I lived there for a few years and tried to snorkel there - but my submechanophobia prevented me from getting more than a few feet into the water. Seeing those big spooky tubes scared the ever living shit out of me.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fe...

I also have megalophobia specifically related to ducting and that picture set of my panic response. I hadn’t really thought too much of it, but I wonder if Thr Empire Strikes Back is to blame.

https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia/

https://www.reddit.com/r/thalassophobia/

Which brings us to heat pollution; heating a river will cause the water to lose oxygen (which it already does not carry much of nor very well). Anything that depends on that oxygen will suffer as a consequence.

Ecosystems experience “disturbances” all the time. Trees fall. Animals dig up plant beds. Extreme fire and ice kill flora and fauna. These “disturbances” aren’t truly often destructive though: they encourage succession and biodiversity. Seed banks and migration allow new life to be expressed and fill the disturbance.

The problem is when disturbances are coming so fast and on such a wide scale that migration can’t keep up or the seed bank is destroyed. In such a situation, biodiversity and overall living mass can nosedive. You end up with a desert which will take millions of years to come back to life.

In the power plant example, the heat “pollution” likely killed off or drove off some species within an area. But it was isolated enough that surrounding ecologies and latent genes could fill the hole, and in fact drive succession and biodiversity further forward than it had been. That’s fine and good, and not true “pollution” in my mind. Or at least not the bad kind.

Environmentalism will only matter once it’s not so profitable to ignore.

Is it good that this plant is dumping a bunch of heat into the ocean? Probably not, but it made some people’s lives better for some number of years. Hopefully the long term consequences don’t make some large number of people’s lives much worse for a longer number of years.

There are some people that will manage to profit from the addressing of it. Others will profit from ignoring the issue or even outright refusing to admit it's an issue at all.

I know which side I'd rather be on.

Grifters taking advantage of a problem for personal gain doesn't mean that the problem doesn't need to be addressed, does it?

This may work for some marine species, but will also be damaging to others. If it affects a keystone species negatively, like say corals, then a larger die off can happen.

This is the exact logic why desalination plants are widely considered bad. Yes, if you look at the entire ocean, you’re barely increasing the salinity of the water, but for the local neighborhood where the waste water is released, the salinity goes up to the point that even saltwater fish find it toxic.

At electric beach it creates a nice, unique ecosystem and there's nothing wrong with that.

At least in Australia, a lot of beaches are eroding. Fast. Like, the Gold Coast is basically completely artificial at this point, they truck the sand in from somewhere else on a regular basis to keep the tourism and Schoolies dickheads constantly flowing through: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-20/the-gold-coast-ever-d...

In that very same Gold Coast (and in many beaches in Australia, and I believe other parts of the world), they erect literal "shark nets" to fence off the parts of the coast that people frequently swim in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_net

So my point is, we already engage in a terrific amount of ... I kinda wanna call it "shitty terraforming" ... in our coastal areas. Turning a few kilometer stretch of beach into a jacuzzi doesn't sound so bad to me when framed in that context :)

Cynical joke aside, renewable electrical systems also need cooling: heat pumps for AC, but also cooling batteries, solar panels if you want them to perform well, etc. I feel like it’s best if that heat is used in heat pumps to warm up water for showers, but there might be some waste left for Electric Beach.

Nuclear plants do the same thing.

Do you also avoid touching water from your kitchen sink? Your bathroom shower?

If you don't shower or bathe or use modern plumbing infrastructure then please, by all means correct my mistaken assumption.

In my experience in smaller boats using the same system (100-150 feet) corrosion is less of a problem than growth and calcification. Mostly we just dissolve everything with acid every once in a while on those systems.

Evolution didn't create all this life with the assumption there would be electric beaches. I suspect the loss of this warmth will be a small price to pay to reduce emissions and that other parts of the biome will flourish in-line with how evolution developed life in that regions for billions of years.

Anyways, the Dutch govt has allocated 400 million EUR [1] and expects to get 160MW - 380 MW installed for this amount (so 1-2x this battery plant in Hawaii). But the national network operator is reducing connection fees and hopes to trigger 2-5GW of new battery capacity by 2030. That's quite massive.

