Spain as a whole 45 million country with diverse geography and scattered population is producing 75 percent of its electricity from renewables and gas and carbon have been down to almost technical zero.
It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery.
During the day, a huge chunk of the produced energy is sold to other countries, that's why I claim that 70% of its electricity is from renewables, even though the production share only accounts for 66%.
> It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery.
IN PARTS of the country. In other regions (Catalunya, Andalucia) there is an ongoing drought which is severely impacting everyone and yeah, hydro-electrical companies had done some, let say questionable decisions regarding their water reservoirs.
I'm not saying that water should not be used as a battery. I'm just saying that there is a very serious water crisis in big places in Spain, and to make the people not very familiar with Spain about the difference in weather and climate that exists within the country. Basically, the parts near the Atlantic ocean are always very rainy, and this year some other zone with no sea got a lot of rain, but the Mediterranean coasts have really low raining in general, and in recent years the situation worsened even more.
Water is more and more becoming a scarce resource unevenly distributed.
Industrials and agricultural processes, energy storage and domestic consumption are all crucial for the people and the economy.
Spain and Portugal did something incredibly smart - both went against EU and won right to cap gas price for power production. That way MWh price is 1Euro in Spain right now while 56 in Germany 74 Italy. This one simple trick fixed their grid. Gas turbines no longer generate 24/7 while charging premium and skewing whole market.
Nuclear doesn't scale quickly. It already adapts from 4GW to 7GW in Spain, but it does it slowly and ahead of weather conditions.
What is needed is more co-located battery storage, and more gravity (solid or water) storage.
Nuclear is never meant to scale, you want to run the plant at 100% as much as possible to recoup costs. It is baseload power and you deal with peaks using peaker plants and batteries.
Maybe I don’t understand the requirement, but can’t a constant-rate supply provide stored power for peak demand and support baseline consumption off-peak?
Nuclear is different to fossil fuel power. It comes from a renewable source. It is bad only because it produced waste, but we're working towards solving this issue.
Uranium is not a renewable resource. All of the uranium on earth was formed in another star’s supernova and seeded in the proto planetary nebula before the earth coalesced.
That's why you use a fast neutron (breeder) reactor to extract up to 90% of the potential fissionable "fuel" from that uranium instead of just a few percent. Another option is the use of thorium of which is there is ca. 3 times as much. By the time both uranium and thorium run out there'll either be practical fusion energy or one of those new battery technologies which are always popping up.
Now we just have to invest a few hundred billion for a few decades until er have practical commercial breeder reactors, while still burning coal and gas while we wait and see whether the engineers can figure it out.
That's it. If you need to have nuclear capacity for a grid for say 30GW, despite average usage being just 10GW, your price is now $300/MWh rather than $100/MWh if you can run them 24/7
Why? All modern nuclear reactors do load following. I believe it’s even an EU requirement. And certainly the practice in France.
Nuclear costs the same thing whether you use it or not. If you meet the peak energy demand with nuclear you might as well save the construction of intermittent renewables.
Doing that is part of the plan for the switch to renewables, and people are actively working on it. A friend of mine at Siemens energy for example is involved in such projects.
Same old, same old. In an interconnected grid, everyone is importing and exporting from and to everyone. Germany (which you are referring to), is still an exporter of electricity.
Only until something brings down the French grid. Power generation should not be too centralised since that creates too many opportunities for failure, accidental (storm, fire) or intentional (sabotage, war).
For a few minutes at low demand time. These kinds of over-grand claims are seriously harmful to the cause of promoting renewables because it makes it seem like we’re almost there and can stop caring. Just look at the excellent, accurate, and up-to-the-hour charts put out by the electricity market itself and you will see where and when the challenges we face still are.
We are way way past that at this point. The renewable generation meeting the total demand is over most of the day. Because of solar PV, the cheapest generation now, the daytime electricity supply is actually more than we need in California. Solar farms (and also wind farms)get curtailed here due to supplying more than the grid can take at times; this is usually for several hours.
