that can help wind and solar is increase in storage and storage is growing. Storage is not only local pump hydro and battery storage. We can for example look at a country like Norway offering storage to the tune of capacity of interconnections. We see Denmark absorbing about 60% of wind and solar. The record holds South Australia with 70% wind and solar.
Is Denmark "absorbing" 60% wind and solar? What do you mean by that? I thought they rather manage to produce 60% wind and solar by being a tiny country in a larger grid. It's like a town near a big wind farm could claim to produce 1300% wind or whatever. It's a meaningsless statistic.
I've just watched several of your videos. Because this is text I need to tell you that I am giving you a long, slow standing clap. You sir, are a most excellent teacher.
"Or conversely the incredibly low efficiency of the combustion variants" Yes I think this hits the nail on the head. Let's pump oil from the ground somewhere in Brazil. Ship it over half the world. Truck it to a refueling station, and then blow it up in a combustion engine where much of the energy is converted to heat (not so bad in winter of course).
California went from 33.6% renewables in 2021 and 54% in 2023. A significant factor was also increased hydro, but it shows that you can get over 50% renewables.
For Germany 2023, looks like 55% renewables, but 40% wind and solar. Traditional renewables, like hydro and biomass, are dispatchable, so they don't come with the same challenges as wind and solar, hence why we count them separately for some purposes
@@erik7853Here in Germany, the majority of the population does not want reactors. There is also no consensus on a nuclear repository. In addition, nuclear power plants hinder the expansion of renewable energies because they are not dynamically controllable
@@TheRealZastaCrocket it's not so much that NPPs "hinder" the expansion of renewable energies, it makes them unnecessary for the portion of demand that the NPPs cover. This is a good thing.
we don't need much energy at night- IF we turn off our lights. thats one example of how we use much more energy than we need. also energy needs to be priced (or taxed) based on the pollution they produce.
Excellent discussion of wind and solar power. This is the aspect of power generation. But to get the power somewhere useful at some time, you need a grid and storage. The grid costs for solar and wind factor in because there is a trade off between that and cheap ground to build solar and wind on. Wind and solar often being remote causes cheaper land but a more expensive grid. The storage cost is a factor since it is required for greater use of wind and solar, leading to less curtailment for a given percentage of power being delivered by renewables.
You are doing great work. I just discovered your channel, and I subscribed halfway through the first video. I've built grid planning models for the Western Interconnection (Western North America). Your videos are well thought out and very clearly presented. I know how much work this is. Thank you!
For the gas hob, there's a video by Technology Connections that shows that gas uses 3.5x more kWh to do the same heating/cooking. Since gas electric-generators and the grid have about 40% efficiency, it's roughly the same amount of emissions either way if your grid was 100% gas. Or half the emissions if your grid is 50% zero-emissions. "Why don't Americans use electric kettles?" is the name of the video.
One of the main reasons Americans don't use electric kettles is that their 120V supply makes it take way longer to heat water because you get less energy availability at the socket.
I like that you do two simulations and cross check them. Increases confidence. This video, like your other videos, is extremely well explained and worth watching several times.
@@iareid8255 Intermittent is not necessarily bad. Only the grid and the backup power as well as storage need to be designed to cope with intermittence.
@@beatreuteler of course intermittency is bad. However much wind capacity that is grid connected needs an equivalent amount of back up capacity. As that is necessary, why bother with wind at all? Batteries, just forget them, they are no answer as they require so much capacity as to be unfeasible.
@@iareid8255 Why bother with wind at all? Because the assumption is totally wrong. Yes, it requires some backup, but a very very small amount compared to the "equivalent amount". Only a minor portion of storage can drastically reduce the need of backup capacity. There is a very good study of a German professor called Hans Werner Sinn who demonstrated the extreme scenarios of backup capacity need without any storage and with need of storage without any backup capacity. Both scenarios lead to capacities an economy would never be capable of bearing. The miracle is the connection of these 2 scenarios lead to a graph with a sort of a hyperbolic shape where an optimum can be found between storage and backup capacity that solves the issue of steady supply with a comparably small fraction of both.
Beat, another academic who does not understand the way the grid works. Back up is a misnomer because without the capacity I refer to the renewable instability would crash the grid. This support has to run whether wind is strong or not. It provides necessary inertia, and reactive power input. Storage is a joke. How can you compensate for days, never mind weeks of very low wind input, you can't it is infeasible. If you are in Germany, how much power is imported from neighbouring countries , which can lead to a false sense of security.
You are one sharp cookie, @MichaelSize. Thanks for this brilliant analysis, which appears accurate for its message, but why did you obviate storage from the equation? Yes, you were making a point about coal, but please consider doing a variant of this video on how we could get to 100% renewable energy with storage. I would love to see that video. I predict that it will require overbuilding wind and solar, and thus require daily curtailment, which I consider to be an acceptable inefficiency in the quest to get us to 100% renewables. Again, thanks.
Your video is excellent, very well detailed, very good explanation, we see your dedication through all the calculation that you've done. You have the same quality than some channel with a thousand times more subscribers. Keep up 💪
So renewables are cleaner and cheaper. I realised that a while back and now have solar and battery and as well as having cheap power I also have energy security.
Yes. You can do it from the app so very convenient. Generally use it in time based mode. Had several power cuts since it was installed and it’s worked faultlessly. Expect to have fewer power cuts once the Tories have gone.
@@fyank1 ok, nice. I'm a Swede and my understanding is that here, it's rare that residential solar+battery installations have off-grid capability. But my info might be dated.
Great explanation on why it makes sense to electrify. I'm in the process electrifying my home and this will electrify the water heaters at our apartment buildings as they break and need replacement. The most difficult part is running the new conductors and upgrading the distribution panels when required.
This is a good model for a worst case scenario. Now these additional factors would push VREs further: hydro power (essentially a form of storage), long-distance transmission (smoothing out the variability of VREs), smart charging of EVs, thermal storage for heavy industry and district heating, manufacturing low-carbon chemical feedstocks like hydrogen, ammonia and methanol. IIRC this would get us 80%-90% renewables if we followed your cost optimisation goal.
Yes, Denmark is very well integrated in whole Nordic grid so it can sustain 60% of variable renewables and Lithuanian grid is also full of variables (although also some pumped hydro) but it is a small market and also balanced by interconnections mainly cable from Sweden
I know you mentioned commission and decommission costs, but another factor is definitely the ease of servicing a plant vs a farm. Solar farms are inherently modular did the panels with the core point being the outer connection. If a panel or even a whole line of panels break or need to be tuned and optimized, that can be done just a few at a time. A power plant has a lot more moving parts and depending on what needs to be done, the whole thing has to stop. In other words, it's easier to break a plant. Just look at how easy it was to break the centrifuges in Iran with a bit of code
The difference is that a power plant is designed to have such maintenance and it is on a predictable schedule. Renewables have intermittent production based on the weather which is inherently unpredictable. Here in the UK we often get weeks of still air in winter when we also get the coldest temperatures and highest energy requirements. If the cost of mitigating these scenarios is added into overall cost calculations renewables become vey expensive indeed.
I enjoy learning about the subjects you delve into and the depth of your analysis. However, I am surprised that in your analysis you did not look into energy storage. Whether by large battery, pumped hydro or pressurized CO2, various energy technologies have already begun(South Australia) to help capture surplus renewable and provide use it for peak demand. It is my understanding that South Australia has or will be soon closing all of its coal burning plants.
Excellent analysis. Tragically TVA in the US is just 3% wind and solar. Hydro and Nuclear are significant at TVA. 20% and 40% respectively. So it's not all bad. I wonder how much solar we can add in order to maximize profits. Instead of building solar TVA is replacing coal with Gas.
This video describes exactly why I'm a big fan of nuclear combined with wind and solar as our best shot of maximizing carbon emissions reductions for as long as possible. Of course, uranium isn't infinite, but the couple centuries of it we have is way better than another couple centuries of fossil fuels.