Expect similar new installations pretty much everywhere.

[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/09/netherlands-allocates...

I suspect for the Netherlands, wind supply is the main factor. That typically needs week-long storage; not sure what’s the best tech at this time frame.

Hawaii on the other hand could probably do some really effective pumped hydro plants. I wonder why the have so many battery installations instead?

Make a dike ring in eg. the north sea, pump water out of the ring into the rest of the North Sea to store power, and vice versa to get it back. Easy peasy...

I remember reading a couple of years ago that there were plans to construct such a "valmeer" inside of the Ijsselmeer, but I can't find much about it now so no idea whether it's been canned or not.

What's your citation on this? I've spoken to a few civil engineers on this topic and they just laugh and say people that promoting pumped hydro haven't done the math and do not realize the size/scale of the mechanisms that they are proposing, and that they are thus not at all feasible.

I don't think you can just say "pumped hydro is really great at scale" sans evidence.

We visited the "Power Vista" near Niagara falls (US side) where they have 13 turbines driven off the water that would otherwise fall over a cliff. What I did not previously know was that the facility includes pumped storage. There is a reservoir above the generator turbines that they can pump water into from the supply of water that would normally drive the turbines. I questioned the staff about this - particularly if it fit into the expansion of solar and wind. I don;t understand the answers I got.

* The station used to be base loaded but no longer is. That makes no sense to me unless they have to restrict flow to maintain a minimum flow over the falls.

* They don't use the pumped storage to store energy from other renewables (including the power station itself.) They will draw it down during the summer months to maintain the minimum flow over the falls.

It was interesting to see but I wonder why they don't run base loaded or make more use of the pumped storage. NB, I'm not an expert WRT generation of distributing load and I may not have been talking to the right people.

Example: a planned 8 GWh pumped hydro facility in Ely, Nevada. It's tiny compared to the landscape around it.

https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/

The Netherlands actually is second place in terms of solar generation per capita in the world (only Australia has more).

It’s probably the former.

- 565 MWh of storage capacity

- 185 MW of instantaneous power delivery capacity

- $219M of financing for the project

Hawaii's residential electricity price is roughly $0.415 per kWh vs a US average of $0.162.

https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-to-e...

Start where electricity is expensive and/or the revenue you steal from thermal generators (grid support mentioned, synthetic inertia, black start capability, etc) supports the economics, and work your way down as battery costs decline and you force thermal generators to become uneconomic due to compressing their runtimes. Think in systems.

https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/321

https://www.statista.com/statistics/183531/renewables-in-the...

In Texas, with an open market for generators, profit is the primary driver of the generation mix. But the difference is electricity generators make more profit with lower cost generation methods, the exact opposite of regulated utilities.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/power-grid-adviso...

They'd likely be doing much better if not for that.

Pro-profit is an irresistible force against most other forces

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

Examples: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aelectricitymaps%2Felectri...

https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib/b...

Huh? Solar, Hydro and Wind are all non-thermal sources of power.

Edit: Technically I believe Solar can function as a thermal plant as well if you are using mirrors to concentrate light to produce heat.

Commerical nuclear fission is unviable at this point [3], even at nimble startups [4] [5], but proponents are free to argue in support of it to anyone who will still listen. Renewables and batteries have reached an escape velocity trajectory [6].

This global energy system will eliminate energy poverty in our lifetime, and like bankruptcy, it'll happen slowly, and then all of a sudden.

[1] https://www.ku.ac.ae/two-minutes-of-sun-enough-to-power-a-ye...

[2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/12/25/all-i-want-for-christ...

[3] https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38894631

[5] https://neutronbytes.com/2023/01/24/nuscales-smr-costs-hit-h...

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502924

The links to my other comments are comments that contain citations supporting the thesis, versus an unnecessary wall of text. No facts I put forth are uncited.

