It doesn't matter how cheap it is. No sun and no wind means no power, which means using coal and other fossil fuels. Increasing use of natural gas has reduced emissions more than switching to renewables.
There's a thought provoking web site out there, Low Tech Magazine. Their basic idea is that electricity 100% of the time isn't as important for everyone and everyting as we think. The need for base capacity is still there of course, but if we allow unnecessary things to shut down when there's less supply we can get away with less.
(Yes, of course we need to have electricity in hospitals and for heating 100% of the time - but if the newspapers are unavailable three days per year, or if some non-essential TV channels turn off when it's really cold - maybe not as bad.)
Increased natural gas usage has been primarily pushed because of the rise renewables.
Natural gas is currently the peaker plant solution to renewables. The fact that more of these plants exist is primarily driven by the fact that larger portions of the grid are being pushed towards renewables.
I think it's more because gas is cheap because of fracking. And the timing between the rise in gas use and the rise in renewable deployments is mostly coincidental. If gas were expensive it wouldn't be used. As it is, gas is cheap and has 1/4 the emissions of coal (IIRC).
The thing is, storage is unsolved. Battery isn't going to cut it. Pumped hydro isn't realistic for much, and we're using intermittent hydro about as well as we can. Thermal solar is unproven economically, but getting closer. Power->gas->power is marginal.
A little bit of nuclear in the mix, plus storing biogas, and aggressively pursuing thermal solar is very important, IMO. It just isn't possible to overprovision wind enough to meet 99th percentile supply/demand mismatch, but having a few percent of nuclear base load really helps.
If we want people to stop burning natural gas and heating oil for their homes, and more to move to electric cars, we'll need a ton more base load, too.
Yes, nuclear can't compete with natural gas base load, but we want to stop burning so much natural gas, so...
Natural gas isn't a base load power source, it is a peaker power source.
Even with a pure nuclear grid, you'd still need a peaking source. That would be provided, probably, by natural gas or hydro if available.
A storage solution is simply required regardless of where the grid goes. I think that Liquid metal batteries look to be the best solution for grid level storage. (relatively cheap, super long life, if massively adopted would likely become a lot cheaper).
> Natural gas isn't a base load power source, it is a peaker power source.
Gee, what are all these combined cycle gas plants that take 12-24 hours to start/shutdown, and require high duty cycle use to be economically competitive, if they're not base generation?
(Yes, I know we're starting to get faster combined cycle plants, but they're still not fast, and they still require to be producing power most of the time to be viable).
> Even with a pure nuclear grid, you'd still need a peaking source. That would be provided, probably, by natural gas or hydro if available.
I suggested use of biogas and hydro in the comment you replied to! Did you not read it, or just talked past it?
> A storage solution is simply required regardless of where the grid goes.
Sufficient overprovisioning of renewables and smart grid greatly reduces the amount of storage/peaking needed. A bit of reliable, carbon-neutral base load greatly reduces the amount of overprovisioning needed.
> Gee, what are all these combined cycle gas plants that take 12-24 hours to start/shutdown if they're not a source of base load? :P
:) Fair point. I generally don't think of NG as being used for base load but you are correct.
> I suggested use of biogas and hydro in the comment you replied to! Did you not read it, or just talked past it?
I missed it in your original comment.
I've not looked in enough to biogas, honestly, to fairly say anything about it. Hydro is a little different though. It requires a lot of land and the right geography in order to work. While I think there are more places where you can add hydro, I think it they are generally running out. It also doesn't help that a lot of well meaning, but IMO wrong ;), environmentalist really oppose hydro for the effects it has on the river critters. That sort of red tape makes gums up new deployments about as bad as new nuclear deployments are gummed up.
That being said, states with a lot hydro in place (north west states, primarily) would be foolish, IMO, not to simply go all renewable. They already have the storage problem solved in the form of hydro power.
> Sufficient overprovisioning of renewables and smart grid greatly reduces the amount of storage/peaking needed. A bit of reliable, carbon-neutral base load greatly reduces the amount of overprovisioning needed.
Perhaps. You'd have to somehow incentivize some industrial businesses to participate in the grid smartly. For example, an electric smelter which only operates during overproduction periods. IDK, maybe the power companies get involved in the steal milling business.
You might be able to get there with things like smart ACs and electic car charging, but it seems like the required cost of deploying that sort of equipment would be pretty high (Higher than a special purpose steal mill? I'm not sure).
> Hydro is a little different though. It requires a lot of land and the right geography in order to work. While I think there are more places where you can add hydro, I think it they are generally running out. It also doesn't help that a lot of well meaning, but IMO wrong ;), environmentalist really oppose hydro for the effects it has on the river critters. That sort of red tape makes gums up new deployments about as bad as new nuclear deployments are gummed up.
Yah, I'm not really saying to add hydro-- there's few opportunities to do this.
But lots of hydro installations are already suited to "peaker" use, where you draw from reservoir just when you need to, and many more can be adapted this way. (Really doing this effectively may require large capital costs to increase the amount of peak generation available from them, drawing down the reservoir more quickly).
> Perhaps. You'd have to somehow incentivize some industrial businesses to participate in the grid smartly. For example, an electric smelter which only operates during overproduction periods. IDK, maybe the power companies get involved in the steal milling business.
This already exists. You can get a big discount on your power if you are a big industrial customer and willing to be turned off with little notice. We need to extend this out to delaying house heat slightly, etc, electric car charging points, as you say.
> the required cost of deploying that sort of equipment would be pretty high
Ain't nothing compared to the capital cost of overprovisioning further or doing storage.
That's what I'm saying: use nuclear as part of a series of things to limit the amount of wind overprovisioning needed. We're going to have extra power during the day most of the time.
But the intermittency at night of wind alone is a big problem. It seems like burning some gas-- hopefully mostly biogas-- is part of the solution, along with leveraging hydroelectric to the maximum extent.
As we add things like electric heating and electric cars charging, etc-- nuclear has a big opportunity to address this increase in base load (and can be effectively combined with smart grid on these uses).
In the end, we cannot build out just wind fast enough, anyways, even if we ignore the overprovisioning required for availability. Might as well build out nuclear in parallel.
The point is, we don't really see a path to enough wind + appropriate storage in order to have a carbon neutral grid... but France performed the transition to a nearly-carbon neutral grid decades ago with nuclear, and the fully-amortized cost of French electricity isn't that bad.
Neither nuclear power nor wind/solar is readily ramped up/down economically, but at least nuclear power is consistently available and can be dispatched to some extent.
You can always turn off renewables during periods of overproduction. Whether you build nuclear+renewables or just renewables, you need to overprovision the renewables and be willing to turn them off. You just have to do this more with only renewables.
(Of course, you'd want to use all available strategies to reduce required overprovisioning-- including maximizing use of dispatchable hydroelectric and biogas, some storage, and agreements with utility users to reduce usage during times of critical supply shortages).
In, ahem, "fairness" to Germany, they operate some of the dirtiest lignite coal power plants in all of Europe. [0] Despite their self-promotion as a leader in green energy transition with the Energiewende, they seem unwilling to shut down these very carbon-intensive operations. Even replacing these plants with hard/anthracite coal or natural gas would be a major improvement, but alas.
