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danieldwilliamI was reading this post
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/09/fossil-fuels-are-dead.html#comments
on Charles Stross' blog, and the comments, and it occurred to me that I see a similar set of arguments advanced whenever renewables are discussed. Specifically when considering how (and whether) a 21st Century electricity system could be powered 100% by renewables, over what time period and whether the overall costs of this would be acceptable (1) they keep cropping up. I consider them to be fallacies.
I'm not suggesting that they are always bad faith arguments but they are I think rather obviously not true when one thinks about them. I think the onus of proving that they apply in any particular situation now rests with the person advancing them. Certainly, if you are going to lead with one of the five renewable fallacies below and you're not doing a lot of work to justify how they apply than I will conclude that at best you are ignorant, shading in to whataboutery and sealioning and at worst making bad faith arguments in cold blood.
So what are these Five Renewable Energy Fallacies? Read on.
Fallacy 1 - Fix It All, Fix it Now or Fix None Of It.
The Fallacy - that in order to add more renewables to any part of grid you have to solve all of the potential problems with getting to 100% renewables.
In order to add renewables to a particular grid (2) over the next 2-3 years (3) you don't have to demonstrate that you can solve all of the potential problems with accommodating renewables on the grid. You just have to solve the immediate blocker. Other blockers can be solved as they start to get in the way. They may turn out not to actually be blockers. Blockers are likely to be grid specific - Hawaii is very different from Switzerland is very different from Australia.
Some examples.
California has a glut of solar PV at the moment. So much so that power prices on a sunny day about lunchtime are turning negative i.e. the power station is paying people to take the power off their hands. No one is going to add more solar PV to California until this is sorted out. What are the solutions? A bit of short term storage, to shift the power from the afternoon to after dark. You don't have to make the storage super cheap, you've got cheap power (see Fallacy 3) and you don't have to solve storing the power for weeks or months. All you have to do is suck up enough power at 2pm and sell it at 2am in order to turn power prices positive during the daytime. Other solutions, increase the interconnetion (4) either with Texas to the east or the Pacific North West to the North. You could see if there were some energy intensive processes that could be run in the afternoon but to be honest I think the California solar glut might be a short-lived problem. I wouldn't build a desalination plant just yet. Existing battery solutions can be built quicker than you can build a desalination plant.
The GB Queue - back when I was employed to think about these things there was a problem adding new wind turbines to the UK grid. Many of the best places for onshore wind were in the North of Scotland. A feature of the North of Scotland is that very few people live there so the electricity grid is not strong (5) and mostly designed to move small amounts of power north from the Central Belt not large amounts of power south. That was more than 10 years ago and the problem has been largely solved. How? A combination of time, a decade, money spent on building bigger cables and I believe some temporary relaxations of the rules about who paid who if the grid had too much power on it any given day. Longer term solutions include large subsea cables bypassing the Central Belt to shift excess power directly to London or across the North Sea to the Low Countries.
So two examples of problems with pretty obvious sets of solutions. One solved, one that will be solved over the coming couple of years. In both cases, once the problems are solved more renewables can be added until a new set of problems is revealed (6)
For sure, if you solve today's problem with a cludge or a bodge that turns out to be sub-optimal when you are operating at or close to 100% renewables then that might prove expensive and / or time consuming.
Do I promise that if you solve today's problems you are guaranteed to solve tomorrow's problems and the problems of the day after too? I do not. But the answer to the problem of getting more renewables on the grid today is to solve the current problems today and tomorrow's later on.
Do I promise you that no investor in energy infrastructure will make the wrong decision and end up losing money? I do not? Diversify your pension portfolio people.
Fallacy 2 - 100% Lemon or 100% Lime or Bust
The Fallacy - that in order to get to 100% renewables you can only use 100% of one type of renewables.
This is a shifting focus fallacy. Oh, look at all the problems over here. Then oh, look at all the problems over there. It fails to recognise that the problems are connected (very literally) and that features of one problem are a potential solution to features of the other problem.
Different renewables technologies have different strengths and weaknesses. These are pretty obvious and well understood by the industry (7). Solar PV is cheap, works during the day when most people want power, doesn't work at night. Onshore wind is cheaper than offshore wind but not as reliable. Geothermal is expensive but constant. Biomass is despatchable (8) but requires stuff to burn and causes smoke. Hydro requires useful valleys with lots of water. Similarly the various forms of storage or transport or energy carrier have their own strengths and weaknesses (9)
And we use different thermal technologies now, coal, two types of gas plant, oil, either in peaker plants or generators or cars and nuclear, alongside some already deployed renewables. We use different technologies for transporting goods and people. Different technologies for spreading news.
But you get a lot of comments along the lines, "but if you're going to use solar PV you need to timeshift *all* the power you need for nighttime, so the storage cost are huge! Bigly battery costs." I don't because I'm not going to try and use nothing but solar PV and lithium-ion batteries. I'm going to add some wind, I'll repurpose an existing hydro scheme to provide overnight power not peak power. I may even install some new cables to the next town over.