Yep! You can also use breeder reactors to significantly extend nuclear fuel reserves, as well as filtering seawater for a nearly-limitless amount of nuclear energy. I’d be surprised if we couldn’t figure out an economical way to make space-based solar after thousands of years…
In this video, I mention 2 to 3 "debunks" of the complaint presented in the intro, but I have been told that it is not entirely clear how those debunks are counted, so I will clarify this here: 1st debunk: as a simple assessment of the status quo, virtually no grid in the world is powered entirely by coal 2nd debunk: making up the bulk of the video, this attempts to prove that even if a grid is currently powered all by coal, such a situation is financially unstable under current economic and technological conditions, so capitalism alone should be sufficient to take any such grid to 40-45% wind and solar in time, as long as regulators refrain from favoritism. The same facts apply to any structural demand increase, which might be fulfilled by coal in the short term, but which will be economically pressured to match the 40-45% wind and solar model in the medium and long term 3rd debunk: even if our grids were powered by all coal, most electrification technologies (particularly, electric cars and heat pumps) are still more climate-friendly than their combustion counterparts
Michael, It is not sensible to have single fuel to generate electricity, the all your eggs in one basket scenario. 2nd Debunk, countries have favoured renewables for decades, and both finacially (Carbon taxes) and politically squeezed reliable genertaors out of business. Is that what you mean by favouritism? Coal is by far the cheapest source of generation when all aspects are taken into consideration, see China and India, for example. 3rd debunk, You cannot be serious??? By what rationale can you claim that? The losses between generation and consumer are very large, electrcity is very convenient but very inefficient. That is forgetting the impact of their construction, evs in particular.
@@iareid8255 1st. debunk: I was watching the video and I didn't see any "all eggs in one basket" scenario. Michael considered Wind, Solar and Gas, which are the 3 of them. 2nd debunk: Most countries are not yet done with the 2nd decade, i.e. In most cases using the plural on decades is wrong. And for coal being the cheapest source this is a wrong information that has been uncovered countless times. You are also totally wrong if you look at China, see them building coal power plants and then derivate from that fact, coal must be cheap for the Chinese too. In fact in China coal power plants are being built because demand is growing stronger than exploitation of wind and solar can cope with. 3rd debunk: It has been investigated and clarified countless times by a nice number of technical institutes with all the good names who unisono say that electricity is more efficient. You bring about no facts whatsoever to support your point.
This means (if I understand the video correctly) that we cannot get rid of fossil fuels or the grid will collapse. I thought the whole reason for renewables was to get rid of fossil fuels to stop climate change. What we are in fact doing is increasing the life span of fossil fuels.
You misunderstood the video. According to the video using 40% wind and solar of energy is the most economical setup with no energy storage. 60% with Li batteries. The video did not mention this but there are better forms of long-duration energy storage out there so could go much higher depending on what kind of energy storage infrastructure gets built. This video also ignores the existence of malton salt solar thermal, geothermal, and nuclear acting as a base load. Probably because the point was to explain why wind and solar growing instead of explaining the energy transition in its entirety.
The role that is attributed to "coal" in my simulation can be played by any dispatchable source of electricity. Alternatives include hydropower and biogas among the "traditional" low-carbon dispatchable sources, but also storage, such as electrical batteries and pumped hydro. Obviously, storage works both ways, absorbing excess production, thus reducing curtailment, but also filling in the gaps when production is low. Synthetic fuels, such as hydrogen or synthetic methane, are also attractive options. Synthetic fuels are generally made from electricity, water, and air, so in principle, they could use electricity only in times of excess production, thus constituting a form of storage, chemical storage, and they also constitute a realistic option for summer-to-winter storage. Finally, there is the concept of "Power to X" or P2X, which means scheduling the electrical loads that can be scheduled for times when wind and solar production is highest. This includes EV charging, hot water production, home heating and cooling, and many industrial activities. Pumped hydro storage has existed for decades, battery storage has started deploying on a large scale in the past few years, and P2X is a natural consequence of time-of-use electricity pricing, and is enabled on a large scale by the advent of smart meters. It is attractive to savvy consumers (especially businesses) who can exploit it to gain lower effective average electricity prices than they could achieve with a fixed price contract. The video assumes a sort of "worst case scenario" by ignoring these options, and that's for two reasons. First, hydro and pumped hydro are natural resources, each grid either has them, or it doesn't, and they are essentially built out, so this is not a scalable solution for the future. Second, while batteries and P2X definitely work, and are scalable, as industries, they are still in their infancy, compared to wind and solar which, as we've seen in parts of Europe and America, have already proven themselves, and I wanted to restrict the videos to technologies that have already proven to have both scale and scalability.
@@SizeMichaelPumped hydro is actually pretty scalable since you can build it closed loop with two artificial reservoirs with no connection to existing hydro resources.
I really like the mathematical approach. It's quite doubtful however to plug in these LCOEs of 30 USD/MWh. Lazard 2023 says 60 for solar and 50 for wind, and that's for world class US resources, not for Europe.
It would be great if you could make a video about applying solar and renewal energies to reduce Earth's energy imbalance; NASA already warned us that there's a limit of 400 years to boil the planet, and no one is talking about that, that excludes fossil fuel but also geothermal and nuclear...
I don't know if it's already implicitly included in LCOE, but there are costs that, from the perspective of an entire country or society, need to put on top of non renewable energy. I'm talking about external costs. Costs to society that exist because of the operation of a business. These need to be internalised, meaning the business has to pay for them, for example through taxes. This means carbon pricing and taxes on other harmful pollutants as well as waste removal. This significantly increases the marginal cost of operation for non renewable powerplants.
@@jesan733 If the operators pay for long term storage in its entirety and their insurance isn't subsidized, then yes, all external costs are internalized for nuclear
@@NicoSchurr nuclear have usually had to over-internalize those costs. I.e. the politicians and their bureaucrats invent much of the costs and force the industry to pay for both the motivated costs and much of the unmotivated costs, the latter of which should rightly be paid by the taxpayers/voters.
Yes, but it is very hard and expensive to harvest it. And in most places where it was tried, unfortunately fracking technologies were used to make the heat exchanger down there, followed by earthquakes. The heat exchanger need to be drilled, without the use of dangerous fracking technology. A canadian company has patented this, which means that everyone else who wants to use this, needs to pay a license. I don't know if they ask for a lot but what I see is that for some reason almost no one makes it so we still need to do steps to make this happen.
In some volcanic areas yes. But as a general solution no. We also need to be aware of the importance of temperature gradients in the Earth's mantle to maintenance of the Earth's magnetic field. Something we must not disrupt.
@@jimgraham6722 Geothermal is not only in volcanic areas. Geothermal is really everywhere. But we mus maintain the right solutions to harvest it. Fracking is a no go.
30% efficient coal plant's represent state of the art in about 1930. More like 45-50% with supercritical steam. The enegy content per tonne is a little low too, coals average long term price has been below $140. Natural gas is below $20/kwh of electricity average over the last 10 years.
Couldn't help but notice the huge expanse of solar panels. Finding a location for the next huge expanse will surely be more difficult and expensive. How much of the landscape do you want to fill with wind turbines and blinking red lights at night? Nuclear might be more expensive, but it offers a constant supply that can charge batteries, fill reservoirs, replace coal plants and doesn't sprawl all over the landscape. Also, an article I've seen in an old Scientific American and a fairly new study from Seaver Wang (Breakthrough Institute) show that nuclear uses less critical minerals. I can't imagine that there is not a lot of potential for nuclear costs to come down with more production.
Hi, thanks for the video. However, don't think people's issue is not building renewable resources or they are not viable. But we are not building fast enough. As in, we need to build renewables and reach net 0 before the climate goes out of hand.
It's possible that all the extra solar will be used up by data processing. It purely depend on the ratio of electricity cost versus the production cost of chips. If you can only run the chips for 12 hours a day, but pay very little for the extra energy it might be worth it to shut down the processing at night. It's unclear whether this will happen as the chips and infrastructure themselves are extremely expensive at the moment. At the moment it for sure never makes sense to only process at night - the electricity cost versus the cost of setup are very far. Though a situation might arise where a power plant only starts up for night time.
Good but how you power your house and the cooktop you use is almost immaterial. To be meaningful, the model must include energy storage cost as well as energy for powering industry, steel, aluminium, cement, fertilizer, synthetic fuel, industrial chemicals, manufacturing and energy embodied in exports as well as transport.
All of the industrial demand that you list, to the extent that it occurs in Czechia, would be included in the historical power demand data. Steel and cement, the two largest industrial sources of CO2, now have practical low or no carbon alternatives. They are developed to the point that large scale manufacturing is now being implemented.
