Making room for the intermittent nature of solar imposes upon the grid a large cost for backup power, adding to the levelized cost of electricity, yet this cost is never ascribed to the cost of the solar panel. The more solar you have the more idle backup power you need.
In France 70% of their power came from nuclear and they added renewables, they then need to throttle the nuclear power plants which is not an easy task, and they then make less money and require tax funded bailouts.
The UK uses gas rather than nuclear for non renewable power.
It’s much easier to turn up and down than nuclear.
Plus we build so few new houses that this is unlikely to be a massive issue, although home batteries and increased electric vehicle charging could be a good place to dump “excess” power.
I’ve tried to make that argument here as well. Adjusting building code to require solar is a great long term idea but in my part of the US there are so few new homes built that it’s really not making a difference any time soon.
It’s more to make the house saleable during its lifetime, and eventually drive a miser sustainable housing supply
It is, and more than that it takes way too long to build. The time for it was 30 years ago.
I noticed that during the 80s and 90s it “wasn’t safe”, and during the last 20 years it was “too expensive”, but now you see a few powerful people advocating for it.
And I can only assume it’s the same big booming Brian Blessed-esque voice as before: that of the fossil fuel industry.
They know they’re on the way out, but if they can make people bicker and argue and spend all their money on nuclear, which will likely take 20 years to actually come online, they can carry on guzzling dinosaur juice, while simultaneously nixing any large eco friendly plans under a giant banner of “the nuclear is already on it’s way!”
The fact that making money is one of the, if not the most important, considerations in this equation is the main problem with this. It simply should be a public service.
That won’t automatically solve all of the other problems but many of the solutions to this problems aren’t considered because they are not profitable, even though they exist. An easy example being gas turbine plants which are much easier to spin up and down as required. But perfectly meeting the needs of all people means there’s no artificial scarcity and thus lower profits.
Indeed, and the environmental factors aren’t the only problem with gas turbines. I’m not going to pretend I am an expert at what is the best solution but interviews I’ve read with experts that speak about the Belgian context. (Which is so densely built there’s not much room for anything) It was the best way balance the grid if more investments were made in solar and wind energy. The reason it didn’t happen is because it was deemed uninteresting because not profitable enough.
So the alternative that was chosen was doing nothing an extending the life of nuclear plants that are working way beyond their planned life and giving the commercial company managing them guarantees they’ll continue making money. Building new nuclear capacity will take longer than a gas turbine and they can’t just be shut down and torn down for something else when better alternatives come along.
And this is usually cheered on by people who think they’re smart by pointing out that if you’re in favour of renewables you can’t be pragmatic about dealing with it’s current problems. While those people very often are against more renewables and just want unending nuclear as if that’s a magic bullet.
Well, I’m pro renewables and pro nuclear, but anti NG. Accounting for methane released into the atmosphere during extraction, transport, refining, and storage, it has about the same carbon impact as coal. And if shipped across the ocean in the form of liquid natural gas (likely for you, since a large proportion of the worlds NG reserves are in the good ol’ US of A), it is worse. You might as well just keep old coal plants running.
The actual solution (as pointed out elsewhere in the thread) is dynamic pricing. And a carbon tax. When people and businesses receive price signals about the expense of using electricity at any given time, they will naturally use more or less of it when it is more plentiful / more scarce.
LiFePO4 batteries within the house are the correct resolution.
In winter the panels make nothing anyway, and in summer the houses will essentially run themselves for somewhere between 4 to 8 months depending on peak power usage and panel array size.
Essentially it removes residential baseload and flattens the duck curve so the peak 1600 to 1900 peak can disappear, with the obvious knock on effect of reducing the LCOE.
Making room for the intermittent nature of solar imposes upon the grid a large cost for backup power, adding to the levelized cost of electricity, yet this cost is never ascribed to the cost of the solar panel. The more solar you have the more idle backup power you need.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
In France 70% of their power came from nuclear and they added renewables, they then need to throttle the nuclear power plants which is not an easy task, and they then make less money and require tax funded bailouts.
The UK uses gas rather than nuclear for non renewable power.
It’s much easier to turn up and down than nuclear.
Plus we build so few new houses that this is unlikely to be a massive issue, although home batteries and increased electric vehicle charging could be a good place to dump “excess” power.
I’ve tried to make that argument here as well. Adjusting building code to require solar is a great long term idea but in my part of the US there are so few new homes built that it’s really not making a difference any time soon.
It’s more to make the house saleable during its lifetime, and eventually drive a miser sustainable housing supply
I’m just saying if you really want to be green you’re building nuclear.
Nuclear is far too expensive for that.
It is, and more than that it takes way too long to build. The time for it was 30 years ago.
I noticed that during the 80s and 90s it “wasn’t safe”, and during the last 20 years it was “too expensive”, but now you see a few powerful people advocating for it.
And I can only assume it’s the same big booming Brian Blessed-esque voice as before: that of the fossil fuel industry.
They know they’re on the way out, but if they can make people bicker and argue and spend all their money on nuclear, which will likely take 20 years to actually come online, they can carry on guzzling dinosaur juice, while simultaneously nixing any large eco friendly plans under a giant banner of “the nuclear is already on it’s way!”
Yeah, but a clumsy Soviet Union and a massive fossil fuel lobby put paid to that in the UK. 5% of our power comes across the channel from France…
The fact that making money is one of the, if not the most important, considerations in this equation is the main problem with this. It simply should be a public service.
That won’t automatically solve all of the other problems but many of the solutions to this problems aren’t considered because they are not profitable, even though they exist. An easy example being gas turbine plants which are much easier to spin up and down as required. But perfectly meeting the needs of all people means there’s no artificial scarcity and thus lower profits.
The “gas” in “gas powered turbines” is natural gas - aka, a fossil fuel, aka, the thing causing climate change.
Indeed, and the environmental factors aren’t the only problem with gas turbines. I’m not going to pretend I am an expert at what is the best solution but interviews I’ve read with experts that speak about the Belgian context. (Which is so densely built there’s not much room for anything) It was the best way balance the grid if more investments were made in solar and wind energy. The reason it didn’t happen is because it was deemed uninteresting because not profitable enough.
So the alternative that was chosen was doing nothing an extending the life of nuclear plants that are working way beyond their planned life and giving the commercial company managing them guarantees they’ll continue making money. Building new nuclear capacity will take longer than a gas turbine and they can’t just be shut down and torn down for something else when better alternatives come along. And this is usually cheered on by people who think they’re smart by pointing out that if you’re in favour of renewables you can’t be pragmatic about dealing with it’s current problems. While those people very often are against more renewables and just want unending nuclear as if that’s a magic bullet.
Well, I’m pro renewables and pro nuclear, but anti NG. Accounting for methane released into the atmosphere during extraction, transport, refining, and storage, it has about the same carbon impact as coal. And if shipped across the ocean in the form of liquid natural gas (likely for you, since a large proportion of the worlds NG reserves are in the good ol’ US of A), it is worse. You might as well just keep old coal plants running.
The actual solution (as pointed out elsewhere in the thread) is dynamic pricing. And a carbon tax. When people and businesses receive price signals about the expense of using electricity at any given time, they will naturally use more or less of it when it is more plentiful / more scarce.
LiFePO4 batteries within the house are the correct resolution.
In winter the panels make nothing anyway, and in summer the houses will essentially run themselves for somewhere between 4 to 8 months depending on peak power usage and panel array size.
Essentially it removes residential baseload and flattens the duck curve so the peak 1600 to 1900 peak can disappear, with the obvious knock on effect of reducing the LCOE.