In California, 100% Solar and Wind in 2045 will need $350 billion in energy storage

118 thoughts on “In California, 100% Solar and Wind in 2045 will need $350 billion in energy storage”

1. # Terraform California

2. We really should upgrade the grid regardless what else is done. Frankly 100% renewable power my be unachievable a reasonable price with current technology but that doesn’t we shouldn’t use renewable power sources at lower levels that don’t cause economic hardship.

3. What months have the top wind speeds in California? In the eastern US wind speeds are higher in the winter. Maybe excess energy in the summer months should be used to pump water south from the pacific northwest? It would be a project finally worthy of long range DC superconducting transmission. Southern California residents might finally have enough water. Maybe there would be enough extra water to allow the Colorado to refill the Salton sea. Maybe California rivers could become rivers again.

4. Where did the comments go?

5. California also needs water storage, the solution build pumped storage dams for hydroelectric on demand that is fed by excess solar and wind during prime generation periods and a nice added benefit is you are also storing water for agriculture and city use, granted you need to construct pipelines. California needs more water storage anyway.

6. # Terraform California

7. We really should upgrade the grid regardless what else is done. Frankly 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} renewable power my be unachievable a reasonable price with current technology but that doesn’t we shouldn’t use renewable power sources at lower levels that don’t cause economic hardship.

8. What months have the top wind speeds in California? In the eastern US wind speeds are higher in the winter. Maybe excess energy in the summer months should be used to pump water south from the pacific northwest? It would be a project finally worthy of long range DC superconducting transmission. Southern California residents might finally have enough water. Maybe there would be enough extra water to allow the Colorado to refill the Salton sea.Maybe California rivers could become rivers again.

9. Where did the comments go?

10. California also needs water storage the solution build pumped storage dams for hydroelectric on demand that is fed by excess solar and wind during prime generation periods and a nice added benefit is you are also storing water for agriculture and city use granted you need to construct pipelines. California needs more water storage anyway.

11. If you think 12 billion dollars is not much money, remember, the 22GW Three Gorges hydro power plant costed 30 billion dollars to be built. But see, instead of building energy generation capacity, you are wasting money with a accessory support to allow renewable energy to work properly. But to be honest, at the current rate of 150GW per year of renewable energy installation, we will take only 200 years to displace fossil fuels. MIT Technology Review also have an article on that one. So we have lost already! Whooo!

12. Oh boy, not this again! It was the tsunami that drowned the generators, the earthquake itself didn’t really damaged the powerplant. That argument that a given region is too dangerous to build cause of earthquakes is nonsense, and could be applied to anything and we might as well just leave California for good! Ask the engineers that have built the Onagawa nuclear power plant, it took a hit from the earthquake and the tsunami far worse than Fukushima and wasn’t damaged, to be honest the powerplant was the only building left standing on the region. Also, this story of mother nature doesn’t care about what we design is senseless. We build giant dams to control the flow of entire drainage basins, preventing destructive floods and producing huge amounts of energy from that. That’s the problem people don’t realize, we interfere with the environment in such a big scale, that “nature-friendly” solutions don’t cut it out.

13. If you think 12 billion dollars is not much money remember the 22GW Three Gorges hydro power plant costed 30 billion dollars to be built.But see instead of building energy generation capacity you are wasting money with a accessory support to allow renewable energy to work properly. But to be honest at the current rate of 150GW per year of renewable energy installation we will take only 200 years to displace fossil fuels. MIT Technology Review also have an article on that one. So we have lost already! Whooo!

14. Oh boy not this again! It was the tsunami that drowned the generators the earthquake itself didn’t really damaged the powerplant. That argument that a given region is too dangerous to build cause of earthquakes is nonsense and could be applied to anything and we might as well just leave California for good!Ask the engineers that have built the Onagawa nuclear power plant it took a hit from the earthquake and the tsunami far worse than Fukushima and wasn’t damaged to be honest the powerplant was the only building left standing on the region.Also this story of mother nature doesn’t care about what we design is senseless. We build giant dams to control the flow of entire drainage basins preventing destructive floods and producing huge amounts of energy from that. That’s the problem people don’t realize we interfere with the environment in such a big scale that ature-friendly”” solutions don’t cut it out.”””

15. …Or they could turn Hoover Dam into a giant battery: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/24/business/energy-environment/hoover-dam-renewable-energy.html

16. Inefficient possible uses are sure expensive compared to probably better uses. So what?

17. I question the findings above. I ran a spreadsheet model using 2017 CAISO hourly demand along with wind and solar production to see how much demand could be supplied using only onshore wind and PV solar before the cost became prohibitive. I assumed a price of $0.02/kWh for a mix of new and paid off wind/solar. For simplicity I left out hydro, geothermal, and biofuel. Taking 2017 solar and multiplying by 15x along with wind by 20x I hit 90% penetration and a cost of $0.07/kWh. Again, no storage. Then assuming CA’s cars and light trucks were battery powered by the ~2040 completion date I found there was enough surplus daily production to charge all EVs on a daily basis except for 20 days. By selling the otherwise curtailed production to EVs the cost drops to $0.04/kWh. Adding 1 million MWh of storage more than created a 24/365 100% wind and solar supplied grid. All EV batteries were charged daily. Far, far less storage than this article assumes. What is getting missed is that overbuilding inexpensive generation is far cheaper than storage. Right now US grids use their coal and combined cycle gas plants between 50% and 60% of the time. Gas peakers run between 5% and 10% of the time. We overbuild fossil fuel generation rather than use storage to cover variability in demand. What is also being missed is the extent we can turn a portion of demand into a dispatchable load, like EV charging. Tasks like water pumping and desalination that can be moved from fixed demand schedules to opportunistic loads further cut overbuilding and cost. 15x solar and 20x onshore wind needs are likely to fall significantly once we start adding in offshore wind. Offshore is a much more regular producer than onshore.

18. …Or they could turn Hoover Dam into a giant battery: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/24/business/energy-environment/hoover-dam-renewable-energy.html

19. Inefficient possible uses are sure expensive compared to probably better uses. So what?

20. I question the findings above. I ran a spreadsheet model using 2017 CAISO hourly demand along with wind and solar production to see how much demand could be supplied using only onshore wind and PV solar before the cost became prohibitive. I assumed a price of $0.02/kWh for a mix of new and paid off wind/solar.For simplicity I left out hydro geothermal and biofuel.Taking 2017 solar and multiplying by 15x along with wind by 20x I hit 90{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} penetration and a cost of $0.07/kWh. Again no storage.Then assuming CA’s cars and light trucks were battery powered by the ~2040 completion date I found there was enough surplus daily production to charge all EVs on a daily basis except for 20 days. By selling the otherwise curtailed production to EVs the cost drops to $0.04/kWh.Adding 1 million MWh of storage more than created a 24/365 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} wind and solar supplied grid. All EV batteries were charged daily. Far far less storage than this article assumes.What is getting missed is that overbuilding inexpensive generation is far cheaper than storage. Right now US grids use their coal and combined cycle gas plants between 50{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} and 60{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of the time. Gas peakers run between 5{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} and 10{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of the time. We overbuild fossil fuel generation rather than use storage to cover variability in demand. What is also being missed is the extent we can turn a portion of demand into a dispatchable load like EV charging. Tasks like water pumping and desalination that can be moved from fixed demand schedules to opportunistic loads further cut overbuilding and cost.15x solar and 20x onshore win

21. Well, we are wasting money with something that doesn’t work. We are selling the people the lie that renewable energy is making a difference, when it isn’t. Fossil fuels investments are still rising and renewable energy investments have stagnated as countries that need energy are looking for real energy. Business as usual.

22. Well we are wasting money with something that doesn’t work. We are selling the people the lie that renewable energy is making a difference when it isn’t.Fossil fuels investments are still rising and renewable energy investments have stagnated as countries that need energy are looking for real energy. Business as usual.

23. One problem with using electrical cars as buffer outside of tiny sharp peaks is that the owner need the capacity for driving, you can not tap it during the night and refuel during day. Renewable are not cheap to build they are cheap to run its no point nor running an solar pannel, running stuff like desalination on cheap power in peaks makes sense, even overbuilding this and only run 5 hour day as in the long run energy is the main cost here

24. Interesting. If you don’t like facts then smear the messenger. I could have pointed out that the data is publically available on the CAISO website. If you doubt my model or math then do your own work and let’s compare. Just so others know, I’ve never worked in the energy field nor have I ever received any funds from an energy company. I do invest in non-managed index funds which means that my investments contain a very small amount of fossil fuel stock. How much? I’ve never looked. I can’t figure out how someone who is reporting that California could run on nothing but wind and solar with a small amount of storage and charge 100% EVs might benefit Big Oil. But perhaps Markko operates in a different reality than most of us. BTW, I just did model run using 2015 CAISO data and found roughly the same outcome. Crank up wind and solar production, use EVs as a dispatchable load, and you need only a small amount, ~1 TWh, of storage to reach a 100% wind and solar grid in California. I’ll try to run the 2016 data in a few days.

25. Robert here is well known as an innumerate spokesperson for Big Oil making more of his baseless claims. Note that he supplies no links to the details and assumptions in his extraordinary claim here that his work is more accurate than the peer reviewed works by Jenkins et al that is published in reputable journal. Nice try Robert.

26. One problem with using electrical cars as buffer outside of tiny sharp peaks is that the owner need the capacity for driving you can not tap it during the night and refuel during day. Renewable are not cheap to build they are cheap to run its no point nor running an solar pannel running stuff like desalination on cheap power in peaks makes sense even overbuilding this and only run 5 hour day as in the long run energy is the main cost here

27. Interesting. If you don’t like facts then smear the messenger.I could have pointed out that the data is publically available on the CAISO website. If you doubt my model or math then do your own work and let’s compare.Just so others know I’ve never worked in the energy field nor have I ever received any funds from an energy company. I do invest in non-managed index funds which means that my investments contain a very small amount of fossil fuel stock. How much? I’ve never looked.I can’t figure out how someone who is reporting that California could run on nothing but wind and solar with a small amount of storage and charge 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} EVs might benefit Big Oil. But perhaps Markko operates in a different reality than most of us. BTW I just did model run using 2015 CAISO data and found roughly the same outcome. Crank up wind and solar production use EVs as a dispatchable load and you need only a small amount ~1 TWh of storage to reach a 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} wind and solar grid in California. I’ll try to run the 2016 data in a few days.

28. Robert here is well known as an innumerate spokesperson for Big Oil making more of his baseless claims.Note that he supplies no links to the details and assumptions in his extraordinary claim here that his work is more accurate than the peer reviewed works by Jenkins et al that is published in reputable journal.Nice try Robert.

29. The Pacific Northwest routinely loses all wind power for a month or so during max load winter cold fronts with virtually no solar power.” Please link to a data source. And make sure you include all the Pacific Northwest. Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Northern California, and British Columbia.