I would never do electric only. In Northeast US it is the least reliable to heat your home. For survival being dependent on one fuel source that can easily be disrupted by storms in an area where most of the energy usage is heat, doesn't make sense. Gas, oil, not perfect but it works in a hurricane, in the freezing cold when ice covers the trees, power lines, solar panels, and wind blades, or in emergencies, and stores better longer without the losses of batteries. Do both, get solar, put in some electric heat, add a heat pump on your furnace AC thats gas fired, but in many areas you would be crazy to rely on the electric grid and electric car in an emergency.
I suspect that your methodology for capturing marginal consumption of coal by just putting in a minimum doesn't follow the way coal power plants would operate in these scenarios. In the USA currently, AFAIK, coal power plants are run at nearly steady state, and its natural gas consumption that is saved or spent by the variability in solar and wind. If you operate a coal plant in a throttled state, the efficiency will drop down as it is throttled more and more. Same with natural gas.
I don't say you are wrong. But Czechia is a suboptimal place to work as an "Example" for wind energy, Wind Energy profits from costlines as the differnce in thermal conductivity of water and soil create predictable winds during day and night. Czechia has no coastline.
Czech republic isn't the best case scenario by a long shot, it actually kinda sucks for renewables. We dont have sea, so no offshore wind, the winters are quite cold with not much sunny days, so low solar efficiency in winter when it is needed the most. 40 % of our energy is nuclear, 40 % coal. And still, solar is increasing rapidly, because it is just so cheap in comparison. Not so much wind, because of terrible construction law, which makes it take like 7 years to get permit, but even in this case, it is still worth it.
Oh, so I am ok so far: with today last month 97% Solar-energy (Electric 1.480 kWh) I am ok to change my partner to use induction for cooking in the restaurant. Nice huge calculations, but I have near NO wind here, the only possibility is also get hot water direct from the sun, and not via convert to electric and then heat. But that is so low part here. Oh, I don't need heating living here (Winter lowest 16 degrees plus), we need cooling and most when sun is shining = hot, where I have the electric then also.
A volcanic winter isn't "no sunlight for years", or else complex life would have been extinct many times over. It's reduced sunlight for years, which would affect the weather, but since solar is already profitable as far north as Finland, realistically, we'd probably just overbuilt solar to get through the event, and turn on the combustion power plants to bridge the gap in the meantime Pretty much how Europe got through the gas crisis, with savings, coal, and boosting LNG, except it would be a sun crisis. Honestly, the more I think about the scenario, the more uninteresting it becomes
As Gas operated power generation is more efficient than coal , would a gas opperated mini powerplant where I then throw away the heat generated and use the electricity generated to power a heat pump more efficient than using electricity from coal fired powerplants to power my heat pump?
The dataset of my simulation includes every single hour during an entire 8 year period, so obviously, it includes all seasons. I also chose a European country for my example, which makes it harder, as wind and solar have to be balanced, as opposed to USA, where solar plus batteries is just going to eat everything thanks to the clear winter skies, but the simulation found solutions anyway.
The wind blows in the winter. Harder than summer, on average. Wind turbines might use oil for lubrication, but how much could they possibly need? Gallons maybe, not tons. Oil is a non-issue. They are not burning it.
Not sure where the idea that renewables are cheaper is coming from, here in he UK our reliance on green energy gives us the highest energy costs in Europe despite having our own fossil fuel reserves. Currently there are huge subsidies in place for renewables and when those subsidies are reduced it makes renewables uneconomical to the point where the latest auction of off shore wind licences in the UK received zero bids. When comparing cost of renewables to traditional generation sources you also need to factor in the cost of backup and supply infrastructure and that makes it extremely expensive. After all batteries aren't cheap and neither is having power stations sitting idle only to be used for 20 to 30 % of the time when renewables aren't working. The real problem in this is that china, India and other growing economies are using cheap fossil fuels so Europe with its very expensive renewable energy is becoming increasingly uncompetitive with industry leaving at a frightening rate. The perceived economics of green energy don't add up and this is starting to become increasingly apparent.
You can see renewables done right by looking at Spain, Texas, or even Poland The schemes differ across jurisdiction, and there isn't one unified source to understand how all of them work, but right now, it seems like those jurisdictions which subsidize renewables at construction time, which is how nuclear works, get cheap electricity, while those which subsidize renewable with ongoing surcharges on electricity bills get expensive electricity For western jurisdictions, another challenge is the push to be ahead of the curve in deployment. At almost 40% wind and solar, the UK is way ahead of the global curve, and even ahead of many most European grids, and the desire is to go even faster, but for developers and customers, the biggest profits would be found in areas that are behind, so if you want them to deploy in the UK, subsidies are needed to close that gap You can see that many Eastern European countries had a boom in wind and solar in the 2007-2010 period to comply with EU mandates, and then absolute stagnation until the 2020s, but today, we're seeing unsubsidized rooftop solar go up all over the place in these same countries. They just pushed way ahead of the curve in the late 2000s To be clear, the main reason why UK has had expensive electricity for the past 2 years is primarily the same as in the rest of Europe: the price of gas pushing up the clearing price in the electricity merit order. The surcharges for subsidizing renewbles are there, but are not the primary reason As for the wind auction, £44/MWh is definitely a low bid, when electricity prices are several hundred pounds per MWh in all of Europe, as well as some parts of America. New York just bid $180/MWh for offshore wind, so I guess the UK didn't want to accelerate that badly Of course, in a completely free market, there would be no bids, the wind farms would just make their revenue by selling electricity, but again, you can't expect developers to build renewables for your "£200/MWh for the next year while gas prices are high and £60/MWh after that, conditional on having space for you in the merit order", which is what UK would be offering in a no-subsidy scenario, while New York just bid "$180/MWh for a decade, no questions asked". It's a question of how much you want to accelerate
@@SizeMichael You say the uk is 40% but that is only on a good day, when we have freezing cold still days in winter it is less than 2%. As renewables are increased so is the huge cost of backup supply. That will never change and cherry picking 'cost' figures which doesn't factor in reliability is the only way renewables costs come even close to traditional energy generation. Subsidies is the only way it becomes economically viable to even build these schemes and even then many are abandoned after realising they cost more than predicted.
A lot of forecasts have it wrong when it comes to storage. in 93% of markets we need less than 5 days worth of energy storage. Almost 80% can do with less than 3 days with the right mixture of solar and wind. Generating is cheap. And we can easily generate 4x what we need to get us through the darkest periods when it is not producing as much, while creating a controllable usable over abundance the rest of the year. Secondly this idea that the grid is going to run a monopoly over the energy supply? Is no longer valid. By the end of the decade it is going to be cheaper for the consumer of electricity to be self sufficient, than to merely pay the service charges of being connected to the grid, before the actual power costs are added to the equation. And that goes for home owners and businesses alike. We have solar coming to market in everything from awnings to windows. And its already the case now that solar panels are now selling for less than 30 cents/watt at wholesale. All evidence suggests it will be less than 15 cents by the end of the decade.
Where I am we have hit 50% curtailment of Solar and wind at 32% of generation. Now we need to spend 1-2 trillion to upgrade transmission and storage infrastructure. Companies are claiming at a 50-100% increase to wholesale price they meet the sustainable break even for solar/wind. The panels and wind turbines are also starting to fail after 7 years instead of the projected 30 years as well. Are the energy companies profiteering or is there something wrong with the calculations? Energy bills have only gone up as renewables increase so far.
You are correct, the economics on renewables has been misrepresented for years and it is getting to the point where this fact is becoming obvious. Here in the UK there were exactly zero bids for the latest off shore wind generation licences because without huge subsidies they are just not going to break even. Also the projected lifespan of wind turbines on average is not even half the original projection needing costly maintenance or replacement. It turns out nature is much tougher on wind turbines than anyone expected.
For your third 'debunk', both ICE cars and coal power plants are about 30-40% efficient. EVs only become better when the electricity comes from combined cycle gas plants, which are about 70% efficient (or ideally from nuclear/renewable power, of course)
Massless energy is the far more logical choice. That is what Nikola Tesla harnessed, the dam at Niagara Falls, to power the first grid design. Think strategically.
Australia is ideal for both wind and solar. As we add more renewables to the grid our prices are spiralling up and up with grid instability increasing the more you add. The myth of cheap electricity is therefore false. The CO2 saving is not there as backup fossil fuel power is needed when the wind and sun are not happening, which is most of the time. Both solar and wind turbines experience a total loss of power on average for nearly two thirds of the total time. Renewables are not cheap and completely inefficient to the point where their utility is not worth the effort. All countries that have tried to switch to renewables are going back to fossil fuels or nuclear.