I don't have to make my grid out of one technology or one type of storage. Only a moron would try. Only a moron would suggest doing so. in sunny conditions with lots of desert I'm going to use lots of solar PV. but not nothing but solar PV. Where the seabed is shallow and windy lots of offshore wind. Anywhere near a volcano I'd look at geothermal (10). Will I use batteries? Maybe, depends how much hydro I've already got on my grid. Or maybe I'll use solar thermal systems to shift power in to the early evening. Or can I buy some power from a neighbouring grid? Or a grid a little bit further away? (11) . Do I have a glut of solar PV on my grid most days? What can I use that for? An aluminium smelter, a desalination plant, hydrogen for my buses?
The future will be a mix of different blends of renewables, storage and transfer technology driven by local conditions with the final mix derived at through a combination of planning, discovery and the outcome of hundreds of real life trials to work out local optimum solutions. The islands of Hawaii, Great Britain and Australia will have very different outcomes.
Fallacy 3 - Will No One Think of the Systems Cost
The Fallacy - that if one element of a system is very expensive then the whole system will be very expensive
The number to keep an eye on is the average cost of providing a unit of power when it is needed.
Some forms of renewable energy at some times are very, very cheap. Solar PV in good conditions can be had for $20 / mwh. This compares pretty well with the current UK wholesale power prices of £83 ($115) up from £53 ($73) in February. $20 / mwh compares pretty nicely with the starting price of day one of operation of Hinckley Point C of £92 /mwh ($127). If I am in California I don't need to timeshift 100% of the power I produce to 5am. I certainly don't need to timeshift 100% of the power I produce from lunchtime in July to midnight in March. Day to night demand - perhaps a ratio of 4:1. So in California I could build 5 units of solar PV for $20 * 5 = $100, spend about $500 shifting 1 unit of electricity from day to night and still be cheaper than Hinckley Point C.
The problem is harder in Europe for sure. Our nearby sunny areas are in North Africa and we may have caused some tension there by invading several times, installing and de-installing military dictatorships to suit ourselves, colonising them and then blowing up their co-religionists on a daily basis for the last 20 years. (12) But we have pretty good wind resources especially offshore wind (13), we don't have zero good solar PV (at current prices). It's not like we're not used to being reliant on unreliable partners for energy. Nor is Europe entitled to having relatively cheap energy. We in Europe may have to get used to the idea that the USA, Africa and Australia get the cheapest energy deal in the 21st Century, just like we did in the 18th Century.
Some parts of the world could move to 100% renewables at price as good as or better than they are currently paying more or less today. Some of us will have to wait a bit longer whilst some costs come down and some problems get solved. Some parts of the world will have cheaper energy than other parts. Got a desert near the equator? Then you going to have abundant, cheap energy and all the benefits that come from that. If you don't then you are a competitive disadvantage and in the long term should expect to see energy intensive economic activity move away from you.
But the key number is whether the average cost of a unit of renewable electricity in the world is cheaper than the average cost of the alternative technologies.
Fallacy 4 - Nothing Less Than Perfection, All the Time
The Fallacy - that a 100% renewables system has to function 100% perfectly in 100% of situations or else it won't be acceptable.
The current power system does not function 100% perfectly in 100% of situations. We've just got used to the ways it isn't perfect and learned to accept them or work around or pay extra for them.
Burning coal is quite dangerous (14), dangerous if you breath the fumes, dangerous if you mine it. Petrol cars are noisy and polluting. Gas supplies are controlled by occasionally hostile foreign powers and the price goes up and down more often than an England sports fan's hopes and dreams. We have fought a number of wars over oil and so far none over sunshine. The UK's current nuclear reactor fleet has some long-term problems with metal fatigue. It will be shut down at some point, perhaps by the regulator, perhaps by surprise. Prices of electricity will go up sharply. Our thermal power stations are large, so the grid is vulnerable to a small number of cascade trips leading to a widespread black out, a rare situation but one for which a suitable "black start" power station gets paid extra to help mitigate. This extra cost is not itemised on our electricity bill. The current system is not perfect. It is not the case that no one in the UK has suffered a black out, had to queue for petrol or seen the mangled body of a beloved son returned in a body bag from a far away oil rich country or dug out of a pit collapse.
Nor should we demand that it is. Perfection costs money and shifts problems from inside one system boundary to another system. (15).
Moving to a 100% renewables energy system will involve us moving from one set of problems to another. In doing so we'll make trades between different problems and between solving problems and spending money. Economics tells us that if the combination of benefits, problems and money for a renewable system is better than the alternatives as judged by the aggregate market participant it will happen without policy support.
I think the renewable industry will end up better and cheaper than the current system but if I'm wrong about the renewables industry being good at optimising that bundle of benefits, problems and costs then the nuclear industry can have a go. Or the specific industries most affected end up with a localised problem that they need to solve in some other way (16) or we could decide that we're happy to provide the policy support needed to get people to shift (17). But the truth is that all systems are a compromise between between costs, problems and benefits. Requiring renewables to be 100% perfect is to hold it a much higher standard than the current system is held to.
