T for tera. The mind boggles.
I can't imagine anything being able to compete with that for speed and scale - or costs, for that matter. Once deployed it's basically free.
that would actually be my preferred solution (if only it was less energy inefficient, sigh).
That ‘negative value’ electricity could also be used to do something else. And actually requires a lot of capital to produce. It isn’t actually free, it’s a side effect of another process that has restraints/restrictions.
For example, Free power for an hour is useless if someone is running an aluminum refinery, because you can’t just start and stop it; and it costs so much capital to make that only operating 1 hour out of 24 is not economic.
And that is for a situation where electrical power costs are one of the most dominant costs!
The cost of CO2 capture, and conversion into usable fuels, is in the cost of the setup of the infrastructure etc (as well as cost to run the pumps once setup, which in this case is where the free electricity goes).
The return on such an investment is likely negative, because the synthesized fuel does not sell for much (compared to the same fuel that is extracted off the ground and refined - look at natural gas as prime example). Therefore, even if electricity is negative (ala, free), you cannot make money from doing it.
Either the cost of the carbon emissions is captured as part of the cost of fossil fuel extraction (and returned to this carbon capture/conversion system) to make it break even, or something else has to happen (like massive efficiency increase in doing such conversions) in order to make it economical.
We don't have enough automatic integration yet to make it happen, but: Residentially, that'd be a great time to charge millions of EVs and raise the temperature of water heaters. It'd be perfect for getting a head start on heating the glass kiln for Monday morning, or to supplement the used railroad ties and other fuels that might be feeding a lime kiln.
It's pretty easy to think of loads that feature scale and/or quantity, and the ability to switch on and off rather quickly. Even if the negative price event only lasts for an hour. (Even if it only lasts 5 minutes.)
Also, once said capex was spent so we could actually use that electricity - it’s marginal cost/value would no longer be negative.
Weird huh?
Notably, if these kinds of situations do keep occurring (aren’t just random), someone almost always ends up spending the capital to capture it, because this is obvious.
You just don’t see all the finance geeks pulling out their calculators and talking about their plans because they know secrecy is an important strategic and tactical advantage when arranging investment and building out capital equipment.
And no, I don't think that's weird at all -- that seems like just a natural path towards the desirable goal of balancing generation and load, and turning a negative into a positive.
In terms of implementation: There's already lot of low-hanging fruit. It only takes software to get connected things like EVs and hybrid, grid-tied battery+solar systems to be centrally commanded to take advantage of negative price opportunities.
The hardware already exists, and more of it is being built every day. And software, once written, can be copied infinitely for free.
We already have sellers who would like to sell surplus energy, but find themselves in situations where they cannot. We also have avid buyers who would like to buy energy cheaper, but who cannot take advantage of the surplus condition when it exists.
That's not a inescapable curse. It is instead an opportunity for a new market optimization.
If I wake up on some hypothetical future day and find my hypothetical EV charged to 90% instead of the 80% I might normally seek to limit it to, and this 10% increase happened for free and without any action on my part, then: I win a little bit, and the generating station with the surplus also wins a little bit, and the distribution/transmission systems still get paid for their part.
I'm happy with my tiny win. The generating station is happy with many thousands of their own tiny wins. It's good stuff.
If this happens often enough (or for long-enough periods) for me in my region, then I might seek a normal limit of 70% or even less and be able to opportunistically absorb even more of the surplus when it happens.
The advantage that participation offers me does decrease over time as things balance (if they can ever become balanced), and that's OK too: The generating station still wins.
(We already have systems that do exactly the opposite of this in the consumer space, and we've had them for a very long time. The oldest I'm aware of are radio-controlled relays for water heaters, and the newest I'm aware of involve smart thermostats. These are utility-controlled systems that are intended to shed load instead of generate load. But if it works in one direction, then it can also work in the other direction.)
In China which recently opened a large off-grid green ammonia plant in Chifeng, they use multiple tiers of energy storage to ensure constant electric power availability.
This is why you see most opportunistic electricity consumption systems doing resistive heating - this equipment is inexpensive.
That is something you can reasonably do, but it's only useful in winter.
> or using high power appliances more during the day
Well, given that people have to work during the day, I doubt that that will work out on a large enough scale. And even if you'd pre-program a laundry machine to run at noon, the laundry would sit and get smelly during summer until you'd get home.
The only change in patterns we will see is more base load during the night from EVs trickle-charging as more and more enter the market.
Dishwasher can also gave a programmed start, so that can also shift from after-dinner to after-breakfast.
I also work some days from home, so other activities can be moved from night to day. We use a bore-hole for irrigation, laundry in the morning etc. Even cooking can often be done earlier in the day.
Aircon is the least problematic- when we need it, the sun is shining.
So yes, habits can shift. Obviously though each situation is different.
We have our heat pump water heater running during the cheap hours, and also change our use of air conditioning/heating to accommodate.
It would probably not work in our favor if we didn't work from home and were out of the home all day.
We simply don't have the transmission and storage for significantly more grid tied solar. It's pointless to build more for purposes of grid supply, we need to build transmission and storage first.
Refinements on ways to sell it to neighbours / recharge various EV's / use it for new purposes are all up to you.
There are lots of analogies to self hosting or concepts around owning and controlling your own data, when it's owned by you, you retain soverignty and full rights on what happens.
I'd expect most tech people will value the distributed nature of solar over equivilents, that by design require centralisation and commerical/state ownership and control.
Get your solar, back increasingly distributed approaches, let those pushing centralised agendas be the ones to pay for their grid. Eventually they are forced to change.
As we're finding in Australia, our high solar uptake by citizens.. is pressuring governments to respond, lest their centralised options become redundant. What we found is that as more people moved to solar, the power companies lumped the costs for grid maintenance onto those who hadnt moved yet, actually contributing to even further accelerated solar adoption and pressure to rework the system. Big corporates can lobby for themselves you dont owe them your custom.
Then, subsides are drying up. Systems have a useful life, your panels can be damaged by storms, for maximizing battery life you need to ensure you don't discharge it below 20%, and neither charge it over 100%.