Source; reporter covering solar news through interviews with grid operators, solar developers and policymakers since 2008
Those graphs clearly say that the state is pulling from non-renewable sources (primarily natural gas and "imports") between the hours of 7PM and 7AM. As I look at the page, right now (3:30AM local time), California is producing less than it needs, and the deficit is about 15,000MW. It isn't even close.
It's fine to say that California is producing more than it needs on net, but adding up total production over 24h and subtracting total consumption over 24h and seeing a positive value isn't meaningful if you're actually dependent on conventional sources for 12 hours a day.
That's more about economics than operations. Nuclear can modulate output, but pretty much won't except for operational needs (maintenance, grid needs). Older reactors take longer to modulate output, but either way, the economics say the reactor cost so much to build that you should run it at capacity as much as possible, especially since its lifetime is limited.
Governor just signed something letting Diablo Canyon run for a few more years. Thank god for that. Impossible to get new nuclear so have to keep what we have.
Nuclear makes for great base generating capacity because it has an incredibly stable output, but that also means the line needs to be kept flat or tons of energy will be wasted.
Nuclear is indeed very inflexible. You can't really turn it off easily or cheaply. The only time it goes down is for maintenance. Typically for extended periods of time when that happens.
However, battery is improving the capacity factor of renewables; especially solar by allowing two things:
- when there's too much of it, you can charge batteries with energy that would otherwise be curtailed/wasted.
- when there's not enough solar, you can discharge batteries.
Both effects help dampen peaks and dips in renewable energy supply and demand. I.e. it helps flatten the curve similar to what you point out is the case with nuclear. The first effect is often over looked: we are actively curtailing renewable energy that we don't know what to do with. People talk about shortages but not about surpluses. And that's actually a lot of energy. It also leads to the fallacy in believing that having lots of EVs increases energy demand when actually it also allows for better utilization of surpluses. Which dampens the impact this has.
Grids are bottle-necked on a lack of cable capacity. We have overproduction of energy in one region and shortages in another. Northern and southern Germany are a good example where on a windy day in the north, the wind energy can't get to the industries in the south that need it. So, they fire up coal plants. The same is the case in the UK where getting wind energy from Scotland south is a problem.
Cables and batteries help improve utilization of renewables. The main thing that drives these things is cost. Nuclear is costly and very slow to deploy. Realistically, any nuclear we don't have right now, won't be there for at least a decade or two. And that's if we would be really diligent about getting to that right now, which of course we aren't.
In the time until then, we'll be deploying solar by the TW/year. Same with batteries. And wind is also growing rapidly. And of course laying some more cables is a lot less controversial than building new nuclear plants. There has been quite a bit of talk of upgrading existing cables with better ones to effectively double capacity. This is even less controversial since the permitting is a lot easier and faster. In short, we'll deploy orders of magnitude more of all this than nuclear, and a lot earlier too. So much that nuclear might turn out to be a rounding error.
The French can only do that because they have so many reactors. If you ramp down a reactor, it poisons it's own fuel with radioisotopes and you can't safely ramp it back up - at least not quickly. You need to wait for the neutron poison to decay naturally, which takes days or even weeks, depending on how much you turned down the reactor.
The reason the French can get away with it is because they have to. If you have this much nuclear on your grid, you can't get around it, the reactors need to follow demand. The good news is that because they have so many reactors, they can have them take turns poisoning their fuel and still have enough time to slowly come back up again. So each night a different reactor ramps down and gets poisoned.
Also, French reactors can take the financial hit of decreasing output much better than American reactors. Nuclear has so small margins that if you tell the investors of a new nuclear plant in the US that their reactor will be required to ramp down a couple of times per month, the entire project turns into a huge financial loss just like that. They need to run at 100% all year, or lose billions.
> So each night a different reactor ramps down and gets poisoned.
They do it intra-day. You can currently follow that through their monitoring [^1]
> Nuclear has so small margins that if you tell the investors of a new nuclear plant in the US that their reactor will be required to ramp down a couple of times per month, the entire project turns into a huge financial loss just like tha
Nuclear reactors tends to be hugely profitable considering their lifetime (80y in USA) but requires an enormous CAPEX.