30. Actually Robert you haven’t produced any fact just unreferenced dubious claims attempting to refute peer reviewed science published in reputable journal, similar to what we see from warming denial trolls. Your innumeracy has been demonstrated innumerable times most recently with your inability to calculate LCOE’s related to wind/solar PPA’s. The idea that you would even know how to use a spreadsheet is jaw dropping. As the testimony showed in the recent Congressional inquiry on Russian trolls, team members with names like Sergei always claimed they were citizens from the California or the Midwest using names like Bob Wallace. One thing that tripped them up was their 24/7 presence on comment threads leaving one with the impression that rather than Bob Wallace they were Team Wallace. Since Big Oil knows that the wind/solar with inefficient fossil backup uses about the same amount of product maybe more than the more efficient all fossil scam,adding in a never never land green storage schlock promoted by useful idiots means that we’ll be burning lotsa fossil fuels into the next century backing up all that wind/solar plant. Germany after spending near $2 Trillion on the wind/solar scam hasn’t so far reduced GHG’s an iota when biofuels counted using real science not politics. But I’ll tell you what Bob, an exercise for you to show us all how much you’ve improved. The Pacific Northwest routinely loses all wind power for a month or so during max load winter cold fronts with virtually no solar power. In the regions future with loads 3 times what they are today, a probable loss of significant hydro potential from Columbia River Treaty, drought and salmon concerns, and wind the only economic “renewable” groff mechanism, calculate for us the extra cost per kWh that would have to added to a customers power bill to make sure he doesn’t freeze in the dark. Last summer the PNW lost nearly the whole summers solar with forest fire smoke. Note that EV’s, contrary to your silly clai

31. Personal vehicles spend over 90{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of their time parked. For best utilization of wind and solar we are going to want a significant amount of the fleet to be plugged in during the day. That is both a solution for best generation use and a good way to provide charging opportunities for those who won’t have a place to plug in where they park at night. California utilities are already spending millions of dollars helping to install workplace charge outlets.The average EV will need about three hours of charging per 24 hours using a basic 240 VAC outlet. That makes EVs a massive dispatchable load that can be switched off when supplies are limited and back on when extra generation is available. Renewables wind and solar are the least expensive to build. Wind is about $1.50/watt and PV solar is about $1/watt. Those are last year prices and this year prices should be even lower. (Except for PV in the US where Trump has caused a small bump up in panel price.)Of course cost to install is not the critical factor. It’s the cost of electricity generated. Wind and CCNG are close in installed cost but wind has no fuel cost thus delivering cheaper electricity.Unsubsidized wind and PV solar are now the two lowest sources of electricity globally. Only a small percentage of new coal and new nuclear.https://www.lazard.com/media/450436/rehcd3.jpgAs for overbuilding few people realize that we’ve overbuilt both coal and combined cycle natural gas plants (CCNG) by about 2x. The capacity factor for each runs between 50{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} to 60{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} which means that both sit unused for over 40{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of the time. It’s even worse with gas peakers which are overbuilt more than 10x. We use our gas peakers between 5{22800fc549

32. The Pacific Northwest routinely loses all wind power for a month or so during max load winter cold fronts with virtually no solar power.””Please link to a data source. And make sure you include all the Pacific Northwest. Washington”” Oregon Idaho Montana Wyoming Northern California”” and British Columbia.”””

33. Actually Robert you haven’t produced any fact just unreferenced dubious claims attempting to refute peer reviewed science published in reputable journal similar to what we see from warming denial trolls. Your innumeracy has been demonstrated innumerable times most recently with your inability to calculate LCOE’s related to wind/solar PPA’s. The idea that you would even know how to use a spreadsheet is jaw dropping.As the testimony showed in the recent Congressional inquiry on Russian trolls team members with names like Sergei always claimed they were citizens from the California or the Midwest using names like Bob Wallace. One thing that tripped them up was their 24/7 presence on comment threads leaving one with the impression that rather than Bob Wallace they were Team Wallace.Since Big Oil knows that the wind/solar with inefficient fossil backup uses about the same amount of product maybe more than the more efficient all fossil scamadding in a never never land green storage schlock promoted by useful idiots means that we’ll be burning lotsa fossil fuels into the next century backing up all that wind/solar plant. Germany after spending near $2 Trillion on the wind/solar scam hasn’t so far reduced GHG’s an iota when biofuels counted using real science not politics.But I’ll tell you what Bob an exercise for you to show us all how much you’ve improved. The Pacific Northwest routinely loses all wind power for a month or so during max load winter cold fronts with virtually no solar power. In the regions future with loads 3 times what they are today a probable loss of significant hydro potential from Columbia River Treaty drought and salmon concerns and wind the only economic renewable”” groff mechanism”” calculate for us the extra cost per kWh that would have to added to a customers power bill to make sure he doesn’t freeze in the dark. Last summer the PNW lost nearly the whole summers solar with forest fire smoke. Note that EV’s contrary to your”

34. Personal vehicles spend over 90% of their time parked. For best utilization of wind and solar we are going to want a significant amount of the fleet to be plugged in during the day. That is both a solution for best generation use and a good way to provide charging opportunities for those who won’t have a place to plug in where they park at night. California utilities are already spending millions of dollars helping to install workplace charge outlets. The average EV will need about three hours of charging per 24 hours using a basic 240 VAC outlet. That makes EVs a massive dispatchable load that can be switched off when supplies are limited and back on when extra generation is available. Renewables, wind and solar, are the least expensive to build. Wind is about $1.50/watt and PV solar is about $1/watt. Those are last year prices and this year prices should be even lower. (Except for PV in the US where Trump has caused a small bump up in panel price.) Of course cost to install is not the critical factor. It’s the cost of electricity generated. Wind and CCNG are close in installed cost but wind has no fuel cost, thus delivering cheaper electricity. Unsubsidized wind and PV solar are now the two lowest sources of electricity globally. Only a small percentage of new coal and new nuclear. https://www.lazard.com/media/450436/rehcd3.jpg As for overbuilding, few people realize that we’ve overbuilt both coal and combined cycle natural gas plants (CCNG) by about 2x. The capacity factor for each runs between 50% to 60% which means that both sit unused for over 40% of the time. It’s even worse with gas peakers which are overbuilt more than 10x. We use our gas peakers between 5% and 10% of the time.

35. Here is one of your batterys that also uses the water afterwords https://yellowdragonblog.com/2018/06/08/bay-area-recoverd-water-funded-pumped-storage-agency-barwf-psa/

36. Here is one of your batterys that also uses the water afterwords https://yellowdragonblog.com/2018/06/08/bay-area-recoverd-water-funded-pumped-storage-agency-barwf-psa/

37. you cant post a citation to Vuukle

38. you cant post a citation to Vuukle

39. Doesn’t include though the average 8 cents a kwh for 35% utilized long distance transmission, 15 cents a kwh for gas backup and 10 cents or so for surplus dumping ” The EIA sets transmission costs for wind at 3 cents and nuclear at 1 cent. The transmission cost for wind will almost certainly drop since we have identified many new sites where by using 140 meter hub heights there will be little to no transmission needed. The same will happen with offshore wind where the maximum distance will be about 20 miles. The EIA’s cost estimate is based on the assumption that we would need to move massive amounts of electricity from the MIdwest to the East Coast. That is apparently not going to be needed. Nuclear and coal are more expensive to integrate into the grid than wind and solar according to ERCOT. Large thermal plants can disappear from the grid with zero advance notice so they need spinning reserve which wind and solar do not need. There is no cost for ‘surplus dumping’ that would be specific to wind and solar. It might be that someone wrote a screwy contract somewhere in Canada. Standard practice would be for the buyer to pay the agreed price per kWh if the wind/solar farm output couldn’t be used and the farm would curtail. That would be in the

40. As even the dumbest wind/solar nut can see EV’s are of zero use for more than a single days storage. When your team learns to read English instead of Russian you’ll find the article costs come from long term and seasonal backup requirements.” The average driving day is about 37 miles in the US. That means for a 250 mile range EV charged to 80% the average EV can go over five days without charging. (250 * .8 / 37 = 5.4) As I pointed out in my first post the article makes an assumption that we need long term storage. As I pointed out, at least for California, it would be much cheaper to simply build enough wind and solar capacity to cover the ‘problem’ months than to try to move massive amounts of energy from season to season. In my modeling I found only four days in 2017 in which 20x solar and 30x wind did not cover all daily needs. Adding a modest amount of storage (1 TWh) was enough to move energy accumulated a few days earlier to cover that need. The same holds for CAISO in 2015. Those are the only years and grids I’ve run so far. I did run the model on three years of ERCOT using wind only as there is no publicly available solar data. I found that ERCOT could reach 80% penetration with wind alone at a similar low cost. “, the LCOE of the latest wind/solar project is 13 cents a kwh at state owned utility rates. ” That is simply false. You must not know how to calculate a LCOE or you must have used incorrect data. Here’s the LCOE calculator I’ve been using for years. Put in reasonable numbers. https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech-lcoe.html Since (I assume you know) wind PPAs are commonly being signed for less than $0.03/kWh your thirteen cent number should have raised a red flag and sent you looking for where you made your mistake. Your cost of installed wind and nuclear are all messed up. Let me give you some reliable sources. Wind Onshore $1.53 Installed Cost/Watt DOE 2016 Wind Technologies Market Report PV Solar $1.00 Installed Cost/Wat

41. You can by posting a google search reference for ie Google “solar-15-percent-returns-lure-investments-from-google-to-buffett

42. As even the dumbest wind/solar nut can see EV’s are of zero use for more than a single days storage. When your team learns to read English instead of Russian you’ll find the article costs come from long term and seasonal backup requirements. As I have pointed out innumerable times without success in penetrating your innumeracy and other thicknesses, the LCOE of the latest wind/solar project is 13 cents a kwh at state owned utility rates. According to IHS market wind costs amount to 48K/MWyr Wind maintenance costs about the same as US nukes. Worldwide nuke operating costs are about half of the gold plated, lawyer generated, US costs. Capital costs of the latest US wind builds is about $5/watt avg – double what Korea build nukes for. Doesn’t include though the average 8 cents a kwh for 35% utilized long distance transmission, 15 cents a kwh for gas backup and 10 cents or so for surplus dumping found by the Ontario Auditor General in that jurisdiction – none of which are needed for nukes. If you want to stop leaving a trail of bodies and GHG pollution you’ll need to get rid of your gas backup – add two orders of magnitude to that number too the cheapest green storage we can project (see Jenkins) Plugging the wind numbers in the NREL calculator with 3% discount 35% capacity factor 20 year life we get a cost of 13 cents a kwh excluding massive gas backup, transmission and surplus dumping costs. Plugging the the nuke numbers with a 95% capacity factor and a 60 year life comes to 4.2 cents/kWh, reducing to 3 cents a kwh with a N of a kind costs. As a noted energy illiterate you be unaware that the vast majority of gas plant costs is operating fuel expense unlike wind/solar/nuke which are capital intensive. Gas plant makes nearly all of its cash with massively subsidied capacity payments necessary to load balance never around when needed wind/solar.

43. So we see that you have no facts to back your claim.

44. Since there is really very little in the way of grid interconnects BPA mostly covers it. Surely your team knows how to use Google. Awaiting your calculations.

