Wholesale power market prices are responding to shocks in the natural gas market from two wars that disrupted those supply chains. Solar and batteries have been and will continue to he the cheapest source of power, and globally, deployment is accelerating.
Not so much in the US, where our braindead political culture is intent on ignoring the obvious economic advantage of renewables, but definitely everywhere else in the world.
> Solar and batteries have been and will continue to he the cheapest source of power, and globally, deployment is accelerating.
I think storage is great and solar has a place, but this is not true unless you discard reliability and other features, which should be in the price. Solar plus storage for baseload power matching requires huge overbuilds. Even in the last few years, before the AI hype, installed utility scale renewables costs went up in the US. It's not just the hardware or national politics.
And if you can't get renewables interconnected in a couple years, then the install rate won't lower the carbon of the existing grid mix charging your car.
Why would you need to “discard reliability”? What do you think storage is for?
People have been saying that solar will never work for my entire life, and my entire career in clean energy, as I have watched it grow and grow and grow and grow.
You’re right that the interconnect queue is broken. Many, many people are working on this problem. Believing that an extremely tractable bureaucratic hurdle means that solar can’t work is madness.
No, solar reliability requires overbuild and storage to compare accurately on LCOE. Hybrid and overbuild = expensive, so not "cheap/er", which you said.
A lot of people have this misconception about solar even with awareness of the duck curve.
I don’t think this is correct. You’re arguing that the industry analyses on this subject are wrong because they’re underestimating how much solar + batteries need to be deployed to be as reliable as a gas power plant. So you’re arguing that initial capex (which everyone acknowledges is higher than natural gas) is somewhat higher than existing analyses think it is.
The lifetime of solar panels is also higher than most of these analyses say it is, because both solar and batteries are frequently found to last well beyond their factory-rated lifetimes. So I think you’re wrong without any additional considerations here, so let’s leave that aside.
What you’re saying here is that the lower ongoing opex of solar and batteries is eaten up by the higher initial capex of gas, but you’re saying the prive of natural gas has no impact on this calculation.
I don’t think this makes any sense. Can you explain your thinking here? Can you cite any data on this?
> You’re arguing that the industry analyses on this subject are wrong because they’re underestimating how much solar + batteries need to be deployed to be as reliable as a gas power plant.
No, the industry knows this. Talk to any investor or developer. See the capacity market blowout in PJM because they don't have enough firm power supply to offset the flood of renewables (sans storage). Or just look at the announcements for natural gas turbine demand by datacenters, which need 24/7 power. The overbuild for renewables and storage is insane to hit the same reliability and safety margins.
> So you’re arguing that initial capex (which everyone acknowledges is higher than natural gas) is somewhat higher than existing analyses think it is
It's not just CAPEX. It's also OPEX. LCOE is a normalized ($/MWh) metric that allows for comparison. See Lazard [0] or NREL's analysis [1] on LCOE costs. Note how expensive solar plus storage becomes on an LCOE basis and realistically, you might need way more than 4h batteries to hit reliability targets.
> because both solar and batteries are frequently found to last well beyond their factory-rated lifetimes.
BTW, this is like saying you can still use laptops past their 5 year warranty. Yes, but that's not how depreciation, financing, and service levels work. These assets are getting pushed to their limits and not everyone's buying tier 1 suppliers.
That little (sans storage) is some load-bearing sleight of hand. Yes, solar is intermittent, and needs to be paired with storage.
You’re saying the overbuild is “insane”. Do you have an actual cite for this? I’m assuming there’s some percent over capacity you need to build that would allow people to reason about this.
I’m still not seeing an answer here re: the cost of natural gas, it seems like that has a huge impact on all of these assumptions.
I can't take your comments seriously, though, I don't think you're trying act in bad faith.
> You’re saying the overbuild is “insane”. Do you have an actual cite for this? I’m assuming there’s some percent over capacity you need to build that would allow people to reason about this.
If you have zero intuition about storage overbuild or underbuild to firm up intermittent capacity or why PJM has an undersupply of storage, then on what basis are you calling my comments on storage "sleight of hand"? My assumption, though, and seriously not trying to be mean, but based on your bio and paradoxical comments, you don't really know how to defend your argument or read these primary sources you requested.
> I’m still not seeing an answer here re: the cost of natural gas, it seems like that has a huge impact on all of these assumptions.
Taking one step at a time, you still haven't acknowledged you were incorrect about LCOE comparisons to date. These are provided in the sources that you asked for.
As for the future, you can run sensitivities. My primary sources included price shock sensitivities. You probably overlooked or can't process them as it appears.