So, in the end, the grid needs to be there anyway, but as most grid costs are fixed, whenever you use it now, it is going to be more expensive.
I have a relatively big battery (12kWh) which is enough to see me through the evening during the summer months. We do not get quite enough sunshine where I live to be off-grid during the winter, but I can use the battery to hedge against grid outages which are common here in the winter due to storms (eg heavy ice taking down power lines).
Batteries have come down a lot in cost, at least the raw ones:
Without the tariffs it would be even cheaper I guess.
There seem to be a few sweet spots in solar - a tiny array that you use all of without having to grid tie it is really cost effective. (The cost of grid tied solar adds 5-10k to the system cost). Otherwise go big. :)
That and they can be cold booted and stand much more temperature diversity bitter and into frozen temps too.
Just saying, the tech and solar expansion is at run away global growth right now, despite American centric machinations.
Add a bit of extra capacity to the wind/solar installations and the battery figures usually plummet.
This is not the problem. The problem is that everyone moves to solar for most of the year not using or paying for the infrastructure, then in cold winter nights everyone expects the grid to be able to supply as normal.
I do, but I do not find value in rich folks who can afford solar wanting their cake and eating it too.
If you get a solar setup, get batteries. Then disconnect from the grid entirely. You should not be able to use the grid as a free backup energy source for the last 5% of the time you'll need it. Those last digits of reliability are the expensive hard problem to solve. That, or be charged appropriately for adding your potential usage to the capacity market. I understand that this is not legal in many places, and that folks disconnecting from the grid also cause the grid to collapse at some point as well. But at least there would be less of an individual perverse incentive involved.
Home solar folks seem to love their free battery though. Or even worse - getting paid to dump power to the grid when it's value is the smallest. Net metering is not the way to go - home solar should be being paid something around instantaneous wholesale pricing at best, plus fees to manage the more complex management of the grid they cause via being thousands of kilowatt-scale install vs. a single 50MW solar farm.
So far in the US at least, many solar programs have simply been a handout to relatively rich folks subsidized by poorer grid consumers. It's really put a sour taste on something that should be for the greater good. I don't mind that those subsidies were used to jump-start the industry, but that time has long since passed.
tldr; if your total system cost to be fully off-grid and never have to worry about a power outage is not substantially more expensive than being grid-connected, you are likely being highly subsidized by other electricity consumers.
Singling out solar and continuing to not prioritize it will inevitably lead to ongoing grid issues. Whereas this has been mostly solved for other sources, due to lobbying and legacy. Thus my confusion about the OPs half-baked point.
"Solar can be deployed by hundreds of thousands of individual efforts and financing at the same time, with almost no bureaucracy."
N>100000 is a lot harder to coordinate than the ~15,000 established power plants, which have come online over the last hundred or so years.
The issues you describe are from coal, oil, and gas lobbyists saying solar isn’t viable because of nighttime. When the grid is made up of batteries…
If every house had solar and some LiFePo batteries on site, high demand can be pulled from the grid while during low demand and high production, it can be given to the grid. The energy companies can store it, hydropower or batteries, for later. We have the ability. The political will is simply the lobbyists giving people money so they won’t. But we can just do it anyway. Start with your own home.
In MA and a few other states, polluters are also required to buy “renewable energy credits.” Since I have a solar array I can sell my RECs whether I export energy or not. It’s my first year with a solar array, so I’m not sure how much to expect, but neighbors tell me that they earn between $500-$1000 a year.
Rules and regulations could solve that problem (meter not allowed to go backwards, solar companies are forced to pay some kind of battery credit, etc), but the free market will always outcompete.
Therefore, I forsee the future lies in 'smart' electricity meters which can charge different rates at different times of day - perhaps with minute by minute live pricing.
It’s called TOU pricing.
> I forsee the future lies in 'smart' electricity meters which can charge different rates at different times of day - perhaps with minute by minute live pricing.
That's what I was responding to, not the day/night predetermined pricing.
A max price guarantee would also give the supplier an incentive to have their planning in order.
In turn, that means that at times of crisis, prices will be high, but not 1000x high.
Gasoline is another resource with live pricing, and suggesting "I want a subscription where I pay $3 per gallon fixed for a year, no matter how much I use and no matter what happens to the price of oil" wouldn't be something a fuel station would entertain, because they know that when the price was under $3 you'd buy elsewhere, and when the price was over $3 you'd buy millions of gallons and resell at a profit.
It's not latency free to act on price changes. If they spike while people are asleep, what do you expect would happen? And would people get a notification everytime the price changed at all. The logistics are hard.
Minute by minute pricing is not crazy to expect and integration with HVAC, battery systems, and inverters isn’t crazy to expect to occur.
Now every device in your home knows the price. For this to work, everyone must get the same price across the whole grid, and there must be sufficient grid capacity for energy to flow freely which isn't always the case. It will also cause issues with some very old (ie. 60+ year old) clocks with mechanical timers.
All of these issues can be fixed by updating the formula:
price_per_kwh = tan(min(max((-60 + system_frequency + published_offset) * 1000, -pi/2), pi/2))
The published_offset would be unique to each district and adjusted from time to time to keep old clocks working properly, and sometimes to deal with limited transfer properties of the grid...
But the neat thing is that even if you don't take into account the published_offset, you still make nearly optimal economic decisions.
People will choose it based on claims in the shop like "Smart timing cuts energy bills by 25% on average!".
It only takes a smallish percentage of demand to be reactive like that and really big price swings won't really happen.
Somewhere they'll still be grandad manually putting the dishwasher on at a cheap hour or turning the hot tub off whenever he sees the price is high, but I expect most to be automatic.
Seriously though this was a huge issue a couple years ago with the freezing and blizzards that hit Texas.
I’m happy enough that a battery will serve me equally well in both modes, but there’s definitely going to be a period where all it does is support self-consumption.
Not all prime movers are the same with regard to grid dynamics and their impact.
