The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

https://gspp.berkeley.edu/news/news-center/the-us-can-reach-90-percent-clean-electricity-by-2035-dependably-and-without-increasing-consumer-bills

by MilnerRoute • 6 years ago

184 94 6 years ago

gspp.berkeley.edu

H8crilA5• 6 years ago

People are so focused on $$ when it comes to (green or other) energy. The real problem is not $$ but Joules. Building any type of a power plant costs energy itself, and unfortunately unlike capital, which is just a concept that you can argue with and win, there is absolutely no arguing with physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#ER...

The energy amortisation time of green power generators (the time it takes to pay back the Joules) is orders of magnitude higher than any dirty energy. This problem is well visible once you count all of the world's energy usage and just plot it. The rollout is anything but fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

godzillabrennus• 6 years ago

Nuclear is the answer.

MattGaiser5• 6 years ago

You could start planning now and you would be lucky to get shovels in the ground by 2035.

MattGaiser5• 6 years ago

What is the significance of this?

H8crilA5• 6 years ago

Well you can do the maths.

Let's assume it takes 1 year to pay back the energy usage, on average, for the green projects (look up that Wikipedia link). Let's also assume that we can dedicate 5% of the world's energy budget towards new power plants and that the world stops growing. So: 5% energy recession and zero global energy demand growth. How long would that take to roll out? 1/5% = 20 years, all of those years will be of serious austerity. Multiple countries (especially those with "good", that is growing demographics) would blow up. Up to you to decide if it's feasible to execute, and those are very optimistic numbers. What if the energy usage grows at 2% and we can dedicate only 3%? Well, that would give us 1/(3% - 2%) = 100 years to finish the project.

These are not happy things to look at. Personally I'm just trying to avoid the impending climate doom. Whatever happens - this problem is here to stay with us for many decades.

hairytrog8• 6 years ago

Well noted. Here's a paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... The energy returned on invested, EROI, has been evaluated for typical power plants representing wind energy, photovoltaics, solar thermal, hydro, natural gas, biogas, coal and nuclear power. The strict exergy concept with no " primary energy weighting" , updated material databases, and updated technical procedures make it possible to directly compare the overall efficiency of those power plants on a uniform mathematical and physical basis. Pump storage systems, needed for solar and wind energy, have been included in the EROI so that the efficiency can be compared with an " unbuffered" scenario. The results show that nuclear, hydro, coal, and natural gas power systems (in this order) are one order of magnitude more effective than photovoltaics and wind power. =

killjoywashere2• 6 years ago

Even if we assume that's correct, those sources have massive impacts under other categories. In contrast, anaerobic bacteria are terribly inefficient with their energy use, yet vastly outperform all animals in terms of biomass. So it's unclear to me that the EROI metric actually matters all that much. If I can produce solar panels with a solar-powered factory at a profit, I don't care about the price of coal or its EROI. I'm printing free money.

Of the 4 options you mention, I'm entirely a fan of hydro and nuclear. Especially nuclear. But FUD makes nuclear hard politically, so while I wouldn't campaign against it, I wouldn't waste my rep campaigning hard for it.

csours3• 6 years ago

Interesting chart, but it does not seem to consider the cost of the installation, just the fuel, or it seems to assume a very long amortization period for nuclear/fossil fuel generation plants.

With wind and solar, all you have is the plant. There's no EROEI on the fuel because there is no energy investment in the fuel for wind and solar.

H8crilA5• 6 years ago

For a very long time solar panels would cost more energy to manufacture than they would output through their lifetime. This is no longer the case, but the amortization period is still large.

Fuel is not the problem. The power plants are the problem.

ctdonath2• 6 years ago

Not convinced.

I’m using utility solar for about 20% of my electricity needs, precisely to experience what’s claimed. Average cost is 50% above regular sourcing, and rising significantly.

https://twitter.com/ctdonath/status/1274157769889918978?s=21

MattGaiser5• 6 years ago

Is that a price of power rise or a price of transmission rise?

beambot• 6 years ago

In many places, it's the "fees because we can" rise.

ctdonath2• 6 years ago

That’s the curious bit: power generated per flat panel-rental fee is decreasing.

Rental cost is consistent.

killjoywashere2• 6 years ago

We did a PPA for full replacement at a time in our life when we were probably at max usage (2 teenagers at home, all electric appliances) and haven't looked back. Our monthly bill immediately dropped and stayed down. As far as I can tell, the only thing I need to worry about is the risk of deflation, and there's not much I can do about that.

koheripbal2• 6 years ago

It GREATLY depends on where you live. Where I live, solar is not a good option. Terrible yield on many cloudy days - horrible yield in winter.

dd364• 6 years ago

I installed 10kW on my home DIY in AZ. Cost was $1.00W and $0.70W after tax incentive. It took me 3 weekends all by myself. It works out to like 1.7c/kWh over the life of the asset. Next step is to add batteries and go off grid. Right now, the utility pays me 9.6c/kWh so I’m not in a rush until they further sabotage net metering. My cost pre-solar was 14-16c/kWh. Also, the cap on grid connected was 10kW and it’s about to go to 20kW.