Fallacy 5 - Oh But the Costs, the Costs, (20)
The Fallacy - that renewables costs are not falling.
There are a lot of comments that assume that costs are static, that renewables prices today will be the renewables prices of the coming decades. Worse there are some people who keep quoting you costs from a decade or two ago. Those costs are wrong. Current costs are lower than costs in the past. Projects currently being decided on assume costs lower than the present.
The falling costs are driven by 5 things.
1) Learning curve effects
2) economies of scale
3) specialisation
4) reduced financial risk
5) interesting new technologies
Factor 5 is the smallest and least useful factor. Most technology that we need to reach 100% renewables energy already exists - it's just a case of making it cheaper. More importantly, the first three factors are persistent. There is no evidence that they are about to stop.
1) Learning curve effects, things get cheaper to do as you repeat doing them because you learn from each iteration. Conventionally they are measured as % fall in cost per doubling of overall output. A 10% learning curve effect means that the 101st unit costs 90% of the 1st unit, the 200th unit costs 90% of the 101st unit and the 400th unit costs 90% of the 200th unit or 73% of the cost of the 1st unit. Learning curve effects for solar PV and battery technology have been consistently at 15% of higher, for decades. Currently solar PV provides about 3% of world electricity. It is currently cheaper in good locations than the gas that goes in a gas turbine. By the time it has doubled in volume and doubled again it will be supplying about 10% of an expanded electricity demand. This will happen over the next ten years. The price of solar PV will fall by about 30% from today's prices.
If you think learning curve effects are going to stop soon the onus is on you to explain how that change is going to happen and why. You have to explain why tomorrow is going to be radically different from the last 40 years.
2) Economies of scale - working along side the learning curve effect are scale economies. Doing lots of a thing in a big factory is cheaper than doing a few of a thing in a small factory. Making a ship with twice the storage capacity as the previous ship does not cost twice as much. Some of this is simple geometry. A wind turbine that has twice the diameter has more than twice the area.
Again, if you think that scale economies don't apply to this industry or won't continue to apply to this industry then the onus is on you to make your case. The facts are against you.
3) Specialisation - a third factor driving the costs of renewables down is that more and better specialists are becoming available as the size and profitability of the industry improves. Offshore wind used to have borrow oil and gas vessels to install turbine towers. The offshore wind industry is now large enough to warrant its own fleet of specialist ships (18). Batteries designed for storing renewable energy for weeks not hours are now worth producing in bulk. Commercial contracts for the sale of renewable energy exist. They can be copied.
4) financial risk in the industry is falling as investors see that overall costs are falling and operators can develop and run renewables projects and pay their debt. This is driven by reliability and improved capacity factors. This has a virtuous circle effect. As interest rates on renewables fall the debt service falls, making it easier for projects to pay their lenders, making the loan less risky. As interest rates fall the interest paid during the building of the project (19) falls, making the whole thing cheaper to build.
5) technology improvements are by far the least important factor. Very little that is new needs to be invented. Sure, it would be great if perovskite solar PV got the conversion rate of solar PV from 20-30% to 40-50% but I don't need that to make solar PV cheaper when I've got massive factories pumping out solar panels by the tens of thousands. Better materials for wind turbine blades would be great if it meant I could double the rotor length without worrying about wingtip rotation speeds, but I don't need them if it now costs me half as much to hire an installation vessel as it used to install the kits in the North Sea.
To say this a third time, the cost of renewables has demonstrably fallen over a long period of time for reasons that are baked in to the process, well observed and well understood from other industries which have gotten cheaper and better over time. If your position is that this is not going to continue for the foreseeable future than the onus is on you to explain why.
As a final concluding remark I would point out that the five fallacies, or their negation are linked. If I have a problem getting more renewables on to my grid (Fallacy 1) then a solution might be to wait for the costs of a solution to come down (Fallacy 5). If I have some systemic problems then perhaps the answer lies in shifting the technologies I use a bit to counter-act a weakness with my current set up with a strength from another technology. Mixed systems are more likely to be resilient than monocultures. Treating these fallacies as if they were independent of each other is, itself, a form of fallacy.
Footnotes.
(1) I'm tempted to snark "acceptable compared to roasting the planet so badly that billions of people die and the rest of us live in the iron age", but I concede that one could technically replace fossil fuels with nuclear power. it would just be more expensive, more dangerous and slower - so probably only a few billion dead.
(2) of which there are probably many thousands in the world
(3) known as renewables penetration
(4) literally big power cables with substations and transformers linking one grid or part of a grid with another.
(5) small power cables, small substations, lower voltages
(6) and power grids are very very heavily regulated with strict permitting conditions. You can't just build a windfarm and plug it in. You have to seek permission from several authorities including the grid operator - these things are planned 5-10 years in advance and subject to lots of analysis before anyone signs a purchase order for anything. So when I say revealed, I mean revealed in theory as part of the planning process.