My reaction to cheaper electricity through wind and solar is to check electricity prices in countries that have done this against those that have not. What I find is a staggering increase in the price of power when those countries (for the USA break it into states) where this approach has been used e.g. In the UK a 25% surcharge has been added to the bill just to support wind farms. Why is this necessary if the things are cheaper? This is reality and is at odds with your analysis. What do you think might be the reason that your model does not predict reality with some sort of accuracy? One suggestion from me is that conventional power stations would have to increase their prices to account for the demand reduction. They may use less fuel but the staffing and capital cost have not gone away and they were planned on the basis of continuous demand. An unrelated point is that return on investment (measured in joules and not money) is never taken into account. Any figure below 10 is basically useless.
the prices of energy increased more in countries with no renewables (look at latvia, Estonia, etc). Mainly because of natural gas price hikes in Europe. The energy crises in Europe is due to gas and Oil price hikes... In the US there is also NO correlation. the biggest correlation we can find is with high taxes (high taxes states have higher priced eletricity). A goo example is Texas, which has one of the highest values of renewables but lower prices (because it has no taxes), same thing with Oregon. California has hight reneables and high prices but also high taxes which explains the prices. Prices have been increasing a lot, but that has nothing to do with reneables, if anything, if we had more in house production of energy we would have more energy security and stability and we wouldn't see these hight increases due to gas and oil hikes. I don't think your are right at all.
The UK actually had cheaper electricity when their government financially supported building renewables before austerity. The prices shot up after austerity and renewables stagnated for years.
Ben, what few seem to understand is that renewables are technically and practically far inferior to conventional generaton. On the technical side (Inertia, synchrous generation, Reactive power and short circuit current support) . For the grid to run it is essential for there to be conventional generators as well, a duplication of capacity. At times they run at far below their capacity, but must run even at low output or the grid will fail. When that happens, if current (U.K.) policy continues, it will be a major event that will takes many days to restore power to most and longer for some. Because renewables are uncontrollable, they cannot contribute to a grid black start.
I imagine the solution to this is, at least in part, for there to be systems in place that act a variable load, preferably something useful. Grid scale batteries are an obvious part of this, but this could also be done with other infrastructure such as water treatment and desalination, pumped hydro, district heating, hydrogen production, etc. There could also be agreements with communities to say, charge cars or heat water at a variable rate or time. Being required to work with whatever we get is certainly more challenging than being able to throttle production to meet demand, but there are certainly ways to smooth it out and work around the variability.
@@AkaRyrye83 The problem with grid level storage is the vastness of it. For the UK, for example, you'd need to store about an exa joule. Have a look at the numbers- that would mean 100 cubic kilometres of water using pumped hydro. I doubt that there is enough lithium in the earths crust to use batteries and that's just for the UK. Then you'd have to replace them 20 years down the road.
The days in your charts only have 23 hours. You forgot the hour from 23 to 0. Who are you trying to convince when you make such basic mistakes. Although it seems ridicolous y will finish the video.
@@casandraa.9837 It is very relevant that the time without solar is a full hour longer and it is relevant, that somebody who speaks about tachnical and physical facts knows to count to 24.
Your analysis is faulty, If coal is only used to backup wind and solar, then it is correct to use 30% efficiency. But if coal is used full time, its efficiency should be 45% due to the fact that you can use Supercritical electricity generation. Recompute using 45% efficiency for coal generation and you will find that using wind and solar is actually more expensive and more harmful to the environment.
You need coal to MAKE Windfarms and Solar panels. This is why China, which makes 70% of them, has been opening two coal mines a week. You need coal for carbon fibre, steel and concrete (windfarms), and for annealed glass (Solar panels). The stuff then has to be shipped all over the world (oil needed for that). In addition, wind farms have diesel generators in them to keep them going when the wind isn't blowing so they don't seize up. On top of THAT, when it freezes, they use helicopters to pour fuel on them to defrost them. The 50 meter long blades can't be recycled, so they're burying the things. Solar panels could be, but the amount you get back selling the rescued materials isn't enough to offset the cost of getting them out, so they're piling those up or burying them. The windfarms can't work without wind but they can't work with too much, either, so they're locked down. If it's windy and.or sunny in, say, the UK, it's likely windy and/or sunny in France, etc. so we can't offload our excess onto them. As a consequence, the companies are being paid NOT to make power because we cannot store it. The batteries needed for storage are another issue. We don't have enough to last more than a few minutes to hours, typically, and certainly not enough to see us through peak demand in the depths of winter, which would leave people freezing to death in the cold. The batteries we DO have require minerals whose extractiokn requires fossil fuels, wrecks the environment in the typically third world country where they're found, AND poisons their water table, so they can't live there. Oh yeah, and it uses slave labour. Plus, Russia and China hold controlling interests in 90% of the known Lithium reserves. I've a feeling as we get more desperate, they'll be hiking up the price BIG TIME. 14,000 solar panels were destroyed in a hailstorm in Nebraska last year, so they're not resilient to, you know, weather which, we're repeatedly being told, will get worse. The windfarms are killing raptors and bats on land, dolphins and whales at sea. They're unreliable, easily wrecked in bad weather, require fossil fuels and, in sum, are a TOTAL SCAM! We NEED alternatives to fossil fuels because they will run out, but an alternative that can't be made WITHOUT fossil fuels is utterly useless. Which makes you a complete idiot.
I don't have to do the calculation to know exponential growth can't continue and we're near the end. There won't be any transition. This isn't a problem to be solved, but a predicament to be faced.
Don't quite your day job. There's going to be a lot of sad doomers who wake up in 20 years to find that the world hasn't ended but they've wrecked their lives because they saw no point in planning for a future that they thought would never come through. Oops.
This is so sad... Your extremely carefully cherry-picked irrelevancies shows that you've at least tried to read on this topic. As no one can avoid so many problems by accident. But you've clearly gotten badly confused at some point. Because you've fallen entirely for the scam that is wind and solar. I hope you keep studying, you might be close to getting the correct answer. Because facts are there's nothing worse than renewable power and in the wonderful world of reality the only way forward is nuclear energy. ;) Every cent spent on renewables is a cent wasted.
I don't agree entirely, wind and solar have cost advantage in many places and we should exploit that. However, hydro and nuclear have reliability advantages and we should exploit that also. The key is finding the optimal mix that keeps costs as low as possible while maximising reliability and decarbonise at the same time. These types of problem are complex, but are amenable to optimisation analysis using techniques such as linear programming to determine relative levels of investment. The mix will certainly vary place to place.
@@jimgraham6722 No, all of that's wrong. It's really clear you're just repeating the sales pitches of wind and solar salesmen and taking a middle ground approach because it sounds intellectual. The reality is that the "optimal mix" as you call it is all or nearly all nuclear power, and exactly zero intermittent renewables. Because this is not a complex issue, reliability is all that matters to utilities. And energy density is all that matter to the laws of physics. And nuclear wins for both, by a wide margin while wind and solar come in dead last for both requirements. And will never improve, these flaws are their fundamental nature.
One point that can help wind and solar is increase in storage and storage is growing. Storage is not only local pump hydro and battery storage. We can for example look at a country like Norway offering storage to the tune of capacity of interconnections. We see Denmark absorbing about 60% of wind and solar. The record holds South Australia with 70% wind and solar.
Is Denmark "absorbing" 60% wind and solar? What do you mean by that? I thought they rather manage to produce 60% wind and solar by being a tiny country in a larger grid. It's like a town near a big wind farm could claim to produce 1300% wind or whatever. It's a meaningsless statistic.
I've just watched several of your videos. Because this is text I need to tell you that I am giving you a long, slow standing clap. You sir, are a most excellent teacher.
"Or conversely the incredibly low efficiency of the combustion variants" Yes I think this hits the nail on the head. Let's pump oil from the ground somewhere in Brazil. Ship it over half the world. Truck it to a refueling station, and then blow it up in a combustion engine where much of the energy is converted to heat (not so bad in winter of course).
California went from 33.6% renewables in 2021 and 54% in 2023. A significant factor was also increased hydro, but it shows that you can get over 50% renewables.
