Most infrastructures are built to handle maximum load. If the load become nearly flat (by utilizing idle time) thanks to electrification, it makes easy to collect grid cost.
The effect of a lot of renewables can be the opposite, though. When the wind is blowing, all consumers may want to charge their Tesla's at the same time, meaning that the grid wil experience even more spikey load patterns.
Batteries as part of the central grid can help, of course.
More spikes are good, it's the height of the tallest spike that determines the cost, so reducing that specific spike is the key. And one way to do that, is to spike at other times instead.
Think about it like roads and rush hour. The width of the road is set for rush hour, and most of the rest of the time it's empty. Any way of shifting demand away from that peak is good. You'd have to shift an infeasible amount to create a traffic jam in the middle of the night, but every extra car removed from rush hour helps.
When I said "more spikey", I meant generally bigger spikes overall. The frequency of spikes is less relevant and not even very related. It is perfectly possible to have BOTH much higher maximum spikes AND greater numbers of relatively tall spikes. (For instance if you compare energy produced by a set of windmill farm to that produced by a group of nuclear plants.)
If you mean higher annual peaks, then it's probably easier to say that, because that's exactly what has been motivating the early solar deployments and the early battery deployments.
The very high summer peaks correlate well with solar (in many places) and so shaving that peak saves you more than you were spending on solar, even before the price plummeted. Same with batteries replacing expensive gas peaker plants.
Overall demand is predicted to rise a little with electrification, but demand was falling in many places anyway, so between that and the tech above for shaving peaks, it's not really a problem.
Note it's a common thing for "pro-fossil fuel" advocates to show "peaks" without enough context. Usually what looks like a peak on a daily basis is in fact a drop in the bucket compared with the yearly peak.
The famous 'duck curve' is a good example of this, where solar and wind reduced the daily and yearly peak, and then the new lower peak in spring/autumn was pointed at as a "problem".
> One misconception related to the duck curve is that solar photovoltaic power does not help supply peak demand and therefore cannot replace other power plants. In California, solar output is low at 7 pm when daily demand usually peaks.[20] This fact leads some to believe that solar power cannot reduce the need for other power plants, as they will still be needed at 7 pm when solar power output is low. However, California's annual demand peaks usually occur around 3 pm to 5 pm,[21] when solar power output is still substantial.[20] The reason that California's annual peak tends to be earlier than the daily peak is that California's annual peak usually occurs on hot days with large air conditioning loads, which tend to run more during midday.[22] As a result, solar power does in fact help supply peak demand and therefore can substitute for other sources of power.
> Note it's a common thing for "pro-fossil fuel" advocates to show "peaks" without enough context. Usually what looks like a peak on a daily basis is in fact a drop in the bucket compared with the yearly peak.
I'm not pro-fossil, rather the opposite. I'm anti-fossil (GHG in general) fuel, and want us to use all production methods available that allow us to gut GHG emissions, including solar, wind AND nuclear. Eventually (a few hundred years from now, maybe, but eventually) it seems like fusion will be the final source.
Also, I'm concerned with replacing ALL sources of fossil fuels, including for heating, most industrial use. And for that to come true, I think we need to have a razor sharp focus on price to make it happen. Lately, even before the current crisis, it seems that prices have been going in the wrong direction while global GHG emissions continue their sharp increase.
It seems to me that part of the reason is that many "renewable" proponents are much more more happy to burn a lot of natural gas than to allow nuclear power, and that they're employing a variety of measures to make nuclear seem unattractive, even compared to natural gas. (I've seen some of these messages sponsored by oil companies, some of which seem to want to build expensive offshore wind parks close to where they already have oil platforms.)
I'm getting the impression that some costs of wind power, in particular, is being covered over. And I'm particularly thinking of wind power. This involves both the unstable demand, unavailability of storage and things like increased transportation costs not clearly linked to the type of source.
So, basically, what I'm looking for is ways to make ALL of solar, wind and nuclear as cheap as possible, with reasonable (and shared) safety and environmental standards.
For that to happen, honesty about real costs, accurate prediction models and willingness to remove factors that increase prices unnecessarily (often due to special interest groups) need to be investigated.
For now, my impression is that the real LCOE, including transportation, of nuclear could be A LOT lower than what is represented by new European and American plants, both based on historical prices and efforts in Korea and China, while the real LCOE of wind tends to increase sharply when wind power gets to about 20-30% of total energy production.
For now, my opinion is that we should continue to invest in solar and wind at the same rate we're currently doing while ALSO work on adjust regulation and the business climate for nuclear to allow the cost to come down at least to Korean levels. Meanwhile, all fossil fuel sources should be taxed at a high enough level to make sure both nuclear and renewable investments have a chance of being profitable (The tax should at least be brought up enough to cover the negative externalities of fossil fuels).
If such taxes were made federal (in the US) and collected by the EU (in the EU market), instead of being collected by individual states, one could at least set up the right incentives.
I don’t agree that fossil fuel should be “taxed at a high enough level to make sure both nuclear and renewable investments have a chance of being profitable”, but do agree that it should be taxed significantly higher. (If the outcome of that is that renewables have a chance to compete, great. But if there was a renewable that needed a $50/gallon tax to be competitive, it doesn’t get my agreement to tax to that level.)