(7) you do not win prizes for pointing out that solar PV doesn't work at night - you do not look astute, you look like a tool. We all know this about solar PV, we all know what the solutions are, and if you are going to have an inside baseball conversation you need to have watched Moneyball.
(8) Able to be switched on and off at will.
(9) and worth noting that the most advanced form of battery, lithium-ion has so far mostly been designed for going in laptops and mobile phones which have different use-cases than industrial power applications.
(10) although you do not need to be near actual magma to make geothermal power generation work. There are lots of places with hot rocks.
(11) line losses from HVDC cables are about 3% per 1,000 kilometers. It's about 8,000 kilometers from Riyadh to Marrakesh - so you are looking at about 25% losses to shift power from one end of the Sahara (through Europe if you have a longer cable) to the other. Power that cost you $20 per megawatthour in Riyadh would cost you $25 in Marrakesh. San Diego to New York is about 4,000 kilometers. 10-15% losses for crossing North America. It is 17, 000 kilometers from Sydney to London, so losses of about half. That power you bought in Darwin for US$20 is going to cost US$40 plus the cost of the cables when it gets to London.
(12) the problem here is not technological, it's political - we don't trust North African states to be reliable energy partners. It's also military. Europeans have been dicks to desert-dwellers to the south of us who can beat us in a fight. The USA decided to be dicks to desert-dwellers who were less good at fighting.
(13) which the good people of Morocco might like to buy at night time.
(14) ignoring for the time being climate change.
(15) e.g. the problem of security of supply for gas which we have solved by bombing Iraq and pretending the Russians are not at war with us.
(16) for example an aluminium smelter might take advantage of negative power prices on sunny windy days by running a double shift at short notice and having to pay workers a premium for having their offshift disrupted.
(17) policy support here means things like subsidies, tax breaks, rules requiring renewables, rules prohibiting pollution.
(18) by specialist I mean, better, cheaper, more reliable and quicker people or equipment or knowledge
(19) capitalised interest, part of the build costs
(20) the costs, the costs are falling, from glen to glen and down the mountainside and I'll be cheap in sunshine or in shadow
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/09/fossil-fuels-are-dead.html#comments
on Charles Stross' blog, and the comments, and it occurred to me that I see a similar set of arguments advanced whenever renewables are discussed. Specifically when considering how (and whether) a 21st Century electricity system could be powered 100% by renewables, over what time period and whether the overall costs of this would be acceptable (1) they keep cropping up. I consider them to be fallacies.
I'm not suggesting that they are always bad faith arguments but they are I think rather obviously not true when one thinks about them. I think the onus of proving that they apply in any particular situation now rests with the person advancing them. Certainly, if you are going to lead with one of the five renewable fallacies below and you're not doing a lot of work to justify how they apply than I will conclude that at best you are ignorant, shading in to whataboutery and sealioning and at worst making bad faith arguments in cold blood.
So what are these Five Renewable Energy Fallacies? Read on.
Fallacy 1 - Fix It All, Fix it Now or Fix None Of It.
The Fallacy - that in order to add more renewables to any part of grid you have to solve all of the potential problems with getting to 100% renewables.
In order to add renewables to a particular grid (2) over the next 2-3 years (3) you don't have to demonstrate that you can solve all of the potential problems with accommodating renewables on the grid. You just have to solve the immediate blocker. Other blockers can be solved as they start to get in the way. They may turn out not to actually be blockers. Blockers are likely to be grid specific - Hawaii is very different from Switzerland is very different from Australia.
Some examples.
California has a glut of solar PV at the moment. So much so that power prices on a sunny day about lunchtime are turning negative i.e. the power station is paying people to take the power off their hands. No one is going to add more solar PV to California until this is sorted out. What are the solutions? A bit of short term storage, to shift the power from the afternoon to after dark. You don't have to make the storage super cheap, you've got cheap power (see Fallacy 3) and you don't have to solve storing the power for weeks or months. All you have to do is suck up enough power at 2pm and sell it at 2am in order to turn power prices positive during the daytime. Other solutions, increase the interconnetion (4) either with Texas to the east or the Pacific North West to the North. You could see if there were some energy intensive processes that could be run in the afternoon but to be honest I think the California solar glut might be a short-lived problem. I wouldn't build a desalination plant just yet. Existing battery solutions can be built quicker than you can build a desalination plant.
The GB Queue - back when I was employed to think about these things there was a problem adding new wind turbines to the UK grid. Many of the best places for onshore wind were in the North of Scotland. A feature of the North of Scotland is that very few people live there so the electricity grid is not strong (5) and mostly designed to move small amounts of power north from the Central Belt not large amounts of power south. That was more than 10 years ago and the problem has been largely solved. How? A combination of time, a decade, money spent on building bigger cables and I believe some temporary relaxations of the rules about who paid who if the grid had too much power on it any given day. Longer term solutions include large subsea cables bypassing the Central Belt to shift excess power directly to London or across the North Sea to the Low Countries.
