"But wind, solar and nuclear are not compatible. A nuclear plant provides the best return if it is operated continuously at full power, it should not be expected to follow the intermittent whims of the wind and sun. In a system with nuclear power the wind and solar serve no useful purpose, the expenditure on wind and solar will have been wasted, so the best approach would be stop building now."
Several truths here. Law of diminishing returns. Logical proof that we'd be better off with zero wind and solar, except for private systems off grid. When will the government stop throwing subsidy money down the drain? The misallocation of capital and resulting higher rates and taxes will take at least a generation, probably 2 or 3, to work off even if we quit subsidies right now.
There is an even simpler way to demonstrate that wind and solar will never work at grid scale. At night during a severe wind drought there is no RE generated, regardless of the number of windmills and solar panels installed.
If the authorities were aware of wind droughts they would never have allowed intermittent inputs from the sun and wind to contaminate and destabilise the power supply. Lack of that awareness has resulted in trillions of dollars being spent worldwide to obtain more expensive and less reliable power with massive damage to the planet. Surely the biggest public policy blunder in peacetime history!
Around the Western world, subsidised and mandated wind and solar power have been displacing conventional power in the electricity supply. Consequently, most of the grids in the west are moving towards a tipping point where the lights will flicker at nights when the wind is low. This is a “frog in the saucepan” effect and it only starts to worry people when it is too lat, as in Britain and Germany.
Consider the ABC of intermittent energy generation.
A. Input to the grid must continuously match the demand.
B. The continuity of RE is broken on nights with little or no wind.
C. There is no feasible or affordable large-scale storage to bridge the gaps.
Therefore, the green transition is impossible with current storage technology.
The rate of progress towards the tipping point will accelerate as AI and electrification swell demand.
In Australia, the transition to unreliable wind and solar power has just hit the wall, while Britain and Germany have passed the tipping point and entered a “red zone,” keeping the lights on precariously with imports and deindustrialization to reduce demand.
The meteorologists never issued wind drought warnings and the irresponsible authorities never checked the wind supply! They even missed the Dunkelflautes that must have been known to mariners and millers for centuries!
There is an urgent need to find out why the meteorologists failed to warn us about wind droughts and why energy planners didn’t check. Imagine embarking on a major irrigation project without forensic investigation of the water supply including historical rainfall figures.
Thank you for this debate, but you seem to be missing many relevant factors that fundamentally affect outcomes.
Your case study from the Royal Society relates to Britain's unique situation; a privatised power industry (since Thatcher's gov't in the 1980's) with low investment for shareholder profit, plus a determination to maintain a grid-based monopoly, and initially with available North Sea oil and gas. But also a fairly large geographical separation between wind producer sites (west coast, and Scotland) and power user sites in the Midlands and south east, in particular London, resulting in up to 30% power losses in transmission.
Thatcher privatised electricity for the gov't to fit into EU rules on pollution without having to pay for replacing old coal fired plants and nuclear power stations. For the privatised companies the cheapest option was gas fired power plants, widely distributed, with North Sea gas available very cheaply, and the ability to instantly adjust output to demand, and a slow build up of offshore wind turbines, with much discussion about wave energy and tidal barrages, never to be built because of lack of gov't money. Obviously all power was grid supplied because that is how consumers are billed.
As North Sea gas declined, the gas was supplied first from Norway, then through European pipelines from Ukraine and Russia, etc. Eventually increasingly cheap gas was imported by ship from America. Note how vulnerable the supply now is to weather and supply lines.
There are two different problems and so different solutions for Britain. The one being worked on is to try to solve the energy companies profit and investment problems, that will require massive further investment in surplus wind and solar farms in different geographical locations, plus continuing to import surplus nuclear energy from France (Norway is stopping exports of energy). This results in some resilience in supply, but electricity is between 50% more and double France's prices. It is notable that a major energy supplier in Britain is EDF, that stands for Électricité de France, the French government owned electricity company that makes profits in Britain to help support investments in France! Obviously all this is grid based distribution.
But if the problem isn't seen as a profit problem but an energy supply problem, then the solution is much simpler - distributed power. A simple change in planning regulations would make all new factories, offices, shops and houses have solar PV and hot water panels on the roofs All existing building would be retrofitted where feasible, paid for by tax breaks, and pressured by a timetable of increasing energy bills over the next 10 years. Industrial estates and housing developments would have 'mini-grids' that would share electricity across the site, and even share hot water (underground insulated pipes) when the layout and demand makes in feasible. The mini-grid would have a single connection point to the grid to buy or sell power as required.
The vast majority of daytime power would then be generated locally, exactly where and when it is being used, eliminating grid losses. Energy costs would plummet. There could be free solar charging points for vehicles outside factories and offices. Large insulated communal hot water tanks could store heat overnight for district heating systems. There would be distinct advantages of putting mixed development close together to share power.