Great explanation! By the way, Germany is actually at 55% renewables in 2023 and accelerates to 80% in 2030.😊
For Germany 2023, looks like 55% renewables, but 40% wind and solar. Traditional renewables, like hydro and biomass, are dispatchable, so they don't come with the same challenges as wind and solar, hence why we count them separately for some purposes
shame they shut down nuclear
yes, but only on 2 days a year😉😮💨
@@erik7853Here in Germany, the majority of the population does not want reactors. There is also no consensus on a nuclear repository. In addition, nuclear power plants hinder the expansion of renewable energies because they are not dynamically controllable
@@TheRealZastaCrocket it's not so much that NPPs "hinder" the expansion of renewable energies, it makes them unnecessary for the portion of demand that the NPPs cover. This is a good thing.
we don't need much energy at night- IF we turn off our lights. thats one example of how we use much more energy than we need. also energy needs to be priced (or taxed) based on the pollution they produce.
Excellent discussion of wind and solar power. This is the aspect of power generation.
But to get the power somewhere useful at some time, you need a grid and storage.
The grid costs for solar and wind factor in because there is a trade off between that and cheap ground to build solar and wind on. Wind and solar often being remote causes cheaper land but a more expensive grid.
The storage cost is a factor since it is required for greater use of wind and solar, leading to less curtailment for a given percentage of power being delivered by renewables.
You are doing great work. I just discovered your channel, and I subscribed halfway through the first video. I've built grid planning models for the Western Interconnection (Western North America). Your videos are well thought out and very clearly presented. I know how much work this is. Thank you!
For the gas hob, there's a video by Technology Connections that shows that gas uses 3.5x more kWh to do the same heating/cooking. Since gas electric-generators and the grid have about 40% efficiency, it's roughly the same amount of emissions either way if your grid was 100% gas. Or half the emissions if your grid is 50% zero-emissions. "Why don't Americans use electric kettles?" is the name of the video.
One of the main reasons Americans don't use electric kettles is that their 120V supply makes it take way longer to heat water because you get less energy availability at the socket.
I like that you do two simulations and cross check them. Increases confidence. This video, like your other videos, is extremely well explained and worth watching several times.
Off shore wind in some places is very reliable. Good news! 😊
Puinditgi,
yes reliably intermittent
@@iareid8255 Intermittent is not necessarily bad. Only the grid and the backup power as well as storage need to be designed to cope with intermittence.
@@beatreuteler
of course intermittency is bad. However much wind capacity that is grid connected needs an equivalent amount of back up capacity. As that is necessary, why bother with wind at all?
Batteries, just forget them, they are no answer as they require so much capacity as to be unfeasible.
@@iareid8255 Why bother with wind at all? Because the assumption is totally wrong. Yes, it requires some backup, but a very very small amount compared to the "equivalent amount". Only a minor portion of storage can drastically reduce the need of backup capacity. There is a very good study of a German professor called Hans Werner Sinn who demonstrated the extreme scenarios of backup capacity need without any storage and with need of storage without any backup capacity. Both scenarios lead to capacities an economy would never be capable of bearing. The miracle is the connection of these 2 scenarios lead to a graph with a sort of a hyperbolic shape where an optimum can be found between storage and backup capacity that solves the issue of steady supply with a comparably small fraction of both.
Beat,
another academic who does not understand the way the grid works.
Back up is a misnomer because without the capacity I refer to the renewable instability would crash the grid. This support has to run whether wind is strong or not. It provides necessary inertia, and reactive power input.
Storage is a joke. How can you compensate for days, never mind weeks of very low wind input, you can't it is infeasible.
If you are in Germany, how much power is imported from neighbouring countries , which can lead to a false sense of security.
You are one sharp cookie, @MichaelSize. Thanks for this brilliant analysis, which appears accurate for its message, but why did you obviate storage from the equation? Yes, you were making a point about coal, but please consider doing a variant of this video on how we could get to 100% renewable energy with storage. I would love to see that video. I predict that it will require overbuilding wind and solar, and thus require daily curtailment, which I consider to be an acceptable inefficiency in the quest to get us to 100% renewables. Again, thanks.
Your video is excellent, very well detailed, very good explanation, we see your dedication through all the calculation that you've done. You have the same quality than some channel with a thousand times more subscribers. Keep up 💪
So renewables are cleaner and cheaper. I realised that a while back and now have solar and battery and as well as having cheap power I also have energy security.
Have you tried running your house in off-grid mode?
Yes. You can do it from the app so very convenient. Generally use it in time based mode. Had several power cuts since it was installed and it’s worked faultlessly. Expect to have fewer power cuts once the Tories have gone.
@@fyank1 ok, nice. I'm a Swede and my understanding is that here, it's rare that residential solar+battery installations have off-grid capability. But my info might be dated.
Great explanation on why it makes sense to electrify. I'm in the process electrifying my home and this will electrify the water heaters at our apartment buildings as they break and need replacement. The most difficult part is running the new conductors and upgrading the distribution panels when required.
This is a good model for a worst case scenario. Now these additional factors would push VREs further: hydro power (essentially a form of storage), long-distance transmission (smoothing out the variability of VREs), smart charging of EVs, thermal storage for heavy industry and district heating, manufacturing low-carbon chemical feedstocks like hydrogen, ammonia and methanol. IIRC this would get us 80%-90% renewables if we followed your cost optimisation goal.
Yes, Denmark is very well integrated in whole Nordic grid so it can sustain 60% of variable renewables and Lithuanian grid is also full of variables (although also some pumped hydro) but it is a small market and also balanced by interconnections mainly cable from Sweden
I know you mentioned commission and decommission costs, but another factor is definitely the ease of servicing a plant vs a farm.
Solar farms are inherently modular did the panels with the core point being the outer connection. If a panel or even a whole line of panels break or need to be tuned and optimized, that can be done just a few at a time.
A power plant has a lot more moving parts and depending on what needs to be done, the whole thing has to stop. In other words, it's easier to break a plant.
Just look at how easy it was to break the centrifuges in Iran with a bit of code
The difference is that a power plant is designed to have such maintenance and it is on a predictable schedule. Renewables have intermittent production based on the weather which is inherently unpredictable. Here in the UK we often get weeks of still air in winter when we also get the coldest temperatures and highest energy requirements. If the cost of mitigating these scenarios is added into overall cost calculations renewables become vey expensive indeed.
Thanks a lot of an insightful video. I suppose you can add pumped up hydro storage for less of solar curtailment in future!
I enjoy learning about the subjects you delve into and the depth of your analysis. However, I am surprised that in your analysis you did not look into energy storage. Whether by large battery, pumped hydro or pressurized CO2, various energy technologies have already begun(South Australia) to help capture surplus renewable and provide use it for peak demand. It is my understanding that South Australia has or will be soon closing all of its coal burning plants.
Excellent analysis.
Tragically TVA in the US is just 3% wind and solar.
Hydro and Nuclear are significant at TVA. 20% and 40% respectively. So it's not all bad.
I wonder how much solar we can add in order to maximize profits. Instead of building solar TVA is replacing coal with Gas.
excellent video
This video describes exactly why I'm a big fan of nuclear combined with wind and solar as our best shot of maximizing carbon emissions reductions for as long as possible. Of course, uranium isn't infinite, but the couple centuries of it we have is way better than another couple centuries of fossil fuels.
Yep! You can also use breeder reactors to significantly extend nuclear fuel reserves, as well as filtering seawater for a nearly-limitless amount of nuclear energy. I’d be surprised if we couldn’t figure out an economical way to make space-based solar after thousands of years…
In this video, I mention 2 to 3 "debunks" of the complaint presented in the intro, but I have been told that it is not entirely clear how those debunks are counted, so I will clarify this here:
1st debunk: as a simple assessment of the status quo, virtually no grid in the world is powered entirely by coal
2nd debunk: making up the bulk of the video, this attempts to prove that even if a grid is currently powered all by coal, such a situation is financially unstable under current economic and technological conditions, so capitalism alone should be sufficient to take any such grid to 40-45% wind and solar in time, as long as regulators refrain from favoritism. The same facts apply to any structural demand increase, which might be fulfilled by coal in the short term, but which will be economically pressured to match the 40-45% wind and solar model in the medium and long term
3rd debunk: even if our grids were powered by all coal, most electrification technologies (particularly, electric cars and heat pumps) are still more climate-friendly than their combustion counterparts
Very interesting and informative 👍
Great information. Thanks for sharing.
Dear Michael. If I got it correctly, your simulation does not consider storage. Is there a good chance you would soon repeat this considering storage?
Michael,
It is not sensible to have single fuel to generate electricity, the all your eggs in one basket scenario.