45. Doesn’t include though the average 8 cents a kwh for 35{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} utilized long distance transmission” 15 cents a kwh for gas backup and 10 cents or so for surplus dumping “”The EIA sets transmission costs for wind at 3 cents and nuclear at 1 cent. The transmission cost for wind will almost certainly drop since we have identified many new sites where by using 140 meter hub heights there will be little to no transmission needed. The same will happen with offshore wind where the maximum distance will be about 20 miles. The EIA’s cost estimate is based on the assumption that we would need to move massive amounts of electricity from the MIdwest to the East Coast. That is apparently not going to be needed.Nuclear and coal are more expensive to integrate into the grid than wind and solar according to ERCOT. Large thermal plants can disappear from the grid with zero advance notice so they need spinning reserve which wind and solar do not need.There is no cost for ‘surplus dumping’ that would be specific to wind and solar. It might be that someone wrote a screwy contract somewhere in Canada. Standard practice would be for the buyer to pay the agreed price per kWh if the wind/solar farm output couldn’t be used and the farm would curtail. That would be in the “””

46. As even the dumbest wind/solar nut can see EV’s are of zero use for more than a single days storage. When your team learns to read English instead of Russian you’ll find the article costs come from long term and seasonal backup requirements.As I have pointed out innumerable times without success in penetrating your innumeracy and other thicknesses the LCOE of the latest wind/solar project is 13 cents a kwh at state owned utility rates. According to IHS market wind costs amount to 48K/MWyr Wind maintenance costs about the same as US nukes. Worldwide nuke operating costs are about half of the gold plated lawyer generated US costs. Capital costs of the latest US wind builds is about $5/watt avg – double what Korea build nukes for. Doesn’t include though the average 8 cents a kwh for 35{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} utilized long distance transmission 15 cents a kwh for gas backup and 10 cents or so for surplus dumping found by the Ontario Auditor General in that jurisdiction – none of which are needed for nukes. If you want to stop leaving a trail of bodies and GHG pollution you’ll need to get rid of your gas backup – add two orders of magnitude to that number too the cheapest green storage we can project (see Jenkins) Plugging the wind numbers in the NREL calculator with 3{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} discount 35{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} capacity factor 20 year life we get a cost of 13 cents a kwh excluding massive gas backup transmission and surplus dumping costs.Plugging the the nuke numbers with a 95{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} capacity factor and a 60 year life comes to 4.2 cents/kWh reducing to 3 cents a kwh with a N of a kind costs.As a noted energy illiterate you be unaware that the vast majority of gas plant costs is operating fuel expense unlike wind/solar/nuke which are capital int

47. So we see that you have no facts to back your claim.

48. Since there is really very little in the way of grid interconnects BPA mostly covers it. Surely your team knows how to use Google. Awaiting your calculations.

49. Just to put the 15x solar and 20x wind into context. In 2017 California generated 11.79% of its total electricity with solar. A 15x increase would mean 179% of total load from solar. Wind supplied 6.24% so a 20x increase would be 124.8% of total load. Combined there would be a potential generation about 3x the total load (304%).. Here are 2017 CFs for US plants. Coal 53.5% (1.9x) CCNG 54.8% (1.8x) NG Turbines 9.4% (10.6x) Hydro 45.2% (2.2x) When one looks at the amount of overbuilding we’ve done to keep the pre-RE grid running 3x overbuilding doesn’t seem as extreme. There should be no complaining if we could get to a 100% wind/solar grid at 2x overbuilding. Going up one more level makes more sense than adding storage because the installed cost of wind and solar is low and both have no fuel costs. That wouldn’t be the case for coal and hydro with their much higher installed costs. And might not make sense for coal and CCNG with their fuel costs.

50. No, you didn’t understand what I said. Read again… “Large thermal plants can disappear from the grid with zero advance notice” Stuff breaks. Large thermal plants break down much more frequently than most people realize. And they give no prior notice that they have a transformer which is about to catch on fire or a pump that is going to fail. They just stop. Because of that the grid needs to maintain some amount of spinning reserve. Generation that can step in very quickly in order to avoid grid disruption. With solar you know years in advance when the Sun will rise and when the Sun will set. You know days ahead about incoming storms and changes in cloud/wind speed that will impact solar and wind output. Because the increases and decreases are very predictable hours in advance there is no need to keep other generation running in the background.

51. To some extent that’s correct. But we now have demand that is not 24 hours per day so the capital is already spent. We already pump water when electricity is cheapest. Those water towers one sees in many cities tend to be refilled late at night when electricity is least expensive. They could as easily be filled a few hours during the day and a few at night if that’s when electricity is cheapest. California uses a lot of energy to pump water over the mountains to SoCal. I think I’ve read that some of that pumping is now shifting to daylight hours as solar is providing less expensive electricity. For something like desal the major cost may be energy. It may make sense for the utility to offer a discounted rate if the desal plant ceases operation when wind/solar supplies are tight. Or it might make economic sense for desal plants to install elevated water storage (to create pressure), fill storage when electricity is cheap, and run off stored water when electricity is expensive. We’re already seeing commercial buildings using cheaper electricity to cool down water and then use that stored ‘cool’ to assist air conditioning when electricity is expensive. I expect we may see the same sort of systems used to assist heat pumps in the coldest parts of the country. Some large industrial plants (aluminum smelters and pulp mills) are paid to shut down when grid supplies are really stressed. It would cost little to make our home appliances ‘smart’ and run them as dispatchable loads. Fill the clothes or dishwasher in evening and have it do its work by breakfast time. It doesn’t matter if your dishes get washed at 8 pm or 3 am. Even spreading out the start times on refrigerators and freezers would help. Cool them down a few extra degrees right before supplies are scheduled to tighten and let them drift through the shortage. Use the same strategy with water heating. EVs are the obvious gorilla in the room. Needing so few hours of charging per day (on average) a

52. Amazing! You’re actually assuming nuclear, with a capacity factor of 92%, (And virtually all of that 8% scheduled outages.) is less reliable than solar and wind. I don’t think it’s possible to reason with somebody who has such whacked out assumptions.

53. Tasks like water pumping and desalination that can be moved from fixed demand schedules to opportunistic loads further cut overbuilding and cost. ” Technically, aren’t you just moving the overbuilding and its associated cost to the capital equipment for those loads, rather than the generation end? I mean, if you’ve got some industrial process that can feasibly run 24/7 with $X of equipment, requiring it to run 50% of the time instead demands that it have $2X worth of equipment. Including transmission capacity!

54. Just to put the 15x solar and 20x wind into context. In 2017 California generated 11.79{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of its total electricity with solar. A 15x increase would mean 179{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of total load from solar. Wind supplied 6.24{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} so a 20x increase would be 124.8{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of total load. Combined there would be a potential generation about 3x the total load (304{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12}).. Here are 2017 CFs for US plants.Coal 53.5{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} (1.9x)CCNG 54.8{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} (1.8x)NG Turbines 9.4{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} (10.6x)Hydro 45.2{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} (2.2x)When one looks at the amount of overbuilding we’ve done to keep the pre-RE grid running 3x overbuilding doesn’t seem as extreme. There should be no complaining if we could get to a 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} wind/solar grid at 2x overbuilding. Going up one more level makes more sense than adding storage because the installed cost of wind and solar is low and both have no fuel costs. That wouldn’t be the case for coal and hydro with their much higher installed costs. And might not make sense for coal and CCNG with their fuel costs.

55. No you didn’t understand what I said. Read again…Large thermal plants can disappear from the grid with zero advance notice””Stuff breaks. Large thermal plants break down much more frequently than most people realize. And they give no prior notice that they have a transformer which is about to catch on fire or a pump that is going to fail. They just stop.Because of that the grid needs to maintain some amount of spinning reserve. Generation that can step in very quickly in order to avoid grid disruption. With solar you know years in advance when the Sun will rise and when the Sun will set. You know days ahead about incoming storms and changes in cloud/wind speed that will impact solar and wind output. Because the increases and decreases are very predictable hours in advance there is no need to keep other generation running in the background.”””

56. To some extent that’s correct. But we now have demand that is not 24 hours per day so the capital is already spent.We already pump water when electricity is cheapest. Those water towers one sees in many cities tend to be refilled late at night when electricity is least expensive. They could as easily be filled a few hours during the day and a few at night if that’s when electricity is cheapest. California uses a lot of energy to pump water over the mountains to SoCal. I think I’ve read that some of that pumping is now shifting to daylight hours as solar is providing less expensive electricity.For something like desal the major cost may be energy. It may make sense for the utility to offer a discounted rate if the desal plant ceases operation when wind/solar supplies are tight. Or it might make economic sense for desal plants to install elevated water storage (to create pressure) fill storage when electricity is cheap and run off stored water when electricity is expensive.We’re already seeing commercial buildings using cheaper electricity to cool down water and then use that stored ‘cool’ to assist air conditioning when electricity is expensive. I expect we may see the same sort of systems used to assist heat pumps in the coldest parts of the country.Some large industrial plants (aluminum smelters and pulp mills) are paid to shut down when grid supplies are really stressed.It would cost little to make our home appliances ‘smart’ and run them as dispatchable loads. Fill the clothes or dishwasher in evening and have it do its work by breakfast time. It doesn’t matter if your dishes get washed at 8 pm or 3 am. Even spreading out the start times on refrigerators and freezers would help. Cool them down a few extra degrees right before supplies are scheduled to tighten and let them drift through the shortage. Use the same strategy with water heating.EVs are the obvious gorilla in the room. Needing so few hours of charging

57. Amazing! You’re actually assuming nuclear with a capacity factor of 92{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} (And virtually all of that 8{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} scheduled outages.) is less reliable than solar and wind.I don’t think it’s possible to reason with somebody who has such whacked out assumptions.

58. Tasks like water pumping and desalination that can be moved from fixed demand schedules to opportunistic loads further cut overbuilding and cost. “”Technically”” aren’t you just moving the overbuilding and its associated cost to the capital equipment for those loads rather than the generation end? I mean if you’ve got some industrial process that can feasibly run 24/7 with $X of equipment”” requiring it to run 50{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of the time instead demands that it have $2X worth of equipment.Including transmission capacity!”””

59. Still quoting Markko… “Yup nuke plants running at 3 cents a kwh are having trouble in so called “merchant” markets where the competitor’s wind/solar and gas are subsidized to 85% by the ratepayer/taxpayer.” Wind and solar topped out at a $0.023/kWh Production Tax Credit subsidy. It applied to only the first ten years of a 20 to 25 year PPA so the subsidy is really something no higher than $0.0115/watt. It’s now down to $0.019/kWh for the first ten years. With wind PPAs running about $0.019/kWh adding in a $0.0115 subsidy would mean an unsubsidized price of $0.03. Subsidies would be about 38%, not 85%. Or if the farm chose to use the Investment Tax Credit they received a 30% tax credit for capital expenses which probably works out less than the PTC but they get the money the first year of operation. “Hard to compete in the most corrupt nation in the OECD when Big Oil owns all the politicians and media.” I have no idea how Big Oil fits into all this. We use almost no oil for electricity generation. Almost all of it is emergency backup generation and in remote Alaskan villages and on islands.

60. Still quoting Markko…“Yup nuke plants running at 3 cents a kwh are having trouble in so called merchant”” markets where the competitor’s wind/solar and gas are subsidized to 85{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} by the ratepayer/taxpayer.”Wind and solar topped out at a $0.023/kWh Production Tax Credit subsidy. It applied to only the first ten years of a 20 to 25 year PPA so the subsidy is really something no higher than $0.0115/watt. It’s now down to $0.019/kWh for the first ten years.With wind PPAs running about $0.019/kWh adding in a $0.0115 subsidy would mean an unsubsidized price of $0.03. Subsidies would be about 38{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12}”””” not 85{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12}.Or if the farm chose to use the Investment Tax Credit they received a 30{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} tax credit for capital expenses which probably works out less than the PTC but they get the money the first year of operation.“Hard to compete in the most corrupt nation in the OECD when Big Oil owns all the politicians and media.”I have no idea how Big Oil fits into all this. We use almost no oil for electricity generation. Almost all of it is emergency backup generation and in remote Alaskan villages and on islands.”””””””