For one thing, it's neither limitless nor free - the limit is the amount of radioactive ore we mine, and the cost is the cost of setting up a plant, running it, mining the ore, purifying it, transporting it,... The cost of nuclear is actually pretty high. I'm not talking about safety except that the cost factors in both passive and active safety mechanisms. And, they take _forever_ to build and bring to operation.

On the other hand, the price of solar (even without subsidy) is already cost competitive with _coal_ leave alone nuclear.[1] But it's intermittent, and batteries like the article are expensive.

So, the question is not either this or that, but what's the right mix...

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Electric...

Nuclear is rather expensive and, with current technology, not „limitless“ in any sense of the word

Heck, can literally glass the waste and dump it on the abyssal plane, job done. (You can do the maths on this easily enough, essentially zero life is effected and the radioactivity of the ocean increases negligibly)

Yeah, if you use standard new construction capacity planning in some cases solar + wind wins. If you target a much lower average/maximum cost per GW (and higher consumption) nuclear wins.

Things like EVs, electric furnaces for recycling, greener chemical plants and carbon capture mechanisms all become more viable with consistently cheap electricity.

I'd love to see your sources for this. To the best of my knowledge it isn't even close and solar is several times cheaper that nuclear. They used to be more comparable a decade or two ago, but solar costs have dropped dramatically since then.

It heaviy depends on how you set up the comparison. If you look at most current energy markets and say "how can I make money with these rules" the answer is almost always build a small amount of renewables. If you say, how should a government invest to retire coal power and achieve a low and stable energy cost, then nuclear can be viable (in some places).

Do you have any specific studies in mind I may have missed?

Take the California grid, peak energy usage is 2x minimum. Nuclear plants are insanely costly when ran at 100%. Imagine running at much lower capacity factors. Say the peaking plants run at 50%, that means the cost for consumers would be ¢2.4-4/kWh. [1]

Logically this entails that if we can solve a nuclear grid then we can solve a renewable grid since they impose the very similar constraints on the grid operators.

[1]: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost...

Only if we build reactors in the modern way rather than like the French did in the 1970s. (The reasons why its so much more expensive are complex, but mostly a regulatory ratchet and an tolerance for risk so low that if applied to the rest of life we'd close down parks as too dangerous)

Nuclear (and construction in general) is a victim of the Baumol Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect , where the cost of something increases over time if it does not see labor productivity improvement, simply because other sectors of the economy do see labor productivity improvement.

It loses every way. Its LCOE is 5x higher. The PR campaign to save it was about neither its cost nor the environment but economically buttressing the nuclear military industrial complex.

It's SO much more expensive in fact that it's actually cheaper to use wind/solar to electrolyze hydrogen, store it underground in a salt cavern and burn that to generate electricity.

>Things like EVs

Things like EVs are even less suited to nuclear power because they dont need constant power and can charge while electricity is cheap. Ditto electric heating.

Electricity is cheap mostly when there is more base load than demand; i.e. at night. I don't think you can have that concept if you want to remove base load and just make electricity when the weather lets you.

The only reason we can realistically get to net zero with batteries and renewables is because we export our polution abroad by having China produce everything. And we then ship it back to us using incredibly carbon-intense modes of transportation.

If we had to onshore all that production and actually count it towards our own emissions we'd have no hope of meeting our climate goals with solar panels and wind power.

Another point is that batteries like this are not actually intended for long term storage. They are instead about stabilizing the grid and dealing with short term spikes and dips in supply and demand of energy. Unlike a coal or gas plant, a battery can respond in milliseconds and be very cost effective for that. Spinning up coal and gas plants is expensive and slow. And they cost money when they are not running.

And while that single coal plant was able to provide so-called baseload; it would only have been able to do so if it was up and running 24/7/365. And that wouldn't be true. They are very reliable but occasionally coal plants have to be down for maintenance, repairs, etc. and this can take quite some time (weeks/months). Same with nuclear plants. So, relying on that to not happen was never a good plan.

