The term Baseload power is not a goal, it's a Problem with some types of power not being flexible. In that context, soar is closer to Baseload power than peaking power plants. Yes, it currently better matches demand than Baseload power, but as you ramp it up the supply / demand miss mach will simply shift around the day.
Turning on some peaking power plants at night vs the day is not a significant issue. Further, the solution is excess capacity not long term storage.
You are handwaving away huge issues here. As Bill Gates said in the same interview I quoted from before:
>"...It’s kind of ironic: Germany, by installing so much rooftop solar, has it that both their coal plants and their rooftop solar are available in the summer, and the price of power during the day actually goes negative—they pay people to take it. Then at night the only source is the coal, and because the energy companies have to recover their capital costs, they either raise the price because they’re not getting any return for the day, or they slowly go bankrupt.
There are many people working on storage—batteries are a form of storage, and there’s a few others, like compressed air, hot metals. But it’s not at all clear that we will get grid-scale economic storage. We’re more than a factor of 10 away from the economics to get that."
Having fossil fuel plants that only operate when needed, but get paid more per kWh than they do now when they run all the time (since as well as fuel costs they have up front construction to cover) is not even close to being a problem. It is in fact part of the solution. What is he doing complaining about this?
Negative prices are also not the big drama he makes them out to be. Sad that he's got a reputation as some kind of genius and he's scared of negative numbers as if it's some kind of witchcraft to have too much of something and use pricing and markets to decide which providers should scale back.
Translating for those scared of negative prices: someone wants to keep providing power for some reason (maybe their setup doesn't like rapid changes in output, which would cost them money in repairs), they want to pay you $X to shut down your system instead. Do a calculation and figure out if shutting down your system is cheaper than that, if so, take the money. Market forces at work! The inflexible system don't make as much money, and the flexible systems gain it.
Or, someone with flexibility in when they need electricity says "I'll agree to heat my water tanks at the point that helps the grid most, how much will you pay me for doing that? The amount we'll pay you is the negative price, except not negative anymore".
Coal and nuclear are huge steam engines. They cool down when you turn them off which causes thermal stress and you then need to heat them up again before they can generate power. Thus Germany's problem is they have coal power plants in the first place.
Gas turbines also have thermal stress, but they are designed for this and they loose vastly less power when you turn them off. With enough of them you can have zero storage and zero problems. Because storage is simply one solution to production / demand mismatch not the only one.
Now yes, peaking power costs more but energy costing more at night is rational behavior and without subsidies you will minimize overall costs.
On the plus side, the CO2 from burning natural gas is less than coal and it doesn't emit mercury or the other particulates and doesn't have a waste issue like coal does. Unfortunately for those who care about climate change, (and if you don't, you should) there are inevitable methane releases from fracking and from distribution of natural gas and those are now known to be much worse than previously thought:
>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25.
...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.
100,000 tons of methane with a half life of less than 10 years. The math is complex and 1 ton of methane becomes more than one ton of CO2, but the actual long term impact is fairly minimal vs the savings from not using Coal. Remember that's ~100,000 tons / ~10,000,000,000 tons = 1/100,000 so yea methane is bad, but in this context it's 0.001% so it's still a rounding error even if it's 100 times that bad.
Anyway, I agree it's not without costs. But, if we got to the point where peaking power from gas makes up ~10% of total electricity supply and the rest of that is renewable power then we will have made massive progress. In other words don't let perfection stand in the way of progress.
>100,000 tons of methane with a half life of less than 10 years. The math is complex and 1 ton of methane becomes more than one ton of CO2,
You are downplaying the impact of methane. As I quoted in the last post, the IPCC estimate is that over 100 years a given amount of methane is 34 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas compared to CO2. Over a 20 year period (which is probably more relevant considering where we are in climate change) methane is 86 times more potent.
>...but the actual long term impact is fairly minimal vs the savings from not using Coal.
That's the problem - there is enough methane being released by our new reliance on natural gas there is concern that we may be having just as much of an impact on climate change as if we went and burned coal.
>...Remember that's ~100,000 tons / ~10,000,000,000 tons = 1/100,000 so yea methane is bad, but in this context it's 0.001% so it's still a rounding error even if it's 100 times that bad.
The problem is that EVERY natural gas well, storage facility and pipeline leaks methane. This was just the largest one. As I quoted in the last post, "...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas."
>... But, if we got to the point where peaking power from gas makes up ~10% of total electricity supply and the rest of that is renewable power then we will have made massive progress.
Yea no kidding - 90% power from intermittent sources would be pretty remarkable. The problem is that 90% power from intermittent sources won't be possible unless there are major advances in grid storage technologies.
In terms of having to use natural gas, nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, so there is no reason this can't be done elsewhere. Minimizing our use of natural gas when when you consider the climate changing negative externalities of natural gas, would be a good thing.
That's just lying with numbers. 86 / 5 = 17.5 so average from year 20 to year 100 is 34 - 17.5 = 16.5x. And again the majority of that 16.5 is over years 20-40.
Further, because of this decay increases in release rate don't stack at 86x year over year. You get a magnified increase in the first year and a smaller net increase every year after that until your down to the carbon content of methane.
Under 10% total gen from peaking power is viable with over production of wind and solar and zero grid storage. It's not going to be 10% 24/7 but 0 most of the day, regular generation at part of the day, and rare spikes up to 50%. You can drop that under 5% with moderate grid storage of around 1h average demand, but you start needing vastly more storage the lower you want to take that number.
No, those numbers are from the IPCC which represents the mainstream consensus. Take it up with them if you think you are right and they are wrong. Using the 20 years number is reasonable considering how far along we are in climate change. As the IPCC report states: "There is no scientific argument for selecting 100 years compared with other choices (Fuglestvedt et al., 2003; Shine, 2009). The choice of time horizon is a value judgement since it depends on the relative weight assigned to effects at different times."
>...Under 10% total gen from peaking power is viable with over production of wind and solar and zero grid storage.
Yea I hear advocates make such claims all the time. Unfortunately I never hear the same thing from people who actually run a major utility. We might get there someday, but for now I have to agree with Gates: "...What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."
Ed: Make that 5/4 * 16.5x or 20.6 However, again it becomes more than 1 CO2 by weight because the 2 O's in CO2 make up a larger fraction of total weight than 4 H's.
Nobody ever mentions varying the price of electricity to reduce demand when the sun isn't shining. We need to get past the assumption that electricity prices should be fixed.
This won't solve the baseload problem, but it will reduce it.
Electric prices have never been fixed at scale. It's really only small scale consumers that get a fixed but often higher rate. See Enron for example. Changing when energy is cheap does not break the model.
So yea, residential customers get a fixed rate but that's because there is no point in demand based pricing. They simply charge you enough that it makes little difference what time of day you use slightly more power. In the future the same is likely to be true.
Turning on some peaking power plants at night vs the day is not a significant issue. Further, the solution is excess capacity not long term storage.