61. Quotes from Markko – “As a demonstrated energy illiterate and defacto Warming Denier you’d be unaware that the future plans for California includes a transition to all electric. I referred to energy above not electricity. Perhaps its your ESL status or more likely you don’t know the difference.” You’d be 100% wrong if you were to make that claim. Actually you have made three false claims in that paragraph. Oops, four. “Sometimes even your thickness leaves me dumbfounded. Here’s your pal, the sosh major at Cleantech posting a chart showing the effects of an 80% discharge on vehicle batteries. Have an associate that can search past wikipedia lookup “battery-lifetime-long-can-electric-vehicle-batteries-last” That article was written by Christopher Arcus who is an engineer. What’s your issue with the way EV batteries are holding capacity? We now have two Tesla Ss that have reached 200,000 miles, one with 240,000, with better than 90% capacity remaining. Plus – “An updated battery study based on crowdsourced data from (about 900) Model S and Model X owners suggests that Tesla’s battery pack will still have 80% capacity after reaching 840,000 kilometers (521,952 miles), or nearly 1 million kilometers driven.” (Teslarati) “As you have demonstrated you are a particularly thick innumerate. What you are claiming is there was not a single night in California that was calm.” Because I have reviewed the hourly wind production for CAISO, 2017. “Nobody believes your made up nonsense – part of the fake fact practice your team used to elect Trump. Note I listed a peer reviewed University of Delaware study done by an EE Phd with 3 times overbuild and he found 10% storage was needed not the .5% you spewed.” As I reported in an earlier comment, wind and solar were much more expensive at the time. As the cost of RE and storage change the optimal cost mix will adjust. Upon reviewing the Budischak paper I find that they used 2008 installed costs for solar and wind

62. Quotes from Markko -“As a demonstrated energy illiterate and defacto Warming Denier you’d be unaware that the future plans for California includes a transition to all electric. I referred to energy above not electricity. Perhaps its your ESL status or more likely you don’t know the difference.”You’d be 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} wrong if you were to make that claim. Actually you have made three false claims in that paragraph. Oops four.Sometimes even your thickness leaves me dumbfounded. Here’s your pal”” the sosh major at Cleantech posting a chart showing the effects of an 80{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} discharge on vehicle batteries. Have an associate that can search past wikipedia lookup “”battery-lifetime-long-can-electric-vehicle-batteries-last””””That article was written by Christopher Arcus who is an engineer.What’s your issue with the way EV batteries are holding capacity? We now have two Tesla Ss that have reached 200″”000 miles one with 2400 with better than 90{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} capacity remaining. Plus -“An updated battery study based on crowdsourced data from (about 900) Model S and Model X owners suggests that Tesla’s battery pack will still have 80{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} capacity after reaching 840000 kilometers (521952 miles) or nearly 1 million kilometers driven.” (Teslarati)“As you have demonstrated you are a particularly thick innumerate. What you are claiming is there was not a single night in California that was calm.”Because I have reviewed the hourly wind production for CAISO 2017. “Nobody believes your made up nonsense – part of the fake fact practice your team used to elect Trump. Note I listed a peer reviewed University of Delaware study done by an EE Phd with 3 times overbuild and he found 10{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dc”

63. December 2017 North Anna Unit 2 shut down due to water leak in cooling system. (10) Clinton down due to a transformer problem (11) Unit 2 at the Indian Point nuclear power plant was offline for two weeks due to leakage from a reactor coolant pump (12) Columbia shut down due to transmission problem. Didn’t turn up in the news until March 2018. (13) January 2018 Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station shutdown after one of the two main 345-volt lines that provide off site power to the plant “became unavailable,” (14) February 2018 Unit 3 at Indian Point shut down when a generator failed. (15) March 2018 Browns Ferry Unit 1 taken offline due to problems with turbine control system. (16) Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station second time in 2018 due to leak and transformer problems. (17) April 2018 Fermi 2 down due to a plant transformer malfunction. (18) Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station down for third time in 2018. Valve problem where water flows into reactor. Pilgrim has been offline 53 of the last 120 days. (19) May 2018 Columbia down for unknown problem (20) Over a 7-8 month span 19 of 98 or 19% of all US reactors were offline for reasons other than scheduled refueling and maintenance. A greater than 30% failure rate on an annual basis. The number of shutdowns may have been higher. Sometimes it’s been months after the shutdown that I find the news. So the 89% to 92% CF of US nuclear reactors? Some fueling and some breakage.

64. December 2017North Anna Unit 2 shut down due to water leak in cooling system. (10)Clinton down due to a transformer problem (11)Unit 2 at the Indian Point nuclear power plant was offline for two weeks due to leakage from a reactor coolant pump (12)Columbia shut down due to transmission problem. Didn’t turn up in the news until March 2018. (13)January 2018Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station shutdown after one of the two main 345-volt lines that provide off site power to the plant “became unavailable” (14)February 2018Unit 3 at Indian Point shut down when a generator failed. (15) March 2018Browns Ferry Unit 1 taken offline due to problems with turbine control system. (16)Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station second time in 2018 due to leak and transformer problems. (17)April 2018Fermi 2 down due to a plant transformer malfunction. (18)Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station down for third time in 2018. Valve problem where water flows into reactor. Pilgrim has been offline 53 of the last 120 days. (19)May 2018Columbia down for unknown problem (20)Over a 7-8 month span 19 of 98 or 19{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of all US reactors were offline for reasons other than scheduled refueling and maintenance. A greater than 30{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} failure rate on an annual basis. The number of shutdowns may have been higher. Sometimes it’s been months after the shutdown that I find the news. So the 89{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} to 92{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} CF of US nuclear reactors? Some fueling and some breakage.”

65. “Yup your overbuilding scenario was done a few years back in a peer reviewed paper by a real EE with a Phd, on the PJM grid through the the University of Delaware.” The paper was published in 2013 by Cory Budischak et al. It was Cory’s doctoral dissertation. You probably know about the paper because I have posted about it several times. Cory’s paper is what got me thinking about large scale overbuilding as a way to bring down the cost of a 100% RE grid. When his paper was written the costs of wind and solar were considerably higher than what they were over five years later (his costs were already outdated when he published). By using current prices a refur of his model would show a high amount of overbuilding to be optimal than was the case when wind and solar were more expensive. “Yup when you do the arithmetic (something you flunked) the total downtime of US reactor is on is about 10% of the downtime due to scheduled low season refueling outages and is usually due to transmission outages that affect all types of generation plant. So 92 average uptime 99% excluding scheduled outages. Solar is 20% wind 35% – why do you post this nonsense.” Single-axis tracking solar is now running about 30% CF and wind farms online since 2013 have CFs in the mid 40% range with some over 50%. For the last five years nuclear CF has varied between 89,9% and 92.3%. Some of that is due to refueling and maintenance and some to breakdowns. Here’s a record of non-fueling/maintenance shutdowns over a few recent months. September 2017 V.C. Summer down due to problem with main transformer. (1) Turkey Point and St. Lucie reactors were shut down due to approaching Hurricane Irma. (2,3) Florida’s St. Lucie nuclear plant was forced into a partial shutdown to clean salt buildup from its transmission yard after Hurricane Irma in September. (4) Cook Nuclear Plant Unit 1 reactor was shut down after a valve that’s part of its reactor coolant supply system opened. (5) Columbia down due t

66. “Yup your overbuilding scenario was done a few years back in a peer reviewed paper by a real EE with a Phd on the PJM grid through the the University of Delaware.”The paper was published in 2013 by Cory Budischak et al. It was Cory’s doctoral dissertation. You probably know about the paper because I have posted about it several times.Cory’s paper is what got me thinking about large scale overbuilding as a way to bring down the cost of a 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} RE grid. When his paper was written the costs of wind and solar were considerably higher than what they were over five years later (his costs were already outdated when he published). By using current prices a refur of his model would show a high amount of overbuilding to be optimal than was the case when wind and solar were more expensive.“Yup when you do the arithmetic (something you flunked) the total downtime of US reactor is on is about 10{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of the downtime due to scheduled low season refueling outages and is usually due to transmission outages that affect all types of generation plant. So 92 average uptime 99{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} excluding scheduled outages. Solar is 20{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} wind 35{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} – why do you post this nonsense.”Single-axis tracking solar is now running about 30{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} CF and wind farms online since 2013 have CFs in the mid 40{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} range with some over 50{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12}.For the last five years nuclear CF has varied between 899{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} and 92.3{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846

67. Markko, I just found some comments from you in my email as I was cleaning out the box. I’ll answer some of your points as I find time. I suspect you won’t be able to take on information that doesn’t support your bias but others might appreciate some facts. “Actually there is quite a bit of curtailment with solar in California.” CA curtailed 77,295 MWh out of 12,803,307 MWh of solar in 2017. That’s 0.6% and does not rise to what most people would consider “quite a bit”. “ Irrelevant as your idiotic plan with 3 times capacity and very little storage would be curtailing all the time.” What you don’t grasp (or don’t want to grasp) is that 1) We already have about 2x overbuilding on our mainly fossil fuel US grids now. In order to meet demand we build more capacity that we need 24/365. 2) Overbuilding wind and solar 3x is probably the best route for CAISO unless longer term storage becomes much cheaper than it is today. “Its a long way to transport wind from the midwest and its 50% capacity factors to rest of the country where it can be used. Not possible without massive transmission subsidies” No, the cost of transmission would be built into the price of the imported electricity. Just as it is now done. All electricity (except on-roof solar) has some transmission cost. Also, the DOE has identified 60% CF resources in both the NE and SE. “Your information is badly out of date. When you learn to use you LCOE calculator you’ll find that even Hinkley is less expensive than offshore wind. Lose the PPA’s, learn to use LCOE “ My info is a 1.5 years out of date. I’ll catch up when the DOE releases 2017 data in September. Now cost. First LCOE is not a full accounting of what it costs to get electricity into the grid. LCOE is only the cost of generation. It does not include land costs, taxes, or owner profits. If those aren’t covered electricity does not flow. The UK just accepted two offshore wind projects at £57.50 per megawatt hour or $0.074/kWh. (C

68. Markko I just found some comments from you in my email as I was cleaning out the box. I’ll answer some of your points as I find time. I suspect you won’t be able to take on information that doesn’t support your bias but others might appreciate some facts.“Actually there is quite a bit of curtailment with solar in California.” CA curtailed 77295 MWh out of 12803307 MWh of solar in 2017. That’s 0.6{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} and does not rise to what most people would consider “quite a bit”.“ Irrelevant as your idiotic plan with 3 times capacity and very little storage would be curtailing all the time.”What you don’t grasp (or don’t want to grasp) is that 1) We already have about 2x overbuilding on our mainly fossil fuel US grids now. In order to meet demand we build more capacity that we need 24/365.2) Overbuilding wind and solar 3x is probably the best route for CAISO unless longer term storage becomes much cheaper than it is today.“Its a long way to transport wind from the midwest and its 50{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} capacity factors to rest of the country where it can be used. Not possible without massive transmission subsidies”No the cost of transmission would be built into the price of the imported electricity. Just as it is now done. All electricity (except on-roof solar) has some transmission cost.Also the DOE has identified 60{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} CF resources in both the NE and SE.“Your information is badly out of date. When you learn to use you LCOE calculator you’ll find that even Hinkley is less expensive than offshore wind. Lose the PPA’s learn to use LCOE “My info is a 1.5 years out of date. I’ll catch up when the DOE releases 2017 data in September. Now cost.First LCOE is not a full accounting of what it costs to get electricity into the grid. LCOE is only the cost of

69. Still quoting Markko…

    “Yup nuke plants running at 3 cents a kwh are having trouble in so called “merchant” markets where the competitor’s wind/solar and gas are subsidized to 85% by the ratepayer/taxpayer.”