Long term storage is always assumed to be needed to compensate for a lack of this baseload. However, baseload is actually a fuzzy notion until you express it in gwh and gw. Hawaii seems to be in the process of proving this might be a lot less than some people seem to assume. At least I'm not aware of them having any long term storage. They'll probably add more battery and resilience to their grid over time in the form of more wind and solar generation and additional batteries. But if these people modeled this correctly and did their homework, this might actually be fine as is. We'll find over time I guess.

One of the benefits of batteries is that they can be spread around and used to alleviate bottlenecks. Building transmission is very expensive, so this is a good early market for them.

These are called Non-Tranmissikn Alternatives or Non-Wires Alternatives:

NTAs are programs and technologies that complement and improve operation of existing transmission systems that individually or in combination defer or eliminate the need for upgrades to the transmission system.

In the UK it's easy to see that Wind and CCGT plants operate in inverse of one another, when it's windy most of our power comes from the wind and the CCGT are switched off. And conversely when it's calm the CCGTs produce most of the power.

Having said that, PG&E is the worst. Agreed.

[0] https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/billing-and-payment/rates-a...

I think California's IOUs are selling the most expensive electricity of any major provider in the nation.

One does have to wonder where all the money has gone, and what the supposed regulators at CPUC are allowing to happen.

Even if they were adequately servicing rural areas, that wouldn't be the root cause. If it was, then power would be more expensive in completely rural states than it is in California.

There was a lot of well-documented corruption decades ago (remember when an entire residential block exploded because they used to falsify line maintenance records and move the money into their personal accounts?) I doubt it's improved since then, and I'm pretty sure that's the root cause.

Power lines cause plenty of forest fires in rural states as well. But the money involved is probably very different, and Californians are bilked for higher rates simply because they are richer than someone in Idaho or Wyoming.

PG&E employees were caught skimming the money for line maintenance. At this point, the whole grid is falling apart.

The power poles in our area have over 20 degree bends in them, and are nearly as old as I am. Last year, we had dozens of trees take out the single digit mile line between ourselves and the freeway, and PG&E's availability was barely one nine. It used to make news if our area had a power outage over 12 hours. Now, it doesn't make news if the outage is under a week.

Other states in the US do not have problems like this. (Puerto Rico does, but it's not a state.)

On top of that the California state government has allowed the insurance cartel to form an artificial monopoly, and then funnel new plans into it, where they can charge a large multiple of fair market rates to homeowners (due to their monopoly status, and the fact that they're an association that was formed by the companies that conspired to refuse to cover the house). Of course, they provide terrible customer service and refuse to pay out after natural disasters.

Here's their web site:

https://www.cfpnet.com

We hav pricy electricity because of our "fixed" grid costs, not because of expensive generation. Utilities usually take a fixed rate of profit from T&D, and are therefore incentivized to overbuild as much as possible, and it's the regulators' job to stop that.

A socialized grid probably would be run much better than the one by PG&E, however legislation to buy them out has usually been extremely poorly timed so that the state, as purchaser, would take the biggest losses instead of the investors who backed the bad management team.

[1] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/RateComparison

So I'm guessing in the long run this will considerably lower the cost of electricity on the island as adding PV capacity is much cheaper than keeping a coal plant running and this battery allows to install much more and use the energy at night. Not sure whether Hawaii has much wind power but it would seem to be rather windy place.

Incidentally the totals work out about the same on a home solar system, my battery is 0.09 p/kwh and the Solar output averages out to about 0.07p/kwh but get paid for export at 0.15 p/kwh.

Edit: I suspect your calculations just represent depreciation over the batteries lifetime, which is only one of the costs involved.

The cycle life of these kinds of batteries is about 5000. Meaning they get about 5000 charge and discharge cycles before their useful life is over. It could be 2000 it could be 10000 and the definition of useful is also dependent on application.

So in it's lifetime this battery can store 5000 * 565 = 2825000 MWh

The cost of the system was $219M.

About 5% of energy is going lost due to inefficiencies.

$219M / (5000 * 565 * 0.95) = $81.6/MWh = $0.082 / kWh.

I am sorry for calculating the efficiency incorrectly in the original post.