Solar, wind, etc., almost universally rely on some form of inverter. This implies the need for solid state synthetic inertia to provide frequency response service to the grid.
Nuclear, coal, gas, hydropower, geothermal, etc., rely on synchronous machines to talk to the grid. The frequency response capability is built in and physically ideal.
Both can work, but one is more complicated. There are also factors like fault current handling that HN might think is trivial or to be glossed over, but without the ability to eat 10x+ rated load for a brief duration, faults on the grid cannot be addressed and the entire system would collapse into pointlessness. A tree crashing into a power line should result in the power line and tree being fully vaporized if nothing upstream were present to stop the flow of current. A gigantic mass of spinning metal in a turbine hall can eat this up like it's nothing. Semiconductors on a PCB in someone's shed are a different story.
One way to think about this problem is that our electrical grids are giant machines—in many ways, the largest machines that humanity has every constructed. The enormous machine of the grid is comprised of many smaller connected machines, and many of those have spinning loads with enormous mechanical inertia. Some of those spinning machines are generators (prime movers), and some are loads (like large electric motors at industrial facilities). All of those real, physical machines—in addition to other non-inertia generators and loads—are coupled together through the grid.
In the giant machine of the grid, electricity supply and demand have to be almost perfectly in sync, microsecond to microsecond. If they're not, the frequency of the grid changes. Abrupt changes in frequency translate into not only electrical/electronic problems for devices that assume 60 Hz (or 50, depending on where you are), but into physical problems for the machines connected to the grid. If the grid frequency suddenly drops (due to a sudden drop in generation capacity or sudden drop in load), the spinning masses connected to the grid will suddenly be under enormous mechanical stress that can destroy them.
It's obviously not possible to instantaneously increase or decrease explicit generation in response to spikes or drops in load (or alternatively, instantaneously increase or decrease load in response to spikes or drops in generation). But we don't need to: all of the spinning mass connected to the grid acts as a metaphorical (and literal) flywheel that serves as a buffer to smooth out spikes.
As the generation mix on the grid moves away from things with physical inertia (huge spinning turbines) and toward non-inertial sources (like solar), we need to use other mechanisms to ensure that the grid can smoothly absorb spikes. One way to do that is via spinning reserves (e.g. https://www.sysotechnologies.com/spinning-reserves/). Another way to do it is via sophisticated power electronics that mimic inertia (such as grid-forming inverters, which contrast with the much more common grid-following inverters).
To learn more about this topic, look up ancillary services (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_services). This Shift Key podcast episode is also a great introduction: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/spains-blackout-and-th...
Reddit post by an EE explaining it better than I can: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/qhear9/commen...
> There are also factors like fault current handling that HN might think is trivial or to be glossed over, but without the ability to eat 10x+ rated load for a brief duration, faults on the grid cannot be addressed and the entire system would collapse into pointlessness.
I don’t understand what you are talking about here. I don’t work in the utility world, I sell and run commercial electrical work, but handling available fault current in my world is as simple as calculating it and providing overcurrent protection with a high enough AIC rating or current limiting fuses. I don’t see why the utility side would be any different.
The lack of rotating mass in a solar site means the rest of the spinning mass of the generators needs to compensate to maintain frequency and voltage, right? So when clouds roll in and the solar field output drops quickly, it’s a challenge for the rest of the system to compensate since any other generator that spins will slow down much more slowly, giving the grid more time to react.
Also, I was not aware that inverters can only handle fault current that is 1.1x the nameplate capacity, that’s a big limitation. I can buy a 20A breaker with 200kaic, which is 10,000x higher than the breaker ampacity, which is extremely helpful for handling fault current.
There are breakers, of course, but they react slowly enough that there will absolutely be a massive overdraw first. Then the breaker will open. Then, some small number of seconds later, it will automatically close.
It will attempt this two to four times before locking out, in case it just needs multiple bursts. It’s called “burning clear”, and it looks just as scary as you’d think… but it does work.
So, solar suppliers need to also survive this.
I'd argue that nothing that uses semiconductors would be suitable for the task. They get you to maybe 2x rated current capacity for a meaningful duration. A spinning turbine can easily handle 10x or more for a much longer duration.
We could put so many redundant transistors in parallel that we have equivalent fault handling, but then we are into some strong economic issues. There's also no room for error with semiconductors. Once you start to disintegrate, it's all over ~instantly. There is no way to control this. A synchronous machine can trade downstream maintenance schedule for more current right now. The failure is much more gradual over time. A human operator can respond quickly enough if the machine is big enough.
The other trivial solution are synchronous condensers. Or just let the generators and maybe even turbines of future emergency reserve thermal plants spin with the grid without consuming any fuel.
Just ensure the proper margins exist in the grid and call in ancillary services as needed.
No need to make it harder than it needs to be.
This is a solvable problem, but it requires a solution nonetheless.
https://www.energy-storage.news/batteries-are-number-one-at-...
https://arena.gov.au/blog/australias-grid-forming-battery-re...
The frequency (50hz or 60hz) comes from those rotational forces from the generators and until we can eliminate them, we have to play nice with them.
Luckily, we have GFMI’s. Grid-forming inverters that can emulate 60hz push pull but you’re right that it’s more than just voltage since we are dealing with high voltage alternating current.
The Australian grid shows that when solar is the dominant part of the grid, it can still work pretty well. But you need to plan for when the sun is not shining and adapt to the notion that base load translates as "expensive power that you can't turn off when you need to" rather than "essential power that is always there when needed". The notion of having more than that when a lot of renewables are going to come online by the tens of GW is not necessarily wise from a financial point of view.
That's why coal plants are disappearing rapidly. And gas plants are increasingly operating in peaker plant mode (i.e. not providing base load). Also battery (domestic and grid) is being deployed rapidly and actively incentivized. And there are a lot of investments in things like grid forming inverters so that small communities aren't dependent on a long cable to some coal plant far away.