    Wind and solar topped out at a $0.023/kWh Production Tax Credit subsidy. It applied to only the first ten years of a 20 to 25 year PPA so the subsidy is really something no higher than $0.0115/watt. It’s now down to $0.019/kWh for the first ten years.

    With wind PPAs running about $0.019/kWh adding in a $0.0115 subsidy would mean an unsubsidized price of $0.03. Subsidies would be about 38%, not 85%.

    Or if the farm chose to use the Investment Tax Credit they received a 30% tax credit for capital expenses which probably works out less than the PTC but they get the money the first year of operation.

    “Hard to compete in the most corrupt nation in the OECD when Big Oil owns all the politicians and media.”

    I have no idea how Big Oil fits into all this. We use almost no oil for electricity generation. Almost all of it is emergency backup generation and in remote Alaskan villages and on islands.

70. Quotes from Markko –

    “As a demonstrated energy illiterate and defacto Warming Denier you’d be unaware that the future plans for California includes a transition to all electric. I referred to energy above not electricity. Perhaps its your ESL status or more likely you don’t know the difference.”

    You’d be 100% wrong if you were to make that claim. Actually you have made three false claims in that paragraph. Oops, four.

    “Sometimes even your thickness leaves me dumbfounded. Here’s your pal, the sosh major at Cleantech posting a chart showing the effects of an 80% discharge on vehicle batteries.

    Have an associate that can search past wikipedia lookup “battery-lifetime-long-can-electric-vehicle-batteries-last”

    That article was written by Christopher Arcus who is an engineer.

    What’s your issue with the way EV batteries are holding capacity? We now have two Tesla Ss that have reached 200,000 miles, one with 240,000, with better than 90% capacity remaining. Plus –

    “An updated battery study based on crowdsourced data from (about 900) Model S and Model X owners suggests that Tesla’s battery pack will still have 80% capacity after reaching 840,000 kilometers (521,952 miles), or nearly 1 million kilometers driven.” (Teslarati)

    “As you have demonstrated you are a particularly thick innumerate. What you are claiming is there was not a single night in California that was calm.”

    Because I have reviewed the hourly wind production for CAISO, 2017.

    “Nobody believes your made up nonsense – part of the fake fact practice your team used to elect Trump. Note I listed a peer reviewed University of Delaware study done by an EE Phd with 3 times overbuild and he found 10% storage was needed not the .5% you spewed.”

    As I reported in an earlier comment, wind and solar were much more expensive at the time. As the cost of RE and storage change the optimal cost mix will adjust.

    Upon reviewing the Budischak paper I find that they used 2008 installed costs for solar and wind. They ran their model with a cost of $6.35/watt per solar and $4.05/watt for wind.

    Unsubsidized single-axis PV solar is now about $1.10/watt, over five times cheaper than in 2008. Unsubsidized installed wind is now about $1.50/watt, almost a third of the 2008 cost. The Budischak paper gives us a very useful model but their results are no longer useful.

    (continued…)

71. December 2017
    North Anna Unit 2 shut down due to water leak in cooling system. (10)

    Clinton down due to a transformer problem (11)

    Unit 2 at the Indian Point nuclear power plant was offline for two weeks due to leakage from a reactor coolant pump (12)

    Columbia shut down due to transmission problem. Didn’t turn up in the news until March 2018. (13)

    January 2018
    Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station shutdown after one of the two main 345-volt lines that provide off site power to the plant “became unavailable,” (14)

    February 2018
    Unit 3 at Indian Point shut down when a generator failed. (15)

    March 2018
    Browns Ferry Unit 1 taken offline due to problems with turbine control system. (16)

    Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station second time in 2018 due to leak and transformer problems. (17)

    April 2018
    Fermi 2 down due to a plant transformer malfunction. (18)

    Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station down for third time in 2018. Valve problem where water flows into reactor. Pilgrim has been offline 53 of the last 120 days. (19)

    May 2018
    Columbia down for unknown problem (20)
    Over a 7-8 month span 19 of 98 or 19% of all US reactors were offline for reasons other than scheduled refueling and maintenance. A greater than 30% failure rate on an annual basis. The number of shutdowns may have been higher. Sometimes it’s been months after the shutdown that I find the news.

    So the 89% to 92% CF of US nuclear reactors? Some fueling and some breakage.

72. “Yup your overbuilding scenario was done a few years back in a peer reviewed paper by a real EE with a Phd, on the PJM grid through the the University of Delaware.”

    The paper was published in 2013 by Cory Budischak et al. It was Cory’s doctoral dissertation. You probably know about the paper because I have posted about it several times.

    Cory’s paper is what got me thinking about large scale overbuilding as a way to bring down the cost of a 100% RE grid. When his paper was written the costs of wind and solar were considerably higher than what they were over five years later (his costs were already outdated when he published). By using current prices a refur of his model would show a high amount of overbuilding to be optimal than was the case when wind and solar were more expensive.

    “Yup when you do the arithmetic (something you flunked) the total downtime of US reactor is on is about 10% of the downtime due to scheduled low season refueling outages and is usually due to transmission outages that affect all types of generation plant. So 92 average uptime 99% excluding scheduled outages. Solar is 20% wind 35% – why do you post this nonsense.”

    Single-axis tracking solar is now running about 30% CF and wind farms online since 2013 have CFs in the mid 40% range with some over 50%.

    For the last five years nuclear CF has varied between 89,9% and 92.3%. Some of that is due to refueling and maintenance and some to breakdowns.

    Here’s a record of non-fueling/maintenance shutdowns over a few recent months.

    September 2017
    V.C. Summer down due to problem with main transformer. (1)

    Turkey Point and St. Lucie reactors were shut down due to approaching Hurricane Irma. (2,3)

    Florida’s St. Lucie nuclear plant was forced into a partial shutdown to clean salt buildup from its transmission yard after Hurricane Irma in September. (4)

    Cook Nuclear Plant Unit 1 reactor was shut down after a valve that’s part of its reactor coolant supply system opened. (5)

    Columbia down due to vacuum leak (6)

    November 2017
    Beaver Valley offline due to electrical problem (7)

    Indian Point down for generator repairs. (8)

    Grand Gulf was shut down at the same time due to fluctuating power output and an apparent lack of knowledge of staff about how to deal with the problem (9)

    (continued…)

73. Markko, I just found some comments from you in my email as I was cleaning out the box. I’ll answer some of your points as I find time. I suspect you won’t be able to take on information that doesn’t support your bias but others might appreciate some facts.

    “Actually there is quite a bit of curtailment with solar in California.”

    CA curtailed 77,295 MWh out of 12,803,307 MWh of solar in 2017. That’s 0.6% and does not rise to what most people would consider “quite a bit”.
    “ Irrelevant as your idiotic plan with 3 times capacity and very little storage would be curtailing all the time.”

    What you don’t grasp (or don’t want to grasp) is that

    1) We already have about 2x overbuilding on our mainly fossil fuel US grids now. In order to meet demand we build more capacity that we need 24/365.

    2) Overbuilding wind and solar 3x is probably the best route for CAISO unless longer term storage becomes much cheaper than it is today.

    “Its a long way to transport wind from the midwest and its 50% capacity factors to rest of the country where it can be used. Not possible without massive transmission subsidies”

    No, the cost of transmission would be built into the price of the imported electricity. Just as it is now done. All electricity (except on-roof solar) has some transmission cost.

    Also, the DOE has identified 60% CF resources in both the NE and SE.

    “Your information is badly out of date. When you learn to use you LCOE calculator you’ll find that even Hinkley is less expensive than offshore wind. Lose the PPA’s, learn to use LCOE “

    My info is a 1.5 years out of date. I’ll catch up when the DOE releases 2017 data in September. Now cost.

    First LCOE is not a full accounting of what it costs to get electricity into the grid. LCOE is only the cost of generation. It does not include land costs, taxes, or owner profits. If those aren’t covered electricity does not flow.

    The UK just accepted two offshore wind projects at £57.50 per megawatt hour or $0.074/kWh. (Carbon Brief)

    Germany just granted licenses for construction of six new offshore wind farms at an average 4.66 euro cents per kilowatt hour (kWh). $0.051/kWh. (Reuters)

    The US’s first offshore wind farm will sell electricity for $0.065/kWh. (Renewable Economy)

    If Hinkley Point was finished and came online this year the guaranteed price would be $0.134/kWh. But it won’t be online for a few years. In 2025 the cost will be $0.168/kWh based on 3% inflation. From there on the cost will rise for the following 35 years and will rise to somewhere around $0.46/kWh.

    The offshore wind farm PPAs are locked down at their sub 8 cent level and will still charge $0.074 down to $0.051/kWh until about 2039 when Hinkley will be demanding $0.35/kWh.

74. Yup Euan Means – a 100% supporter of the world’s number one climate scientist James Hansen, and who like him documents his work, as opposed to Team Wallace a fake fact troll team of defacto Warming Deniers using demonstrated innumerates to push fake undocumented studys. Note that Mean’s work agrees with the peer reviewed material in this article.

75. More spew from Team Wallace.

    As a demonstrated energy illiterate and defacto Warming Denier you’d be unaware that the future plans for California includes a transition to all electric. I referred to energy above not electricity. Perhaps its your ESL status or more likely you don’t know the difference.

    Sometimes even your thickness leaves me dumbfounded. Here’s your pal, the sosh major at Cleantech posting a chart showing the effects of an 80% discharge on vehicle batteries.

    Have an associate that can search past wikipedia lookup “battery-lifetime-long-can-electric-vehicle-batteries-last”

    As you have demonstrated you are a particularly thick innumerate. What you are claiming is there was not a single night in California that was calm. Nobody believes your made up nonsense – part of the fake fact practice your team used to elect Trump. Note I listed a peer reviewed University of Delaware study done by an EE Phd with 3 times overbuild and he found 10% storage was needed not the .5% you spewed.

    “It’s over rover” You are killing me – is that a translation from some Russian phrase?

    Yup nuke plants running at 3 cents a kwh are having trouble in so called “merchant” markets where the competitor’s wind/solar and gas are subsidized to 85% by the ratepayer/taxpayer. Hard to compete in the most corrupt nation in the OECD when Big Oil owns all the politicians and media.

76. Maybe there is another Bob Wallace on Team Wallace who has the Russian equivalent of Grade 1 who can search in more sources than Wikipedia.

77. Yup your overbuilding scenario was done a few years back in a peer reviewed paper by a real EE with a Phd, on the PJM grid through the the University of Delaware. Unlike your nonsense with a .5% storage requirement that I debunked earlier the real numbers showed a need for a 10% storage with triple capacity as opposed to the 20% in the study here, an several orders of magnitude greater than nuclear cost.

