I have a 3.8kW rated system (cost about £5k) at about 56N, and it actually produces that much on clear summer days. Currently it's grey outside and outputting about 2kW (I can ssh into the computer looking at the meter). The high latitude does mean extended summer days. Admittedly it probably wouldn't be viable without subsidy today.
I don't think individuals are very good at adapting to the long term market. If I know gas will be more expensive in 5 years, I can't do very much with that today. There's also the old "the market can stay irrational longer than you stay solvent": if I invest too early I can just as easily lose money.
In the UK, I think the general public are ahead of the media and politicians on the issue. There's a noisy anti-environmentalist and anti-windfarm contingent, but most people recognise the tradeoffs. I don't think people want to be their own producer en masse, any more than grow their own food or be their own bank, but if they can make a capital investment that saves money and produces income then you're speaking the right language to the middle class.
People might start to get vocal when gas prices go up in the UK; complaints about fuel poverty and demands for more fracking. It'll require a long period of gas being more expensive than electricity for fuel and heating for people to switch their homes over.
I am well aware of the limitations, was merely pointing out that renewables could greatly improve the status quo when it comes to resiliency for a large portion of the population. And the extreme latitudes can still benefit from solar in the summer. It mostly just comes down to cost/benefit tradeoffs.
It seems like the parent comment was suggesting that natural gas was a necessity. I whole heartedly disagree. For winter months in extreme latitudes, other forms of renewables (hydro, geothermal, wind, biomass) should be sufficient.
Well it's cheaper than gas, even before you add a carbon price, which makes it much, much cheaper, so that's a good reason to build it in parallel.
Price is roughly equal with wind, maybe a little more expensive than onshore wind and a little less than offshore.
And the outgoing Conservative party has effectively banned onshore wind in England.
But eventually as deployment grows you'll hit seasonality constraints that solar doesn't hit closer to the equator. Wind correlates with demand better in this region.
It isn't in the UK. There is very little surplus capacity in our grid. We started moving away from coal and subsidising green power years ago, and there has been chronic underinvestment in some areas as a result. A few years ago, it was a massive issue, things have improved (particularly now with falling demand) but it is a legitimate concern in some cases. Also, remember that the UK will need wind, solar doesn't work, and it isn't windy all the time (despite parts of our country being relatively windy).
The wind and solar capacity factors are anti-correlated.
There are areas in france where the december average is >2.6kWh/d. At 54kg/kWp a modern panel on a lightweight racking system gets this works out to 1800t/TWh and it's almost all glass you can build the same net wattage now for half the price and then use the money you save to replace in 30 years (or 50 if you take real world degradation rather than predicted). Having to recycle some glass once to decarbonize now ranther than in 20 years is a reasonable tradeoff for halving the costs. The gas plants are dirt cheap and that much solar would easily power enough electrolysis to fill your february gap during the 11 months of the year when it produces far more. The electrolysers will be needed in either case for ammonia, shipping, and SAF.
If we're invoking technology that doesn't exist and costs several times more, just use something that does exist and costs several times more like a CSP plant and an HVDC cable.
Additionally for the vast majority of the world which is in transmission range of somewhere arid, CSP is strictly cheaper than the easy part of a Natrium reactor.
I think the UK by 2030 (or so) is actually going to have a really major problem with too much renewable capacity at times - not just not enough transmission capacity, just too much full stop.
There's currently 30GW of wind in the UK (offshore + onshore), plus an ambition to get another 35GW of offshore installed in the next 6 years. I'm not sure whether that will be met, but I would project at least another 20GW of offshore wind will come online based on in construction/approved projects by 2030.
At that point we'll have 55GW of wind, plus a huge amount of solar (probably 25GW minimum, potentially a lot lot more).
UK electricity consumption is very low per capita and it is falling rapidly with not much sign of this changing.
I think we are going to be in a position where we have (way) too much power at least 50% of the year.
Some will be able to be used for storage, and some potentially exported via HVDC, but I fear the generation on windy + sunny days will be pretty enormous.
This would all get sorted out by 'the market' but CfD contracts basically pay to keep producing whatever the price (I believe some of the contracts may have changed slightly on this). Which really distorts the market.
>the long pole in the tent seems to be the cost of the steam turbine generator
And yet some "renewables-only" people want to rely on gas turbines for the times of unfavorable weather conditions.
