Look at the work of Tony Seba, who has analyzed the properties of a possible fully-renewable grid.
In his models, you over-provision PV and wind (doable because it is so cheap, and getting cheaper) so it can cover peak loads. Then during the 90+ percent of non-peak time there is super-cheap excess power available which he dubs “super power”.
Using pricing signals, this can be used to enable activities which would normally be cost-prohibitive under current models. When power is cheap, crank up the desalinators, electric steel and aluminum mills, pumped storage, hydrogen converters, bitcoin miners, and anything else smart people can devise to do with inexhaustible, inexpensive clean power on a somewhat intermittent basis.
His model also shows that you can choose trade offs between how much battery you invest in and how much generation you build, allowing you to optimize costs depending on how much or little of this “super power” you want to generate. More batteries = less generation and less excess power, and vice versa.
I think many find this unintuitive because they formed their opinions of renewable energy during the early, high cost parts of its ramp and have not adjusted their thinking to the current part of the S-curve.
But renewable energy is already the least expensive source of electricity in most markets. It is our amazing good fortune that it is also environmentally fairly benign, extremely safe, has very low maintenance costs, can be geographically distributed to reduce grid distribution costs, and is able to scale with few limits aside from simple land availability. And its Wright’s law cost declines appear unconstrained for the foreseeable future.
This is the key part that most people are missing.
Standard thermal electricity generation is a very mature technology, no matter the heat source. Turbine-based combined cycle natural gas generation was a bit of a step up, but it used already mature tech: jet turbines.
Solar and wind and batteries are fundamentally different, and more like integrated circuit technology or DNA sequencing: falling in cost at a tremendous rate.
Looking at current prices or current installed bases of solar or wind or batteries is not very informative for assessing the technologies. You really need to see the history of prices to project their future, then you need to start seeing that for each application, adoption is non-linear once the tech becomes the cheapest option for that application.
What I'm most surprised about on HN is how few commenters here seem to understand tech curves. The HN audience, of all audiences, should have the clearest view of how traditional energy industry assumptions are about to be disrupted in the coming decades. We don't know the full extent of the disruption, but views like Seba's of huge amounts of surplus energy, seem inevitable. Arbitrage in time and geography will be the money making opportunities.
Working for one of the largest energy grid providers in Europe, I can tell you: This is the future we‘re currently building. We already have many areas with a huge energy surplus completely generated by renewables.
There is no one here that doubts the renewable future and we‘re quite sure we can finish building the necessary grid until the end of the decade (with around 6 times the capacity of the current European grid).
That is very encouraging to hear! In the US we have a few forward thinking utilities, thou go perhaps not as forward thinking as imagining a 6x capacity grid. But it seems that most are stuck focusing on the disadvantages of change as opposed to the immense opportunity this transition provides.
In his models, you over-provision PV and wind (doable because it is so cheap, and getting cheaper) so it can cover peak loads. Then during the 90+ percent of non-peak time there is super-cheap excess power available which he dubs “super power”.
Using pricing signals, this can be used to enable activities which would normally be cost-prohibitive under current models. When power is cheap, crank up the desalinators, electric steel and aluminum mills, pumped storage, hydrogen converters, bitcoin miners, and anything else smart people can devise to do with inexhaustible, inexpensive clean power on a somewhat intermittent basis.
His model also shows that you can choose trade offs between how much battery you invest in and how much generation you build, allowing you to optimize costs depending on how much or little of this “super power” you want to generate. More batteries = less generation and less excess power, and vice versa.
I think many find this unintuitive because they formed their opinions of renewable energy during the early, high cost parts of its ramp and have not adjusted their thinking to the current part of the S-curve.
But renewable energy is already the least expensive source of electricity in most markets. It is our amazing good fortune that it is also environmentally fairly benign, extremely safe, has very low maintenance costs, can be geographically distributed to reduce grid distribution costs, and is able to scale with few limits aside from simple land availability. And its Wright’s law cost declines appear unconstrained for the foreseeable future.