2nd Debunk,
countries have favoured renewables for decades, and both finacially (Carbon taxes) and politically squeezed reliable genertaors out of business. Is that what you mean by favouritism? Coal is by far the cheapest source of generation when all aspects are taken into consideration, see China and India, for example.
3rd debunk,
You cannot be serious???
By what rationale can you claim that? The losses between generation and consumer are very large, electrcity is very convenient but very inefficient. That is forgetting the impact of their construction, evs in particular.
@@iareid8255 1st. debunk: I was watching the video and I didn't see any "all eggs in one basket" scenario. Michael considered Wind, Solar and Gas, which are the 3 of them. 2nd debunk: Most countries are not yet done with the 2nd decade, i.e. In most cases using the plural on decades is wrong. And for coal being the cheapest source this is a wrong information that has been uncovered countless times. You are also totally wrong if you look at China, see them building coal power plants and then derivate from that fact, coal must be cheap for the Chinese too. In fact in China coal power plants are being built because demand is growing stronger than exploitation of wind and solar can cope with.
3rd debunk: It has been investigated and clarified countless times by a nice number of technical institutes with all the good names who unisono say that electricity is more efficient. You bring about no facts whatsoever to support your point.
This means (if I understand the video correctly) that we cannot get rid of fossil fuels or the grid will collapse. I thought the whole reason for renewables was to get rid of fossil fuels to stop climate change. What we are in fact doing is increasing the life span of fossil fuels.
You misunderstood the video. According to the video using 40% wind and solar of energy is the most economical setup with no energy storage. 60% with Li batteries.
The video did not mention this but there are better forms of long-duration energy storage out there so could go much higher depending on what kind of energy storage infrastructure gets built. This video also ignores the existence of malton salt solar thermal, geothermal, and nuclear acting as a base load. Probably because the point was to explain why wind and solar growing instead of explaining the energy transition in its entirety.
The role that is attributed to "coal" in my simulation can be played by any dispatchable source of electricity. Alternatives include hydropower and biogas among the "traditional" low-carbon dispatchable sources, but also storage, such as electrical batteries and pumped hydro. Obviously, storage works both ways, absorbing excess production, thus reducing curtailment, but also filling in the gaps when production is low. Synthetic fuels, such as hydrogen or synthetic methane, are also attractive options. Synthetic fuels are generally made from electricity, water, and air, so in principle, they could use electricity only in times of excess production, thus constituting a form of storage, chemical storage, and they also constitute a realistic option for summer-to-winter storage. Finally, there is the concept of "Power to X" or P2X, which means scheduling the electrical loads that can be scheduled for times when wind and solar production is highest. This includes EV charging, hot water production, home heating and cooling, and many industrial activities.
Pumped hydro storage has existed for decades, battery storage has started deploying on a large scale in the past few years, and P2X is a natural consequence of time-of-use electricity pricing, and is enabled on a large scale by the advent of smart meters. It is attractive to savvy consumers (especially businesses) who can exploit it to gain lower effective average electricity prices than they could achieve with a fixed price contract.
The video assumes a sort of "worst case scenario" by ignoring these options, and that's for two reasons. First, hydro and pumped hydro are natural resources, each grid either has them, or it doesn't, and they are essentially built out, so this is not a scalable solution for the future. Second, while batteries and P2X definitely work, and are scalable, as industries, they are still in their infancy, compared to wind and solar which, as we've seen in parts of Europe and America, have already proven themselves, and I wanted to restrict the videos to technologies that have already proven to have both scale and scalability.
@@SizeMichaelPumped hydro is actually pretty scalable since you can build it closed loop with two artificial reservoirs with no connection to existing hydro resources.
I really like the mathematical approach. It's quite doubtful however to plug in these LCOEs of 30 USD/MWh. Lazard 2023 says 60 for solar and 50 for wind, and that's for world class US resources, not for Europe.
It would be great if you could make a video about applying solar and renewal energies to reduce Earth's energy imbalance; NASA already warned us that there's a limit of 400 years to boil the planet, and no one is talking about that, that excludes fossil fuel but also geothermal and nuclear...
Very good presentation. All luddites should be required to watch.
I don't know if it's already implicitly included in LCOE, but there are costs that, from the perspective of an entire country or society, need to put on top of non renewable energy. I'm talking about external costs. Costs to society that exist because of the operation of a business. These need to be internalised, meaning the business has to pay for them, for example through taxes. This means carbon pricing and taxes on other harmful pollutants as well as waste removal. This significantly increases the marginal cost of operation for non renewable powerplants.
Not nuclear though, its costs are already internalized.
@@jesan733 If the operators pay for long term storage in its entirety and their insurance isn't subsidized, then yes, all external costs are internalized for nuclear
@@NicoSchurr nuclear have usually had to over-internalize those costs. I.e. the politicians and their bureaucrats invent much of the costs and force the industry to pay for both the motivated costs and much of the unmotivated costs, the latter of which should rightly be paid by the taxpayers/voters.
@@NicoSchurr such costs are mostly political in nature, so they're overinternalized. The industry pays too much and taxpayers too little.
3:00 - finaly someone else understand it. I was taliking about it 4 years.
Geothermal is millions of years and everywhere beneath our feet.
Yes, but it is very hard and expensive to harvest it. And in most places where it was tried, unfortunately fracking technologies were used to make the heat exchanger down there, followed by earthquakes. The heat exchanger need to be drilled, without the use of dangerous fracking technology. A canadian company has patented this, which means that everyone else who wants to use this, needs to pay a license. I don't know if they ask for a lot but what I see is that for some reason almost no one makes it so we still need to do steps to make this happen.
In some volcanic areas yes. But as a general solution no. We also need to be aware of the importance of temperature gradients in the Earth's mantle to maintenance of the Earth's magnetic field. Something we must not disrupt.
@@jimgraham6722 Geothermal is not only in volcanic areas. Geothermal is really everywhere. But we mus maintain the right solutions to harvest it. Fracking is a no go.
@@beatreuteler There's no heat inside mountains, just to nitpick.
@@bjorntorlarsson Maybe you ask a tunnel builder by the next occasion.
30% efficient coal plant's represent state of the art in about 1930. More like 45-50% with supercritical steam. The enegy content per tonne is a little low too, coals average long term price has been below $140. Natural gas is below $20/kwh of electricity average over the last 10 years.
great video. Given that much electric generation is done using natural gas, shouldn;t you also compare with gas instead of just coal?
Couldn't help but notice the huge expanse of solar panels. Finding a location for the next huge expanse will surely be more difficult and expensive. How much of the landscape do you want to fill with wind turbines and blinking red lights at night? Nuclear might be more expensive, but it offers a constant supply that can charge batteries, fill reservoirs, replace coal plants and doesn't sprawl all over the landscape. Also, an article I've seen in an old Scientific American and a fairly new study from Seaver Wang (Breakthrough Institute) show that nuclear uses less critical minerals. I can't imagine that there is not a lot of potential for nuclear costs to come down with more production.
Now onto the inevitability of Nuclear 2.0.
Hi, thanks for the video. However, don't think people's issue is not building renewable resources or they are not viable. But we are not building fast enough. As in, we need to build renewables and reach net 0 before the climate goes out of hand.
It's possible that all the extra solar will be used up by data processing. It purely depend on the ratio of electricity cost versus the production cost of chips. If you can only run the chips for 12 hours a day, but pay very little for the extra energy it might be worth it to shut down the processing at night. It's unclear whether this will happen as the chips and infrastructure themselves are extremely expensive at the moment. At the moment it for sure never makes sense to only process at night - the electricity cost versus the cost of setup are very far. Though a situation might arise where a power plant only starts up for night time.
Good but how you power your house and the cooktop you use is almost immaterial.
To be meaningful, the model must include energy storage cost as well as energy for powering industry, steel, aluminium, cement, fertilizer, synthetic fuel, industrial chemicals, manufacturing and energy embodied in exports as well as transport.
All of the industrial demand that you list, to the extent that it occurs in Czechia, would be included in the historical power demand data. Steel and cement, the two largest industrial sources of CO2, now have practical low or no carbon alternatives. They are developed to the point that large scale manufacturing is now being implemented.
I would never do electric only. In Northeast US it is the least reliable to heat your home. For survival being dependent on one fuel source that can easily be disrupted by storms in an area where most of the energy usage is heat, doesn't make sense. Gas, oil, not perfect but it works in a hurricane, in the freezing cold when ice covers the trees, power lines, solar panels, and wind blades, or in emergencies, and stores better longer without the losses of batteries.