And, the turbines are still more efficient (46% efficiency with modern Siemens turbines), and the heat that isn't going into the turbine steam can still be used elsewhere, like for district heating or for industrial purposes, which makes the overall system very high yield.
In comparison, photovoltaics is currently at 20% efficiency. Wind is at 60% but it's quite intermittent and unpredictable.
My thinking is much the same, though living in a higher and winder latitude I'm participating in a wind turbine co-operative (UK only though) [0]
It's not classed as an investment for tax reasons and limits you to 120% of your estimated residential consumption. It will essentially remove the wholesale cost of electricity from my bill for 25 years - so protects me from price spikes like the past 12 months.
My town has a river running through it and would love to invest in a similar hydro scheme. The LCOE for wind/solar/hydro would seemingly always beat fossil fuels, given how finite the latter is.
It's great......when the wind blows. In the UK we have about 15GW of installed wind generating capacity, but it's very rarely fully utilized. The variability means it's balanced out by other sources mostly gas powered Combined cycle turbines. During summer there have been weeks where wind and solar were negligible and gas was providing nearly 60% of the electricity generated. Nuclear is reliable, but we only have about 5GW of capacity, we can import another 6GW from Europe and other sources such as biomass and hydro are about 3GW. There's higher wind capacity utilisation in Winter but there are still days when it's very still and we have to rely on fossil fuels. French nuclear and British gas turbines help to balance out demand across Europe when the winds are still, but it's variability is a real issue. Would more installed capacity help?
Why are people down-voting this comment? Is being correct not allowed? In Australia it is often not sunny for days on end, also it is often not windy for days on end, over huge areas of land - you know, like, bigger than a lot of European countries.
For wind and solar to be economically competitive with coal / gas / nuclear they have to be at price parity including 24+hrs storage. This isn't going to happen any time soon without massive government incentive.
Professor Barry Brook of Adelaide University has been blogging about this for a good few years now. We need to think critically about 'sustainable energy'. I encourage you all to read his blog [1], particularly the TCASE [2] (Thinking Critically About Sustainable Energy) series.
Let's level the playing field: ultimately there are only two good metrics worth considering a) life-time cost per kWh and b) life-time CO2 emissions per kWh --- but to level the playing field you need to consider each generating technology on a base-load comparison. It's no good comparing a 1GW gas plant and a 1GW nameplate solar installation because the sun only shines about 6.5hrs per day averaged throughout the year in, say, Adelaide for example, so you typically need to over-build solar by a factor of 4 and then add storage. When you do that the life-time cost and life-time CO2 emissions aren't so crash got because of the massive amounts of energy intensive stainless steel, steel, and concrete required, plus new transmission lines.
If you want to see a real-world example of how wind does work, check the UK National Grid Status site [3] - the wind hasn't been blowing in the UK for weeks, presently their 8GW of installed wind is generating 0.82GW electricity.
The data speaks for itself, look at the graphs. A vote for wind / solar is a vote for new gas _because_ gas is easily load following. Of course, the gas plant owners don't like that because when the wind blows their plants sit idle.
The whole renewable energy push is an expensive mess. I've commented elsewhere on HN about this, so I'll stop repeating myself now.
For the odd day. It never happens for lengthy periods. Most of the time wind will be the right answer for significant generation in Britain and Ireland, with great interconnect export potential, so we'll use proportionally less solar and more wind in the mix than Italy will. :p
I simply don't understand why just about everyone on HN who argues against renewables presumes 100% solar, 100% wind, 100% whatever. Every nation will have an appropriate mix for their differing conditions -- isn't that obvious? Apparently it's really not. Interconnecting to nearby nations to move mainly westerly wind power eastwards, and mainly southerly solar northwards. Yet it's still worthwhile for Romania to be adding wind generation. It's still worthwhile for England and Scotland to add solar.
No one is expecting one nation to actually supply the whole of Europe -- grids are becoming more localised and far smarter within the European super-grid that's aiming for continent wide management. The UK is already seeing moves to demand shifting, and localised demand. We'll see far more of that fine level demand shifting, managing in-home batteries and grids managing ever more generating sources to keep to the best mix of sources at any given moment. Right now they do a fine job as you basically never realise the grid is even there, yet the mix of sources varies across every day throughout the year. How Orkney power companies manage it gives an idea where we're heading.