Like most infrastructure, any attempt to try to fund them entirely privately with investor seeking a 9% quick ROI is doomed to fail.
Hinkley Point is a very good example of that. It is estimated that the price per MWH would be more than halved if the project would have a funding by public bond instead of the current private investor deathtrap.
That's only "economical" because the French taxpayers subsidize EDF with billions of euros both in direct subsidies [1] and in the form of price caps [2].
EDF as hugely profitable and brought back billions to its main stock holder (the French state) for multiple decades.
The recent debt crisis has mainly two causes:
- The state has used EDF to shield consumers against the 2022-2023 energy price increases. EDF has taken the losses directly for the state.
- The results of terrible energy policies the last decades (attempt to reduce nuclear at 50% and mainly the infamous ARENH).
What happened is pretty typical of when you have a state is directly managing a private actor: Incompetent politicians swiping their foots on the company to satisfy their own demagogy.
The way I understand it, there's a lot of talk about more solar and more wind and more whatever, but much less talk about more cabling between regions. Or maybe it's happening just doesn't make the headlines? Because even today we could scrap a few more percents by simply redistributing better the energy where it's needed...
Increasing grid connectivity is certainly happening, but it's not very exciting. You see news about new large undersea connections. There's news from time to time about the Tres Amigos interconnection facility between the US grids in the east, west, and Texas (mostly delays, unfortunately). News here and there about better connectivity between north and south england. Local news about local projects (my area is wiring some leaf substations into a ring; very exciting for me, not much for anyone else; although the why is to provide reliability to a charge an electric ferry that carries 200 cars, so maybe a little exciting?).
A lot of times connectivity impacts site selection of projects. A wind farm needs to have good wind, reasonable neighbors, and access to loads. There's articles about not being able to build more wind in northern england because there's not enough transmission infra to get the power where it needs to be.
Nuclear power plants can scale with demand. They're primarily steam generators and those feed turbines. You have many mechanisms you can use to control total power output in these systems.
In the sense that you're wasting fuel lifetime, to a certain extent, but I imagine that also varies with the level of reactivity currently allowed in the vessel by the control rods.
Other commenters also pointed it out, but ramping down a nuclear reactor is not an easily reversed process. After a ramp down the fuel needs a certain amount of time before it can be ramped back up again. The output can be modulated, but it's a process that must be performed over a long period of time.
Nuclear makes for square supply curves which are kind of hard to handle, especially if you have a large percentage of your supply from a few reactors like they do in Finland.
It will take hours, at least. Nuclear is sloooooooooow. You can make it hot very quickly, but it will take hours to days to cool down. Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant finally turned cold this month, 2 years after start of full scale Russian invasion and occupation of the plant.
Are you sure it’s only a few minutes at low demand times? I checked a few days in April at your link, and if I’m reading the graphs right, it looks like renewable production exceeded demand for at least several hours in the afternoon for each of the days I checked.
The headline on the original article seems unhelpful and perhaps deliberately misleading, but unless I’m reading the graphs wrong (quite possible!) this also doesn’t seem, like, a 15 minute window at 2 a.m. where unexpectedly strong winds created a temporary blip of excess production.
It's also notable that battery capacity has increased quite a bit over the past year. The reduction in NG power plants output after sundown is pretty remarkable.
Take a look at
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/index.html
Scroll down to "Net demand trend" which is "System demand minus wind and solar" and compare yesterday vs last summer and a year ago
Yesterday (4/15) lowest net demand was 366 MW
Last summer, July 4th , lowest net demand was 2350 MW
Last year (4/15/23) lowest net demand was 2227 MW
You can see that last summer, with so much more "powerful" sun, the net demand never went below 2300 MW. Last year went down to 2227 MW. Today, we are down to 366 MW.
We manage to produce so much more solar in the last year that the net demand minus renewables went down by ~1800 MW. That means a few more years of improvements like that and we will have excess power generation of solar/wind at least during the day for most days. So if we start storing that excess generated power, we will start making a dent on other times of max power (since we can discharge batteries when max demand is needed).
