<story><title>Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-09/gas-plants-will-get-crushed-by-wind-solar-by-2035-study-says</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>I suspect that if variable electricity pricing for consumers, a great deal of the need for &amp;quot;batteries&amp;quot; will evaporate. Heavy consumer electric uses (charging the car, HVAC, hot water) can easily be time shifted. It isn&amp;#x27;t time shifted today because consumer electricity rates are constant 24&amp;#x2F;7.</text></item><item><author>batmansmk</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t get fooled by simple price comparison. It&amp;#x27;s comparing apples and oranges.
Gas, nuclear, coal, reversible dams, geothermy... are all controllable energy sources: they produce when we need it.
Wind and solar are intermittent.&lt;p&gt;Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s happening is that countries migrating towards wind turbines like Germany also adds coal plant to the same capacity in order to compensate for when the wind doesn&amp;#x27;t blow. For each GW of wind one can find a GW of coal or gas being installed.&lt;p&gt;Then, if we are talking about adding batteries into the mix to make it work, solar and wind become far from carbon neutral, and endangers us way more than nuclear.</text></item><item><author>beat</author><text>I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I&amp;#x27;ve been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40&amp;#x2F;mwh, with wind at under $50&amp;#x2F;mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60&amp;#x2F;mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100&amp;#x2F;mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don&amp;#x27;t get unhelpfully pedantic!).&lt;p&gt;These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear. Coal plants are shutting down as fast as replacements can be built, and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they&amp;#x27;re losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now.&lt;p&gt;The cost of PV solar has dropped over 80% in the past decade, and wind like 50%, due to engineering improvements in operation and economies of scale in manufacturing. But it&amp;#x27;s a reasonable question how much farther their prices will drop. It seems unlikely to me that we&amp;#x27;ll see another decade of such radical price drops.&lt;p&gt;Gas, on the other hand, is vulnerable to markets and availability. How long will it stay so cheap? And what happens if a politically progressive government gets serious about carbon taxing? On the other hand, it&amp;#x27;s a lot cheaper up-front to build a gas plant, and a lot less painful if it closes early.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>batmansmk</author><text>Electricity price is already adapted hour per hour on the European Market. When the wind blows in Germany, price sometimes even go negative: it costs operationally less to energy producers to pay people to use the energy than stopping equipment. No change has been noted on the electricity usage.&lt;p&gt;Electricity bill is on average $100 per household per month. People won&amp;#x27;t shift their usage because electricity is too cheap anyway. 1.6% of your revenue === 1.6% of your saving effort.&lt;p&gt;Note that the periodicity of wind blowing is days and weeks, so it&amp;#x27;s too long and too intermittent to align daily routines on it. Forget about charging your car or hot water aligned on it, the only solution we have scaled to use this wind energy is reversible dams &amp;#x2F; potential energy, and of that we have no more unexploited geography to support wind turbines. Feb 2019 we produced in Germany 10,000GWh with wind versus 3,000GWh in July 2019. And between 2 consecutive weeks, it can be a factor of x10 of difference.
&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;energynumbers.info&amp;#x2F;capacity-factors-at-danish-offshore-wind-farms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;energynumbers.info&amp;#x2F;capacity-factors-at-danish-offshor...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-09/gas-plants-will-get-crushed-by-wind-solar-by-2035-study-says</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>I suspect that if variable electricity pricing for consumers, a great deal of the need for &amp;quot;batteries&amp;quot; will evaporate. Heavy consumer electric uses (charging the car, HVAC, hot water) can easily be time shifted. It isn&amp;#x27;t time shifted today because consumer electricity rates are constant 24&amp;#x2F;7.</text></item><item><author>batmansmk</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t get fooled by simple price comparison. It&amp;#x27;s comparing apples and oranges.
Gas, nuclear, coal, reversible dams, geothermy... are all controllable energy sources: they produce when we need it.
Wind and solar are intermittent.&lt;p&gt;Equip fully the world with solar and wind and the trains will have to leave their stations when the wind blows and not at any other moment.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s happening is that countries migrating towards wind turbines like Germany also adds coal plant to the same capacity in order to compensate for when the wind doesn&amp;#x27;t blow. For each GW of wind one can find a GW of coal or gas being installed.&lt;p&gt;Then, if we are talking about adding batteries into the mix to make it work, solar and wind become far from carbon neutral, and endangers us way more than nuclear.</text></item><item><author>beat</author><text>I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I&amp;#x27;ve been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40&amp;#x2F;mwh, with wind at under $50&amp;#x2F;mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60&amp;#x2F;mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100&amp;#x2F;mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don&amp;#x27;t get unhelpfully pedantic!).&lt;p&gt;These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear. Coal plants are shutting down as fast as replacements can be built, and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they&amp;#x27;re losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now.&lt;p&gt;The cost of PV solar has dropped over 80% in the past decade, and wind like 50%, due to engineering improvements in operation and economies of scale in manufacturing. But it&amp;#x27;s a reasonable question how much farther their prices will drop. It seems unlikely to me that we&amp;#x27;ll see another decade of such radical price drops.&lt;p&gt;Gas, on the other hand, is vulnerable to markets and availability. How long will it stay so cheap? And what happens if a politically progressive government gets serious about carbon taxing? On the other hand, it&amp;#x27;s a lot cheaper up-front to build a gas plant, and a lot less painful if it closes early.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mruts</author><text>The price for electricity already varies hour by hour. Maybe not as much as solar would, but most people (including me) are not paying a pegged price for electricity 24&amp;#x2F;7.</text></comment>