This does not take into account the maintenance cost.

But full cycle is probably not the complete picture when it comes to grid scale storage since they have some control over the charge/discharge rate and they can optimize their usage, a bit like how electric cars allow you to stay in the 20-80% range instead of going all the way up to 100%.

On top of maintenance costs we probably need to account for finance costs (5% interest rate means repayments of 100mil over 10 years) and the fact batteries don't tend to ever get charged/discharged 100%.

Presumably if you built this you'd want a bit of return on your investment, so you'd have to charge more on top.

TBC: I think these batteries make economic sense (even more so if coal/petrol had externalities baked into their costs), but we don't want to oversell things

- land acquisition

- earthworks

- civil construction

- grid hookup

But this allows more PV generation to be put in which is the cheapest way of producing energy.

The important thing is battery storage is competitive with peaking plants over a period of hours. And lowest cost when it comes to short term supplies on the order of seconds to an hour.

Also the logistics of containerized batteries is great. You need a place to put them and a grid connection. And nothing more than that.

Seems kind of on the expensive side, but maybe it's reasonable for this kind of project -- and there might be some big one-time costs like connecting the site to the power grid.

Seems like there's a lot of room to drive costs down though. Some company could plausibly buy the batteries for $100/kwh, sell a completed power station for $200/kwh, and still make a profit.

$219,000,000.0 / 565,000 Mwh = $387.61/kwh. That's a bit more reasonable. That's not that far out of line with paying retail prices for reputable-brand LFP cells in the U.S.

https://www.thunderstruck-ev.com/calb-l173f163b.html

Fat Man was 88 TJ

https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/update-rolling-oahu-outages...

Further it’s generally offset by increased Wind power and decreased AC usage, and can be further compensated by increased hydroelectric generation.

You can have prolonged periods of abnormal weather. As an example, across Europe we had months of extremely low wind in 2020:

https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...

Ie: Lots of solar when the wind isn’t blowing

The only question is if you can charge in the day not if there’s clouds at night.

It will depend on what kind of storm are we talking. Depending on wind speed, wind turbines may need to lock their gearboxes to avoid falling apart.

But arguably yes, increased wind power before and after a large storm perhaps.

This is incorrect for several reasons first we care about Wind + Solar + Hydro not Solar alone.

8X % reduction in solar over 15 minutes sure, but track full days output and it’s not 90% across the full day. Similarly you rarely see 100% of theoretical output over a full day, so it’s really the delta between expected output and minimum output that matters.

Also, you don’t build exactly as much generation as you would need assuming 100% output every single day. That’s just as true for Nuclear/coal etc as it is Solar / wind. Redundancy has a cost, but it can effectively guarantee a surplus.

Batteries, like coal plants should be pretty resilient. Wind turbines should be mostly fine as well. The Chinese actually have lots of off shore wind and seasonal typhoons. You can expect some percentage of turbines to need maintenance after that probably. But overall it should be fine. Solar panels basically produce less power with cloud cover. And if they aren't mounted properly there might be some storm damage. But otherwise, that should be fine too. Hail would be a bigger challenge than wind. There were some reports of freakishly large hail stones destroying some solar panels a while back.

Mostly, having a lot of decentralized power generation in the form of wind turbines and solar panels all over the place is a good idea from a resilience point of view.

> It literally did not coincide at all, given that the coal plant in question closed in September 2022.

You simply don't get it. You're oddly requiring the bad storm happen soon after the plant was closed down for there to be a connection, which is obviously not the case. One can take an action which creates a vulnerability that takes some time to finally cause a problem.

You're saying something as silly as: the removal of the bolts holding in the emergency exit plug did not cause the hole in Alaska Airlines flight 1282, because the door didn't fly off immediately after the bolts were removed.

The original lack of capacity was caused by two malfunctioning units in a thermal plant. The capacity from this coal plant could only have allowed for one more failed unit.

Weak correlation if any.

In the studies I've seen the time shift required is on the order of seasons and the capacity required is cost prohibitive.