That's the plan on how to keep lowering the net demand more and more.
See also https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html and scroll down to "Batteries trend" and compare today vs a year ago.
A year ago, batteries were discharging max 3MW and were drained by 10-11 pm.
Yesterday batteries were discarging at max 5.3MW and were fully drained around 11:30.
So batteries handled twice as much power for longer period of time.
The high price is probably more related to the fact that Germany relied on gas and oil from Russia in addition to closing down all nuclear power plants. Short and medium term this will show in the price.
I'd like to thanks the German government's policies for the past decades for making me pay absurd electricity prices since the Russian invasion started, even though I live in Sweden with 90+% of renewable electricity generation I'm forced to pay the highest spot price in the EU (aka, gas in Germany) because of Germany's decision to burn coal and gas all the way into 2022... The inertia on modernising Germany is starting to bite your neighbours.
> I'm forced to pay the highest spot price in the EU
This isn't true — prices are the same throughout a zone, but Germany and Sweden are not in the same zone. Sweden has several zones. The total possibly export from Sweden to neighbouring countries is not unlimited, which is the reason for the boundaries.
I have a layman understanding of the pricing structure so it's probably not entirely true "paying the highest spot price in the EU" directly but given I was paying 5-10x more for electricity in December 2022 than ever before my best guess is that when Germany was paying a lot more for electricity due to an increase in the price of gas-generated electricity we were affected by the dominoes falling: electricity would be sold for a higher bid if exported to Germany (or to a zone neighbouring Germany which would be selling to Germany) which caused a shortfall in my zone (SE3) increasing the bid price.
So even if it was a second order effect I had to pay much more than ever before due to increased spot prices in other zones.
I'm not sure Sweden's at the 90+% mark yet ... and besides, that's not counting energy demand in the transport sector and non power generation applications.
I'm counting nuclear in the 90+% of electricity (not energy in general where oil will count), not renewable though I agree, more like non-CO2 emitting.
> I live in Sweden with 90+% of renewable electricity generation
Except sweden isn't self sufficient at all with electricity… Can I really say that I'm 100% renewable if I have a tiny solar panel at home, and for the rest I use power from somewhere else?
Sweden exported electricity almost every hour for 2023 (import 40 hours of 8760 = 0.5%). Most of the hours when importing electricity was due to low and negative prices when operators could use water reservoirs as batteries. Currently, there is an obvious overcapacity with an export of almost 20% of production.
Same in Norway. We in effect subsidize German poor decision making. And unlike when Greece collapse happened, the voices in Berlin are suspiciously quiet about austerity. Oh well, as long as they learn the lesson…
> And unlike when Greece collapse happened, the voices in Berlin are suspiciously quiet about austerity.
You seem to have no idea whatsoever, what is currently going on in Germany, because literally the opposite is true. Germany is trying to practice austerity and keeping its so called "debt brake" (German states have to have a balanced budget, federal state can take up to 0,35% of GDP in new loans) by cutting subsidies, which is why farmers have been protesting in Berlin etc.
Nice link. At this specific moment in time, natural gas is 19.9%, nuclear is 5.6%, and here's the great lie imports are 38.5%. There's no telling what the source of that imported energy is.
The big driver of renewables in California is solar - check the graph for the whole of yesterday, and you'll see how different the picture is during the day.
Yes, there's still a gap overnight which over time will come to be filled by more wind and battery storage. But California's really lucky with solar - it's already so cheap and easy that it makes battery storage financially viable even using today's tech. It's now just a matter of continuing to scale it out...
Mark Z. Jacobson! Haven't heard that name in a few years.
Don't know him personally, but here's a tangent for the interested: In the first year of my PhD, I read several of his papers from the 90's on the GATOR family of climate models. At the time, I was interested in a potential intersection with my field. One thing that struck me was the absolutely exquisite attention to detail in one of his papers made to model the perspiration of water vapor from leaf stomata in forests (don't have the paper handy but can find if anyone's interested). It was really quite impressive.