Oh, and I had never done it before. Read a lot and watched videos. Technology is making it plug and play.

m4634• 6 years ago

That's a wonderful achievement. I've browsed www.sunelec.com for years because they sell pallets of panels for less than 0.50/watt and I think ... someday DIY.

egypturnash• 6 years ago

One more reason to not re-elect Mr. I Love Coal.

sigzero• 6 years ago

The questions are always "How much will it cost?" "Is it worth it?" "Do we have the political will to do it?"

sharemywin• 6 years ago

not in that order.

kelnos• 6 years ago

My opinion is that it doesn't matter how much it costs; it is worth it at any cost, because continuing down the path of making our planet uninhabitable for humans is not a winning strategy.

However, I don't think we have the political will to do it, which is really the only thing that matters in the end.

pkaye• 6 years ago

In my county in California, the county purchases the electricity while PG&E provides the infrastructure. The 50/50% solar/wind plan is only around $4/month more than the standard plan.

https://ebce.org/residents/

koheripbal2• 6 years ago

California is sunnier than most parts. That makes a big difference.

m4634• 6 years ago

California also charges people up to .48/kwh so there's a good incentive for people to get solar.

manfredo6• 6 years ago

This plan is rather misleading. You're buying energy from the same grid, but paying a markup to say it's coming from solar and wind. Say the company generates 100Wh of solar, 100Wh of wind and 200Wh of natural gas. Bill buys the 50/50 solar and wind plan and "buys" 100Wh of solar and 100Wh of wind at a marked up rate. Charlie buys the normal plan and gets his energy from the remaining sources. If a meteor hits the gas plant at night, Bill's electricity is still going out.

California still generates 45% of its energy from fossil fuels. And another 10% from nuclear which some don't consider renewable. Solar and wind account for 21% of electricity generation: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo....

hairytrog8• 6 years ago

Exciting. But here are some problems.

- Unfortunately, they are averaging the entire US, which is made of several grids, so the bad days are not that bad in their analysis. To fix those bad days, you'd need hella more storage, hella more capacity. e.g. 3-4x the renewables capacity than the normal need.

- Such a system has a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid. If Covid has taught us anything, it is the need for resiliency in the face of rare events. In this case unfavorable weather, broken transmission, etc.

- Cost projection is rosy... The panels, batteries, and storage are already very close to the material cost. Need some pretty fundamental tech transitions to improve further.

- If there is no policy change, nukes and nat gas will not be competitive 99% of the time because solar/wind are nearly free electricity and bid extremely low power prices that nuke/gas can't compete with. So even though they will provide the backbone and dispatchibility needed for on-demand power, they do not currently have the financial incentive to do so. We need resiliency and dispatchibility payments.

Report is Berkeley and GridLab, mostly policy wonks

A much better report from MIT: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S25424... or http://energy.mit.edu/research/utility-future-study/

Both are harder to read and give worse news, so probably won't be part of the policy discussion...

The report itself: http://www.2035report.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2035-Re...

And the data explorer: https://www.2035report.com/data-explorer/?hsCtaTracking=aefa...

smabie• 6 years ago

Say you drop it to 80%, would that work?

hairytrog8• 6 years ago

Drop what to 80%?

Our economy works really well because electricity is 100% dispatchable. You flip the switch at any time, things work. If you go below that, the economy will follow the weather, which I guess is just a different way to operate. But it's not so fun. I have some friends in South Africa where power rationing is in place. You basically have a few dead hours every day because the grid isn't run well and they haven't built enough capacity. They hate it. You're cooking a nice pie for grandma and then BAM, powers out. You're on your treadmill, and BAM - you hit the wall. You're playing CoD, and BAM. Sucks to suck.

ip262• 6 years ago

Instead of dispatchability payments, why not demand response? Thermostats, electric cars, water heaters, dryers, smelters, and data centers can all turn on a dime if an incentive is there.

Also, what's wrong with policy wonks?

hairytrog8• 6 years ago

it's just difficult to coordinate all these things top down and there's a bunch of extra infrastructure and IT, and more regulation and rules and complexity. People telling you when you can and can't do things, etc. Eh. Seems unAmerican.