It may be that the weather patterns in Hawaii are sufficiently stable that it makes it possible to remove the companion base load generation capacity. The article seems to hint at the fact that the total capacity of the coal plant was much higher than the storage capacity of the battery system:

> With 565 megawatt-hours of storage, the battery can’t directly replace the coal plant’s energy production ...

So it isn't clear how much capacity has been lost in this switch. They may also be other changes in the generation portfolio that aren't discussed in the article.

If you don't like the cost assumptions (they cite sources) you can tweak them and see how the optimum solutions change.

The equivalent of Snowy 2 - 350 GWh in lithium ion batteries at current prices would be about $48 billion. The actual cost will be about $13 billion - ~3.7x cheaper.

I like that they use actual historical weather models though. I can't stand op-eds that assume that you wouldn't have a mix of solar and wind and short and long term storage to stabilize power output. It's the first model I've seen that's definitely on the right track.

Note I said solar plus batteries. Many of the ridiculous back of the envelope numbers you see for batteries assume every watt is sacred and must be stored and used.

It's usually cheaper to build more renewables, throw some over generation away and charge batteries for short term balancing when that is actually cheaper.

What you actually care about is electricity delivered and having weeks of storage isn't as valuable when you can rely on the sun rising every day.

Snowy 2 is a particularly bad project:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/snowy-2-much-how-can-a-2-2gw-wat...

but I'd suggest any hydro project where the dam isn't needed for other water based uses e.g. agricultural, is probably going to struggle to justify itself versus more renewables and batteries.

It's 3.7x cheaper with roughly equivalent ability to dispatch power and roughly similar round trip efficiency. I fail to see how that adds up to losing economically.

>What you actually care about is electricity delivered and having weeks of storage isn't as valuable

Snowy 2 isn't weeks. It's about ~4 hours. I agree that Australia doesn't need weeks worth of 90%-roundtrip-efficiency storage. About 8-12 hours is enough to achieve a 95% green grid.

>Snowy 2 is a particularly bad project:

Your article complains that the price is higher than it was advertised at which is true, but the new higher price "blowout" price tag of $12 billion still pegs it as 3.7x cheaper than batteries. For some reason your article chooses not to make this comparison, although it's keen to emphasize that 12 billion is 4k per family.

> The claimed 350,000MWh of storage has long been disputed by energy experts as not being deliverable:

> * The upper reservoir, Tantangara, is rarely full.

> * The lower reservoir, Talbingo, even if empty can only fit two-thirds of Tantangara’s water.

> * Talbingo is normally kept as full as possible as it also serves as the upper reservoir for the Tumut 3 pumped hydro station (1,800 MW).

> * Refilling Tantangara will take a couple of months due both to limited periods when pumping energy is cheap enough and to the limited inflow into Talbingo from Eucumbene Dam.

An article suggseting it can provide less than half, which already puts it nearly on par with just purely batteries:

https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-will-not-produce-nearl...

But you seem to have missed my main point that comparing the price of storing energy over longer than a day is silly if you can instead spend some of the money on solar power which can deliver power on a predictable schedule and reduce the need for storage.

Their claims don't make a lot of sense though.

>The upper reservoir, Tantangara, is rarely full.

So... it's a battery that doesn't get filled up. Cool I guess we need to produce more power so we can utilize it better? No. They want it shut down.

>The lower reservoir, Talbingo, even if empty can only fit two-thirds of Tantangara’s water.

And? It's simple physics - you push water uphill that stores power. Push it uphill again and you store even more power.

>Refilling Tantangara will take a couple of months due both to limited periods when pumping energy is cheap enough

"Oh no, we haven't built enough solar and wind yet to match the storage capacity of this enormous battery. Let's just stop building it!" wtf?

>An article suggseting it can provide less than half, which already puts it nearly on par with just purely batteries: https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-will-not-produce-nearl...

This article looks even more like bitterness from the competition and they seem similarly COMPLETELY INCAPABLE of comparing what they call a "blowout cost" to the cost of batteries. Probably because 3.7x still blows chemical batteries out of the water and they're acutely aware of that fact being inconvenient.