The problem with this is that the energy companies can no longer make profits to maintain the grid, so there has to be a higher price for grid supplied power, and that encourages more local generation and energy efficiency. And that kills off the energy companies!
So that might work for France, with state run power, but won't work for Britain unless it moves back towards state run energy services, which would mean a genuine left wing government. No sign of that right now.
Much of the above seems to equate with America's problems, but the longer it continues down the fossil route and doesn't invest in renewables,
the harder it gets to ever find the money to rescue itself from the fossil dead end.
Lastly, all the above is one reason I moved from energy vulnerable and insecure Britain to France, with 70% nuclear and 15% hydro and tidal electricity, and a mix of wind and solar and gas and coal for the rest. It is a net exporter of energy to Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany (which means if needed, it could cut them off and keep supplying itself), and the energy is amongst the cheapest and most stable in Europe. In the future it can import solar energy from north Africa via undersea cables, and so it should be stable for at least the rest of my lifetime (he says, selfishly! 🙂). It is almost all considered carbon neutral, and is one of the few countries where electric cars, trucks and ships actually make sense.
Energy is the core to every economy. Energy is money. Surplus energy is profit. Energy stores are capital assets. If a country doesn't have a stable future energy policy, then it has no stable future economy. It really is that simple.
It's inherently hilarious (except it's not) that - allegedly, mind you - climate change is going to make for crazy unpredictable weather patterns and yet here we are, putting all our eggs in the energy basket that relies on... wait for it.... favourable weather!
One thing you don't discuss (in this article anyway) is the risk/reward of centralised vs decentralized energy production.
Given the forecast instability of technological society as a result of climate change, is investing in centralised power generation, like nuclear, a wise choice, or should we be designing a system that has some potential to keep working when the center fails and grids are balkanised into ever smaller fragments?
Long duration energy storage (LDES) is what is needed. Traditionally this has been pumped hydro, however the economics have not favoured it because you need to buy low and sell high and electricity prices have only recently started to vary appreciably over the day allowing this to happen.
In the UK the four existing pumped hydro storage schemes were state-funded more than five decades years ago to consume and store overnight generation from nuclear, as nuclear was unable to ramp up and down to meet the changing profile of electricity demand.
As we get more W&S we will get increasing periods of abundance (low prices) and lack with high prices on an hour by hour basis. This will drive investment into LDES including more novel forms such as pumped heat (and maybe H2 but I’m not so sure). There is nothing about the physics that says that this can’t be done. From an economic perspective I’m afraid (for the nuclear bros) the combination of W&S + LDES will be cheaper than nuclear which to date has been an endless money pit, wholly dependent upon taxpayer handouts and subsidies even after decades of deployment.
Even today 2/3 of taxpayers money in UK governments DESNZ - roughly £2-3bn per year goes to manage nuclear’s legacy costs!
The other problem with green hydrogen coming from wind that would otherwise be curtailed is that the (expensive) hydrogen plant will be idle when wind power is NOT curtailed. Low capacity factor for hydrogen production adds capital inefficiency to its physical inefficiency. A really bad idea from renewables promoters who are not thinking things through.
The telling detail is that installed wind capacity in the USA has continued to increase, yet annualized net generation from wind generation has decreased.
Your all position is, in short: the price of a KW/h by W&S does not include the externalities, grid adaptations being the most relevant.
Fine.
Did you calculate the externalities of producing electricity with fossil or nuclear fuels? Have you ever included in those costs the adaptation to climate change, the increased mortality rates, the worsened general health, the nuclear power stranded costs, the infrastructure to bring fossil fuels in our countries (ports, pipelines etc), wars in producing countries, just to name a few.
Your “simple chart” tells absolutely nothing about the true blessing that W&S are.
People are living longer, in better health, better fed, better educated than ever in the history of humanity. The costs of bringing fossil fuels to the power plant is included in the cost of electricity they produce. The ONLY way W&S look cheap is if you pass their added costs for grid upgrades and changes to the grid operator instead of making W&S pay for the changes.
Good article but it would have been nice to have a paragraph or two explaining why current battery technology cannot bridge between WS and customer. I have seen several articles that showed battery energy storage only meets.demand for a few hours. So natural gas energy production will still be needed and rates will keep increasing. The Moss Landing battery fire shows there is another bad side effect of batteries.
"But wind, solar and nuclear are not compatible. A nuclear plant provides the best return if it is operated continuously at full power, it should not be expected to follow the intermittent whims of the wind and sun. In a system with nuclear power the wind and solar serve no useful purpose, the expenditure on wind and solar will have been wasted, so the best approach would be stop building now."
