Let's Review What's Going on Worldwide
We can learn a lot from others
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The below is a selection of articles from across the world about energy. It is mostly governments and very credible research institutions. There’s a big wonderful world outside of Colorado and we can learn from it.
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it
— George Santayana
IEA: New Nuclear in the EU by 2040 to be Cheaper than Renewables + 8 Hours of Storage
Keep in mind 8 hours is not enough to get through 1 day of dunkelflaute.
Pennsylvania’s once top coal power plant eyed for revival as 4.5GW gas-fired AI campus
It’s for datacenters and they are unwilling to use wind & solar & batteries because of the downtime those entail.
Percentage of Wind + Solar vs Price of Electricity by Country
Excellent discussion of the relationship between more wind & solar and higher prices.
Clean Firm Power is the Key to California’s Carbon-Free Energy Future
TL:DR; It requires nuclear or gas with carbon capture1
Sweden plans €27bn in state loans to build new nuclear reactors
Keir Starmer set to approve nuclear plant in bid to power up economic growth
eia: Since the 2011 Fukushima accident, Japan has restarted 14 nuclear reactors
Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity
LCOE2 isn’t a good comparison because it does not account for batteries for wind & solar. This is better (still not great).
What is different about different net-zero carbon electricity systems?
My hope is Colorado can learn from these others rather than following the Germany example of wind & solar giving us high prices.3
I’ll leave you with one final comment. In a discussion on reddit I was asked why I was proposing to power Colorado primarily with wind & solar. I replied I was not, that it was the state going that way. That person replied with:
The thing about Rube Goldberg machines is that you can definitely build them.
The question becomes should you build them.
— reddit user
It’s not clear we can get affordable carbon capture.
Levelized Cost of Electricity.
To Germany’s credit their average blackout/customer/year is 13 minutes. Better than Colorado’s 100 minutes.
In the old days LCOE was accurate, since the system costs were identical to all generation sources. Wind and solar stopped making LCOE an accurate measure of anything.
One of the main problems is the need for inertia in a system. You MUST have inertia, or something very like it, for the system to even work at all. Wind and solar do not generate any inertia - in fact they suck inertia from the grid. At low levels this has no cost, but as you increase wind and solar, you increase the inertia demands from other units in the system. This becomes very expensive. And this cost is over and above all other costs.
To explain, even more basically, inertia is the grids' ability to maintain a stable electrical frequency. Maintaining constant frequency is critical for safe operation of the grid. As demand changes, even by a tiny bit, something in the system needs to respond to that change. A large spinning mass, say a turbine, has a lot of inertia, and by slowing or speeding up, slightly, and adjustment can be made. It is incredibly quick and reliable.
Solar and wind have no inertia. Not only that, but they also inherently destabilize the grid, due to weather (a cloud passes over the sun, your voltage drops at the solar panel - something else in the system must immediately take up that slack).
As wind and solar become large parts of the total system, the need for inertia compounds rapidly. At the stupid level, you maintain a large spinning mass in a nat gas generator solely to provide inertia to the system (side note - the Germany lies about this, a lot. They don't "count" emissions form nat gas generators that are spinning and providing inertia because they are technically not providing power to the grid. They are on standby. They are, however still burning gas).
These 8-hour batteries are NOT for moving power from Tuesday to Thursday, they are there solely to solve the inertia problem. That is why they seem like such a joke, yet power providers are insisting they be added to the system. Almost their sole function is to provide synthetic inertia to the systems. That is what they get paid for, and how they generate money. The exist to fix a huge problem wind and solar is creating. Yet these batteries are almost always misreported as "storage", even though there are not usually used for that purpose. That 8-hour storage isn't adequate for a dunkleflaute, it isn't even adequate for 8 hours of night, because it is being used for another purpose.
Thanks for explaining the use of the 8 hour battery. It led me to read an NREL paper on the subject "Inertia and the Power Grid: A Guide Without the Spin"