I know a lot of people are disparaging the 100% number but I think the article is more about indicating that this is the inflection point as renewables and batteries are still getting cheaper and more installations are happening.
Yes, exactly. Renewables keep achieving new milestones, keep not only growing but also accelerating, and we haven't seen any indication they have a weak point except the obvious variability of production.
But the falling costs, the simplicity and the very low maintenance costs will trump variability. The grid will be built around that, it's kind of obvious at this point. One of the fastest growing solar areas in the world is Texas which has very loose rules on what you can deploy to the grid. So if you leave it to the market, it will only deploy renewables and storage. Everything else is dead until we reach a point where renewables meet their limitation. But again, this hasn't happened yet in 30 years of poor predictions on what those limitations are.
” California will entirely be on renewables and battery storage 24/7 by 2035.
California passed a law that commits to achieving 100% net zero electricity by 2045. Will it beat that goal by a decade? We hope so. It’s going to be exciting to watch.”
Remarkable, especially considering California’s population is 39 million people.
> Remarkable, especially considering California’s population is 39 million people.
All else being equal, it is easier to accomplish, the larger the population, as the statistics will be somewhat in your advantage.
simple example: if you want to be on 100% renewables on your self, your energy production needs to meet your energy consumption 100% of the time. The moment you pool with a neighbor, that no longer is true; if you need more than you produce, but your neighbor needs less than they produce, the pair of you still can be 100% on renewables.
Now, energy production and energy demand between neighbors are highly correlated, so the effect isn’t very high for n=2 (but even then, it’s easier to buy a mix of solar and wind once you pool with a group than when doing it alone), but with millions of people spread out over hundreds of kilometers, that changes.
> And what makes it even better is that California has the largest grid-connected battery storage facility in the world (came online in January …), meaning those batteries were filling up with excess energy from the sun all afternoon today and are now deploying as we speak to offset a good chunk of the methane gas generation that California still uses overnight.
If it exceeded 100% energy demand, why were they still using methane?
The title is a little misleading. Solar energy production is very variable. So I assume over 100% portion is referring to the peak production hours only. At those times, the power grid usually sells the excess energy to other states.
Met its electricity demand for a short period of each day. I don't think the chin-scratching over why the public isn't agog at this milestone is sincere. Keep going and give us a call when it hits 50% of the total demand.
"Energy demand" is a huge stretch. It is just electricity. It does not cover energy used in transportation (car, ships, flight) and energy used to produce imported goods. It also does not cover recycling and renewal. Even food gets like 60% of energy from fertiliser, that is not included here!
Anyway, I am just silly old person. So let's march towards bright future. We need solar powered battle tanks and solar powered fighter jets!
Somehow 100% renewable but the most expensive electric I've ever paid for. How much does 2000kWh cost again?
Also, the most prone to fire-hazard because of above-ground electric. Remember when PG&E caused the most destructive wildfire in California history?
Weird rub-it-out article IMO most likely paid for by some PAC. With all the money pumped into California power projects, it never equaled lower power prices, reliability, or safety...
If you want to see a power grid truly without good pricing, reliability, or safety, look at Texas. Summer brings constant outages and market prices dozens of times higher than the norm. People were getting bills for thousands of dollars for a single family home in recent summers.
Hahahaha, okay. I'm in Texas now. I use a ridiculous amount of power to be honest mining in my single family home with A/C running all summer & heatpump during the winter. Care to explain? I've had more expensive bills in San Franciso, Alameda county just heating my home with way more temperate weather. I can provide actual data if you want. Outages? I've had more brown-outs & black-outs in California... the power system there is trash. I lived there for 30+ years LOL. I'de love to know the lore of your perception of the California power system... It's a monopoly. It's 3x more expensive. It's above-ground and caused the most damaging wildfire in California history. What am I missing? Have you lived there for so little-long?
That leaves me to my original question. How much 2000kWh cost in California again?
Texas produces more than twice the amount of energy than any other state. While Texas leads in energy consumption, the state also has the largest amount of surplus energy produced after consumption.
Same thought. It’s a bit of a bait and switch as the title implied to me a major milestone. But it’s not and the real milestone of renewables providing power continuously day and night remains.