So two examples of problems with pretty obvious sets of solutions. One solved, one that will be solved over the coming couple of years. In both cases, once the problems are solved more renewables can be added until a new set of problems is revealed (6)
For sure, if you solve today's problem with a cludge or a bodge that turns out to be sub-optimal when you are operating at or close to 100% renewables then that might prove expensive and / or time consuming.
Do I promise that if you solve today's problems you are guaranteed to solve tomorrow's problems and the problems of the day after too? I do not. But the answer to the problem of getting more renewables on the grid today is to solve the current problems today and tomorrow's later on.
Do I promise you that no investor in energy infrastructure will make the wrong decision and end up losing money? I do not? Diversify your pension portfolio people.
Fallacy 2 - 100% Lemon or 100% Lime or Bust
The Fallacy - that in order to get to 100% renewables you can only use 100% of one type of renewables.
This is a shifting focus fallacy. Oh, look at all the problems over here. Then oh, look at all the problems over there. It fails to recognise that the problems are connected (very literally) and that features of one problem are a potential solution to features of the other problem.
Different renewables technologies have different strengths and weaknesses. These are pretty obvious and well understood by the industry (7). Solar PV is cheap, works during the day when most people want power, doesn't work at night. Onshore wind is cheaper than offshore wind but not as reliable. Geothermal is expensive but constant. Biomass is despatchable (8) but requires stuff to burn and causes smoke. Hydro requires useful valleys with lots of water. Similarly the various forms of storage or transport or energy carrier have their own strengths and weaknesses (9)
And we use different thermal technologies now, coal, two types of gas plant, oil, either in peaker plants or generators or cars and nuclear, alongside some already deployed renewables. We use different technologies for transporting goods and people. Different technologies for spreading news.
But you get a lot of comments along the lines, "but if you're going to use solar PV you need to timeshift *all* the power you need for nighttime, so the storage cost are huge! Bigly battery costs." I don't because I'm not going to try and use nothing but solar PV and lithium-ion batteries. I'm going to add some wind, I'll repurpose an existing hydro scheme to provide overnight power not peak power. I may even install some new cables to the next town over.
I don't have to make my grid out of one technology or one type of storage. Only a moron would try. Only a moron would suggest doing so. in sunny conditions with lots of desert I'm going to use lots of solar PV. but not nothing but solar PV. Where the seabed is shallow and windy lots of offshore wind. Anywhere near a volcano I'd look at geothermal (10). Will I use batteries? Maybe, depends how much hydro I've already got on my grid. Or maybe I'll use solar thermal systems to shift power in to the early evening. Or can I buy some power from a neighbouring grid? Or a grid a little bit further away? (11) . Do I have a glut of solar PV on my grid most days? What can I use that for? An aluminium smelter, a desalination plant, hydrogen for my buses?
The future will be a mix of different blends of renewables, storage and transfer technology driven by local conditions with the final mix derived at through a combination of planning, discovery and the outcome of hundreds of real life trials to work out local optimum solutions. The islands of Hawaii, Great Britain and Australia will have very different outcomes.
Fallacy 3 - Will No One Think of the Systems Cost
The Fallacy - that if one element of a system is very expensive then the whole system will be very expensive
The number to keep an eye on is the average cost of providing a unit of power when it is needed.
Some forms of renewable energy at some times are very, very cheap. Solar PV in good conditions can be had for $20 / mwh. This compares pretty well with the current UK wholesale power prices of £83 ($115) up from £53 ($73) in February. $20 / mwh compares pretty nicely with the starting price of day one of operation of Hinckley Point C of £92 /mwh ($127). If I am in California I don't need to timeshift 100% of the power I produce to 5am. I certainly don't need to timeshift 100% of the power I produce from lunchtime in July to midnight in March. Day to night demand - perhaps a ratio of 4:1. So in California I could build 5 units of solar PV for $20 * 5 = $100, spend about $500 shifting 1 unit of electricity from day to night and still be cheaper than Hinckley Point C.
The problem is harder in Europe for sure. Our nearby sunny areas are in North Africa and we may have caused some tension there by invading several times, installing and de-installing military dictatorships to suit ourselves, colonising them and then blowing up their co-religionists on a daily basis for the last 20 years. (12) But we have pretty good wind resources especially offshore wind (13), we don't have zero good solar PV (at current prices). It's not like we're not used to being reliant on unreliable partners for energy. Nor is Europe entitled to having relatively cheap energy. We in Europe may have to get used to the idea that the USA, Africa and Australia get the cheapest energy deal in the 21st Century, just like we did in the 18th Century.
Some parts of the world could move to 100% renewables at price as good as or better than they are currently paying more or less today. Some of us will have to wait a bit longer whilst some costs come down and some problems get solved. Some parts of the world will have cheaper energy than other parts. Got a desert near the equator? Then you going to have abundant, cheap energy and all the benefits that come from that. If you don't then you are a competitive disadvantage and in the long term should expect to see energy intensive economic activity move away from you.
But the key number is whether the average cost of a unit of renewable electricity in the world is cheaper than the average cost of the alternative technologies.