The economics of all this are adding up. Solar is the cheapest source of energy. Batteries are getting cheap as well. And the rest is just stuff you need to maintain a reliable energy system. None of this is cheap but it's cheaper than the alternative which would be burning coal and gas. And of course home owners figuring out that solar + batteries earn themselves back in a few short years is kind of forcing the issue.
Australian grid prices are coming down a lot because they are spending less and less on gas and coal. The evening peak is now flattened because of batteries. They actually have negative rates for power during the day. You can charge your car or battery for free for a few hours when there's so much solar on the grid that they prefer to not charge you than to shut down the base load of coal/gas at great cost. Gas plants are still there for bridging any gaps in supply.
I don't have the exact 'before' numbers on me, but our peak electricity costs went up from around 42c/kWh to 56c/kWh around 18 months ago.
At the same time that feed-in was halved from 4c/kWh to 2c. Having said that, I'm pretty sure 'Shoulder' and 'Off-Peak' went down slightly.
(I'll update this when I can access my spreadsheet with the actual numbers and dates)
I should also say that I'm fairly insulated from this price rise having recently gotten a battery installed, plus moving to a special EV plan, so I charge the car and the house battery at the very cheap off peak rate (special for EV owners) and run the house entirely off battery, topped up with solar.
It's a privileged setup, but one that I planned and worked towards for a fair while, having seen ever increasing electricity prices always on the horizon (even before AI started eating all the resources).
Inflationary money is basically an ugly hack to allow prices to fall without falling.
It's primarily the places that try do both solar an fossil fuel retirement that are experiencing high energy prices - California, UK, Europe, Australia, etc.
High energy prices happen when you don't do the basics to be ready for a change before making it. Or when you skip basic maintenance until everything falls apart. I'm sure there are many other complex factors I don't know about.
That's why something like 30% of Australian houses have solar.
That said, grid prices spiked recently. Both a combination of subsidies expiring, and fewer people buying grid power (because of solar) causing fixed costs to be shouldered by fewer people.
It should be pointed out that while electricity prices went up on paper, a lot of people aren't paying those higher prices because they are on solar!
Also worth pointing out that much of the US is below 49 degrees latitude. Which is south of most of Europe. Washington DC and San Francisco are at a similar latitude (38) as Melbourne (-37). Most of the US is perfectly situated for getting pretty decent solar power around the year. Yes it gets cloudy sometimes. It's usually not continent wide. You can compensate with cables and batteries. The US is far behind because of policy and their local energy monopolists blocking progress. Not because of anything to do with the weather or geography.
Prices have a lot to do with scarcity. Which with monopolists has more to do with the lack of a free market than with a scarcity of resources. Installing solar is about 3-5x more as expensive in the US as in Australia. The permitting process in the US is more expensive than the total cost of buying and installing in Australia. That's a policy problem in the US. All the hand wringing around that topic isn't helping a lot. A bit of pragmatism could improve things a lot and probably very quickly. Australia is showing how to do that. And yes, they have rain there too and you can go skiing pretty close to Melbourne. That isn't stopping them.
Someone pointed out that the big problem with solar isn't how do we store daytime solar for nighttime use - this is easily solved with batteries. The real unsolved problem is how do we store summer solar for winter use.
Australia doesn't have this problem, not to the extent of other colder places, because we don't need a lot of heating in the winter.
Same method. Massive scale, trivial to deploy, works with barely any maintenance.
It can be.
Unless existing bureaucracy doesn't want that.
Big industrial projects. Big power plants. Big finance. Real men.
It’s silly. If you want a real men trip get into body building and MMA or something and use solar power.
Why is this any different than the sheer size of manufacturing and natural resources to extract other forms of energy?
Oil, natural gas, coal also all take vast amounts of capital investment and resource extraction to implement.
And California has the most expensive electricity prices in the US.
Google says they degrade to 80-90% capacity over 25-30 years, which is ~double your 15 year time period. I've also previously seen people claiming that they then stabilise around the 80% level, and that we don't really know how long their total possible lifespan is because many extant solar panels are outliving their 25 year rated lifespans.
Capacity reduced to 80% won't work for some high-performance use cases, but is pretty decent for most.
Why is this such a dealbreaker like you make it out to be? It's easily fixed by over-provisioning to account for future losses. Not to mention that power grids almost always have more capacity than what's needed, to account for future growth and maintenance downtime.
Yes, demand rose, and solar panels were installed whose capacity was about 60% of the new demand, but to say solar handled 60% of new capacity is blatantly false.
As someone who owns solar panels, I'm painfully aware that there can be days, weeks of bad weather when there's barely any generation. But even at the best of times, solar has a hard time covering for the demand of something like data centers which suck down insane amount of juice round the clock.
There's also no information about whether these data centers are located to be close to solar farms, and we know that in many cases, they're not.
If I add the same 1MW for solar, needless to say even assuming perfect weather, I'm lucky to get 1/3rd of that. Under real circumstances, the numbers are probably much worse.
When looking at marketing, I think it's always safe to assume they picked the most flattering numbers when they didn't specify how they made the calculation.
That's why it's very meaningful to talk about adding kWh - 1 kWh peak solar means more in Texas than in Chicago. It's even less meaningful for batteries - they can sustain incredible currents, to the point it's very rarely the meaningful bottleneck.
Yet that's exactly that what the cited 'global think-tank' Ember did, which the article cites as source. So they either misled on purpose, or like a lot of people, they confused GWh and GW, which is such a grave error for a supposed expert, that their whole analysis should be disregarded.
Solar panel prices fell hugely in the past years. Is there anything that could significantly reduce installation costs?
Apparently you even need a permit from the grid operator for it.
Here in NL they come to your house a week after you call and your panels are up and connected in 4 hours or so.
Parts/materials costs in contractor quotes are often padded so they aren't completely overshadowed by the labor portion. In any job where there's specialized knowledge or license restrictions (HVAC) or risk (walking on a roof), the floor for labor rates is usually 2-4x the materials cost.
