On The Highway to Energy Poverty

Colorado's Energy Plan will deliver unreliable expensive energy

First, I’ve made this post as short as possible, but no shorter. I am postulating that much of what everyone thinks about Colorado’s energy policy is wrong. And that requires me to have incontrovertible proof. For that proof, please read on.

Second, as you come to learn we’ve been going the wrong way, it’s natural to point fingers. I think that’s unfair. Two months ago I would have voted yes for an initiative to tax me more in support of wind energy. We all believed the conventional wisdom.¹ None of us have time to fact check everything we hear. It’s pure luck I dived into this.

Third, a lot of this gives ranges, sometimes because it’s hard to measure,² other times because it’s highly dependent on the specifics.

Fourth, there is a straightforward way to deliver reliable inexpensive energy to all of Colorado while reducing CO2 significantly. We just need to follow the math. And yes, read on to see an affordable inexpensive solution.

If it’s any consolation, Germany is in much worse shape than us (they’re basically where the Colorado Plan hopes to have us in 2040). California and New England are also in worse shape, much closer to achieving equity with Germany.

Edison Pearl St Generation Station

The Colorado Plan

And the California plan and the New England plan and the Germany plan and the United Kingdom plan and the … well you get it. The fundamental plan is Wind + Solar + Batteries + Interconnections³.

First, Solar makes sense, when sized appropriately. Solar is reliably intermittent. Cloud cover, storms, volcanic eruptions will all reduce it. But it comes on every morning, powers well through the middle of the day, and then goes down just as we hit peak usage. We can use this - for that daytime usage.

But the rest, uh no.

Transmission Lines

Colorado is working on improving our transmission lines. The improvements within the state - excellent idea.

The improvements to enable large scale transfers to other ISO/BAs⁴, including California and a HVDC connection⁵ the the Eastern grid - big mistake. The problem is every ISO proposing this is doing so because, when the wind dies and the sun sets and they’re short of power, they can pull it from their neighbor.

How’s that worked for us with the water in the Colorado River? Right. California wins and we lose.

As to the argument that the wind is always blowing somewhere, here’s wind generation for the country as a whole.⁶

Germany who in a fit of national insanity shut down perfectly good nuclear plants and went all in on Wind and Solar has something called Dunkelflaute⁷ which is when they get a week long period of no wind. Germany’s need for power boosted wholesale prices 10x. Norway & Sweden are now considering disconnecting from the European grid as they don’t want to continue paying for Germany’s mistake.

Now if we continue down our present road, and some of our neighbor states are smarter, then yes lets connect to them so we can grab power when we need it. But even on our present course connecting to CAISO⁸ is a bad idea because they’re going to Dunkleflaute themselves sooner than we will and just like the Colorado River, they’ll pull from us spiking our energy prices.

So for interconnections, go only with ISOs that are doing as well or better than us with a sensible working energy plan.

Batteries

The key part of generating most of our power from Wind + Solar is we have batteries that we charge up mid day and when the wind is blowing. And then we use the batteries at night and when the wind stops.

The problem here is the scale. At least use (Spring/Fall middle of the night) Colorado uses 6.2GW of power. At peak summer use it’s 20GW (solar helps here) and peak Winter 14GW (which will increase a lot if we switch to heat pumps). So let’s just say 10GW average.

And let’s say we only need to save up 2 days. There’s longer Dunkelflautes⁹ but most, from the graph, seem to be under 2 days. That’s 480GWh.¹⁰ That’s an insane amount of storage. And this is ignoring the times when the wind is blowing, but the peak over several days is 30% or 60%. At 30% the wind turbines if installed at 3x need (which is the minimum), then the wind is powering things, but it’s not recharging the batteries.

So, 1GWh of batteries presently costs about $148m.¹¹ So the 2 day backup is $71 billion dollars. These batteries are good for 10 years so, figure total payout is 1.5x for 10 year bonds, that’s $10.6 billion/year. That’s equal to 25% of the Colorado annual budget.

Battery prices are slowly decreasing. But the key word is slowly.¹² Unless there is some new technology, and a lot of things are being tried, this will never approach affordable.¹³

Wind Turbines

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

— John Adams

And now we come to one of the dumber¹⁴ things this country has done recently. On each point below I did a lot of research, I was careful and conservative with my math, and I then presented it to a number of people who really know this stuff for them to find problems. And they did. And where they did I corrected it.

Foundational to what I list below is you have to look at the whole system. When the wind is blowing everything is sunshine & puppies and there’s news articles that at 2:03pm on this day Colorado was fully powered by wind.

But the whole system needs to include that 2 days later, we’re in the doldrums, and our backup to wind is a SCGT¹⁵ burning gas¹⁶ and emitting CO2. On the flip side, if you did not have wind turbines our best option is CCGT¹⁷, which also burns gas, but is more efficient than a SCGT.

So with that, here’s what I found:

1. Wind + SCGT backup emits more CO2 than a CCGT.

2. Wind + SCGT costs more to run that a CCGT.

3. Wind + SCGT capex¹⁸ is about the same as for a nuclear plant.

   1. And their opex¹⁹ is also similar.

4. Wind requires transmission lines from the wind farm, sited based on wind patterns, to the grid. That’s $1m - $8m/mile.