Fallacy 4 - Nothing Less Than Perfection, All the Time
The Fallacy - that a 100% renewables system has to function 100% perfectly in 100% of situations or else it won't be acceptable.
The current power system does not function 100% perfectly in 100% of situations. We've just got used to the ways it isn't perfect and learned to accept them or work around or pay extra for them.
Burning coal is quite dangerous (14), dangerous if you breath the fumes, dangerous if you mine it. Petrol cars are noisy and polluting. Gas supplies are controlled by occasionally hostile foreign powers and the price goes up and down more often than an England sports fan's hopes and dreams. We have fought a number of wars over oil and so far none over sunshine. The UK's current nuclear reactor fleet has some long-term problems with metal fatigue. It will be shut down at some point, perhaps by the regulator, perhaps by surprise. Prices of electricity will go up sharply. Our thermal power stations are large, so the grid is vulnerable to a small number of cascade trips leading to a widespread black out, a rare situation but one for which a suitable "black start" power station gets paid extra to help mitigate. This extra cost is not itemised on our electricity bill. The current system is not perfect. It is not the case that no one in the UK has suffered a black out, had to queue for petrol or seen the mangled body of a beloved son returned in a body bag from a far away oil rich country or dug out of a pit collapse.
Nor should we demand that it is. Perfection costs money and shifts problems from inside one system boundary to another system. (15).
Moving to a 100% renewables energy system will involve us moving from one set of problems to another. In doing so we'll make trades between different problems and between solving problems and spending money. Economics tells us that if the combination of benefits, problems and money for a renewable system is better than the alternatives as judged by the aggregate market participant it will happen without policy support.
I think the renewable industry will end up better and cheaper than the current system but if I'm wrong about the renewables industry being good at optimising that bundle of benefits, problems and costs then the nuclear industry can have a go. Or the specific industries most affected end up with a localised problem that they need to solve in some other way (16) or we could decide that we're happy to provide the policy support needed to get people to shift (17). But the truth is that all systems are a compromise between between costs, problems and benefits. Requiring renewables to be 100% perfect is to hold it a much higher standard than the current system is held to.
Fallacy 5 - Oh But the Costs, the Costs, (20)
The Fallacy - that renewables costs are not falling.
There are a lot of comments that assume that costs are static, that renewables prices today will be the renewables prices of the coming decades. Worse there are some people who keep quoting you costs from a decade or two ago. Those costs are wrong. Current costs are lower than costs in the past. Projects currently being decided on assume costs lower than the present.
The falling costs are driven by 5 things.
1) Learning curve effects
2) economies of scale
3) specialisation
4) reduced financial risk
5) interesting new technologies
Factor 5 is the smallest and least useful factor. Most technology that we need to reach 100% renewables energy already exists - it's just a case of making it cheaper. More importantly, the first three factors are persistent. There is no evidence that they are about to stop.
1) Learning curve effects, things get cheaper to do as you repeat doing them because you learn from each iteration. Conventionally they are measured as % fall in cost per doubling of overall output. A 10% learning curve effect means that the 101st unit costs 90% of the 1st unit, the 200th unit costs 90% of the 101st unit and the 400th unit costs 90% of the 200th unit or 73% of the cost of the 1st unit. Learning curve effects for solar PV and battery technology have been consistently at 15% of higher, for decades. Currently solar PV provides about 3% of world electricity. It is currently cheaper in good locations than the gas that goes in a gas turbine. By the time it has doubled in volume and doubled again it will be supplying about 10% of an expanded electricity demand. This will happen over the next ten years. The price of solar PV will fall by about 30% from today's prices.
If you think learning curve effects are going to stop soon the onus is on you to explain how that change is going to happen and why. You have to explain why tomorrow is going to be radically different from the last 40 years.
2) Economies of scale - working along side the learning curve effect are scale economies. Doing lots of a thing in a big factory is cheaper than doing a few of a thing in a small factory. Making a ship with twice the storage capacity as the previous ship does not cost twice as much. Some of this is simple geometry. A wind turbine that has twice the diameter has more than twice the area.
Again, if you think that scale economies don't apply to this industry or won't continue to apply to this industry then the onus is on you to make your case. The facts are against you.
3) Specialisation - a third factor driving the costs of renewables down is that more and better specialists are becoming available as the size and profitability of the industry improves. Offshore wind used to have borrow oil and gas vessels to install turbine towers. The offshore wind industry is now large enough to warrant its own fleet of specialist ships (18). Batteries designed for storing renewable energy for weeks not hours are now worth producing in bulk. Commercial contracts for the sale of renewable energy exist. They can be copied.
4) financial risk in the industry is falling as investors see that overall costs are falling and operators can develop and run renewables projects and pay their debt. This is driven by reliability and improved capacity factors. This has a virtuous circle effect. As interest rates on renewables fall the debt service falls, making it easier for projects to pay their lenders, making the loan less risky. As interest rates fall the interest paid during the building of the project (19) falls, making the whole thing cheaper to build.