    Yup when you do the arithmetic (something you flunked) the total downtime of US reactor is on is about 10% of the downtime due to scheduled low season refueling outages and is usually due to transmission outages that affect all types of generation plant. So 92 average uptime 99% excluding scheduled outages. Solar is 20% wind 35% – why do you post this nonsense.

    I’ve noticed that Team Wallace makes use of its vast team of resources to argue with Gish Gallop spewed vast amounts of irrelevancies.

78. More FUD from the troll farm I see

    Nobody cares what you stick with. You haven’t heard – you have already demonstrated that your search for knowledge is limited to Wikipedia.

    So you can’t back your made up nonsense that you claimed came from ERCOT like everything Team Wallace puts out. Your purpose is to out spew everybody else who unlike you isn’t paid to comment.

    Actually there is quite a bit of curtailment with solar in California. Other jurisdictions wind sell at a loss of 8 cents a kwh – profitable with subsidies. As an illiterate you are unaware of subsidies beyond the federal. Irrelevant as your idiotic plan with 3 times capacity and very little storage would be curtailing all the time.

    Its a long way to transport wind from the midwest and its 50% capacity factors to rest of the country where it can be used. Not possible without massive transmission subsidies.

    Your information is badly out of date. When you learn to use you LCOE calculator you’ll find that even Hinkley is less expensive than offshore wind. Lose the PPA’s, learn to use LCOE and Grade 3 arithmetic, and stop depending on Wikipedia for information.

79. I believe that is proposed already, but the capacity would not be enough. Would be nice to get additional water storage and pump-hydro storage as well, CA should be adding water storage as it is to deal with droughts, and energy storage would be a secondary benefit as well

80. I have read that you can turn citrus fruit into powerful batteries. No doubt high on the list for alternative energy for California.

81. California – 557 kWh Per Month per household. That works out to roughly 19 kWh per day.

    Only Maine and Hawaii use less electricity per household.

    “The base Tesla EV has a 50kWh battery which will have serious life issues if used more than 20% on a regular basis.”

    There’s a company called Tesloop which does limo runs between LA and Vegas. They rapid charge one or two times per day running close to zero before recharging. Their first set of batteries still had 80% capacity at 200,000 miles. There’s a taxi driver who fully charges and mostly discharges every day who, at last report, had reached 240 miles while still maintaining over 80% capacity.

    “unable to understand that at a 300% overbuild 3 times zero is still zero.”

    I have the data. There are no zero wind hours. None. A roughly 300% overbuild of wind and solar would have seen 78% of all hours in 2017 fully supplied by only wind and solar. Penetration without storage would have been 89%.

    Where Jenkins failed is where you are failing. Both of you are failing to understand how overbuilding can, at least in some regions, eliminate the need for large amounts of storage.

    “Search “can-texas-go-100-renewable” ”

    Oh for dog’s sake. That’s Euan Means. His specialty is setting up his arguments so that renewable fail and we are forced to turn to much more expensive nuclear.

    “Numerous times I’ve pointed to you that a PPA contains all sorts of financing, marketing and subsidies therein and has meaning only to the contracting parties.

    You certainly have not been my knowledge source when it comes to the contracted price of wind or solar. There are things that I have known for a long, long time. I learned, for example, about PPAs before there was an internet. And I’m sure you aren’t the individual who talked to me about investing in wind turbines at Altamont Pass back in the mid 1980s

    I recognize that you are suffering from an extreme case of crotch irritation because nuclear is now priced off the table in the US and many other places. But that’s just the facts, Jack. You can make all the ridiculous claims you like but those who own and invest in nuclear will tell you that nuclear is toast in the US. It’s over, Rover.

    BTW, recent data finds 26 out of 66 US nuclear plants will be closed or deeply in debt by 2021. If paid off plants are now competitive in today’s energy market there is zero chance a new reactor could survive.

82. I’ve heard no one claim that the EIA’s historical numbers are inaccurate. Their predictions are pretty much unusable but that is due, I suspect, to politics. I’ll stick with the 3c/kWh US average rather than one data point from Canada. And, as I said, it’s not as likely we’ll move much electricity from the Midwest to East Coast now that we’re moving to higher hub heights and offshore.

    Underwater cabling may be expensive but the distances are very short.

    If you want to accuse ERCOT of lying best you take that up with them.

    “Wind/solar can disappear from the grid with zero advance notice as well ”

    Only if the computers connected to the weather stations fail. Approaching/departing clouds and changes in wind speed are automatically factored in. Wind farms are now using lidar to detect upcoming abrupt changes in wind speed to that they can adjust blade angle to take maximum advantage of an increase or to feather the blades to reduce heavy loading with more extreme increases.

    “Your 5 cents a kwh doesn’t include subsidies which double and triple the payback on curtailment.”

    Almost all PPAs for wind are now under 5 cents per kWh. Without subsidies. I have no idea how a PTC would operate for wind not delivered due to curtailment. Since grids are not doing any real curtailment it’s not an issue at this point in time. When we do reach a point when we are starting to curtail those new farms will be built without subsidies as subsides are now fading out.

    That said your “double and triple the payback on curtailment makes” no sense. If a kWh is curtailed and the federal subsidy program allows that kWh to be claimed as production then the value to the wind farm would be the amount of the PTC, a maximum of 2.3 cents. (The PTC is currently 1.9 cents.)

    92% CF for nuclear. Wind farms built from 2013 onward are averaging the mid 40% range with some over 50%. The DOE has identified significant areas spread around the country where we should expect CFs from 60% to 70% with 140 meter hub heights.

    One gets 37% by averaging in earlier constructed wind farms which used lower hub heights and shorter blade lengths. There’s one farm built many years ago that has something like a 16% CF.

    I expect there will be capacity payments to wind and solar farms later as we move into the overbuilding phase. It will probably make sense for utilities to contract the services of multiple wind and solar farms while knowing there will be times when they will discard/curtail some of the production. That’s exactly what those of us off the grid do. We install (make capacity payments) for enough nameplate to cover most days, including partially cloudy, shorter winter days. Then we curtail a lot of potential production on sunny, long summer days.

    Oh, somewhere you claimed offshore wind is more expensive than nuclear. Your information is badly, badly out of date. You need to check to see what offshore is running in Europe these days.

83. I’ve already described to you how with ample overbuilding wind and solar can become extremely reliable generation resources, at least for the CAISO and ERCOT grids. I don’t know about other grids as I have no access to their data.

    What it seems that you are doing is ‘not building enough’. You’re not considering overbuilding which, in general, will be cheaper than storage or dispatchable generation fill in.

    By limiting the amount of wind and solar you do create large amounts of time when some other source will be needed for fill in. That’s bad design.

    And I don’t think you realize how often nuclear plants fail. Let me give you a sample of a few recent months.

    September 2017

    V.C. Summer down due to problem with main transformer. (1)

    Turkey Point and St. Lucie reactors were shut down due to approaching Hurricane Irma. (2,3)

    Florida’s St. Lucie nuclear plant was forced into a partial shutdown to clean salt buildup from its transmission yard after Hurricane Irma in September. (4)

    Cook Nuclear Plant Unit 1 reactor was shut down after a valve that’s part of its reactor coolant supply system opened. (5)

    Columbia down due to vacuum leak (6)

    November 2017

    Beaver Valley offline due to electrical problem (7)

    Indian Point down for generator repairs. (8)

    Grand Gulf was shut down at the same time due to fluctuating power output and an apparent lack of knowledge of staff about how to deal with the problem (9)

    December 2017

    North Anna Unit 2 shut down due to water leak in cooling system. (10)

    Clinton down due to a transformer problem (11)

    Unit 2 at the Indian Point nuclear power plant was offline for two weeks due to leakage from a reactor coolant pump (12)
    Columbia shut down due to transmission problem. Didn’t turn up in the news until March 2018. (13)
    January 2018
    Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station shutdown after one of the two main 345-volt lines that provide off site power to the plant “became unavailable,” (14)
    February 2018
    Unit 3 at Indian Point shut down when a generator failed. (15)
    March 2018
    Browns Ferry Unit 1 taken offline due to problems with turbine control system. (16)
    Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station second time in 2018 due to leak and transformer problems. (17)
    April 2018
    Fermi 2 down due to a plant transformer malfunction. (18)
    Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station down for third time in 2018. Valve problem where water flows into reactor. Pilgrim has been offline 53 of the last 120 days. (19)

    May 2018
    Columbia down for unknown problem (20)

    Over a 7-8 month span 19 of 98 or 19% of all US reactors were offline for reasons other than scheduled refueling and maintenance. A greater than 30% failure rate on an annual basis. The number of shutdowns may have been higher.

    Sometimes it’s been months after the shutdown that I find the news.

84. “The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) is an American federal agency operating in the Pacific Northwest. BPA was created by an act of Congress in 1937 to market electric power from the Bonneville Dam located on the Columbia River and to construct facilities necessary to transmit that power.” Wiki

    There’s a lot, lot more to the PNW than Bonneville Dam.

    Here’s your claim – . “The Pacific Northwest routinely loses all wind power for a month or so during max load winter cold fronts with virtually no solar power.”

    Neither you or your nephew has brought the data to support your claim.

85. More FUD from Big Oil’s Team Wallace – how many of you are on staff anyway? Like his associates of the Trump election team in St Petersburg, Team Wallace is notorious for putting out fake fact.

    The average energy use in a California household is roughly 50 kWh a day excluding transportation. The base Tesla EV has a 50kWh battery which will have serious life issues if used more than 20% on a regular basis. Not much use when a spot of bad weather like those more and more frequent atmospheric rivers shuts down wind/solar for more than overnight.

    Only an incredible energy illiterate would put out that sort of schlock.

    Your innumeracy makes you unable to understand that at a 300% overbuild 3 times zero is still zero. Then you claim only a 1 TWh of storage – or 1 days average california summer load – can store the 200% overage on a sunny windy day you lay out your ignorance for all to see. How it can hold the absurd 4 day figure you claim defies imagination. Jenkins was predicting 36 terawatt hours. You can see why nobody believes your ridiculous spreadsheet.

    Actually it happens that somebody credible did ERCOT study at 100% – no surprise his numbers disagree with your schlock.

    ” According this analysis, “as much as 50 terawatt-hours of storage would be needed to balance ERCOT’s wind and solar generation against ERCOT’s demand over the three-year period considered in this 100% renewable scenario.”

    Search “can-texas-go-100-renewable”

    Works out to about 2 bucks a kwh for the cheapest storage available.

    As you’ve demonstrated you can’t even work a spreadsheet much less a LCOE calculator.

    Numerous times I’ve pointed to you that a PPA contains all sorts of financing, marketing and subsidies therein and has meaning only to the contracting parties. For example I could have a customer who pays my wind farms bills with a fixed contracts 70% of my output at 15 cents a kwh , so I can make extra cash practically giving away any surpluses for 3 cents a kwh.

    As an innumerate you are unable to see that I used more or less the same costs as you quoted adjusted for real projects not some garbage from your sociology major pals Cleantech blog.

    You nuclear numbers are based on a corrupt first of kind project in the most corrupt country in the OECD built by a rapacious private power operators. A more accurate number would be the recent turnkey APR-1000 project in the UAE with all labor materials and engineering barged in from Korea. Public power could built the same turnkey unit on the old Satsop site at Aberdeen in 4 years or less, everything barged in, no Americans allowed on site, for $3.5B/GW 3 cents a kWh.