But, the real issue is that almost nobody pays cash upfront for their solar install. Between incentives, loans, and/or predatory PPAs, the prices lose touch with reality. See healthcare, college tuition, housing prices, etc. for similar scenarios where credit or third-parties distort the market.
How much more expensive can that be?
It's probably much more in the planning process and tariffs on Chinese PV.
It's entirely obvious that most of these places make money off the financial engineering, not the installation part.
I'd sign a competent contractor today for my quite marginal installation plans if I could find someone I'd trust to build something decent and to my specification.
They also tend to devalue the house as it's more difficult to get insurance, and many potential buyers are used to shitshow level of installs and/or dealing with a more complex close due to the seller needing to pay off loans/leases/etc.
A lot of these plays are also companies setting up complex financial engineering schemes that boil down to government subsidy arbitrage.
Any roofer could do the panel install, and would do a far better job than a solar hack that had 3 days of training. Electrical would be an electrician.
I have low electricity costs, no time of use pricing, and I don’t think I can sell back. I also live in a very cloudy city. So solar doesn’t make much sense!
Another thing, if you have the space, is to consider a ground mount. Ground mount hardware adds a little cost, but it is a lot easier for a solar installer to set up, so they finish faster. Since labor is the biggest driver of cost, then it makes sense to build a very big array that doesn’t just offset your operating costs but completely eliminates it (well, net-eliminates it anyway).
I think the main consideration where I live is whether you can make the investment and if you plan on staying in your house long enough to realize the benefit. Also nearly all of the power I offset is from coal.
Complete no brainer.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-real-story-with-australian
The difference in the permitting process between Australia and US is staggering.
If you want a good example, rather look at France!
You probably meant late 20th Century France, when better renewable alternatives didn't exist, not current 21st century France.
It can be done.
Even an electrified kitchen (which Saul also suggests for everyone) is iffy in Australia, because good freestanding ovens with induction cooktops cost about 3x what freestanding ovens with a gas cooktop would cost, not to mention the electrical rewiring costs, which could be substantial especially if a conversion to 3-phase is needed.
Solar should be installed on unproductive land. Buildings should be covered in panels. Carparks should have solar roofs. If i were king of zoning, every new construction would be required to cover say 50% of thier footprint in panels. That is the direction to go. We should not continue to convert farmland.
A total parody, but on point. "Can I Beat Farming Sim WITHOUT FARMING?" - The Spiffing Brit
Depending on who you ask, it would take somewhere between 2.5 [3] and 13.5 million acres [4] of solar to supply total US electricity demand, including storage and maintenance etc. We could double it to be safe and account for the reduction in ethanol production, and it would still all fit within the land currently used for corn ethanol. (btw this works out to a >10x increase in efficiency over ethanol.)
Of course I do agree that there's lots of less productive land (desert in the west, grazing land in the plains, and parking lots/rooftops everywhere) that should be used when available. But even in the midwest and east the land use is not a problem.
[0] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=1057...
[1] - https://www.ncga.com/stay-informed/media/the-corn-economy/ar...
[2] - https://www.wri.org/insights/increased-biofuel-production-im...
[3] - https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/2015/05/21/fact-checking-elon...
[4] (PDF) - https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy08osti/42463.pdf
I guess the good news is, solar is available when demand is highest. Nonetheless, is it helping to solve a problem or is it serving more as an enabler of the status quo?
That is what we're using this electricity for, right?
It's worked out well for us in the past.
Wind and solar, nuclear, EVs, manufacturing, robots, chips, and drones should be helped along by the state.
We would be stupid not to spend in these categories.
We should also build out chemical inputs manufacture, rare earths refining, pharmaceutical manufacture, etc. to support the work that happens downstream and to be less fragile to supply chain disruption.
A multi-polar world is inherently less stable and demands more self-sufficiency.
They have been able to lower the taxes that affect the richest (big beautiful bill) and cut spending on social programs (Medicaid).
So it surely looks to me like the US economy is following a plan, just not the one that's in the best interest of the population -- which is OP's original criticism.
This just seems like a quibble over wording, given that "planned economy" is generally assumed to refer to economic planning by some governmental authority. Nobody thinks the opposite of a "planned economy" is everyone just going based off vibes, for instance.
Also the move to electric heat pumps is increasing electricity rates but reducing natural gas usage and improving overall efficient.
The GP comment was trying to do snarky doomerism but accidentally hit upon a lot of truths. It’s amazing how many things are getting better but some people are hell bent on being cynical about it anyway.
Most of Europe is poor. AC is expensive. It's actually that simple.
There's AC in Switzerland.
Not at all, it has one of the lowest rate in Europe along with the UK. It's very hard to get the building permit required to install one. Portable AC has had a boom those past few years though (because it doesn't require a permit).
That air conditioning worked great for years, but a few months before I left that position, the facilities management people suddenly came in and ripped it out. No justification given.
Thank God TPTB didn't notice I had AC for all those years; it really would have been miserable without it. But despite the misery I noted all around me, there was an extremely strong disdain for air conditioning that permeated the culture. When I talked to friends and colleagues about the AC situation I was regularly ribbed for being a gluttonous American wasting electricity on such a triviality. They were legitimately proud to suffer. Baffling.
I've come to the conclusion that most Western and Central Europeans--yes, including Swiss--have a masochistic superiority complex around AC. They see suffering without AC as core to the European identity and sweating it out in unproductive misery (or taking a whole month off of work) as virtuous. They willingly kill thousands of people and leave hundreds of millions more in misery every year simply to feel superior and European.
But I'm very sceptical of those numbers. They are apparently even worse for cold, and you can't attribute that to lack of airconditioning. I still think the huge difference can only be attributed to a difference in reporting.
Cuts both ways.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence doesn't cut both ways.
For example: https://www.nber.org/digest/aug19/official-statistics-overst...
> In September 2022, a vicious heat wave enveloped much of the western U.S., placing tens of millions of people under heat advisories. Temperatures across California soared into the triple digits. Sacramento broke its heat record by more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit when the temperature hit 116 degrees.