But given the total enthusiasm and commitment, I bet it could be made to work. But maybe we have to accept that it's gonna cost more, and that we'll probably lose on other sides. This renewable world just might not be such a nice place. Power would be less taken for granted because it would not always be available. a lot more people would have to work in the industry to keep it going (low EROI for renewables) and they wouldn't be working in other industries. Ironically, that's a plus in the article, which touts immense job creation. lol - not a very good objective. The landscape near populated areas would be dominated with wind turbines and solar plants.

xyzzyz2• 6 years ago

Most data centers needs non-stop 24/7 reliability, and there are very few use cases where it makes sense and is even possible to delay your workload waiting for lower energy prices. Smelters have complicated processes, and they cannot really turn on a dime. Lastly, data centers and smelters are expensive capital investments, and typically the economic calculation requires them to be run non-stop to recoup the capital investment.

noneeeed• 6 years ago

People always nay-say demand management, but here in the UK the National Grid already does this. They have contracts with many large industrial companies who presumably get lower rates in return for being able to turn down their demand on request.

specialist2• 6 years ago

"But here are some problems."

The opportunities are insurmountable.

"...a very low resiliency because it depends on national grid."

Grid will become massively decentralized. Transmission costs are already greater than production costs in many systems, a trend that will continue.

We'll get resiliency "for free".

Others have already commented on demand shifting. Additionally, producers will innovate, creating new "products" to meet unique customer demands. Like colocation.

"...nukes and nat gas will not be competitive 99%"

Current nukes must be propped up for as long as possible, stopgap until renewables can overtake.

We'll definitely need new nuke options, like small modular reactors (micro reactors) and reprocessing. (My future perfect is traveling wave reactors, but that's a long ways off.)

We need to phase out natural gas asap.

hairytrog8• 6 years ago

I think I came out a little strong and biased here. My apologies. Some more thoughts on this article.

- They group nukes in the clean %, so today we're at 37% clean already. not bad. Going to higher clean % with mix of wind/solar expansion + new storage + dispatchable nukes is very possible and the political momentum to throw a lot of money at this is there.

- I think it's unlikely costs can be reduced much in most parts of the US if we still want 100% dispatch capability.

- It's not just about cost. We should consider paying a bit more for carbon considerations, within reason and without forgetting who gets punished by higher prices in the short term, and without compromising the 100% dispatchable standard.

- Wind/solar LCOE is approaching very low numbers, so it should be used as much as possible, but we shouldn't throw a trillion dollars from the government, as the article suggests, to shove wind/solar down the grid's throat. It's likely to break the grid and waste a load of money. Government should just ensure the markets can properly deal with higher renewables without compromising the grid. They can do this via establishing capacity markets, resiliency markets, R&D for storage tech, etc. They might also do a carbon tax to try to set the higher cost we are willing to pay from above.

- There are significant resilience, material, and regulation challenges. It's not just the energy storage for a few hours, but longer term for days and weeks. If we are a responsible society and expect smooth operations and we want to do an extreme renewables expansion, we need to pay the price to keep an idle fleet of fully dispatchable gas/nukes in addition to the renewables fleet or establish multi month storage.

cinquemb7• 6 years ago

I think it's unlikely costs can be reduced much in most parts of the US if we still want 100% dispatch capability.

I disagree, if there was a desire to transport molten salt tanks and retrofit coal plants with supercritical steam turbines and build large molten salt storage reservoirs on such sites, we could do it today for under 5 cents/kwh for 24/7 availability.

See comments [0] and [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23588691

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581910

sunstone• 6 years ago

The key enabling technology is to tie all the separate grids together with High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power lines. This technology is flying under the radar but it's getting cheaper very quickly and it allows for continent size electric grids.

To give a sense of how cheap it's getting consider that there's a proposal to send solar energy from North Australia to Singapore using this tech. That's about 4000km distance total with about 3000km of that under the ocean. 4000km is very close to the distance from Seattle to Miami. If Singapore can afford this then for sure the US can dig around in the couch and come up with enough spare change to build this out.

tareqak• 6 years ago

I wonder if there is a way to quantify the health benefit of a solar installation on a roof, and/or associate battery storage as a dollar value on a per roof / per home basis.

ehutch79• 6 years ago

Moving to clean electricity is not strictly about money. Even if it is for you, factor in the difference in health costs of people around a bunch of burning coal, vs solar or wind. also environmental cleanup. etc.

m4634• 6 years ago

Ever since watching "Planet of the Humans" I find myself scrutinizing anything that says "renewable energy" because it might be burning trees.

