Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar by 2035: Study

I hope this is a solid study and not just wishful thinking. I&#x27;ve been looking at pricing, and right now, fracked gas plants are running around $40&#x2F;mwh, with wind at under $50&#x2F;mwh and PV solar (no battery storage) at around $60&#x2F;mwh. Coal and traditional nuclear are running around $100&#x2F;mwh (these are all rounded numbers from memory, don&#x27;t get unhelpfully pedantic!).<p>These numbers are obliterating both coal and nuclear. Coal plants are shutting down as fast as replacements can be built, and nuclear plants are shutting down a decade or more before official end-of-life, because they&#x27;re losing major customers to cheaper alternatives that are available right now.<p>The cost of PV solar has dropped over 80% in the past decade, and wind like 50%, due to engineering improvements in operation and economies of scale in manufacturing. But it&#x27;s a reasonable question how much farther their prices will drop. It seems unlikely to me that we&#x27;ll see another decade of such radical price drops.<p>Gas, on the other hand, is vulnerable to markets and availability. How long will it stay so cheap? And what happens if a politically progressive government gets serious about carbon taxing? On the other hand, it&#x27;s a lot cheaper up-front to build a gas plant, and a lot less painful if it closes early.

My understanding (which is probably uninformed at best) has been that coal, nuclear, etc are used to cover base load, and basically work best when up and running at 100% all the time.<p>Natural gas has the advantage that it can be spun up and down pretty quickly, which has meant that it is used primarily for &quot;peak&quot; load, which I think used to be covered a lot of the time by things such as diesel and oil plants and have basically been supplanted at this point by natural gas.<p>Solar and wind have the trouble that they are unreliable, which means you need something to smooth out demand. This is something coal and nuclear are poor at, meaning if you are bringing solar and wind into the mix on a large scale, natural gas becomes even more appealing since you can spin it up &#x2F; down to balance capacity.<p>A thing I don&#x27;t see mentioned very often is the relative density of each power source. One of the things nuclear and coal have going for them, is that you can supply <i>a lot</i> of electricity in a fairly limited footprint.<p>Wind and solar a much less dense, meaning you need to cover a much larger area, and you need it to be more distributed rather than all concentrated in one place.<p>All of this is to say that I think everything is inter-related much more than people realize. Shifting to using more solar &#x2F; wind creates a pressure to move away from coal &#x2F; nuclear even without considering the &quot;clean energy&quot; aspect.

1) I think it&#x27;s certainly <i>possible</i>, but 2035 is still some time out. Extrapolating battery costs 16 years from now is not at all straightforward.<p>2) The headline result can be true even if solar&#x2F;wind&#x2F;storage have significant annual gaps in availability. If a gas plant was originally built on the assumption that it could run profitably for 5000 hours per year, but in the future there are only 2000 hours a year it can run profitably (due to more solar&#x2F;wind), it can be financially &quot;crushed.&quot; At least in competitive electricity markets. There could be large writedowns as plant load factors decline. Since gas plants are much less labor intensive to keep running than coal plants, I don&#x27;t expect to see gas plants mothballed and demolished quite the way American coal plants have been over the past 5 years. They may still be profitable to run in the peak-demand season each year even with much more renewable capacity deployed. But they&#x27;ll make less revenue and profit, burn less fuel, and emit less CO2.

Gas Plants Will Get Crushed by Wind, Solar <i>and big batteries</i>.<p>Without some form of storage, peaking power plants are required to support wind and solar, and these are typically gas-fired.

I read the headline too fast and thought it said &quot;Gas <i>planets</i> Will Get Crushed by <i>Solar Wind</i> by 2035&quot;.<p>Sounded terrifying.

Some time, in not so distant future, we will have abundant, almost infinite, almost free, renewable energy. We will forget what an energy bill is, because administration overhead will be higher than the price of the energy itself. It will just be an inconspicuous tiny item on the city taxes. And we won&#x27;t think it&#x27;s amazing. We&#x27;ll take it for granted. It will become new normal. Just like now we don&#x27;t remember any more what it feels like not being reachable by phone when you go out for dinner with your friends.<p>Mark my words.

RMI has been pushing hydrogen cars for a while. I was never a big fan of their analysis there - so take their conclusions with a bit of a grain of doubt.<p>Ironically gas and solar &#x2F; wind sometimes go together with gas filling gaps in generation on a more flexible basis. Interesting to read here that gas will be &quot;crushed&quot;. That will need some huge battery capacity - not saying its not possible but...<p>Coal though - if article was coal is going to be crushed - sure.

Excess electric doesn&#x27;t have to be in stored with chemicals like lithium ion, energy is still energy.

I downloaded the study - it&#x27;s long and filled with pictures so haven&#x27;t read yet.<p>I expect they made the mistake of not taking into account the increase in cost due to a primarily renewable grid. Such massive changes in the type of generating supply will yield massive changes in the costs to supply power. As you remove all the dispatchable power sources (power generators that you can put on line at will) you have to build really big heat or electricity storage and would have to have emergency generating capacity for the potential of extremely low wind and sun for days and weeks at a time. Basically, you&#x27;d have to have all the natural gas generators and pipelines for the eventuality of bad renewable conditions. Who will pay for that? Just leaving them idle 95% of the time is not the best use of money and it&#x27;s possible the government may have to pay for renewable&#x27;s storage problems.<p>Geography is also a serious concern. Texas will have vastly different economics than than Washington or New York.