86. Sorry it took an extra day to get back to your team. It’s very difficult for a working man to keep up to Big Oil’s disinformation shop.

    The EIA, charged with promoting fossil fuels, is extremely inaccurate – making assumptions the politicians of the day are comfortable with. I use real numbers of real projects. Both Ontario the NE grid have experienced 8 cent a kWh transmission costs when we consider that wind/solar often comes from great distances from the load, while requiring 100% nameplate transmission capability while loaded to 10 to 40% of capacity on average. Their bias is obvious when you consider nukes are built very close to load centers with transmission lines at 100% capacity nearly always – transmission cost near zero per kWh.

    Underwater transmission systems are very expensive so the cost is still enormous. Since offshore wind is much more expensive than nuke power, your offshore dream depends on your employer’s continuing ability to bribe the always corrupt American politician – hard to argue with that.

    “Nuclear and coal are more expensive to integrate into the grid than wind and solar according to ERCOT”

    This is an out and out lie – detailed reference to the report and paragraph where this is stated is required.

    Wind/solar can disappear from the grid with zero advance notice as well so they need spinning reserve for both that event and the need to maintain loads when weather fronts shut down the unreliables – as little as a few minutes.

    Your 5 cents a kwh doesn’t include subsidies which double and triple the payback on curtailment.

    Actually the capacity factor of the US nuke fleet keeps increasing every year and is now the low mid 90’s while last year wind average capacity was 37% with the higher capacities in the midwest getting free pride of place transmission to massive surplus to eastern market – basically the transmission cost is so high that wind is of no value otherwise.

    I use real numbers input to NREL’s LCOE calculator. Your ridiculous claims make little difference to results when input to the program while your demonstrated innumeracy prevents you from doing so.

    There are no capacity payments for wind and solar as they are undependable, while nukes and coal need to run all out. Dirt cheep gas peakers can cycle on and off, 90% of their cost is fuel – lotsa capacity payments for them.

87. As a noted energy illiterate you’d be unaware the most grids like to have about 10% grid reverse available for large transmission or generation failures – wind/solar don’t count. Wind/solar needs to be backed up to 100% nameplate to cover the certainty of wind area full output to low or no output in time frames of minutes to hours as weather fronts come and go, picking up the load as the unreliable drops off. Even if the drop off is predictable the backup resource needs to be available, paid for and ready to go – not necessary with a nuke plant where the only outages generally are low load season refueling events.

88. Actually turns out my 6 year old nephew is taking innernet at school. I gave him the BPA reference and he found the relevant link in 10 minutes. But then English is his first language. No need to translate to Russian.

89. Just to put the 15x solar and 20x wind into context.

    In 2017 California generated 11.79% of its total electricity with solar. A 15x increase would mean 179% of total load from solar. Wind supplied 6.24% so a 20x increase would be 124.8% of total load. Combined there would be a potential generation about 3x the total load (304%)..

    Here are 2017 CFs for US plants.
    Coal 53.5% (1.9x)
    CCNG 54.8% (1.8x)
    NG Turbines 9.4% (10.6x)
    Hydro 45.2% (2.2x)

    When one looks at the amount of overbuilding we’ve done to keep the pre-RE grid running 3x overbuilding doesn’t seem as extreme. There should be no complaining if we could get to a 100% wind/solar grid at 2x overbuilding. Going up one more level makes more sense than adding storage because the installed cost of wind and solar is low and both have no fuel costs. That wouldn’t be the case for coal and hydro with their much higher installed costs. And might not make sense for coal and CCNG with their fuel costs.

90. No, you didn’t understand what I said. Read again…

    “Large thermal plants can disappear from the grid with zero advance notice”

    Stuff breaks. Large thermal plants break down much more frequently than most people realize. And they give no prior notice that they have a transformer which is about to catch on fire or a pump that is going to fail. They just stop.

    Because of that the grid needs to maintain some amount of spinning reserve. Generation that can step in very quickly in order to avoid grid disruption.

    With solar you know years in advance when the Sun will rise and when the Sun will set.

    You know days ahead about incoming storms and changes in cloud/wind speed that will impact solar and wind output. Because the increases and decreases are very predictable hours in advance there is no need to keep other generation running in the background.

91. To some extent that’s correct. But we now have demand that is not 24 hours per day so the capital is already spent.

    We already pump water when electricity is cheapest. Those water towers one sees in many cities tend to be refilled late at night when electricity is least expensive. They could as easily be filled a few hours during the day and a few at night if that’s when electricity is cheapest.

    California uses a lot of energy to pump water over the mountains to SoCal. I think I’ve read that some of that pumping is now shifting to daylight hours as solar is providing less expensive electricity.

    For something like desal the major cost may be energy. It may make sense for the utility to offer a discounted rate if the desal plant ceases operation when wind/solar supplies are tight. Or it might make economic sense for desal plants to install elevated water storage (to create pressure), fill storage when electricity is cheap, and run off stored water when electricity is expensive.

    We’re already seeing commercial buildings using cheaper electricity to cool down water and then use that stored ‘cool’ to assist air conditioning when electricity is expensive. I expect we may see the same sort of systems used to assist heat pumps in the coldest parts of the country.

    Some large industrial plants (aluminum smelters and pulp mills) are paid to shut down when grid supplies are really stressed.

    It would cost little to make our home appliances ‘smart’ and run them as dispatchable loads. Fill the clothes or dishwasher in evening and have it do its work by breakfast time. It doesn’t matter if your dishes get washed at 8 pm or 3 am. Even spreading out the start times on refrigerators and freezers would help. Cool them down a few extra degrees right before supplies are scheduled to tighten and let them drift through the shortage. Use the same strategy with water heating.

    EVs are the obvious gorilla in the room. Needing so few hours of charging per day (on average) and having the ability to skip days make them excellent dispatchable loads.

92. Amazing! You’re actually assuming nuclear, with a capacity factor of 92%, (And virtually all of that 8% scheduled outages.) is less reliable than solar and wind.

    I don’t think it’s possible to reason with somebody who has such whacked out assumptions.

93. “Tasks like water pumping and desalination that can be moved from fixed demand schedules to opportunistic loads further cut overbuilding and cost. ”

    Technically, aren’t you just moving the overbuilding and its associated cost to the capital equipment for those loads, rather than the generation end? I mean, if you’ve got some industrial process that can feasibly run 24/7 with $X of equipment, requiring it to run 50% of the time instead demands that it have $2X worth of equipment.

    Including transmission capacity!

94. ” Doesn’t include though the average 8 cents a kwh for 35% utilized long distance transmission, 15 cents a kwh for gas backup and 10 cents or so for surplus dumping ”

    The EIA sets transmission costs for wind at 3 cents and nuclear at 1 cent. The transmission cost for wind will almost certainly drop since we have identified many new sites where by using 140 meter hub heights there will be little to no transmission needed. The same will happen with offshore wind where the maximum distance will be about 20 miles. The EIA’s cost estimate is based on the assumption that we would need to move massive amounts of electricity from the MIdwest to the East Coast. That is apparently not going to be needed.

    Nuclear and coal are more expensive to integrate into the grid than wind and solar according to ERCOT. Large thermal plants can disappear from the grid with zero advance notice so they need spinning reserve which wind and solar do not need.

    There is no cost for ‘surplus dumping’ that would be specific to wind and solar. It might be that someone wrote a screwy contract somewhere in Canada. Standard practice would be for the buyer to pay the agreed price per kWh if the wind/solar farm output couldn’t be used and the farm would curtail. That would be in the <5 cent range. Hinkley Point has a 'guaranteed take' contract along this line except that they will get paid more than 12 cents per kWh.

    "Plugging the wind numbers in the NREL calculator with 3% discount 35% capacity factor 20 year life we get a cost of 13 cents a kwh excluding massive gas backup, transmission and surplus dumping costs.

    Plugging the the nuke numbers with a 95% capacity factor and a 60 year life comes to 4.2 cents/kWh, reducing to 3 cents a kwh with a N of a kind costs"

    You've put a heavy thumb on the scale.

    Currently new wind farms are reporting CFs in the mid to high 40% range with some over 50%. No nuclear returns a 90% CF over its life.

    Our oldest wind farms operated for 30 years before refurbishing. We should expect newer turbines to last much longer. No US nuclear plant has yet reached the age of 50.

    In addition, it is much cheaper to refurbish a wind farm with worn out turbines than to build a new one. Take off the turbines, Bolt on new turbines. The towers/foundations, access roads, transmission lines are reusable.

    When you generate theoretical numbers as you did you should then look at current real world prices to see if you're in the ballpark. Which you are not.

    If CCNG or gas turbine plants are receiving capacity payments then that's a payment to 'be there' for both renewables and coal/nuclear.

95. “As even the dumbest wind/solar nut can see EV’s are of zero use for more than a single days storage. When your team learns to read English instead of Russian you’ll find the article costs come from long term and seasonal backup requirements.”

    The average driving day is about 37 miles in the US. That means for a 250 mile range EV charged to 80% the average EV can go over five days without charging. (250 * .8 / 37 = 5.4)

    As I pointed out in my first post the article makes an assumption that we need long term storage. As I pointed out, at least for California, it would be much cheaper to simply build enough wind and solar capacity to cover the ‘problem’ months than to try to move massive amounts of energy from season to season. In my modeling I found only four days in 2017 in which 20x solar and 30x wind did not cover all daily needs. Adding a modest amount of storage (1 TWh) was enough to move energy accumulated a few days earlier to cover that need.

    The same holds for CAISO in 2015. Those are the only years and grids I’ve run so far. I did run the model on three years of ERCOT using wind only as there is no publicly available solar data. I found that ERCOT could reach 80% penetration with wind alone at a similar low cost.
    “, the LCOE of the latest wind/solar project is 13 cents a kwh at state owned utility rates. ”

    That is simply false. You must not know how to calculate a LCOE or you must have used incorrect data. Here’s the LCOE calculator I’ve been using for years. Put in reasonable numbers.

    https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/tech-lcoe.html

    Since (I assume you know) wind PPAs are commonly being signed for less than $0.03/kWh your thirteen cent number should have raised a red flag and sent you looking for where you made your mistake.

    Your cost of installed wind and nuclear are all messed up. Let me give you some reliable sources.

    Wind Onshore
    $1.53 Installed Cost/Watt
    DOE 2016 Wind Technologies Market Report

    PV Solar
    $1.00 Installed Cost/Watt
    $1.07 With Tracking
    U.S. Solar Photovoltaic System Cost Benchmark: Q3 2017
    https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf

    Nuclear
    $6.94 Installed Cost/Watt based on the initial cost of estimate of $15.5 billion at Vogtle 3 & 4 for 2, 234 MW.

    $10.30 Installed Cost/Watt based the current cost of Vogtle 3 & 4 which is at $23 billion. It is expected that the final cost will rise to at least $25 billion taking the cost per watt to $11.29 or higher

    When the expected cost of Vogtle 3 & 4 was $15.5 billion Citigroup’s LCOE projected a kWh cost of $0.11. Now that cost has risen to $23 billion the cost of electricity risen to approximately $0.16/kWh and it could go higher.
    You’re mixing up overnight and installed costs, omitting financing during construction. Your using overnight numbers for nuclear from a country whose costs can’t be met in the US.

