>it costs 3-10x what the equivalent generating capacity in renewables would cost
Except renewables can't actually replace fossil fuels. They need baseload provided by fossil fuels to be viable. They are also defuse energy sources, and so require huge surface area and lots of materials for collectors - not great for a growing world, both in population and per capita energy needs. Oh, they are variable across days, seasons and inter-year periods, but there is no battery technology coming that is able to store even enough power to a moderately sized city for a few minutes, much less the weeks it would need.
> Except renewables can't actually replace fossil fuels. They need baseload provided by fossil fuels to be viable.
False. Renewables could get to 100% of the grid. A key is using hydrogen for the last 10% or so. This is not currently competitive with fossil fuel, but then neither is nuclear.
I'm not an expert in this, but isn't this just a really extra lossy type of battery? Hydrogen takes energy to create, so if you're creating hydrogen from renewable energy sources during peak load, you have to go energy -> hydrogen -> energy with efficiency losses both ways. I remain unimpressed by hydrogen, as it seems to only be practical if you don't any other options for existing stores of energy. For instance a large scale battery system, or even some mechanical energy storage systems.
The benefit of power to gas is that most countries already have an existing system that can both store and burn it. The efficiency is low but the necessary infrastructure investments are also incredibly low compared to building battery based energy storage. It is also an unavoidable step if you want to invest into carbon capture in the future. Excess methane can be exported. Suddenly even a resource poor nation like Germany could become an energy exporter.
When you consider that renewable share in % per day in Germany follows a normal distribution then you realize that there are only a few days that actually need to utilize hydrogen or methane to generate power.
Yes. The advantage of hydrogen is the extremely low cost per unit of stored energy. That is the cost you want to minimize for a storage case with few charge-discharge cycles, like rainy day or seasonal storage.
For diurnal storage, batteries or other more efficient storage technologies would make more sense, since there would be more charge-discharge cycles over which to amortize the cost of the system.
>A National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) study concludes that by 2050, hydrogen storage lasting for two weeks “is expected to be cost-effective.”
2050!!!
By 2050 we'll also have Fusion and other mythical power sources.
To be fair, hydrogen is one of those "mythical" power sources. It just happens to be the one that is becoming viable in the short-term and is not dependent on some future discovery.
Burn the hydrogen in combustion turbines, just like natural gas.
You repeat an excuse, but nuclear builds have failed, and continue to fail, not because of regulation, but because of the high unforgiving complexity of nuclear power plants. The post mortems at huge cost overruns point to management failures, not new regulations sprung out of nowhere.
>Burn the hydrogen in combustion turbines, just like natural gas.
That simple? Anyone in the world actually using hydrogen in this way?
You can dissmis nuclear all you want, but doesn't change the fact that renewables (outside of hydro/geothermal for which you need special geography) do not work. There is no nation on this planet that is powered by renewables. There is no nation on this planet that is planning to be powered by renewables. Germany believes in renewables so much they are signing multi-decade contracts to ship gas from Russia and building new pipelines!
"Our turbines have nearly 30 years of experience operating on a variety of fuels that contain hydrogen, totaling over 6 million operating hours as hydrogen-fueled turbines using concentrations ranging from 5% to 95% (by volume)."
> You can dissmis nuclear all you want, but doesn't change the fact that renewables (outside of hydro/geothermal for which you need special geography) do not work. There is no nation on this planet that is powered by renewables.
Ah yes, the old "nothing can ever happen for the first time" argument. Mindless reactionary nonsense. No nation is powered by renewables, therefore no nation can ever be powered by renewables, technical arguments be damned.
That hydrogen can be used as fuel is not controversial. Of course it can. What I mean is that nobody is actually using hydrogen as part of a renewable life-cycle (i.e. generating hydrogen from excess renewable energy, and using as energy store).
>Ah yes, the old "nothing can ever happen for the first time" argument. Mindless reactionary nonsense.
The problem for you is that renewables have been around for years so the fact that they aren't powering any economy needs an explanation. Furthermore, even conceptually, you haven't explained HOW they would power an economy. Renewables have well known limitations. They are diffuse power sources, require huge surface areas covered with high-tech collectors, and are highly variable. The only way we can get them to work is by attaching them to a grid with natural gas or coal - because we have no way to store excess energy enough to bridge their variability. You can deny this, but it is an actual fact and the fact that you cannot point me to a region that has solved this should be quite telling.
> The problem for you is that renewables have been around for years so the fact that they aren't powering any economy needs an explanation.
Renewables have only recently become competitive (or more than competitive). This has happened so fast that existing generating capacity is still largely the old technology. Those old technologies will only be ripped out when their OPERATING costs are greater than the full cost of installing renewables to replace them.
That this old technology is still there doesn't mean it's competitive on a clean sheet basis, it just means it's not worth ripping it out yet.
The rapid decline in renewable prices leads to some interesting contrasts. In the UAE, for example, they are now bringing some Korean reactors online that were green lighted about a decade ago. They will produce power for somewhere around $.08/kWh, perhaps a bit higher. At the same time, contracts have been signed for a large PV field there that will sell power for $0.013/kWh. If they had waited on those nuclear plants and just built PV now they would have come out ahead.
What you want to look at is where new money is going, when new generating capacity is needed (and remember, power demand has been flat in the US for a decade). Renewables are taking a large share of that, and would take a larger share (in the US) with nonzero CO2 taxes.
Where is this 10% coming from? Solar doesn't work at all between sundown and sunrise. Similarly wind also doesn't align with energy demand either.