5) technology improvements are by far the least important factor. Very little that is new needs to be invented. Sure, it would be great if perovskite solar PV got the conversion rate of solar PV from 20-30% to 40-50% but I don't need that to make solar PV cheaper when I've got massive factories pumping out solar panels by the tens of thousands. Better materials for wind turbine blades would be great if it meant I could double the rotor length without worrying about wingtip rotation speeds, but I don't need them if it now costs me half as much to hire an installation vessel as it used to install the kits in the North Sea.
To say this a third time, the cost of renewables has demonstrably fallen over a long period of time for reasons that are baked in to the process, well observed and well understood from other industries which have gotten cheaper and better over time. If your position is that this is not going to continue for the foreseeable future than the onus is on you to explain why.
As a final concluding remark I would point out that the five fallacies, or their negation are linked. If I have a problem getting more renewables on to my grid (Fallacy 1) then a solution might be to wait for the costs of a solution to come down (Fallacy 5). If I have some systemic problems then perhaps the answer lies in shifting the technologies I use a bit to counter-act a weakness with my current set up with a strength from another technology. Mixed systems are more likely to be resilient than monocultures. Treating these fallacies as if they were independent of each other is, itself, a form of fallacy.
Footnotes.
(1) I'm tempted to snark "acceptable compared to roasting the planet so badly that billions of people die and the rest of us live in the iron age", but I concede that one could technically replace fossil fuels with nuclear power. it would just be more expensive, more dangerous and slower - so probably only a few billion dead.
(2) of which there are probably many thousands in the world
(3) known as renewables penetration
(4) literally big power cables with substations and transformers linking one grid or part of a grid with another.
(5) small power cables, small substations, lower voltages
(6) and power grids are very very heavily regulated with strict permitting conditions. You can't just build a windfarm and plug it in. You have to seek permission from several authorities including the grid operator - these things are planned 5-10 years in advance and subject to lots of analysis before anyone signs a purchase order for anything. So when I say revealed, I mean revealed in theory as part of the planning process.
(7) you do not win prizes for pointing out that solar PV doesn't work at night - you do not look astute, you look like a tool. We all know this about solar PV, we all know what the solutions are, and if you are going to have an inside baseball conversation you need to have watched Moneyball.
(8) Able to be switched on and off at will.
(9) and worth noting that the most advanced form of battery, lithium-ion has so far mostly been designed for going in laptops and mobile phones which have different use-cases than industrial power applications.
(10) although you do not need to be near actual magma to make geothermal power generation work. There are lots of places with hot rocks.
(11) line losses from HVDC cables are about 3% per 1,000 kilometers. It's about 8,000 kilometers from Riyadh to Marrakesh - so you are looking at about 25% losses to shift power from one end of the Sahara (through Europe if you have a longer cable) to the other. Power that cost you $20 per megawatthour in Riyadh would cost you $25 in Marrakesh. San Diego to New York is about 4,000 kilometers. 10-15% losses for crossing North America. It is 17, 000 kilometers from Sydney to London, so losses of about half. That power you bought in Darwin for US$20 is going to cost US$40 plus the cost of the cables when it gets to London.
(12) the problem here is not technological, it's political - we don't trust North African states to be reliable energy partners. It's also military. Europeans have been dicks to desert-dwellers to the south of us who can beat us in a fight. The USA decided to be dicks to desert-dwellers who were less good at fighting.
(13) which the good people of Morocco might like to buy at night time.
(14) ignoring for the time being climate change.
(15) e.g. the problem of security of supply for gas which we have solved by bombing Iraq and pretending the Russians are not at war with us.
(16) for example an aluminium smelter might take advantage of negative power prices on sunny windy days by running a double shift at short notice and having to pay workers a premium for having their offshift disrupted.
(17) policy support here means things like subsidies, tax breaks, rules requiring renewables, rules prohibiting pollution.
(18) by specialist I mean, better, cheaper, more reliable and quicker people or equipment or knowledge
(19) capitalised interest, part of the build costs
(20) the costs, the costs are falling, from glen to glen and down the mountainside and I'll be cheap in sunshine or in shadow
no subject
Date: 2021-09-06 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-06 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-06 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-07 06:56 am (UTC)I look at the cost trajectory of renewables and the increasing pace of rollout and I think - we've just about got this. Renewables are going to be cheap enough, soon enough that we'll avoid most of climate change. And then some days I look at it and I think, we've missed this by 20 years.
But we are definately moving and whilst we can't have it all *now* every solar panel or wind turbine installed today is a little bit of carbon avoided
no subject
Date: 2021-09-06 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-06 05:25 pm (UTC)It's geothermal power generation for areas without volcanic activity, like the Canadian Shield geologic formation.
https://www.eavor.com/
Basically, a closed-loop system using deep hard rock to boil a proprietary working fluid (I suspect ammonia), using a turbine to create electricity. The innovation is that the boiling point of the working fluid is well below the ambient heat of the rock.
When electric demand is low, the deep rock around the pipe warms up, allowing you to have higher surge capacity.