Do both, get solar, put in some electric heat, add a heat pump on your furnace AC thats gas fired, but in many areas you would be crazy to rely on the electric grid and electric car in an emergency.
I suspect that your methodology for capturing marginal consumption of coal by just putting in a minimum doesn't follow the way coal power plants would operate in these scenarios. In the USA currently, AFAIK, coal power plants are run at nearly steady state, and its natural gas consumption that is saved or spent by the variability in solar and wind. If you operate a coal plant in a throttled state, the efficiency will drop down as it is throttled more and more. Same with natural gas.
I don't say you are wrong. But Czechia is a suboptimal place to work as an "Example" for wind energy, Wind Energy profits from costlines as the differnce in thermal conductivity of water and soil create predictable winds during day and night. Czechia has no coastline.
Czech republic isn't the best case scenario by a long shot, it actually kinda sucks for renewables. We dont have sea, so no offshore wind, the winters are quite cold with not much sunny days, so low solar efficiency in winter when it is needed the most. 40 % of our energy is nuclear, 40 % coal. And still, solar is increasing rapidly, because it is just so cheap in comparison. Not so much wind, because of terrible construction law, which makes it take like 7 years to get permit, but even in this case, it is still worth it.
Oh, so I am ok so far:
with today last month 97% Solar-energy (Electric 1.480 kWh)
I am ok to change my partner to use induction for cooking in the restaurant.
Nice huge calculations, but I have near NO wind here, the only possibility is also get hot water direct from the sun, and not via convert to electric and then heat. But that is so low part here.
Oh, I don't need heating living here (Winter lowest 16 degrees plus), we need cooling and most when sun is shining = hot, where I have the electric then also.
Until a volcano erupts and there no sunlight for years, or a nuclear winter, then what?
Then we adapt to the new reality...at least the ones who survive.
A volcanic winter isn't "no sunlight for years", or else complex life would have been extinct many times over. It's reduced sunlight for years, which would affect the weather, but since solar is already profitable as far north as Finland, realistically, we'd probably just overbuilt solar to get through the event, and turn on the combustion power plants to bridge the gap in the meantime
Pretty much how Europe got through the gas crisis, with savings, coal, and boosting LNG, except it would be a sun crisis. Honestly, the more I think about the scenario, the more uninteresting it becomes
As Gas operated power generation is more efficient than coal , would a gas opperated mini powerplant where I then throw away the heat generated and use the electricity generated to power a heat pump more efficient than using electricity from coal fired powerplants to power my heat pump?
You forgot the season. Less sun in the winter also wind needs oil to operate. Wind turbines needs lots of oil.
The dataset of my simulation includes every single hour during an entire 8 year period, so obviously, it includes all seasons. I also chose a European country for my example, which makes it harder, as wind and solar have to be balanced, as opposed to USA, where solar plus batteries is just going to eat everything thanks to the clear winter skies, but the simulation found solutions anyway.
The wind blows in the winter. Harder than summer, on average. Wind turbines might use oil for lubrication, but how much could they possibly need? Gallons maybe, not tons. Oil is a non-issue. They are not burning it.
Not sure where the idea that renewables are cheaper is coming from, here in he UK our reliance on green energy gives us the highest energy costs in Europe despite having our own fossil fuel reserves. Currently there are huge subsidies in place for renewables and when those subsidies are reduced it makes renewables uneconomical to the point where the latest auction of off shore wind licences in the UK received zero bids. When comparing cost of renewables to traditional generation sources you also need to factor in the cost of backup and supply infrastructure and that makes it extremely expensive. After all batteries aren't cheap and neither is having power stations sitting idle only to be used for 20 to 30 % of the time when renewables aren't working. The real problem in this is that china, India and other growing economies are using cheap fossil fuels so Europe with its very expensive renewable energy is becoming increasingly uncompetitive with industry leaving at a frightening rate. The perceived economics of green energy don't add up and this is starting to become increasingly apparent.
You can see renewables done right by looking at Spain, Texas, or even Poland
The schemes differ across jurisdiction, and there isn't one unified source to understand how all of them work, but right now, it seems like those jurisdictions which subsidize renewables at construction time, which is how nuclear works, get cheap electricity, while those which subsidize renewable with ongoing surcharges on electricity bills get expensive electricity
For western jurisdictions, another challenge is the push to be ahead of the curve in deployment. At almost 40% wind and solar, the UK is way ahead of the global curve, and even ahead of many most European grids, and the desire is to go even faster, but for developers and customers, the biggest profits would be found in areas that are behind, so if you want them to deploy in the UK, subsidies are needed to close that gap
You can see that many Eastern European countries had a boom in wind and solar in the 2007-2010 period to comply with EU mandates, and then absolute stagnation until the 2020s, but today, we're seeing unsubsidized rooftop solar go up all over the place in these same countries. They just pushed way ahead of the curve in the late 2000s
To be clear, the main reason why UK has had expensive electricity for the past 2 years is primarily the same as in the rest of Europe: the price of gas pushing up the clearing price in the electricity merit order. The surcharges for subsidizing renewbles are there, but are not the primary reason
As for the wind auction, £44/MWh is definitely a low bid, when electricity prices are several hundred pounds per MWh in all of Europe, as well as some parts of America. New York just bid $180/MWh for offshore wind, so I guess the UK didn't want to accelerate that badly
Of course, in a completely free market, there would be no bids, the wind farms would just make their revenue by selling electricity, but again, you can't expect developers to build renewables for your "£200/MWh for the next year while gas prices are high and £60/MWh after that, conditional on having space for you in the merit order", which is what UK would be offering in a no-subsidy scenario, while New York just bid "$180/MWh for a decade, no questions asked". It's a question of how much you want to accelerate
@@SizeMichael You say the uk is 40% but that is only on a good day, when we have freezing cold still days in winter it is less than 2%. As renewables are increased so is the huge cost of backup supply. That will never change and cherry picking 'cost' figures which doesn't factor in reliability is the only way renewables costs come even close to traditional energy generation. Subsidies is the only way it becomes economically viable to even build these schemes and even then many are abandoned after realising they cost more than predicted.
A lot of forecasts have it wrong when it comes to storage. in 93% of markets we need less than 5 days worth of energy storage. Almost 80% can do with less than 3 days with the right mixture of solar and wind. Generating is cheap. And we can easily generate 4x what we need to get us through the darkest periods when it is not producing as much, while creating a controllable usable over abundance the rest of the year.
Secondly this idea that the grid is going to run a monopoly over the energy supply? Is no longer valid. By the end of the decade it is going to be cheaper for the consumer of electricity to be self sufficient, than to merely pay the service charges of being connected to the grid, before the actual power costs are added to the equation. And that goes for home owners and businesses alike. We have solar coming to market in everything from awnings to windows. And its already the case now that solar panels are now selling for less than 30 cents/watt at wholesale. All evidence suggests it will be less than 15 cents by the end of the decade.
Where I am we have hit 50% curtailment of Solar and wind at 32% of generation. Now we need to spend 1-2 trillion to upgrade transmission and storage infrastructure. Companies are claiming at a 50-100% increase to wholesale price they meet the sustainable break even for solar/wind. The panels and wind turbines are also starting to fail after 7 years instead of the projected 30 years as well. Are the energy companies profiteering or is there something wrong with the calculations? Energy bills have only gone up as renewables increase so far.
You are correct, the economics on renewables has been misrepresented for years and it is getting to the point where this fact is becoming obvious. Here in the UK there were exactly zero bids for the latest off shore wind generation licences because without huge subsidies they are just not going to break even. Also the projected lifespan of wind turbines on average is not even half the original projection needing costly maintenance or replacement. It turns out nature is much tougher on wind turbines than anyone expected.
My country has 99% renewables 🤠
Mighty wholesome.
Are you Norwegian?, Norway is a very rare example and has resources not available to most countries.
@@iareid8255 nope
@@SpectacurlAlbania, chile, Uruguay?
For your third 'debunk', both ICE cars and coal power plants are about 30-40% efficient. EVs only become better when the electricity comes from combined cycle gas plants, which are about 70% efficient (or ideally from nuclear/renewable power, of course)
Massless energy is the far more logical choice. That is what Nikola Tesla harnessed, the dam at Niagara Falls, to power the first grid design.
