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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.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 11 2019, @12:06PM (8 children)
Alternately, the people making those plants are thinking more short term. Just because something might not be profitable in 2035 as the study claims, doesn't mean it can't be profitable before then.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 11 2019, @12:36PM
Probability of actual motive doubles with each halving of the time scale.
16 years in the future most of today's decision makers will be dead, senile, or retired to their private islands with a staff of young native girls to take care of their every need and desire. Post 2035 economics don't mean a lot to any of them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by meustrus on Wednesday September 11 2019, @04:14PM (4 children)
Just because the battery systems are "expensive" doesn't mean that fossil fuel plants are cheaper. Power plants are really "expensive", especially in recurring operation costs that are order of magnitude smaller for wind and solar, even with battery systems.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 12 2019, @10:16AM (3 children)
Natural gas plants aren't just fossil fuel plants. They're the cheapest sort of fossil fuel plants by a considerable margin [eia.gov] (the same link shows some advantage over battery systems in the cost department - assuming battery systems are actually as cheap as they presently are costed as - Tesla in particular may be greatly underpricing its battery systems). They have superior capability to battery systems. They don't need to be charged up in order to work. And they won't run out of energy after a few hours of operation.
The only real advantages battery systems have is a slightly faster response time and the ability to absorb energy which is useful when the grid is so oversupplied that they need to pay someone to consume the electricity.
I explicitly mentioned that the natural gas plant was replacing the role of the battery systems not wind and solar. Battery systems need to be charged in order to work. That's considerable recurring operation costs right there. And the distributed nature of solar and wind means considerable energy losses.
Further, you're ignoring the camel in the tent, reliability. Batteries do make these renewable sources somewhat more reliable. But natural gas can actually replace capacity, should bad weather or accident take substantial generation off the grid. The capacity of natural gas won't degrade like batteries or solar will.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday September 13 2019, @07:04PM (2 children)
How does it cost money to keep batteries charged? They're supposed to collect the off-peak power that otherwise would be wasted.
Meanwhile, the gas plant needs to be running at its basic capacity 24/7, because scaling generation is slow, running too low is wastefully inefficient, and the only thing more complicated and expensive than turning it off is turning it back on again when it's needed.
It's those scaling costs that make fossil fuel plants unsuited to handling cloudy days in a solar deployment.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 13 2019, @10:01PM
No, it doesn't.
Batteries are pretty slow on the scaling generation too (particularly since they don't actually generate anything!), running natural gas too low is much less wastefully inefficient than running at a loss, and the whole point of natural gas is that it turns on and off really efficiently and quickly.
What would those scaling costs be again? Because you have yet to mention one.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 13 2019, @10:13PM
Only if there such waste. I already granted that is possible when companies are paying to get rid of their electricity. But otherwise it replaces some other use (for example, off-peak refrigeration, cryptocurrency mining, etc). The user might not be paying much for that electricity, but it's not a genuine waste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 11 2019, @11:27PM (1 child)
Both solar panels and batteries are getting cheaper and more efficient.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 12 2019, @10:36AM