Something I&#x27;m curious about is how this will affect plant manufacturers. Specifically I&#x27;m thinking about generator manufacturers like MHI, Siemens, GE, Toshiba. Do they just shut those divisions down and move on?<p>There&#x27;s also a lot of other businesses that exist for building&#x2F;maintaining&#x2F;repairing plants and equipment that are non-OE and their futures seem grim.

On the week of August 12, the Texas grid, managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) maxed out at around 75,000 MW of load. On one of the worst days, the approx. 24,000 MW nameplate capacity wind farms on that grid produced about 4,500 MW at the absolute peaks of demand. In other words, wind farms produced 18% or so of their maximum rated capacity.<p>This is a typical pattern during the dog days of August. Winds lull during the late afternoon, and pickup after midnight. Winds farms, on an annual basis, provide 22% of Texas electricity generation. However, during these peak demand hours, natural gas contributed about 50,000 MW, with coal and nuclear distant second and third place. If Texas wind farms are to displace the gas-fired plants, there will need to be 10-fold increase in their numbers, or somehow solar and battery storage will have to step in.<p>Saying that wind is going to crush gas, is only half true. Currently, the pipeline of new generators being built in Texas has slightly more wind (capacity factor ~ 40%) being installed than gas. Solar, during the next 5 years, is being built (allowing for capacity factor ~ 20%) at about the same rate (~12,000 averaged MW). You could call these technologies the &#x27;three amigos&#x27;, as they will be appearing, as new generating capacity, in (very) roughly equal amounts. Nevertheless, gas plants are a unique, and necessary part of the future, due to their dispatch ability. They can literally be called upon to deliver electricity 24&#x2F;7&#x2F;365.<p>Importantly, one hour of generation during these peak periods costs 450 times the average generator&#x27;s fees for electricity. In other words, one hour of a natural gas plant&#x27;s output, during these near-black-out conditions (properly termed Energy Emergency Alert), earns them as much as running those plants, non-stop, the previous 19 days. These extreme spikes haven&#x27;t happened in Texas for a few years. Still, there is lots of opportunity for the gas plants to be the &#x27;high rollers&#x27; of the Texas grid during their expected 30+ years of operation.<p>Peak usage week: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ercot.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;wcm&#x2F;lists&#x2F;164134&#x2F;August_PUC_Presentation_FINAL.PDF" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ercot.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;wcm&#x2F;lists&#x2F;164134&#x2F;August_PUC_Pre...</a> Energy Emergency alert: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ercot.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;wcm&#x2F;lists&#x2F;164134&#x2F;EEA_OnePager_FINAL.PDF" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ercot.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;wcm&#x2F;lists&#x2F;164134&#x2F;EEA_OnePager_F...</a>

link to 2 page summary of the study <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rmi.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;clean-energy-portfolio-two-pager.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rmi.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;clean-energy-port...</a>

The report in question:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rmi.org&#x2F;insight&#x2F;clean-energy-portfolios-pipelines-and-plants" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rmi.org&#x2F;insight&#x2F;clean-energy-portfolios-pipelines-an...</a>

&gt;&quot;The authors of the study say they analyzed the costs of construction, fuel and anticipated operations for 68 gigawatts of gas plants proposed across the U.S. They compared those costs to building a combination of solar farms, wind plants and battery systems that, together with conservation efforts, could supply the same amount of electricity and keep the grid stable.&quot;<p>If the same amount of electricity is being supplied, why are conservation efforts needed? Has anyone downloaded the reports from Rocky Mountain Institute? They want your email address.

When I see studies of this nature I always think that it is such beautiful idea to be living in a clean world. To be clear, I work in the petroleum industry; so this would most certainly be an obvious end to my line of work. I will hopefully be living in the keys by 2035.<p>At the rate our world population is expanding, I have to wonder if there is simply enough surface area we can turn over to power generation and lose it to things such as farming and other agriculture.<p>We are learning to farm land previously thought too arid for non-hearty crops.

I don&#x27;t see batteries being able to store the amount of power (for a practical battery lifetime to be cost effective) needed to make solar a practical primary electricity source.

Sorry to thread jack, but- important question: how are people reading Bloomberg now that they shut down incognito mode as of this week? Disabling Javascript doesn&#x27;t seem to work either. I&#x27;m using Outline for the time being, but it&#x27;s slow and annoying, and it won&#x27;t load any longforms that contain multiple pictures or graphs. Anyone else have a better solution?

What are the steps into getting there? What are the biggest roadblocks - scientific or political?

No they won&#x27;t, unless the storage issue is solved.<p>(A comment someone else made and it got greyed out by the &quot;we hate your poopy face!&quot; crowd.)<p>And even if it IS solved. After outside wind and solar infrastructure is destroyed by the next continent wide Winter superstorm, how would having a few hours (or days) of storage help?

Clean energy sounds good to me!!

No they won&#x27;t, unless the storage issue is solved.

I&#x27;m interested in understanding how this will play out with the electrification of cars. As it stands now, the production and distribution infrastructure is mostly used for homes. But you could easily double your home&#x27;s electric consumption with an electric car traveling just 10 miles per day. If we see a quick change in electric car adoption, our production and distribution systems are going to be massively strained. We might be keeping gas and coal powerplants online just for capacity reasons alone.

There are at least 5 better alternatives to wind and solar, but we don&#x27;t teach science any more in public schools.<p>If we did, there wouldn&#x27;t even BE climate change alarmist hysteria poised to destroy entire economies.