   1. Nuclear you build next to a coal mine and just move the line terminus 500 feet.

5. Wind + SCGT has a 20 year lifetime, nuclear 80+ years.

6. Solar, Nuclear, & Wind are all incredibly safe.

The first thing to take away from this is you don’t have wind as an energy source. You have wind + gas backup as an energy source. You have the expense of maintaining the entire gas exploration, pumping, distributing, and turbine power infrastructure.

Nuclear power is just on. Running at 100% day and night, windy or calm, snowstorm or heat wave. And it has the smallest environmental impact of any energy source.²⁰

An additional key advantage to nuclear is it does not require constant replenishment. Neither does wind, but wind’s gas backup requires a constant flow of gas. The freeze in Texas a couple of years ago where all power got shut down - their gas valves froze and that immediately shut off the gas turbines.

Wishful Thinking

There are a lot of very smart people trying to solve very hard problems to address the shortcomings of wind and solar. A better battery, carbon capture, green hydrogen, fusion²¹, SMRs, and more…

And look, some of those will pan out. But we don’t know which and we don’t know when. Continuing to grow our wind usage with the plan that there will be this wonderful new battery technology in 5 years that is being manufactured at scale - that’s nuts.

Watch what’s happening. Take advantage of anything new that helps. But don’t plan on it. Even something that works in the lab has what, maybe a 10% chance of ever being produced at scale in a factory. Concept to assembly line is hard.

What Colorado Should Consider

I hope the Colorado Energy Office and the Legislature will work through what I have presented here and see if it’s correct. Worst case, I was wrong but in your investigation you found some things to improve in the energy plan. Best case, we, all of Colorado, avoid making the same mistake as Germany.

My suggestion is:

1. Stop all efforts to add wind generation.

   1. Do use the existing wind turbines until they wear out.

2. Replace all coal plants with CCGT as quickly as possible.²²

3. Start building 7 Korean nuclear plants.²³

   1. Aside from being the optimum approach, this is a lot of highly skilled jobs, both the construction and the operation.

4. Figure out the appropriate size solar for peak use. Build out to that.

5. Figure out what to use for additional peak needs.

   1. Probably a combo of SCGT and nuclear.

6. Put in a BESS of ~250MWh. That makes balancing the grid a lot easier.

7. Be very careful about who we increase our transmission capacity with.

8. Keep an eye on promising technology. Be prepared to pivot once it’s proven.

   1. To me the best indicator is customers have re-ordered a new product.

I know a lot of the politicians in this state, on both sides of the aisle. A fair number of them are smart and thoughtful.²⁴ I’m hopeful that this will lead to Colorado being an example of how to deliver electricity that is dependable, plentiful,²⁵ inexpensive, and green.

1. And I hate that I have to agree with Donald Trump about something (that Wind energy makes no sense). Yuck!

2. Good example here about how difficult it is to measure the backup to wind.

3. HVAC transmission lines connecting our ISO with adjoining ISOs.

4. Independent System Operator / Balancing Authority - while the grid is larger than an ISO, most of the balancing occurs within the ISO because there usually are not transmission lines with enough capacity to transfer significant amounts between ISOs.

5. Admittedly, using an HVDC line to connect the Western & Eastern grid is a really cool idea.

6. Entire year also displayed here

7. The Germans are now calling it Dunklfucked and energy is the primary issue for their upcoming elections.

8. California ISO

9. If we continue growing our dependence on wind, I’ll bet money that Dunkelflaute will enter our vocabulary.

10. GWh is Giga Watt hour or providing 1 GW for 1 hour.

11. The Cost of BESS

12. Every technology wants to follow Moore’s law. But nothing else does. Most everything else has rapid improvements at first. And then each additional win is harder and accomplishes less.

13. Will Toor in my interview with him said that Colorado is not going to go heavy into batteries. But every state document I’ve read says they will. So unclear what’s going on here.

14. Not dumbest - there is a long list of much dumber things this country has done recently.

15. Single Cycle Gas Turbine

16. In energy discussions gas is natural gas and oil is gasoline.

17. Combined Cycle Gas Turbine

18. CAPtial EXpenditures - what it costs to manufacture, install, & build each

19. OPerational EXpenditures - what you spend yearly keeping them running.

20. Rooftop solar has a smaller environmental impact. But the large solar farms, those have a sizeable environmental impact.

21. 50 years ago when I took freshman physics my professor told us we’d have fusion energy in 20 years. And he was right - they’re still telling us we’ll have it in 20 years.

22. That cuts the CO2 emissions in half and eliminates all the other awful stuff coal emits.

23. Will Toor in my interview with him said that the administration’s policy is green, including existing nuclear designs. But state law is renewables and all reports by the administration mention SMRs but not existing nuclear designs.

24. Bill Ritter & Ken Buck - I’m annoyed with both of you for leaving public service.

25. While not mentioned much, this is gigantic. Plentiful cheap power means things like desalinization and pumping that water throughout the West.