Several truths here. Law of diminishing returns. Logical proof that we'd be better off with zero wind and solar, except for private systems off grid. When will the government stop throwing subsidy money down the drain? The misallocation of capital and resulting higher rates and taxes will take at least a generation, probably 2 or 3, to work off even if we quit subsidies right now.
There is an even simpler way to demonstrate that wind and solar will never work at grid scale. At night during a severe wind drought there is no RE generated, regardless of the number of windmills and solar panels installed.
If the authorities were aware of wind droughts they would never have allowed intermittent inputs from the sun and wind to contaminate and destabilise the power supply. Lack of that awareness has resulted in trillions of dollars being spent worldwide to obtain more expensive and less reliable power with massive damage to the planet. Surely the biggest public policy blunder in peacetime history!
Around the Western world, subsidised and mandated wind and solar power have been displacing conventional power in the electricity supply. Consequently, most of the grids in the west are moving towards a tipping point where the lights will flicker at nights when the wind is low. This is a “frog in the saucepan” effect and it only starts to worry people when it is too lat, as in Britain and Germany.
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/07/11/approaching-the-tipping-point/
Consider the ABC of intermittent energy generation.
A. Input to the grid must continuously match the demand.
B. The continuity of RE is broken on nights with little or no wind.
C. There is no feasible or affordable large-scale storage to bridge the gaps.
Therefore, the green transition is impossible with current storage technology.
The rate of progress towards the tipping point will accelerate as AI and electrification swell demand.
In Australia, the transition to unreliable wind and solar power has just hit the wall, while Britain and Germany have passed the tipping point and entered a “red zone,” keeping the lights on precariously with imports and deindustrialization to reduce demand.
The meteorologists never issued wind drought warnings and the irresponsible authorities never checked the wind supply! They even missed the Dunkelflautes that must have been known to mariners and millers for centuries!
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/The_endless_wind_drought_crippling_renewables___The_Spectator_Australia.pdf
There is an urgent need to find out why the meteorologists failed to warn us about wind droughts and why energy planners didn’t check. Imagine embarking on a major irrigation project without forensic investigation of the water supply including historical rainfall figures.
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/climate-change/no-gusts-no-glory/
Thank you for this debate, but you seem to be missing many relevant factors that fundamentally affect outcomes.
Your case study from the Royal Society relates to Britain's unique situation; a privatised power industry (since Thatcher's gov't in the 1980's) with low investment for shareholder profit, plus a determination to maintain a grid-based monopoly, and initially with available North Sea oil and gas. But also a fairly large geographical separation between wind producer sites (west coast, and Scotland) and power user sites in the Midlands and south east, in particular London, resulting in up to 30% power losses in transmission.
Thatcher privatised electricity for the gov't to fit into EU rules on pollution without having to pay for replacing old coal fired plants and nuclear power stations. For the privatised companies the cheapest option was gas fired power plants, widely distributed, with North Sea gas available very cheaply, and the ability to instantly adjust output to demand, and a slow build up of offshore wind turbines, with much discussion about wave energy and tidal barrages, never to be built because of lack of gov't money. Obviously all power was grid supplied because that is how consumers are billed.
As North Sea gas declined, the gas was supplied first from Norway, then through European pipelines from Ukraine and Russia, etc. Eventually increasingly cheap gas was imported by ship from America. Note how vulnerable the supply now is to weather and supply lines.
There are two different problems and so different solutions for Britain. The one being worked on is to try to solve the energy companies profit and investment problems, that will require massive further investment in surplus wind and solar farms in different geographical locations, plus continuing to import surplus nuclear energy from France (Norway is stopping exports of energy). This results in some resilience in supply, but electricity is between 50% more and double France's prices. It is notable that a major energy supplier in Britain is EDF, that stands for Électricité de France, the French government owned electricity company that makes profits in Britain to help support investments in France! Obviously all this is grid based distribution.
But if the problem isn't seen as a profit problem but an energy supply problem, then the solution is much simpler - distributed power. A simple change in planning regulations would make all new factories, offices, shops and houses have solar PV and hot water panels on the roofs All existing building would be retrofitted where feasible, paid for by tax breaks, and pressured by a timetable of increasing energy bills over the next 10 years. Industrial estates and housing developments would have 'mini-grids' that would share electricity across the site, and even share hot water (underground insulated pipes) when the layout and demand makes in feasible. The mini-grid would have a single connection point to the grid to buy or sell power as required.
The vast majority of daytime power would then be generated locally, exactly where and when it is being used, eliminating grid losses. Energy costs would plummet. There could be free solar charging points for vehicles outside factories and offices. Large insulated communal hot water tanks could store heat overnight for district heating systems. There would be distinct advantages of putting mixed development close together to share power.
The problem with this is that the energy companies can no longer make profits to maintain the grid, so there has to be a higher price for grid supplied power, and that encourages more local generation and energy efficiency. And that kills off the energy companies!