If your time horizon is long enough, the best possible investment thesis is to assume that climate change is real and the energy transition is inevitable.
I’ve worked in clean energy software and hardware since 2014. I’m currently looking for a new position, and recently some research firms came out of the woodwork offering to pay me a high consulting rate just to better understand the market. I wasn’t even looking for this, they just came to me. All they said was “interest in this area is increasing.”
P.S., if you’re looking for someone with deep domain knowledge and senior-level engineering skills for your clean energy project, I’m available. https://matthewgerring.com
He’s right. I built a hackintosh from a PowerMac G4 motherboard I bought off of eBay with my saved-up babysitting money when I was 12 or 13 because I was absolutely desperate to have a machine I could edit movies with, I couldn’t afford a real Mac, and I read on the internet somewhere that this was the cheapest way to get one. I knew lots of older brothers who were “into” computers (all of them for gaming) that thought I was an idiot, because building my own mac made everything ten times harder. I didn’t care. I was obsessed.
This is a $599 computer with purpose-built architecture for (barely) running (small, underpowered, near-useless) LLMs. There are children saving pennies for this machine that will do great, horrifying, dangerous things with these computers. I can’t wait to see the results.
Actually I think the last 20 years of the Internet demonstrates that copyright is more important than ever, because unless it's enforced, people with more capital than the copyright owner will simply steal creative works and profit from them.
The idea that "information wants to be free" was always a lie, meant to transfer value from creators to platform owners. The result of that has been disastrous, and it's long past time to push the pendulum in the other direction.
See also "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence), and what a goofy, naive, misguided disaster that early internet optimism turned into.
No, AI does not mean the end of either copyright or copyleft, it means that the laws need to catch up. And they should, and they will.
The only extant “X-risk” is, and always has been, climate change. “AGI” is science fiction, and actually-existing AI is making climate change harder to deal with, by increasing electricity demand on our fossil-fuel-powered grid with no attendant increase in clean generation.
Serious engineers need to stop whatever they’re doing and work on this problem.
Also, if you’re hiring: I’m an expert on the U.S. regulated utility industry, demand management, and solar & battery system design, fabrication and deployment.
From their About:
“Work on Climate quickly built the world’s largest and most successful community of its sort – with tens of thousands of members around the globe, thousands of whom have found climate jobs and started companies”.
Not affiliated but I ran into this initiative recently.
Really AI is a drop in the bucket compared to other things. Beef and dairy take up an incredible amount of water, land, and energy but we don't complain about that.
AI could lead to massive savings and improvements in terms of emissions and climate change. AI could possibly help us out of this.
Beef and dairy have no chance of helping us. They'll kill us and the beef nuts will say how they saved 4% of emissions by moving some cows around. Problem solved.
I remember a couple years ago my family was worried about the Amazon burning and I was like "well, you could eat less beef as that's driving a lot of that in Brazil". Turns out they didn't care that much. With how generally hippie my family is it really made me realize how absolutely screwed we are ecologically.
AI is also a useful tool that offers a lot of potential to untangle the permitting thickets that make it difficult to build the infrastructure necessary for the energy transition...
The only extant “X-risk” is, and always has been, economic collapse due to loss of energy. “Climate Change” is science fiction.
/s
It amazes me climate change X-riskers scoff at denialists and then do the exact same denialism with AGI. How many leading AI scientists (like climate science) would it take to convince you?
"Our great religion, their primitive superstition"[0]
Yes, that’s correct, I do not want a vibe-coded freeway overpass, thanks.
We all need to get serious about the unavoidable, unsolvable fact that these tools produce output of unknowable accuracy. Some things require such accuracy, precision, and, importantly, accountability. LLMs are capable of none of these things. Refusing to be honest about this and take appropriate precautions will lead to disaster.
I do. One of the reasons our infrastructure is so expensive is planning & design.
For a single freeway overpass, you could be looking at $3M (25% of the total budget) before you have even broken ground. That covers feasibility studies, traffic modeling, rough layout, environmental studies, permitting, structural engineering, blueprints, bidding, contracts, community outreach, and the list goes on.
If AI can reduce the cost of that by even 10%, that would be huge.
Cool, we agree, and if you think the place to cut corners on that is the engineering calcs, you have lost your mind. If you do that, not only will people die, you will drastically increase costs because the infrastructure project you built will collapse.
Europe and Asia both have reliable, modern infrastructure that’s decades ahead of the United States and they did not need the million-monkeys-on-typewriters machine to accomplish that.
Not so much in the US, where our braindead political culture is intent on ignoring the obvious economic advantage of renewables, but definitely everywhere else in the world.
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