This would mesh well with the varying output of solar and wind. The cost is around $0.30 per kWh, so far more expensive than current renewable prices, but the ability to absorb demand might be an alternative to batteries.
Although if I ran a utility, I'd still like the scalability and quick installation of battery packs. Especially as battery prices are dropping so fast.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-06 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-06 09:58 pm (UTC)It might make sense for high latitude small communities, since it scales down better than nuclear. It also should work better in cold climates, which helps in extracting work from lower grade heat. Perhaps it can complement solar, which could help compensate for lower efficiency of geothermal during the arctic summer.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-07 07:02 am (UTC)I can see two area where it might have a roll.
One is avoiding seasonal storage, putting solar PV in to a battery in summer to draw out the power in late spring. That's costly because you only use the battery once a year. Producing electricity using expensive geothermal might turn out to be cheaper than producing it using something cheaper but storing it for months.
Second use that occurs to me is as a heat source to feed in to a district heating scheme as replacement for natural gas or fuel oil. Whilst electricity from renewables compares okay with electricty from gas on a cost basis as a source of heat it is at a cost disadvantage. Geothermal straight to heat might be better - but I'm not familiar enought with the cost structure of geothermal to know how much of the capital cost is the drilling and pipes and how much is the turbine.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-07 07:42 am (UTC)https://cornishlithium.com/projects/lithium-in-geothermal-waters/geocubed/
no subject
Date: 2021-09-07 07:07 am (UTC)That said I think it the argument that is most likely to be used in bad faith.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-06 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-07 07:04 am (UTC)You can run a similar system with heat, heating some inert mass when electricity is cheap and drawing down the heat.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-07 10:23 am (UTC)https://www.nspower.ca/your-home/energy-products/electric-thermal-storage
https://www.steffes.com/electric-thermal-storage/room-units/
no subject
Date: 2021-09-08 03:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-08 08:57 am (UTC)I've no great problem with nuclear being part of zero-carbon energy system. It kills fewer people than coal mining. Entirely possible that it turns out to be cheaper than seasonal storage in some situations in the long term. But I'm not optimistic about its long term prospects. And by long term I mean the next 50-100 years. It's struggled to meet the cost challenges it has and despite half a dozen navies building nuclear powered submarines no one has yet started building small modular reactors cheaply.
So I'm fully expecting new nuclear plants to be built in China or by China in other countries over the coming decades and for them to stay in operation for 60 years but I think by 2050, in hindsight, we may think they were the wrong choice.
The nuclear industry has some constraints on the number of reactors that can be built over any given period. It's been a while since I looked but I'd be surprised if there were more than a dozen foundries in the world capable of making a nuclear containment vessel for a large nuke.
I also agree that economies that sell fossil fuels are not just going to stop. They have currently both economic and political power and they will use it to keep producing as long as they can. But at some point people will stop buying it. The processes by which the coal industry for example can make itself cheap enough to compete involve automation which reduces the political power of the industry.
I find it quite telling that Saudi Arabia is in the process of preparing its population for life after oil money.
On your first point, did you mean highly relevant in the developed world rather than the developing world? I definitely agree it will be relevant for decades to come but I think more so in developed countries.
(As I was walking to work today thinking about your comment I was doing a bit of Fermi estimation on solar PV production in a 100% solar PV world - expected life of a solar panel say 25 years, which implies a 4% attrition rate annually. Therefore, if you were making solar panel factories you'd be unwise to make more factories than are needed to produce about 4% of the total number of solar panels deployed in the world. Which implies something like a 25 year build out period for solar PV. The same logic applies to wind turbines. )
I think the energy systems of the developed world have quite a lot of inertia. Their grids are mostly built around national grids serviced by a small number of very large coal or nuclear power stations, replaced recently by CCGT's. I think developing nations have an opportunity to move straight to newer technologies. That said, quite a lot of developing nations are sitting on sizeable reserves of oil or gas or coal and might fancy electrifying by digging that up and burning it locally.
One of the things I find really useful to remind myself of when looking at energy systems is the long lifespan of the industry. Even a small power plant is developed with a 25 year life expectancy and if I were building a nuclear plant today I'd be looking for 60-100 years of operation. There are a lot of assets being built around the world that will be on the grid for a generation maybe two to come and the shape of the grid we build in the next 25 years will persist for centuries.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-08 09:55 am (UTC)Developing, especially in middle-income countries, where fossil fuel-based infrastructure is already in place, but the money to convert isn't. Plus of course, fossil fuels are essential manufacturing feedstocks, especially in the chemical industry.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-08 12:54 pm (UTC)I am hopeful that renewables will be significantly cheaper than fossil fuels so the money will be less of an issue. Particuarly as most developing countries are closer to the equator then most developed countries. How the money shakes out I think depends on whether those countries are converting or scrapping exiting fossil fuel plants or replacing them at the end of their life. I'd expect them to do the latter whilst also using more renewables when adding capacity to their existing grid.
I need to find out more about the Indian energy system. That seems important in this context.