Think strategically.
Australia is ideal for both wind and solar. As we add more renewables to the grid our prices are spiralling up and up with grid instability increasing the more you add. The myth of cheap electricity is therefore false. The CO2 saving is not there as backup fossil fuel power is needed when the wind and sun are not happening, which is most of the time. Both solar and wind turbines experience a total loss of power on average for nearly two thirds of the total time. Renewables are not cheap and completely inefficient to the point where their utility is not worth the effort. All countries that have tried to switch to renewables are going back to fossil fuels or nuclear.
You cannot build wind and solar without millions of tons of coal,
My reaction to cheaper electricity through wind and solar is to check electricity prices in countries that have done this against those that have not. What I find is a staggering increase in the price of power when those countries (for the USA break it into states) where this approach has been used e.g. In the UK a 25% surcharge has been added to the bill just to support wind farms. Why is this necessary if the things are cheaper? This is reality and is at odds with your analysis.
What do you think might be the reason that your model does not predict reality with some sort of accuracy?
One suggestion from me is that conventional power stations would have to increase their prices to account for the demand reduction. They may use less fuel but the staffing and capital cost have not gone away and they were planned on the basis of continuous demand.
An unrelated point is that return on investment (measured in joules and not money) is never taken into account. Any figure below 10 is basically useless.
the prices of energy increased more in countries with no renewables (look at latvia, Estonia, etc). Mainly because of natural gas price hikes in Europe. The energy crises in Europe is due to gas and Oil price hikes... In the US there is also NO correlation. the biggest correlation we can find is with high taxes (high taxes states have higher priced eletricity). A goo example is Texas, which has one of the highest values of renewables but lower prices (because it has no taxes), same thing with Oregon. California has hight reneables and high prices but also high taxes which explains the prices. Prices have been increasing a lot, but that has nothing to do with reneables, if anything, if we had more in house production of energy we would have more energy security and stability and we wouldn't see these hight increases due to gas and oil hikes.
I don't think your are right at all.
The UK actually had cheaper electricity when their government financially supported building renewables before austerity. The prices shot up after austerity and renewables stagnated for years.
Ben,
what few seem to understand is that renewables are technically and practically far inferior to conventional generaton. On the technical side (Inertia, synchrous generation, Reactive power and short circuit current support) . For the grid to run it is essential for there to be conventional generators as well, a duplication of capacity. At times they run at far below their capacity, but must run even at low output or the grid will fail. When that happens, if current (U.K.) policy continues, it will be a major event that will takes many days to restore power to most and longer for some. Because renewables are uncontrollable, they cannot contribute to a grid black start.
I imagine the solution to this is, at least in part, for there to be systems in place that act a variable load, preferably something useful. Grid scale batteries are an obvious part of this, but this could also be done with other infrastructure such as water treatment and desalination, pumped hydro, district heating, hydrogen production, etc. There could also be agreements with communities to say, charge cars or heat water at a variable rate or time.
Being required to work with whatever we get is certainly more challenging than being able to throttle production to meet demand, but there are certainly ways to smooth it out and work around the variability.
@@AkaRyrye83 The problem with grid level storage is the vastness of it. For the UK, for example, you'd need to store about an exa joule. Have a look at the numbers- that would mean 100 cubic kilometres of water using pumped hydro. I doubt that there is enough lithium in the earths crust to use batteries and that's just for the UK. Then you'd have to replace them 20 years down the road.
The days in your charts only have 23 hours. You forgot the hour from 23 to 0. Who are you trying to convince when you make such basic mistakes.
Although it seems ridicolous y will finish the video.
Isn't it irrelevant in that context? Seems to be those charts are intended to place accent on dayhours when the sun gives light.
@@casandraa.9837 It is very relevant that the time without solar is a full hour longer and it is relevant, that somebody who speaks about tachnical and physical facts knows to count to 24.
I am sure we will get a reasonable explanation.
Your analysis is faulty, If coal is only used to backup wind and solar, then it is correct to use 30% efficiency. But if coal is used full time, its efficiency should be 45% due to the fact that you can use Supercritical electricity generation. Recompute using 45% efficiency for coal generation and you will find that using wind and solar is actually more expensive and more harmful to the environment.
You need coal to MAKE Windfarms and Solar panels. This is why China, which makes 70% of them, has been opening two coal mines a week. You need coal for carbon fibre, steel and concrete (windfarms), and for annealed glass (Solar panels). The stuff then has to be shipped all over the world (oil needed for that). In addition, wind farms have diesel generators in them to keep them going when the wind isn't blowing so they don't seize up. On top of THAT, when it freezes, they use helicopters to pour fuel on them to defrost them. The 50 meter long blades can't be recycled, so they're burying the things. Solar panels could be, but the amount you get back selling the rescued materials isn't enough to offset the cost of getting them out, so they're piling those up or burying them. The windfarms can't work without wind but they can't work with too much, either, so they're locked down. If it's windy and.or sunny in, say, the UK, it's likely windy and/or sunny in France, etc. so we can't offload our excess onto them. As a consequence, the companies are being paid NOT to make power because we cannot store it.
The batteries needed for storage are another issue. We don't have enough to last more than a few minutes to hours, typically, and certainly not enough to see us through peak demand in the depths of winter, which would leave people freezing to death in the cold. The batteries we DO have require minerals whose extractiokn requires fossil fuels, wrecks the environment in the typically third world country where they're found, AND poisons their water table, so they can't live there. Oh yeah, and it uses slave labour. Plus, Russia and China hold controlling interests in 90% of the known Lithium reserves. I've a feeling as we get more desperate, they'll be hiking up the price BIG TIME.
14,000 solar panels were destroyed in a hailstorm in Nebraska last year, so they're not resilient to, you know, weather which, we're repeatedly being told, will get worse. The windfarms are killing raptors and bats on land, dolphins and whales at sea. They're unreliable, easily wrecked in bad weather, require fossil fuels and, in sum, are a TOTAL SCAM!
We NEED alternatives to fossil fuels because they will run out, but an alternative that can't be made WITHOUT fossil fuels is utterly useless. Which makes you a complete idiot.
You blow it out of proportion and have no other solution.
Renewables are intermittent. If you think batteries can support the grid you need to put the crack pipe down
You might want to read up on grid scale batteries.
@@incognitotorpedo42 Look at the megawatt-hour capacity of those "grid scale" batteries. They aren't supporting the gris like a gas fired Peaker plant
Solar and wind power as what we currently use are money pits
The energy industry disagrees with you.
@incognitotorpedo42
Of course they do.
There are billions in govt. handouts
I don't have to do the calculation to know exponential growth can't continue and we're near the end. There won't be any transition. This isn't a problem to be solved, but a predicament to be faced.
Don't quite your day job. There's going to be a lot of sad doomers who wake up in 20 years to find that the world hasn't ended but they've wrecked their lives because they saw no point in planning for a future that they thought would never come through. Oops.
This is so sad... Your extremely carefully cherry-picked irrelevancies shows that you've at least tried to read on this topic. As no one can avoid so many problems by accident. But you've clearly gotten badly confused at some point. Because you've fallen entirely for the scam that is wind and solar.
I hope you keep studying, you might be close to getting the correct answer.
Because facts are there's nothing worse than renewable power and in the wonderful world of reality the only way forward is nuclear energy. ;) Every cent spent on renewables is a cent wasted.
I don't agree entirely, wind and solar have cost advantage in many places and we should exploit that. However, hydro and nuclear have reliability advantages and we should exploit that also.
The key is finding the optimal mix that keeps costs as low as possible while maximising reliability and decarbonise at the same time.
These types of problem are complex, but are amenable to optimisation analysis using techniques such as linear programming to determine relative levels of investment.
The mix will certainly vary place to place.
It's too bad you missed the point of the video entirely. "The only way forward".... ok then...
@@incognitotorpedo42 No, I understood the point of the video very well. It's just hopelessly wrong in every way.
@@jimgraham6722 No, all of that's wrong. It's really clear you're just repeating the sales pitches of wind and solar salesmen and taking a middle ground approach because it sounds intellectual.
The reality is that the "optimal mix" as you call it is all or nearly all nuclear power, and exactly zero intermittent renewables.
Because this is not a complex issue, reliability is all that matters to utilities. And energy density is all that matter to the laws of physics. And nuclear wins for both, by a wide margin while wind and solar come in dead last for both requirements. And will never improve, these flaws are their fundamental nature.