“a specially designed photovoltaic cell could generate up to 50 watts of power per square meter under ideal conditions at night, about a quarter of what a conventional solar panel can generate in daytime”
The idea is to capture the energy that escapes into space when solar panels cool down during the night.
So batteries are too expensive, but space launches aren't? Even assuming the light can be sufficiently focused to bypass the inverse-square law, it'll still need precision manufacturing to actually deliver the power to the panels reliably. And that's assuming mirrors are enough, and you don't need space-side solar panels and microwave/laser beams (which will be even more expensive than hundred-mile-focus mirrors).
Push am (ever so slightly) larger fraction of the sun's energy output into our atmosphere, what could possibly go wrong!
I know, the amount of net electricity per added total energy might end up no worse than in a fusion power best case scenario, but still... When you add the climate effect of re rocket launches required I don't think it could ever become worthwhile.
So they could build a battery big enough to serve 15 minutes of the nighttime trough and declare mission accomplished with only enough solar to fill the battery on a rainy winter solstice day? Some goalposts just beg for getting moved. (I assume that this is unrelated to the 2045 goal, so it's not really bad, just bad headlining)
I'm not sure how many want to hear this, but western deinstustrailization and shifting of domestic production to imports makes most of this irrelevant.
In 20yr nigeria alone will have a larger population than the whole of europe, and is industrializing.
Total carbon consumption by westerns is always rising due to shifting it to imports; and in any case, we're only 1bn people.
Actually stopping carbon consumption by westerns rising is a "war footing" economic programme; and actually stopping climate change requires changing the industrialization trajectories of many non-western countries.
If solar and wind can be used economically in the west then of course developing countries can also use them. In fact, most of Africa has more sun-hours than typical western countries. Solar and wind can also be used where there are poorly developed electricity grids as it can be produced where it is consumed.
The goal is to stop co2 ppm from rising in the atmosphere beyond dangerous levels, these arent policies to stop that happening, they're polices to replace minor sources of co2 emission (electricity use in developing countries).
I mean if people want to believe all this matters, so be it; but it doesnt. The goal isnt to replace coal power stations with solar ones, it's to stop co2 levels from rising. They're rising 20ppm/decade, iirc, and none of this does anything to change that. maybe it stops them from rising faster than they would have done.
Industrial emission of CO2 is the main factor; there's not much deindustrializing economies can do beyond deindustrailizing. And, of course, pat themselves on the back as they do so.
There's zero economic, social or political cost to western policies at the moment and they arent reducing CO2 emissions. It's very much "green theatre".
The goal is to stop the actual levels of Co2 ppm from rising. This is all fairly meaningless; it does nothing to change the actual outcome.
In particular when more of that green energy is going to be used on bigger EVs, more aircon, more screens, etc. Western countries are unlikely to reduce their overall energy demand, in which we should account for the one necessary for producing the imported goods.
That said, opening solar farms to shut down coal plants is a net good regardless.
I care to know what a reasonable upper limit is. It is the height of western arrogance to say "it's currently 400ppm, we already got ours, and so it cannot go /any/ higher, which means everyone else has to pay for out past extravagance."
If we're truly that concerned about it, then we need to get to work on carbon capture and conversion, and do our part to be carbon negative so that non industrialized areas of the world have an opportunity to catch up.
And this isn't just about industrialization, it's about quality of life, it's about longevity, it's about wealth. Pretending that CO2 is the only concern leaves everything else on the floor. And without any diplomacy, this is the kind of policy that starts wars.
Up to you if you actually want to solve the problem in the long term or not. So, again, what's an acceptable upper limit?
I dont know. i dont care very much. the question is just the one you have proposed, in your colonialist defence of the colonies.. yes, indeed, it lies with what we believe of them
in otherwords, our own deindustrialization is irrelevant
It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery.
I made a website to track this: https://energy.antizone.online
During the day, a huge chunk of the produced energy is sold to other countries, that's why I claim that 70% of its electricity is from renewables, even though the production share only accounts for 66%.