> California death certificates showed that 20 people died as a result of heat-related illness from Aug. 31, 2022 to Sept. 9, 2022.
> But a study last year by California’s Department of Public Health found that death rates increased by about 5 percent statewide during the heat wave, causing 395 additional deaths.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-deaths-from-h...
Excess mortality studies seem to show about 24 per 100,000 excess deaths from heat in Europe vs 6 in US/Canada.
I'd love to see an age adjusted figure as well as it's likely Europe has likely more very old people and my guess is that heat/cold mortality is concentrated in the very old people.
Much of the US already had warmer summers than Europe when the impact of climate change was smaller, so AC is far more common.
Much of the US is extremely unpleasant without air-conditioning for a substantial portion of the year so of course everyone living in those parts installs it.
Could this be made the basis of an efficient cooling system?
You are starting to see a lot more external AC (heat pump?) units jerry-rigged into the sides of multi-unit dwellings, though.
But the problem of consumer rates just always ratcheting up needs addressed.
Unexpectedly high electricity bills are almost always from actual usage. Unexpectedly high winter electricity bills are usually from resistive electric heating in one way or another.
You didn’t mention their normal December bill in this exact house, which is an important piece of information.
The Fuel Adjustment is the legal loophole difference in the regulated rate vs the market rate. A few scheduled maintenance windows and oh look, we are short power.
I suspect they got slammed with an alternative energy supplier that charges abusively high rates.
With that said, the total cost to the consumer of electricity is 3X what it was 20 years ago, and I am in one of the cheapest markets.
If someone changes to a TOU plan and their bill shoots up, they’re smart enough to blame the plan change and cite that
Most surprise winter time bills are just excess electric heater usage, such as after the purchase of a couple space heaters without thinking about the overall cost.
> This is why there's pushback in some areas that have had deregulated energy markets
What areas have deregulated residential electricity?
Cars are the big one. However even heating is going electric (heat pumps, not resistive). Induction stovetops outperform residential gas cooktops. Some cities are even experimenting with phasing out natural gas hookups for new construction.
It all adds up, and it a good thing. It doesn’t explain 100% of the growth but it’s a lot of it.
> Amercian industrial base is being restored, that more and better services are being provided (better healthcare, inexpensive and healthy food, comfortable, efficient and inexpensive transportation).
Trying to put concepts like “better healthcare” on to the growth of electricity demand is unrealistic but generally speaking we’re putting electricity to good use. It’s not being wasted.
I have gas-cooked since I was a kid (living in an area with a lot of natural gas, so houses were connected to gas since the 50ies), but induction is so much nicer that I'm happy to not be able to cook during a once in a ~10-20 year outage. Also a lot safer (it still happens quite frequently that a house blows up because of a gas leak, just this week there was a huge explosion in Utrecht what was presumably a gas leak).
Of course, the equation may change for countries with less stable power.
Here in SE Michigan (USA) I have quite a few friends who've totaled more than 15 days without power in the past couple years. Most of that in multi-day outages.
Here in Colorado they've started pre-emptively shutting off power during wind storms when it's hot and dry because there have been multiple instances of wind blowing down power lines which then start big fires. We had one instance in December where the power was out 2-3 days for tens of thousands of people, and over a week for some people.
Of course the problem is that nobody wants to pay to bury the lines. They'd need all new equipment for digging, to retrain all of the technicians, and get permission from a million different entities to dig up their land. We're effectively locked in to overhead cables.
Many larger homes in this area have whole-house generators (powered by utility natural gas) with automatic transfer switches. During the 50-hour outage, we "abandoned ship" and stayed with someone who also had an outage, but had a whole-house generator.
Other areas just 5-10 miles away are like what you describe: maybe one outage in the past 10 years.
I live in downtown Toronto and we get ice rain that occasionally knocks out power in portions of the city, though I live downtown where most of the lines are buried and I'm on the same electrical sub-block as several hospitals. The last time I lost power was the massive North American blackout of 2003.
I guess you don't live in Berlin.
An 8kW generator suitable for occasional use is only ~1,000$. A Powerwall 3 does 11kW continuous and peaks at 30kW for transitory loads like starting heavy equipment.
The most convenient solution where a generator automatically kicks in during a power outage requires an electrician and extra equipment, but there’s also real tradeoffs to having gas lines going to your home.
I think part of the problem with whole home backups is that they tend to be sized to a maximum load that is unusual or could be avoided with some effort. And that providing a backup for the essentials you actually need is relatively cheap and uncomplicated if you make some modest sacrifices.
It comes as a surprise to most users because power outages are so rare. They just assume it will work until 8 years later when they try to cook something during the first long outage in their area.
Huh, I did not know that. The natural gas stove that I grew up with has a good ol' fashioned pilot light, so it's fine even when the power goes out.
It's far easier to provide a backup for electric appliances using a generator, than it is to store CNG onsite for gas interruption.
Also an outdoor camp chef stove. Both are cheap and work great. My camp chef doubles as an outdoor pizza oven.
Mostly a myth by cooks that think it "heats faster" or "heats with a better distribution of heat".
It is foolish, but many still think so. I personally believe that the only kind of cooking that benefits from NG are round-bottom woks. But they can be substituted by flat-bottom pans without problems.
It’s almost entirely about heat _control_, especially when you turn the heat down or off. Non-induction electric stoves can take minutes or longer for a burner to cool down. When you cut the heat on a NG stove, it’s essentially immediate.
This matters quite a bit for heat-sensitive dishes like omelettes.
Induction doesn’t have this problem, but also hasn’t been widely available until maybe recently and won’t work on a lot of aluminum cookware. So you’re asking people to change their cookware along with their range. That can be a bridge too far for many.
For the lower temperatures, a lot of that temperature control can be made with bain marie (warm water).
And the remaining ones aren't made in aluminum cookware, anyway. And people that cook such sophisticated food probably will have a lot of non-aluminum cookware, already.
To be more precise: mostly CO2 and small amounts of CO. But the actual concentration of CO2 in your house can be affected by a lot of other factors (ventilation, urban environment, weather, etc).