    (running out of characters)

96. You can by posting a google search reference for ie

    Google “solar-15-percent-returns-lure-investments-from-google-to-buffett”

97. As even the dumbest wind/solar nut can see EV’s are of zero use for more than a single days storage. When your team learns to read English instead of Russian you’ll find the article costs come from long term and seasonal backup requirements.

    As I have pointed out innumerable times without success in penetrating your innumeracy and other thicknesses, the LCOE of the latest wind/solar project is 13 cents a kwh at state owned utility rates.

    According to IHS market wind costs amount to 48K/MWyr Wind maintenance costs about the same as US nukes. Worldwide nuke operating costs are about half of the gold plated, lawyer generated, US costs. Capital costs of the latest US wind builds is about $5/watt avg – double what Korea build nukes for. Doesn’t include though the average 8 cents a kwh for 35% utilized long distance transmission, 15 cents a kwh for gas backup and 10 cents or so for surplus dumping found by the Ontario Auditor General in that jurisdiction – none of which are needed for nukes. If you want to stop leaving a trail of bodies and GHG pollution you’ll need to get rid of your gas backup – add two orders of magnitude to that number too the cheapest green storage we can project (see Jenkins)

    Plugging the wind numbers in the NREL calculator with 3% discount 35% capacity factor 20 year life we get a cost of 13 cents a kwh excluding massive gas backup, transmission and surplus dumping costs.

    Plugging the the nuke numbers with a 95% capacity factor and a 60 year life comes to 4.2 cents/kWh, reducing to 3 cents a kwh with a N of a kind costs.

    As a noted energy illiterate you be unaware that the vast majority of gas plant costs is operating fuel expense unlike wind/solar/nuke which are capital intensive. Gas plant makes nearly all of its cash with massively subsidied capacity payments necessary to load balance never around when needed wind/solar.

98. So we see that you have no facts to back your claim.

99. Since there is really very little in the way of grid interconnects BPA mostly covers it. Surely your team knows how to use Google. Awaiting your calculations.

100. you cant post a citation to Vuukle

101. Here is one of your batterys that also uses the water afterwords

     https://yellowdragonblog.com/2018/06/08/bay-area-recoverd-water-funded-pumped-storage-agency-barwf-psa/

102. Personal vehicles spend over 90% of their time parked. For best utilization of wind and solar we are going to want a significant amount of the fleet to be plugged in during the day. That is both a solution for best generation use and a good way to provide charging opportunities for those who won’t have a place to plug in where they park at night.

     California utilities are already spending millions of dollars helping to install workplace charge outlets.

     The average EV will need about three hours of charging per 24 hours using a basic 240 VAC outlet. That makes EVs a massive dispatchable load that can be switched off when supplies are limited and back on when extra generation is available.

     Renewables, wind and solar, are the least expensive to build. Wind is about $1.50/watt and PV solar is about $1/watt. Those are last year prices and this year prices should be even lower. (Except for PV in the US where Trump has caused a small bump up in panel price.)

     Of course cost to install is not the critical factor. It’s the cost of electricity generated. Wind and CCNG are close in installed cost but wind has no fuel cost, thus delivering cheaper electricity.

     Unsubsidized wind and PV solar are now the two lowest sources of electricity globally. Only a small percentage of new coal and new nuclear.

     https://www.lazard.com/media/450436/rehcd3.jpg

     As for overbuilding, few people realize that we’ve overbuilt both coal and combined cycle natural gas plants (CCNG) by about 2x. The capacity factor for each runs between 50% to 60% which means that both sit unused for over 40% of the time. It’s even worse with gas peakers which are overbuilt more than 10x. We use our gas peakers between 5% and 10% of the time.

103. “The Pacific Northwest routinely loses all wind power for a month or so during max load winter cold fronts with virtually no solar power.”

     Please link to a data source. And make sure you include all the Pacific Northwest. Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Northern California, and British Columbia.

104. Actually Robert you haven’t produced any fact just unreferenced dubious claims attempting to refute peer reviewed science published in reputable journal, similar to what we see from warming denial trolls. Your innumeracy has been demonstrated innumerable times most recently with your inability to calculate LCOE’s related to wind/solar PPA’s. The idea that you would even know how to use a spreadsheet is jaw dropping.

     As the testimony showed in the recent Congressional inquiry on Russian trolls, team members with names like Sergei always claimed they were citizens from the California or the Midwest using names like Bob Wallace. One thing that tripped them up was their 24/7 presence on comment threads leaving one with the impression that rather than Bob Wallace they were Team Wallace.

     Since Big Oil knows that the wind/solar with inefficient fossil backup uses about the same amount of product maybe more than the more efficient all fossil scam,adding in a never never land green storage schlock promoted by useful idiots means that we’ll be burning lotsa fossil fuels into the next century backing up all that wind/solar plant. Germany after spending near $2 Trillion on the wind/solar scam hasn’t so far reduced GHG’s an iota when biofuels counted using real science not politics.

     But I’ll tell you what Bob, an exercise for you to show us all how much you’ve improved. The Pacific Northwest routinely loses all wind power for a month or so during max load winter cold fronts with virtually no solar power. In the regions future with loads 3 times what they are today, a probable loss of significant hydro potential from Columbia River Treaty, drought and salmon concerns, and wind the only economic “renewable” groff mechanism, calculate for us the extra cost per kWh that would have to added to a customers power bill to make sure he doesn’t freeze in the dark. Last summer the PNW lost nearly the whole summers solar with forest fire smoke. Note that EV’s, contrary to your silly claims might provide for only few hours assistance in these type of events as the consumer is unlikely to abide with having his vehicle crippled.

     Note as well that well it may not have happened recently but historically there have been really long lasting atmosphere river weather systems that could wipe out solar power in California for many weeks just like winter weather routinely does in the PNW. I shudder to think what a volcano event or even worse forest fires might do.

     No need for those spreadsheets you have so much trouble with, just simple Grade 3 arithmetic that you can post here. I get about a buck a kwh added to a customers bill just to cover that event alone.

105. One problem with using electrical cars as buffer outside of tiny sharp peaks is that the owner need the capacity for driving, you can not tap it during the night and refuel during day.
     Renewable are not cheap to build they are cheap to run its no point nor running an solar pannel, running stuff like desalination on cheap power in peaks makes sense, even overbuilding this and only run 5 hour day as in the long run energy is the main cost here

106. Interesting. If you don’t like facts then smear the messenger.

     I could have pointed out that the data is publically available on the CAISO website. If you doubt my model or math then do your own work and let’s compare.

     Just so others know, I’ve never worked in the energy field nor have I ever received any funds from an energy company. I do invest in non-managed index funds which means that my investments contain a very small amount of fossil fuel stock. How much? I’ve never looked.

     I can’t figure out how someone who is reporting that California could run on nothing but wind and solar with a small amount of storage and charge 100% EVs might benefit Big Oil. But perhaps Markko operates in a different reality than most of us.

     BTW, I just did model run using 2015 CAISO data and found roughly the same outcome. Crank up wind and solar production, use EVs as a dispatchable load, and you need only a small amount, ~1 TWh, of storage to reach a 100% wind and solar grid in California.

     I’ll try to run the 2016 data in a few days.

107. Robert here is well known as an innumerate spokesperson for Big Oil making more of his baseless claims.

     Note that he supplies no links to the details and assumptions in his extraordinary claim here that his work is more accurate than the peer reviewed works by Jenkins et al that is published in reputable journal.

     Nice try Robert.

108. Well, we are wasting money with something that doesn’t work. We are selling the people the lie that renewable energy is making a difference, when it isn’t.
     Fossil fuels investments are still rising and renewable energy investments have stagnated as countries that need energy are looking for real energy. Business as usual.

109. …Or they could turn Hoover Dam into a giant battery: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/24/business/energy-environment/hoover-dam-renewable-energy.html

110. Inefficient possible uses are sure expensive compared to probably better uses. So what?

111. I question the findings above. I ran a spreadsheet model using 2017 CAISO hourly demand along with wind and solar production to see how much demand could be supplied using only onshore wind and PV solar before the cost became prohibitive. I assumed a price of $0.02/kWh for a mix of new and paid off wind/solar.

     For simplicity I left out hydro, geothermal, and biofuel.

     Taking 2017 solar and multiplying by 15x along with wind by 20x I hit 90% penetration and a cost of $0.07/kWh. Again, no storage.

     Then assuming CA’s cars and light trucks were battery powered by the ~2040 completion date I found there was enough surplus daily production to charge all EVs on a daily basis except for 20 days. By selling the otherwise curtailed production to EVs the cost drops to $0.04/kWh.

     Adding 1 million MWh of storage more than created a 24/365 100% wind and solar supplied grid. All EV batteries were charged daily. Far, far less storage than this article assumes.

     What is getting missed is that overbuilding inexpensive generation is far cheaper than storage. Right now US grids use their coal and combined cycle gas plants between 50% and 60% of the time. Gas peakers run between 5% and 10% of the time. We overbuild fossil fuel generation rather than use storage to cover variability in demand.

     What is also being missed is the extent we can turn a portion of demand into a dispatchable load, like EV charging. Tasks like water pumping and desalination that can be moved from fixed demand schedules to opportunistic loads further cut overbuilding and cost.
     15x solar and 20x onshore wind needs are likely to fall significantly once we start adding in offshore wind. Offshore is a much more regular producer than onshore.

112. If you think 12 billion dollars is not much money, remember, the 22GW Three Gorges hydro power plant costed 30 billion dollars to be built.
     But see, instead of building energy generation capacity, you are wasting money with a accessory support to allow renewable energy to work properly.
     But to be honest, at the current rate of 150GW per year of renewable energy installation, we will take only 200 years to displace fossil fuels. MIT Technology Review also have an article on that one. So we have lost already! Whooo!

113. Oh boy, not this again! It was the tsunami that drowned the generators, the earthquake itself didn’t really damaged the powerplant. That argument that a given region is too dangerous to build cause of earthquakes is nonsense, and could be applied to anything and we might as well just leave California for good!

     Ask the engineers that have built the Onagawa nuclear power plant, it took a hit from the earthquake and the tsunami far worse than Fukushima and wasn’t damaged, to be honest the powerplant was the only building left standing on the region.

     Also, this story of mother nature doesn’t care about what we design is senseless. We build giant dams to control the flow of entire drainage basins, preventing destructive floods and producing huge amounts of energy from that.
     That’s the problem people don’t realize, we interfere with the environment in such a big scale, that “nature-friendly” solutions don’t cut it out.

114. # Terraform California

115. We really should upgrade the grid regardless what else is done. Frankly 100% renewable power my be unachievable a reasonable price with current technology but that doesn’t we shouldn’t use renewable power sources at lower levels that don’t cause economic hardship.

116. What months have the top wind speeds in California? In the eastern US wind speeds are higher in the winter. Maybe excess energy in the summer months should be used to pump water south from the pacific northwest? It would be a project finally worthy of long range DC superconducting transmission. Southern California residents might finally have enough water. Maybe there would be enough extra water to allow the Colorado to refill the Salton sea.
     Maybe California rivers could become rivers again.

117. Where did the comments go?

118. California also needs water storage, the solution build pumped storage dams for hydroelectric on demand that is fed by excess solar and wind during prime generation periods and a nice added benefit is you are also storing water for agriculture and city use, granted you need to construct pipelines. California needs more water storage anyway.

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