This article did mention solar, wind and batteries and carbon-free so it might be ok.

abvdasker• 6 years ago

But it won't.

manfredo6• 6 years ago

A few things stick out to me:

* This study assumes that we can ramp up purchases of solar and wind generation to match this graph: https://imgur.com/lMU252r while costs continue to decrease. That's not how markets work. Rapidly buy solar panels and the cost of solar panels go up. Put solar panels in all the places where it's easy to install and now you have to pay extra to put them in places where it's not so convenient.

* This study thinks we can achieve this with only ~200 MWh of storage. This is an optimistic projection. To put this in perspective, daily US energy use is 11.5TWh. We're giving solar and wind generation only ~15% allowed variability before we're dipping into gas. Yeah, it does say that it's only 90% clean electricity, but even reaching this figure is optimistic.

randombytes6869• 6 years ago

That's far too optimistic about storage. For small off-grid systems, you need ~5 days of battery capacity to ride out lack of wind/sun. On a large scale you'll need less because you can move power from place to place.

But still. Sun is down half the day and wind speeds can be low in areas hundreds of miles wide. Its obvious they will need at least a day of battery capacity, probably more. Not hours.

Solar and wind are great. Many areas in the US have hours long periods during the day where power is 100% renewable. But batteries are way too expensive and I don't like when politicians make laws based on predictions 15+ years in the future.

cinquemb7• 6 years ago

This study thinks we can achieve this with only ~200 MWh of storage.

Agree, very unrealistic.

One thing that always disappointing to me about these conversations is that solar == photovoltaics, batteries == li-ion electrochemical… luckily the world isn't limited to these asumptions and developments have been and continue to be made, even if they are mostly ignored/overlooked by the HN crowd.

manfredo6• 6 years ago

Things like kinetic storage are geographically limited. Most places with available hydroelectric storage already generate electricity from dams.

Chemical storage in the form of natural gas produced by the Sabatier process is very inefficient. Currently it's at 55% efficiency to go from power to gas. Even the most efficient combined cycle plants are currently 65% efficient. End to end efficiency is ~1/3.

Also, using synthetic natural gas requires a means to capture the exhaust of gas plants to actually make it carbon neutral. Converting the fraction of a percent of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not currently possible.

The conversation is mostly about batteries because that is the only known option at the moment, other than geographically limited ones.

specialist2• 6 years ago

Are you predicting that solar panel production won't continue to scale to meet demand?

manfredo6• 6 years ago

The limiting factor of producing solar panel at these immense scales is the cost of raw materials. As other posters pointed out this study is already assuming that the cost of solar panels and wind will be barely greater than the cost of materials.

And yes, if the US tries to increase it's solar capacity by a factor of 50 in the next 15 years (and especially while other countries try to do the same) these materials will become more scarce and thus more expensive.

IshKebab• 6 years ago

I seriously doubt America will buy solar panels quickly enough to outstrip supply. Much more likely that production will increase and costs will go down due to economies of scale.

Also there is no shortage of places to put solar panels, especially in America.

philipkglass• 6 years ago

How did you get 200 MWh? From page 20 of the report:

"In summary, retaining existing hydropower capacity and nuclear power capacity (after accounting for planned retirements) and about half of existing fossil fuel capacity, combined with 150 GW of new 4-hour battery storage, is sufficient to meet U.S. electricity demand with a 90% clean grid in 2035, even during periods of low renewable energy generation and/or high demand. Under the 90% Clean case, all existing coal plants are retired by 2035, and no new fossil fuel plants are built beyond those already under construction. During normal periods of generation and demand, wind, solar, and batteries provide 70% of total annual generation, while hydropower and nuclear provide 20%. During periods of high demand and/or low renewable generation, existing natural gas plants (primarily combined-cycle plants) cost-effectively compensate for remaining mismatches between demand and renewables-plus-battery generation—accounting for about 10% of total annual electricity generation, which is about 70% lower than their generation in 2019."

150 GW of batteries with 4-hour discharge is 600,000 MWh.

http://www.2035report.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2035-Re...

manfredo6• 6 years ago

The graph displays 150 GW, with no duration specified. 4 hours of 150GW storage, or 600GWh of storage, is still only 5% of the nation's current daily electricity consumption.

And that's probably going to be an even smaller share in 2035 as more vehicles go electric.

alblue• 6 years ago

The UK has recently ended its coal-free streak for power generation; up until a few days ago we had been coal free for 67 days, the longest time since the start of the industrial revolution.

https://twitter.com/alblue/status/1274290853817827328

The plan is for the national grid to close coal plants by 2024 leaving just natural gas (the gas, not the American car fuel) as a high carbon source in our power grid.

coding123• 6 years ago

I was thinking about going big and buying about 100 panels for my 12 acre property. Anyone have any success in small scale solar farming with a utility?

The US can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 without increasing consumer bills

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