But yeah if I built a new house, I would have an induction top.
*this is a regular occurence in some countries
Also, heat pumps do best when the temperature differential is lower. So in older housing without floor heating or duct heating, it is typically not as efficient to use a heat pump when the water to heat has to be above 55 degrees Celsius.
For any new residential construction I think there is very little value in natural gas.
The #1 problem with heat pumps in Canada is low temperature performance. The heat output drops but the rate of heat loss from the house also increases. This is the precise situation where even backup resistive heat cannot keep up. Methane is excellent at filling this gap, especially now when winter temperatures swing more than earlier.
Toronto regularly has ten days per year where the high temperature is below -15 C.
Even cold climate heat pumps struggle at those temperatures. I would know, i have one.
I didn’t see it reverse cycle yet. But I have air-air with one outside unit connected to three inside units. It’s a Mitsubishi Heavy from 2023.
But really it comes down to heating. Heat pumps are not universally better. We are currently sitting at -25C or so which is pretty common in the winter (it can even get a fair bit colder at times). Hardly any of the contractors around here work with heat pumps, and even the ones that do aren't aware of the latest tech. That said even if you could get a cutting edge system through sheer money/will I am not sure how it would perform without at least a gas backup. At least from an efficiency standpoint.
Not to mention we have had electricity go out in the winter which can be life threatening or at least cause substantial damage to property. I can't remember ever having the gas go out. (we have generator backup but that couldn't run an electric furnace for very long).
Lastly we have a gas water heater (tankless) and damn that thing is efficient. A few therms a month...
I live in Southern Ontario and I have a heat pump with an auxiliary natural gas furnace for emergency heating. The heat pump shoulders most of the heating load but the thermostat does kick on the furnace when the heat pump starts falling behind.
It should also be noted that although heat pumps are very efficient, even when it's below freezing outside, they cannot raise the temperature of the house very quickly. Consumers are generally quite unhappy when it takes 8 hours to raise the temperature of the house by 1 degree, so the thermostat usually calls for the furnace to start up before things get that bad.
Heat pumps are getting better at lower temperatures, but in an environment like Canada you still want auxiliary heat to be safe.
> It should also be noted that although heat pumps are very efficient, even when it's below freezing outside, they cannot raise the temperature of the house very quickly. Consumers are generally quite unhappy when it takes 8 hours to raise the temperature of the house by 1 degree
That would be an undersized heat pump in any regard. The installer would be at fault for screwing up that badly.
You're right that efficiency falls off at lower temperatures, 8 hours to move 1 degree would be from the installer sizing the unit wrong.
The heat pump I have is only a few years old and cost $12,000 installed (before tax credits). To be able to rapidly heat the house when it's -40 outside would require a system costing several times that! Much cheaper just to use a furnace for those few days per year.
For temperatures significantly into negative territory a ground source heat pump would perform far better, where it can draw on a source of heat that will always be at least above freezing.
A hybrid system doesn't seem like a bad trade-off though..
For example, when cooking an omelette, a recommended technique is to angle the pan so the liquid part flows towards the hot part of the pan touching the flame as you slowly scrape the curds up to rest at the cooler part of the pan. AFAIK an induction cooktop is unable to simulate this technique. Now maybe there are similar ways of getting this, but there’s centuries of experience informing cooking on top of a fire in some form or another. The techniques for cooking on induction cooktops well have not been learned, taught and communicated.
Perhaps it helps that I had never had that particular advice for cooking on gas/electric!
P.S. basting works on induction if I crank up to boost mode.
For amateurs, I find that the gain of control from using induction far outweighs everything else--especially at low heats. If I put a newbie on an induction with a temperature sensor, they generally do great. Over time they start to correlate the behavior of the food with the temperature, but, even if they don't, they still can maintain control over the food via the temperature sensor.
> The techniques for cooking on induction cooktops well have not been learned, taught and communicated.
And, sometimes, those old techniques are just a pain in the ass and only exist because of the lack of control. Caramelizing onions requires a lot less attention when I can set the pan to a specific temperature and don't have to worry about thermal runaway as the water cooks off. There are all manner of directions for thickening custards that aren't required if you can set the pan at exactly 180F and know that it isn't going above that. Tempering chocolate is stupidly easier when you can set the pan for 115F-81F-88F rather than having to swish it on a marble slab or put it on a double boiler and risk seizing the chocolate because of water. On an electric or gas stove, I plan for two batches of caramel because I almost always screw up my first batch if I haven't done it in a while; on induction I almost never miss. etc.
And then there's the downsides of gas:
They're a complete mess to clean. Tons of nooks and crannies where stuff might get into. They suck for low heat simmering. There's iron plates you can put below the pot to distribute the heat but that's cumbersome. Low heat flames also go out more easily if there's a draft. Not even talking about air quality and fire risks.
So I'm never going back to gas if I can help it. If I have a choice I'll probably get an induction stove next time around.
Well, unless the inverter valve breaks and you've got an air conditioner for two and a half months of winter.
Ask me how I know.
The biggest advantage of NG is that we can store months of it. (Currently we can store only seconds of electricity, if that. Citation needed!)
I have a dream that some day we will come up with an efficient process for generating methane from atmospheric CO2, water, and electricity, and we’ll be able to take advantage of our extensive natural gas grid. (Natural gas is essentially methane.)
Yes, amongst others.
> increasing energy consumption, I'm happy that people are living in more comfortable homes, that the Amercian industrial base is being restored, that more and better services are being provided (better healthcare, inexpensive and healthy food, comfortable, efficient and inexpensive transportation).
Over the last 25 years, we've the seen the following change across the dimensions you picked:
Energy consumption: +15%
Population: +21%
Hospitals (hospital sector size as a function using employment as proxy): +45-50%
Homes: +27-30%
Food production: +23-25%
Transportation (vehicle miles travelled): +14-16%
------
Some take-aways:
Population grew faster than energy and transportation, implying major efficiency gains.