>But you seem to have missed my main point that comparing the price of storing energy over longer than a day is silly if you can instead spend some of the money on solar power which can deliver power on a predictable schedule

You seem to be saying that storage can be done away with. It can not.

You're putting a lot of effort into missing my point.

A system that has a gas turbine backup for that non-windy week of winter that happens every 5 years is something of substantial value. Use batteries for capital maximizing daily cycles, and leave coal and gas as "storage" for seasonal emergency cycles, this would be a major, major achievement for humanity.

So this makes the battery and the gas plant compete in the market place, each with it's own economic strengths. The gas plant won't handle daily cycles since the emissions cost would kill it, but it can provide emergency power at a rate and for a duration that would make batteries monstrously capital expensive.

By slowly sliding up the emissions pricing, you will tradeoff the long term emissions versus the energy cost, and let the market efficiently allocate the resources until net zero, or near zero, becomes economically attainable.

I can see that cost for the solar/wind itself but seems very low for the masses of hydrogen (and associated round trip losses) that it's suggesting. I have read some estimates that it could at least double the price?

I understand why people are so quick to argue against batteries as a power supply when they are unproven in a given scenario. I think it's a narrow way of thinking that ignores everything we know about the progression of technology and devalues the skilled professionals actually doing this work, but I understand. What I don't understand is what compels a person to grasp at straws and pose speculative "what ifs" after a project is successfully in operation. What more do you need? Does it need to run fifty years before you're convinced?

    * dark starting
    * capacity
    * grid stabilization

I think you are mis-interpreting my comment and being unfair in characterizing what I'm saying as "narrow minded" or "grasping at straws".

> The old coal generator provided three key values to Oahu, Keefe explained: energy (the bulk volume of electricity), capacity (the instantaneous delivery of power on command), and grid services (stabilizing functions for the grid, wonky but vital to keeping the lights on).

> The battery directly replaces the latter two: It matches the coal plant’s maximum power output (or “nameplate capacity,” in industry parlance), and it is programmed to deliver the necessary grid services that keep the grid operating in the right parameters.

What do you think of the idea that, given proper experience and technology, we can have a grid system that does not suffer from inadequate wind/solar/hydro/battery? That is the mindset we need to shift our framing to as these technologies continue to expand and prove themselves on larger and larger scales. I have no doubt people had to shift their framing around the entire idea a reliable coal-based electricity production once upon a time as well.

Tony Seba has some presentations on this topic. His argument is that renewables is getting so cheap that you can build so much that the minimum production covers all days with few exceptions. I guess that might assume some reasonable grid upgrades as well.

Marc Z Jacobsen has some fairly detailed studies for going 100% renewables. He doesn't generally assume any improvements in technology, so his estimates are conservative. I don't remember seeing anything about seasonal storage.

You may ask about colder regions. Seems like the solution there will be 1. Trash burning (getting common in Scandinavia.. you could even do it with CO2 capture as a power plant in Oslo, Norway is developing), with district heating 2. Geothermal for district heating 3. Nuclear for a bit of extra baseload (UK, Sweden and Finland are all building nuclear)

Also keep in mind that to go zero-carbon, we need to make a hell of a lot of hydrogen, ammonia, e-fuels, biofuel/oil/coal (I just read news about a Danish company starting commercial operation of a giant microwave reactor that can efficiently make bio-oil/coal from sewer sludge).

All these solutions will imply a lot of storage capacity. If you're making enormous quantities of hydrogen you're going to have buffers at both the production and consumption side. Production can probably be throttled if needed.

I'm guessing that the hydrogen power plants we already have will also be kept around to serve as backup. There's some pretty serious talk about switching the natural gas pipelines from Norway to Europe from gas to hydrogen. First making hydrogen with carbon capture and storage, then green hydrogen made with off-shore wind.

And off-shore wind is another thing that's getting more common. If you build really big off-shore wind turbines the production is very reliable.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4dc8

It appears to be a somewhat arbitrary notion of how long would it take the full storage to be completely depleted, if it was being partly offset by continuing renewable generation over that time.