There's a lot of new interconnects in the pipeline across all of Europe too -- UK has 5 or 6 new ones coming soon. Scotland is progressing to new pumped storage of similar size to Dinorwig, though I'm not sure where in the approval process that currently is, or if it'll ultimately be rejected.
We'll all keep some generation of last resort -- right now, in the UK that's coal. It comes in as less economic than interconnects most of the time. There's a few (three or four IIRC) remaining coal plants, all of which are spending 99% of the time idling. Doing absolutely nothing but being ready for spin up. In five years all the coal will be closed, and it'll be the gas plants at the bottom of the heap. It's already uneconomic to build new gas.
There are of course windy days where wind generates more electricity than is consumed, but the 53% figure is for the first half of the year.
The U.K. is up to around 40% of annual electricity consumption from renewables too. (43% of generation which I think excludes the 8% from imports.)
Net Zero is a good target but ultimately it’s getting most of the way there which is important. We need to replace heating, transport and industrial uses so we have to build out as much emissions free generation capacity as we can as quickly as we can. Renewables currently seem like the most cost effective approach.
Not as much as you'd think. While someone may always have wind or sun, at times that someone is unfeasibly far from Northern Europe. (Low wind conditions in all of Nordics, and to some extent even all over Europe are quite possible.)
PV produces absolutely nothing when electricity is most used and absolutely necessary (midwinter).
Hydro capacity in Finland is at its maximum potential and even now cannot make up for times when wind is producing close to nothing.
Also, all these workarounds cost money -- some of them, lots of it. For TVO, Olkiluoto 3 costs roughly 5B euros for 1.6GW of nuclear.
Home Solar installations in the UK are paying off in about 6-8 years at the moment for an installation that has guarantees for 25 years (except inverter/batteries). They are more than capable of surviving the weather we see in the UK even 1 in 100 year hail storms or hurricanes.
Wind is averaging 30.2% of the yearly power production of the Uk and its growing fast. There are numerous solar arrays going up across the country beyond just the home projects which are currently running at 200k homes a year, its limited by installers not demand. The most important stat really is that 4x the current Uk power demand of Solar projects is currently held up on grid upgrades which will take us through to 2035. That alone with some battery storage will be more than enough. This transition in the Uk is happening and fast and all the economics show its because green power is cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear power.
What options have we got for low carbon generation?
Onshore and offshore wind, Nuclear (all mentioned), solar, hydro. As far as I'm aware all the good hydro sites in Britain have been used up, so there's only solar that really should have been mentioned.
Off shore wind is probably more expensive that solar, does that really change the parents point?
The UK is at latitude too high to benefit very much from solar energy. It is not mountainous enough to benefit from hydroelectricity. Nor is there much scope for geothermal.
So we have gas, wind and nuclear, and that's it.
In the government's infinite wisdom they decided to place a moratorium on on-shore wind generation for stupid NIMBY reasons. Fortunately we have plenty of offshore wind capacity, but when the wind isn't blowing, all we have is gas turbines plus whatever scraps of nuclear France is willing to throw us.
It's also just turned warm and sunny in the UK. I turned the heating off for the first time in months today and solar is producing just as much as nuclear right now.
At a much much lower cost.
Those wind shortfalls have a strong tendency to line up with good weather when solar produces more and heating is less needed.
The UK also has more pumped storage coming online and octopus even has home electricity tarriffs that promote time shifting demand.
I don't think individuals are very good at adapting to the long term market. If I know gas will be more expensive in 5 years, I can't do very much with that today. There's also the old "the market can stay irrational longer than you stay solvent": if I invest too early I can just as easily lose money.
In the UK, I think the general public are ahead of the media and politicians on the issue. There's a noisy anti-environmentalist and anti-windfarm contingent, but most people recognise the tradeoffs. I don't think people want to be their own producer en masse, any more than grow their own food or be their own bank, but if they can make a capital investment that saves money and produces income then you're speaking the right language to the middle class.
People might start to get vocal when gas prices go up in the UK; complaints about fuel poverty and demands for more fracking. It'll require a long period of gas being more expensive than electricity for fuel and heating for people to switch their homes over.
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