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posted by martyb on Wednesday September 11 2019, @07:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the things-prior-to-2038 dept.

Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035, Study Says

By 2035, it will be more expensive to run 90% of gas plants being proposed in the U.S. than it will be to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems, according to the report Monday from the Rocky Mountain Institute. It will happen so quickly that gas plants now on the drawing boards will become uneconomical before their owners finish paying for them, the study said.

The authors of the study say they analyzed the costs of construction, fuel and anticipated operations for 68 gigawatts of gas plants proposed across the U.S. They compared those costs to building a combination of solar farms, wind plants and battery systems that, together with conservation efforts, could supply the same amount of electricity and keep the grid stable.

As gas plants lose their edge in power markets, the economics of pipelines will suffer, too, RMI said in a separate study Monday. Even lines now in the planning stages could soon be out of the money, the report found.

Hopefully our electrical distribution grid will still work.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:24AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:24AM (#892621)

    "together with conservation efforts" is in the Bloomberg article, but not in the original document. There is no fudge factor.

    Maybe the thing Bloomberg was talking about is what the report describes as "demand-side management," i.e. reducing peak load by shifting power consumption to off-peak times, or storing power locally in batteries to handle peak draw.

    I appreciate you're trying to get an apples-to-apples comparison, but it's not that easy. Fossil fuel power can throttle up and down. You don't want to run the power plant at full power all the time because it would wear out. Solar and wind power plants make however much energy they make. There's no throttle. It's like a 300HP car engine vs. a 300HP tractor engine, the tractor engine is much bigger because designers know it's going to have to make full power most of the time it is operating, whereas the car only needs it for a few seconds now and then. That means that you actually end up overbuilding capacity in order to meet peak demand, and you end up throwing away some of the power that is generated when it's not peak demand. Demand-side management reduces this overbuild.

    Despite this, the original report also includes results for what happens if there's no demand-side management used. It takes about eight more years to completely overtake natural gas.

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