This accounts for the most initially bizarre claim of the paper, that introducing bioenergy into the system (i.e. storage of natural gas from non-fossil sources) would increase this 12 week period to a full year:

> Interestingly, the decrease in renewable overcapacity in parallel to the increase in overall storage volume means that the period when storage is fully used, that is, the period that defines storage requirements, is prolonged to more than 1 year (10 October 1995 to 3 February 1997).

But obviously a longer period is actually better by this weird metric.

They give some more reasonable numbers of 12 days of energy storage elsewhere, which corresponds with figures given in models like this one, which suggest 13 days of power-to-X fuel would be a low cost optimum for Germany:

https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...

i.e. the stored gas would if burned and used exclusively for electricity production would last 13 days as it equals 4% of the total electricity production. Of course, it wouldn't be used in that manner, but in concert with other energy sources, leading to the inflated number you quote from the paper.

And of course, an electricity system that burned 4% fossil gas would hardly be the end of the world. I personally would rather see nations do that and pay a carbon fee to let poorer nations achieve their low hanging goals than obsess about the last 4% in an unhealthy and (often seemingly intentionally) conuterproductive manner.

Based on a quick reading it seems they are assuming the average supply is 130% of the average load over the year.

It depends very much on where you live. Famously, California can get to 100% renewable production with 3 hours of storage, because production is very stable, load peaks match production well and there is sufficient natural hydropower resources available.

In contrast, Finland would need about 3 months worth to hit 100% renewable. Because worst load peaks happen when production from both wind and solar can be zero for a prolonged period, and natural hydro output is limited at the same time. 3 months is absolutely not actually feasible, so there will always need to be some baseload from nuclear or fossil sources.

But 2-3 days of storage is still quite a lot. The recently started OL3 power plant had a total construction cost of ~11B€, making it one of the most expensive construction projects ever. It has a nameplate capacity of 1600MWe, assuming 95% capacity factor (it goes up when it's cold and down when it's warm), if you spent it's construction cost building grid-scale batteries, assuming the lowest cost of a completed battery project anywhere in the world, you'd get something like 27 hours of storage. So even if the primary production was free, if you need more than that, you'd be better off building the world's largest and most expensive nuclear power plant instead of batteries + renewables.

He was a coauthor on a recent review article on 100% RE energy systems. One conclusion of the review article is that e-fuels are very useful, and that with e-fuels costs are similar to those of energy systems based on fossil fuels.

E-fuels (like hydrogen) inherently provide very long term storage.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...

gives a crazy low cost for a solar + battery plant that assumes storage for an hour and a half which is certainly too little. When I split out their generation and storage numbers and put in the assumption that 12 hours of storage gets you through the night the price is getting in the same range as gas turbine power plants.

There's the seasonal problem too, the answer to that is some combination of building more solar capacity or adding huge amounts of storage. I'd estimate that the daily insolation varies by a factor of 2 or so in NY

https://www.solarenergylocal.com/states/new-york/new-york/

so you could build maybe twice the solar capacity and have enough generation in the winter. Judged that way the system cost is creeping in the direction of what nuclear energy costs, though you've got a lot of "free" electricity in the summer although that could be "free as in puppy". Hypothetically you could do something like desalinate seawater and pump it uphill into reservoirs but operating any kind of industrial factory intermittently is going to be murder for capital and operating costs. There is this idea

https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/

where you could smooth out diurnal variation in a "hydrogen economy" factory by overbuilding electrolyzers, but to take advantage of "free" summer electricity you might have to lay off all your workers half the year not to mention building surplus transmission infrastructure.

Of course it takes detailed modeling of supply and demand to get good cost estimates for renewable plus storage systems and one thing I find irksome about that EIA report is that it quotes one number for a solar energy plant which is just wrong because the exact same solar plant will product a lot more power in Nevada and it will in Wisconsin. Many people are quoting these numbers and not really aware that they are discrediting themselves and the renewable energy cause because quoting a number that doesn't depend on time and place just violates common sense.