So that might work for France, with state run power, but won't work for Britain unless it moves back towards state run energy services, which would mean a genuine left wing government. No sign of that right now.
Much of the above seems to equate with America's problems, but the longer it continues down the fossil route and doesn't invest in renewables,
the harder it gets to ever find the money to rescue itself from the fossil dead end.
Lastly, all the above is one reason I moved from energy vulnerable and insecure Britain to France, with 70% nuclear and 15% hydro and tidal electricity, and a mix of wind and solar and gas and coal for the rest. It is a net exporter of energy to Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany (which means if needed, it could cut them off and keep supplying itself), and the energy is amongst the cheapest and most stable in Europe. In the future it can import solar energy from north Africa via undersea cables, and so it should be stable for at least the rest of my lifetime (he says, selfishly! 🙂). It is almost all considered carbon neutral, and is one of the few countries where electric cars, trucks and ships actually make sense.
Energy is the core to every economy. Energy is money. Surplus energy is profit. Energy stores are capital assets. If a country doesn't have a stable future energy policy, then it has no stable future economy. It really is that simple.
It's inherently hilarious (except it's not) that - allegedly, mind you - climate change is going to make for crazy unpredictable weather patterns and yet here we are, putting all our eggs in the energy basket that relies on... wait for it.... favourable weather!
Oh, the irony.....
One thing you don't discuss (in this article anyway) is the risk/reward of centralised vs decentralized energy production.
Given the forecast instability of technological society as a result of climate change, is investing in centralised power generation, like nuclear, a wise choice, or should we be designing a system that has some potential to keep working when the center fails and grids are balkanised into ever smaller fragments?
Long duration energy storage (LDES) is what is needed. Traditionally this has been pumped hydro, however the economics have not favoured it because you need to buy low and sell high and electricity prices have only recently started to vary appreciably over the day allowing this to happen.
In the UK the four existing pumped hydro storage schemes were state-funded more than five decades years ago to consume and store overnight generation from nuclear, as nuclear was unable to ramp up and down to meet the changing profile of electricity demand.
As we get more W&S we will get increasing periods of abundance (low prices) and lack with high prices on an hour by hour basis. This will drive investment into LDES including more novel forms such as pumped heat (and maybe H2 but I’m not so sure). There is nothing about the physics that says that this can’t be done. From an economic perspective I’m afraid (for the nuclear bros) the combination of W&S + LDES will be cheaper than nuclear which to date has been an endless money pit, wholly dependent upon taxpayer handouts and subsidies even after decades of deployment.
Even today 2/3 of taxpayers money in UK governments DESNZ - roughly £2-3bn per year goes to manage nuclear’s legacy costs!
The other problem with green hydrogen coming from wind that would otherwise be curtailed is that the (expensive) hydrogen plant will be idle when wind power is NOT curtailed. Low capacity factor for hydrogen production adds capital inefficiency to its physical inefficiency. A really bad idea from renewables promoters who are not thinking things through.
This is great work. I have several detailed Grid models that show exactly the same effect.
I refer to it as the 'Effect of Diminshing Returns'.
Where do we see a large grid with 50% wind and solar?
Germany and California are in the 40s and are struggling with high electricity prices, high curtailment, and high electricity imports.
The telling detail is that installed wind capacity in the USA has continued to increase, yet annualized net generation from wind generation has decreased.
Dear
Your all position is, in short: the price of a KW/h by W&S does not include the externalities, grid adaptations being the most relevant.
Fine.
Did you calculate the externalities of producing electricity with fossil or nuclear fuels? Have you ever included in those costs the adaptation to climate change, the increased mortality rates, the worsened general health, the nuclear power stranded costs, the infrastructure to bring fossil fuels in our countries (ports, pipelines etc), wars in producing countries, just to name a few.
Your “simple chart” tells absolutely nothing about the true blessing that W&S are.
Wow! The dumb just get dumber
Looking at your mirror?
People are living longer, in better health, better fed, better educated than ever in the history of humanity. The costs of bringing fossil fuels to the power plant is included in the cost of electricity they produce. The ONLY way W&S look cheap is if you pass their added costs for grid upgrades and changes to the grid operator instead of making W&S pay for the changes.
Good article but it would have been nice to have a paragraph or two explaining why current battery technology cannot bridge between WS and customer. I have seen several articles that showed battery energy storage only meets.demand for a few hours. So natural gas energy production will still be needed and rates will keep increasing. The Moss Landing battery fire shows there is another bad side effect of batteries.
Interesting chart. What is the source of the data for the graph?
Amen
This is right, until an affordable storage technology changes the game e.g ammoniak fuel cells or else
The point at which wind and solar start generating significant amounts of useless electricity is far lower than your graph shows.
We see grids and renewables start to struggle when they exceed 20% of generation in the real world.