At that level, nuclear would be much, much cheaper. Also, there could be a "net tax" system where renewables AND nuclear would get some of those taxes as price subsidies. Let's say that fossil fuels were to be disadvantaged by $X per unit of pollution (lets say 1 unit would be the pollution from 1 ton of natural gas). To prevent all of that disadvantage, one could lower it by $Y (for ($X-$Y)/unit pollutant, and at the same time subsidize nuclear and renewables by $Y per unit of pollutant it displaced.
That way, the competitive advantage would still be $X, but Y could be set high enough that net taxes would stay the same as today.
I'm philosophically opposed to referencing it to "whatever amount would be required to make renewables competitive" but more aligned to "whatever amount represents the true costs, including externalities" (and making the same levies against renewables as well, for mining externalities, waste disposal, etc). Or true costs plus a small margin to ensure there's a nudge.
I don't mind people being exposed to the true cost of their energy; I want that. I don't want to get into picking winners and losers by referencing them to economics of an unrelated power source.
Well, I agree with you. I suppose my argument was presuming that either nuclear or renewables WOULD be competitive with fossil fuels for almost all use cases, if all externalities of fossil fuels are included.
I've seen figures like $15-20 being what gas would cost if the real cost of externalities of driving were included, but I think the carbon is only like 90 cents of that.
Wind power is cheap. This has been true for over a decade. It's not a conspiracy (unless you count the fossil fuel companies and their pet politicians lying about everything for decades, and literally profiting from misery and death).
You have to really try hard to make renewables and nuclear enemies, but a lot of money has been spent on that as it became more obvious that renewables were a good idea and a threat to fossil fuels. I've noticed a recent trend where people attack roof mounted solar because it's so much worse than utility solar. Utility solar is just replacing nuclear in the argument as people get wise to the scam and they need to update the message to slow down the fossil fuel phase out by pointing out that "this isn't perfect, do something else" in the hope that they won't do the something else.
For me nuclear is in the same boat as tidal, geothermal or CSP. Cool tech, but entirely on cost, wind and solar are going to dominate energy production in the future so at best a bit player.
Luckily nearly every single other policy supports tidal, CSP and nuclear just as much as it supports solar and wind. Electric vehicles? Can run on nuclear electricity. Green Hydrogen? can be made with nuclear electricity (technically called Pink Hydrogen). Heat pumps? Can be run with nuclear electricity. Carbon taxes? Don't apply to nuclear as it's low carbon. Air pollution controls? Don't apply to nuclear as it's low pollution. Insulation? Makes it easier to use heat pumps, powered by nuclear power. Time of use pricing? Traditionally used exactly for nuclear power. Demand response? Keeps nuclear running at it's peak efficiency. Battery storage peakers? Can time shift nuclear generated electricity. Believing in climate change? Great opportunity for nuclear, lots of people in the climate change community supported it as part of solution, before wind and solar plummetted in price.
> At the end of 2008, James Hansen stated five priorities that he felt then President-elect Barack Obama should adopt "for solving the climate and energy problems, while stimulating the economy": efficient energy use, renewable energy, a smart grid, generation IV nuclear reactors and carbon capture and storage. Regarding nuclear, he expressed opposition to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, stating that the $25 Billion (US) surplus held in the Nuclear Waste Fund "should be used to develop fast reactors that consume nuclear waste, and thorium reactors to prevent the creation of new long-lived nuclear waste."[96]
> In 2009, Hansen wrote an open letter to President Obama where he advocated a "Moratorium and phase-out of coal plants that do not capture and store CO2".[93] In his first book Storms of My Grandchildren, similarly, Hansen discusses his Declaration of Stewardship, the first principle of which requires "a moratorium on coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester carbon dioxide
So disagreeing on nuclear vs renewables is very minor in the big scheme of things. He was wrong about carbon capture and storage for the same reason, renewables got cheap enough that it no longer made financial sense to do on a large scale.
If you don't believe the wind and solar costs, then obviously you'd come to other conclusions, but you'd be wrong. Just as if you thought tidal or geothermal was going to be as big as solar and wind. But in places where tidal or geothermal makes sense, all the other policies work to support it so it's all good. We were right to try all these technologies to see which one worked out, they probably all have useful niches still.
> If you don't believe the wind and solar costs, then obviously you'd come to other conclusions, but you'd be wrong.
If I'm wrong and you're right, then I have no problem with that, although from what I've seen, the various green movements in Europe have attacked nuclear almost exclusively for ideological reasons, not economic ones.
I still believe that if we give nuclear an equal playing field to other energy forms when it comes to safety standards, other environmental regulations and allow them to be built efficiently by private companies without unnecessary red tape, prices will come down enough for them to be competitive.
Likewise, it seems to me that efforts to fully cover the grid with wind power (particularly in climates where solar is still expensive) has met with problems that have been partly covered up by proponents, and that this has contributed to increased prices, at least in Europe.
But if honest analysis proves me wrong, then I see no problem with that, just as long as it is really the economical side, not ideological ideas that the true reason for future prioritizations.
It can, but that would lead to wasted energy when demand is pushed below supply (when there is no way to store the supply).
That sort of defeats the benefit of elasticity in the demand that was the premise. The idea was that when there is a lot of power being generated on a sunny and windy day, everyone should charge all batteries, heat their water a few extra degrees, run heating or air conditioning a bit harder, etc, as an hour later, the sun could go down, the wind stop blowing and power generation could be scarce.
On the other hand elastic supply sources with a fuel cost (hydro, fossil fuels and to some extent nuclear) are much more suited for cases where consumption elasticity is linked to limitations of the distribution systems.