Housing stock outpaced population, reflecting smaller household sizes and more single-person households.
Healthcare expanded far faster than population, a structural shift rather than demographic necessity.
Food production grew roughly in line with population, but without proportional land expansion productivity gains.
Transportation growth lagged housing growth, suggesting more remote work, urbanization, and efficiency.
> Housing stock outpaced population, reflecting smaller household sizes and more single-person households.
Or rich people owning more vacation homes.
> Healthcare expanded far faster than population, a structural shift rather than demographic necessity.
What? It could easily be the population getting older and/or sicker. Even if it was a structural shift, it could be in the negative direction ie less efficiency.
> Food production grew roughly in line with population, but without proportional land expansion productivity gains.
What land expansion? You didn't include that in your stats. And no source to verify.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
Home ownership rates have a 6 percent variance over the last ~50 years.
We dont have a housing problem in America, we have a utilization problem:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q... as an example.
There is a conversation that needs to be had about housing, but no one is going to LIKE the medicine that comes with that.
Ok, I'll say it: it's for AI datacenters to train chat bots.
Really doesn't sound like much of a surge then!
Of that we cannot be sure... Because maybe 6 years saw a fall - so there would only be 4 rises, of which this is the smallest!
This article equates generation with consumption which is a fallacy.
Lots of solar and wind generation is actually produced without meeting demand meaning that the generated electricity often has to be wasted.
This pumps the numbers for 2024 and depresses them for 2025.
First, US demand increased by 3.1%. That is bad - demand should be going down, since there is a need to conserve electricity while much of it is provided by CO2-emitting sources. That said - it is not such a huge "surge" that the fact that 61% of it was covered by an increase in Solar capacity is so impressive.
Second, Solar generation is said to have reached 84 TW. But if the increase in demand was 135 TW, and that's just 3.1% of total demand, then total demand is 4355 TW, and Solar accounts for 1.92% of generation. That is _really_ bad. Since we must get to near-0 emissions in electricity generation ASAP to avoid even harsher effects of global warming; and most of the non-Solar generation in the US is by Natural Gas and Coal [1].
You could nitpick and say that the important stat is "total renewables" rather than just Solar, and that the US has a lot of Nuclear, and that's technically true, but it's not as though Nuclear output is surging, and it has more obstacles and challenges, for reasons. So, the big surge to expect in the US is Solar - and we're only seeing very little of that. If you mis-contextualize it sounds like a lot: "60% of new demand! 27% increase since last year!" but that's not the right context.
[1] : https://www.statista.com/statistics/220174/total-us-electric...
It is not bad. Energy usage is the best proxy we have for societal wealth. It's starting to somewhat decouple, but I'd posit that's largely due to financial woo-woo than actual real wealth. Time shall tell. A lot of energy (no pun intended) was put into short-term easy wins on the efficiency side the last couple decades, but those low hanging fruits are largely picked over. In the end, it requires serious capital investment into energy production and distribution.
> demand should be going down
Naw. If we want to actually regain any sort of self-determination as a nation we need to re-industrialize and learn to make things again. This is a multi-generational project that takes decades to even build the foundation for. This all requires energy - preferably as clean and cheap as possible.
We should be looking what what China is doing. Building everything possible as quickly as possible. Spam solar, wind, nuclear, and yes natural gas which enables the former two to exist to begin with. Start spinning up battery plants as well on top of it. Coal I can grant is silly to invest in these days, re-purpose those plants as their useful lifetimes run out into natural gas or nuclear power plant sites.
Then start spamming long distance transmission lines throughout the country to further even out demand vs. supply, so more sunny and windy locations can pick up the slack in other regions of the country. Start telling NIMBYs to go pound sand.
This degrowth stuff is just a way to make poor and working class folks suffer. China and India are building so much energy production capacity it simply doesn't matter anyways. Build or have your grandchildren be left behind.
You seem to be suggesting that we should continue to warm up the planet so as to increase "societal wealth". No, we should not, it is harmful and dangerous.
> Naw. If we want to actually regain any sort of self-determination as a nation
Avoiding global warming is an imperative. Your desire to feel "self-determination as a nation" is at most a nice-to-have.
That said - if the US were able to separate out a 're-importation of production capacity' from another country when estimating energy use, and could show a significant drop with that aside, and a drop relative to the energy use as part of that production activity, then - ok, that would be a legitimate argument that its conduct is better than the numbers suggest.
> This is a multi-generational project
So, you're claiming that it's ok for you to keep warming us all up and have the seas rise, and droughts, and fires, and agriculture failing etc. for at least, say, 50 years because of your multi-generational project.
No way. Now, of course, I'm just a guy on the Internet and the US is a global empire which invades and bombs kidnaps heads-of-state etc. But - that must be resisted. Also, the political elites within the US who subscribe to that view must be resisted internally.
> China ... Building everything possible as quickly as possible.
China's policies are a mixed bag; but they are certainly not building _everything_ as quickly as possible. And a lot of what they're building is non-CO2-emitting energy production capacity. Its official plan (IIRC) is no increase in emissions after 2030, and full neutrality by 2060 - which is absolutely not building everything nor as quick as possibly. Now, that is not good enough, but US policy (and your approach) seems to be "burn, baby, burn".
> This degrowth stuff is just a way to make poor and working class folks suffer.
Ah, yes, US society and economy these days are all about aleviating poverty and promoting working class interests.
Why do people even pretend like we haven't signed up for "what's worse than the worse case scenario?" as far as climate goes?
The only way to reduce the already severe impacts of global warming are to keep fossil fuels in the ground. It doesn't matter how much energy is generated by solar so long as we continue to dig up and burn fossil fuels. It's quite clear that we have zero intentions of slowing down or even keeping our fossil fuel consumption steady.
If we had record electricity demand, and anything short of 100% of it was covered by renewables, that means we're burning more fossil fuels then we were before.
We have, pretty unequivocally at this point, signed up for seeing what the end game of civilization looks like rather than realistically exploring or even considering any alternatives.
[0] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-met-61-of-us-...