Hydrogen isn't the answer either. It is incredibly inefficient to produce via electrolysis, meaning you would have to massively over-provison your collectors.
>This is not currently competitive with fossil fuel, but then neither is nuclear.
Why are you focusing on price? Renewables don't work. They could be free and you'd still be building natural gas plants. This why no nation is actually powered by renewables. When an article claims a nation has reached 100% renewable energy it's always geothermal or hydro - which require the right geography.
The last 10% comes from rare dark/calm periods. I requires a storage technology beyond mere diurnal storage (for which there are plenty of options and where continued cost decline will almost certainly address your negativity.)
> Why are you focusing on price? Renewables don't work. They could be free and you'd still be building natural gas plants.
If price is no object, then obviously renewables can be made to work anywhere. After all, one could dump heat into underground thermal stores and use that as artificial geothermal. The thermal time constant for a several hundred meter chunk of bedrock is measured in centuries.
Baseload is the last thing renewables need. Baseload displaces renewables because you cannot regulate baseload fast enough. Just take a look at Germany and their coal fueled baseload. It has slowed down the Energiewende and made electricity expensive because consumers have to pay for curtailed renewables via the EEG surcharge. Imagine building a renewable energy infrastructure and then throwing out the electricity it generates because coal buddies get priority treatment. If anything Germany needs to get rid of any legacy baseload plants and take advantage of more flexible power plants like natural gas plants.
> Oh, they are variable across days, seasons and inter-year periods, but there is no battery technology coming that is able to store even enough power to a moderately sized city for a few minutes, much less the weeks it would need.
There is no need for "battery technology". This strawman keeps getting repeated just like crappy quadrocopters being used as killer weapons. It's because docile consumers can't see past their own little bubble and imagine that industrial giants also buy all their stuff at the supermarket.
No, you use an entire mix of different technologies and strategies to solve this problem. I don't want to repeat myself but seasonal differences are usually solved by curtailment. If winter needs more power you build enough plants for winter and then curtail the excess energy in summer. Medium term storage needs are trivially met with power to gas (both hydrogen and methane), short term storage needs can be solved via batteries, compressed air or thermal storage. All of these technologies have been available for a long time. The reality is that renewables can easily reach 80% generation without any storage investments at all so practically no country on earth has bothered to invest into additional storage, not because technologies are missing. It's just not a practical concern for the next 20 years.
>you use an entire mix of different technologies and strategies to solve this problem.
Like what? What's the mix?
And why is nobody doing it?
>It's just not a practical concern for the next 20 years.
Because they use coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro or geothermal ... You know power sources that can actually power a modern economy.
>Medium term storage needs are trivially met with power to gas (both hydrogen and methane), short term storage needs can be solved via batteries, compressed air or thermal storage.
You keep using words like 'trivial' when no nation is actually building this kind of infrastructure. No nation even has plans to build this infrastructure.
>All of these technologies have been available for a long
Yes. Therefore it should make you question why they aren't being used. Perhaps they aren't because they don't work at grid-scale?
I think this is artificially restricting the solution space.
We have fixed price and supply of electricity over the day due to historical reasons, but it's not the future. And we can make the change gradually using variable pricing and speeding up the transition with the tools of regulation.
And of course other developments will help counter the price spikes - manufacturing and cooling systems adapting their power usage patterns, hvdc lines, energy storage, houses getting more energy efficient to cool/heat by using insulation and heat/cold recovery in ventilation etc etc. Energy is currently just so incredibly cheap that most obvious improvements are left on the table or progressing at glacial speeds.
Only residential has fixed prices for electricity over the day. Industrial electricity has always been sold in variable prices, e.g. furnaces and other large consumers run when power is cheap and go into hold mode when it is expensive. There even is a large discount if you allow the power company to switch your consumption on/off. All that is already a reality and has been for decades.
Which goes to show: there still is baseload to consider, and there always will be. There is a green electricity ceiling that can only be circumvented with storage.
But still "base load" is no law of nature. Half the market is on fixed price, and regulation has so far dictated that there has to be a lot of "base load" type power production, and without co2 externalities priced in that's been profitable for producers too. But it's all rules and tech we invented and can be changed.
The amount of supply following the current industrial users are incentivised to do, and the requisite investments, will be much higher once the fixed price system is dismantled from the remaining portion of the market.
It's a term that means we can guarantee a set amount of power regardless of environmental conditions. Renewables are sensitive to environmental conditions, and we don't have a battery technology to bridge renewable variablity and hence the need for 'base-load'. In that context, 'base load' is a law of nature.
"base load" is also a statistical law of nature. Your consumers might want or need to consume your product regardless of the price. I will run my heating before I freeze to death, and I will thaw a meal before I starve. Somebody will switch on their lights in the dead of night. The hospital will run its MRI when an emergency arises.
All these things are rather randomly occuring things, some correlated, some uncorrelated. All these create a "ground noise" of consumption. All these things lead to a need for baseload power, which can only be removed by switching off the grid.
Except renewables can't actually replace fossil fuels. They need baseload provided by fossil fuels to be viable. They are also defuse energy sources, and so require huge surface area and lots of materials for collectors - not great for a growing world, both in population and per capita energy needs. Oh, they are variable across days, seasons and inter-year periods, but there is no battery technology coming that is able to store even enough power to a moderately sized city for a few minutes, much less the weeks it would need.
>And when we get to that last 5-10%
Try 50%.